Tuesday we got "Kick Ass" from Netflix and decided we couldn't wait till later to watch it. It is still awesome. If you haven't seen it yet you ought to see it now that it's out on DVD. I crashed pretty shortly after that though.
Wednesday i went over to
balivatn's place to hang out for awhile in the evening.Thursday i came home from work early so we could go to the Orange County Fair (since the 15th was the last day.) We had several kinds of fair food. We looked at all the various deep fried this and that foods and considered trying some of them, but ended up getting fried "Australian potatoes" instead, which doesn't really count in my mind. I also got full before we got around to getting any funnel cake, which made me kind of sad. We looked through the various craft exhibits and found two different video game themed cross-stitch(?) pieces by two different people, plus several game or streampunk related paintings in the painting section. After that we went to the usual thursday night boardgaming, where we played a game of Power Grid which resulted in what i think was the first time for this particular group that someone was denied victory by strategic resource consumption.
Friday was the Rush concert. A long time ago (a few months) i asked if anyone else would be interested in going, and
sithjawa said yes. shelleycat had already told me that she didn't think she'd be up for it on a friday evening, so i just got two tickets. Then about a week before the event sithjawa said she might be sent on a business trip early the next week and wasn't sure if she'd get back in time to go to the concert. So i checked with shelleycat since she'd changed her friday schedules around since i'd gotten the tickets and she said she _might_ feel up for it if sithjawa couldn't go. Then a couple days before the concert sithjawa said that the business trip had been canceled, so she would be able to go. Then the day of the concert sithjawa ran into some really bad traffic while heading down to my place and about a half hour before the concert she called me to say that she was at least 30 minutes away from my place and probably more like an hour, and i should just go without her. So i checked with shelleycat and she said that she'd already gotten herself into the mindset of not going, so she didn't really feel up to going by that point. So after a brief attempt to convince her otherwise i gave up and just headed down myself.Thankfully the traffic was pretty light starting from where i was, i guess whatever was causing the jam was somewhere a little north of me, so i managed to make it down to the amphitheater relatively quickly. I ended up getting directed to the back corner of the parking lot. When i got to the ticket booth area i was keeping an eye out for anyone i could sell my spare ticket to, and noticed a small group of people standing around near the front of the area where we started getting funneled in, one of whom was holding up one finger. So i walked over to them and asked if they wanted a spare ticket about the same point they asked me if i had a spare ticket :) First a cute girl said she was looking for lawn tickets and had $20, and was disappointed when she found out my ticket was about $75. Then the two middle aged guys spoke up saying they were willing to pay $40 for it, but understood if i wanted to sell it to her since she asked first. So at this point i was torn between waiting around to see if i could get more than $40 from someone else, take the immediate $40, or take a $20 loss to sit with a cute girl. However i was already running late and didn't want to waste more time trying to find someone willing to pay $60, and felt that turning down an extra $20 in favor of selling it to a cute girl might be too... blatant? So i sold it to first person who'd offered $40. On the plus side it turned out he was buying it for his son, who didn't actually show up until after the intermission. So for the first half of the concert i got two seats worth of space to myself which was kind of nice.
Once inside i headed straight for the stands and heard them start the pre-show video just as i was working my way up the stairs. I half-watched the second half while navigating my way to my seat and sat down just in time to get up and cheer a minute or two later when they actually came out on stage, so great timing :)
I tried to take some notes on what they played, so if i've got this right:
1: Spirit of Radio
2: Time Stand Still
3: Presto
4: Stick It Out
5: Workin' Them Angels
6: Leave That Thing Alone (at least i think so, i have trouble with their instrumentals =P)
7: Faithless
8: BU2B ("Brought Up To Believe," the B-side single from their upcoming album.)
9: Free Will
10: Marathon
11: Subdivisions
Intermission
12: Tom Sawyer
13: Red Barchetta
14: YYZ (Maybe? Even less sure of this one than "Leave That Thing" alone above.)
15: Limelight
16: The Camera Eye
17: Witch Hunt
18: Caravan (The main single from their upcoming album.)
19: Neil Peart's drum solo
20: Alex Lifeson's acoustic guitar solo
21: Closer to the Heart
22: 2112 (Just the first couple bits of course =)
23: Far Cry
Encore
24: La Villa Strangiato (i think)
25: Working Man
Since the title of the tour is "Time Machine" there was a lot of time and clock imagery, and since the name of their upcoming album is "Clockwork Angels," and the video background while they were playing "Caravan" was a train that turned into an airship it seems they're taking a turn for the Steampunk :) The other theme seems to be alchemy; the cover for the "Caravan" single has a clock with a bunch of alchemical symbols on it, and at the merchandise booth they had two t-shirts labeled "Alchemy" and "Steam." (The third was "Lightning.") I see the potential for a lot of Full Metal Alchemist AMVs ;)
They also had the washing machines on stage that they introduced a couple shows ago. There were a set of labels running along the bottom of part of the washing machine props that said "Real Time - Half Time - Bass Time - Sausage Time." It was kind of amusing that the camera for the video feed kept zooming in on Geddy and such a way that the text got cropped in the background to "ass time sausage" I'm not sure how we were supposed to interpret that :) Oh, i didn't get a lot of what was up with the video they ran right after the intermission, but part of it involved a fictional dispute between the manager for Rush (who were going by the name "Rash" in the video, and Geddy was wearing a "Rash" t-shirt for the first half) and the director for their video. During the argument a set of barmaids in octoberfest type outfits were wandering back and forth for no particular reason, carrying pitchers of beer, until finally the director snapped at them, "Stop moving pitchers!" (I expect maybe two or three people reading this at most will get the in-pun =)
After the concert was over i spent way too long waiting for everyone to file slowly out of the amphitheater and then stopped by the merchandise booth and spent way too long waiting in line to buy two t-shirts and the "Caravan" single, thus "legitimizing" a certain torrent download from a couple weeks ago :)
Friday we hooked up with some friends to go to a local diner that had been featured on "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives," but, perhaps to be expected, it was rather crowded so instead we ended up going to another diner across the street that
shelleycat was familiar with.Sunday we went to see "In the Heights" with
shelleycat's sorta-step-mom (it's complicated.) It was pretty much a "Rent" or "Avenue Q," except instead of Bohemian/LGBT or Geek/Muppets it was primarily Hispanic themed.And to end things on a high note, this monday i had a dentist appointment and got two and a half fillings =P (The half is a temporary filling that will get replaced next monday.)
Other than the dentist re-visit i don't think we have anything else planned for awhile. We're thinking of going to a "Food Truck Fest" the weekend after next, and the next weekend after that is labor day/PAX/
coraa and jmpava's wedding. 