An audience with the Godfather

Yep, that's right, the Godfather of Soul, none other than the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, the inimitable, the authentic, James Brown (Mr. Brown, to you). That's us with The Boss, at his most recent appearance in the Bay Area, at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga.

Kerry and I took off on a school night, in spite of all worries about nasty traffic, and made the trek to Saratoga for a very special evening. As it turned out, there was no traffic (that rebounding Silicon Valley economy -- NOT), and we got there in an hour. We didn't need to do the drive-through at Chez Mac, because there was time, and food, at our fabulous destination. We just didn't know.

Because my brother, Roger, is currently employed as Mr. Brown's on-the-scene, showbiz manager, we got comped tickets (6th row center), and a personal audience with Mr. Brown himself ("Plzd to meet cha, God Bless"). It was over in a heartbeat, but we did get a photo opp, and made the most of it.

The show itself was awesome. The band includes about a dozen musicians, and then you add four backup singers, Mr. Brown, and two Bambi/Thumper-esque dancers wearing shorts and halter tops, which gets you almost twenty people on stage. The tenor sax player in particular was HOT, with several impressive solos. Mr. Brown performed all the standard songs you'd expect, including my favorite, an emotional, down-on-one-knee rendition of "This is a man's man's man's world".

We had never been to the venue before, which is the old Paul Masson winery, now converted into an outdoor theater/music venue complete with restaurant overlooking the entire Bay Area. Fantastic view. Really quite the memorable experience.

Thanks Roger :-)

Of skirts and nicknames

It's been a busy week, as usual. Kerry left the house at 5:45 this morning to venture to Folsom, where there's a prison, and a grocery store. She went to the grocery store.

I'm finally getting some relief from allergy hell. I got new eye drops on Monday, and they're definitely an upgrade from my Patanol, which had worked quite well until the recent histamine deluge. The drops are called Alrex, and they seem to doing the job. My eyes were simply on fire for the past 2-3 weeks, and we're back down to a smolder.

On to the punch lines...

Alex wanted to know "Is God a nickname?"
To which I answered, "For what?"
"You know, is God a nickname?"
"What would be the full name?"
"I don't know. Maybe George."
"George who? What would be his last name?"
"Washington?"

At least it wasn't another famous "W".

With envy and sympathy all wrapped up together, Annie told us, "My friend Kiara has 1,001 skirts. Some day she's gonna get tired of wearing them and she's gonna put some pants on." Nothing like the sensibilities of a four year old.

Irrigation travails

So I had been noticing that our lawn was getting increasingly brown over the past 7-10 days, but I thought it would just fix itself (why, I don't know). I kept looking for a little water on the patio in the morning, but didn't see it. Finally, this past Saturday, I confirmed that the sprinklers weren't working. 4 out of 6 zones dead, all where my precious new turf was installed only a few weeks ago as part of the firepit finale.

City boys and suburban irrigation projects don't mix well, but thankfully my friend Francis Raquel stopped by and pointed me in the right direction. He's an engineer by trade, and before I knew it, I had the voltmeter out doing testing at various points in the irrigation control circuit to rule out various problems. Even before that, he showed me how to manually open the valves to check if there's water in the system or if the line is broken. Good news was the valves were OK. It was the irrigation control wire that runs in the ground somewhere from our garage to the valves in the bushes in back of our house. Francis and I tested every little wire, to finally determine the problem. I appreciated his disciplined approach to rooting out the problem, something that I might have figured out, but those city genes would have made it take a lot longer.

So a couple of trips to the hardware store (like m&m's you can't have just one trip) and I was installing new control wire, with Alex on my heels, asking if my Dad taught me how to do this. Answer: he's also a city boy. So we got a little bonding time in the bushes with a wire stripper and these neat little wire connectors that have silicone caulk inside them to keep out the moisture in outdoor applications (thanks Francis, for this tip as well).

At the end of the day, I had new control wire installed, and the back sprinklers working like new. Just need to bury the cable (or just hide it), and then deal with the one valve that used to work, but no longer does. The old two steps forward, one step back syndrome. At least my precious grass is getting a daily drink now.

Blog layout update

Continue to mess with the layout for the site. Added some cool new things from feedster, which will enable me to have a site search for the blog portion of the site. It's not working yet, but I think feedster has to come and spider the site, which they claim happens in 4-6 hours.

Annie had a good one today: "Why do they say "fruit" in the Hail Mary?"
To which Alex responded: "Jesus's family didn't even have enough money to buy fruit!"

Annie really does have a comedic sense about her, because I've never understood the "fruit" portion either. Try explaining to children what "fruit of thy womb" is. Or even what womb is. Annie almost came up with "a womb is where a wabbit wests", but I'd be putting words in her mouth.

Kitchen redesign notes

We love our house, and though the kitchen looks nice, the layout is awful. It's time to fix it. So we met with Margie Little, a kitchen designer in the East Bay, on the recommendation of a friend. It was a little overwhelming, as we spent 4 hours talking about kitchens, our kitchen, 3 different layout possibilities, and variations on them. I think we OD'd. 4 hours was probably too much time in one sitting. We did end up with some cool new ideas, that we definitely wouldn't have thought of, so perhaps it was worth it. More to come...

First Post!

OK. This is really my first post. After trying in vain to doctor someone else's css to get a 3 column layout, I'm going with the simple Blogger provided layout, and I'll deal with format later.

This is really my attempt to move the old eleda.com frontpage site to the backburner. I never liked the format, and didn't know how to code when I set it up. Now, it seems more work than it's worth to reformat. So I'm starting fresh. Maybe this will allow me to update the site on a more frequent basis than once a year ;-)