Isaiah

Just a couple weeks ago while we were up in Northern Virginia for a visit to see Amy's folks. While there, I took this picture of Isiah, one of about a dozen horses at their house and also my favorite. A few days after we got home from our visit we got word that Isaiah had become sick and died unexpectantly. All their horses are pretty cool, but Isaiah was the coolest and I was so bummed to hear that he was gone.

None of these pictures truly do justice to the size of this magnificent animal. He had to be totally bent over for me to be taller than him. When he was completely upright, he towered.

He was definately my favorite of all mom's horses and I'll miss him a ton. I'll try to attach a few other pictures of him as well.

Band Madness

So, with VCU and Wisconsin both eliminated from this year's NCAA basketball tournament we can shift to more important issues... MUSIC.

Rob turned me on to a great site that is set up like March Madness, but for music... BAND MADNESS!!!

Unfortunately, I'm posting this half-way through the voting of round one... sorry! But, it's not too late to go to the site and you can vote on head to head match-ups. The styles of music span the entire music spectrum.

A few examples:

Led Zeppelin vs Evanescence
Stereolab vs Faith No More
Decemberists vs Andrew W. K.
Steppenwolf vs George Thorogood
Creedence Clearwater Revival vs Carole King
The White Stripes vs Foreigner
Robert Palmer vs 50 cent
ABBA vs The Replacements
Johnny Cash vs The Villiage People
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah vs Godspeed You Black Emperor

...and so on.

Here's the opening of the official entry from the site:

"BAND MADNESS is a March-Madness style, single elimination tournament of pop/rock bands where the winners are determined strictly by fan voting. There are 512 artists from various decades and genres, all battling it out to determine once and for all which band is the voted-for-the-most-est!

The rules of voting are simple: vote for who you like better. That’s it. Not for who you think you should vote for, not for who’s more historically significant, etc. Just vote for who you like better, then go ahead and post some inflammatory comments about bands other people voted for. After a couple days, the voting wraps up, we move on to the next bracket, and a whole new round of voting and inflammatory comment-making begins. Simple enough?

The bands are divided into four brackets (check out the full bracket here) Right now, voting for Round 1, Bracket A is open now; the rest of the brackets will open as follows:

Round 1, Bracket A - Monday, March 12
Round 1, Bracket B - Wednesday, March 14
Round 1, Bracket C - Monday, March 19
Round 1, Bracket D - Wednesday, March 21

Pretty cool, eh? Better than basketball.

Go vote!

VCU defeats Duke

It's going to be a fun day at work tomorrow :)

I just watched my alma mater VCU Rams send my 'home-town' Duke Blue Devils packing 79-77.

Even though a majority of my co-workers are NC State folks, they all know I'm a VCU guy and it'll be nice to raise my VCU coffee mug in victory at our staff meeting tomorrow.

Well done guys!

Typical Monday...

A Monday wouldn't be a Monday without drama, right?

A little backstory first:

Back in October, a few days before our two-week trip to Wisconsin, my car died and was beyond what we could afford to fix but we were lucky enough to find a guy that would buy it for a small but helpful amount.

Amy and I managed with one car for 4 months. She would bring me to work, take the kids to school then go home, pick the kids up from school and then pick me up from work. Last week, we finally scraped up enough to get a cheap car for me to get to work everyday.

Well, that lasted just over a week. This morning, when it came time to go outside to warm the car up (yeah, there was frost on the car down here in Raleigh) the car wouldn't start. After we got someone to look at it, turns out to be a combination of the timing belt, alternator, and bad/wrong spark plugs. Comes out to be a bunch more money we may have to put into it.

Lame...

Great Concert

On Saturday night, Amy and I were able to go see Billy Joel at the RBC Center... for free.

Okay, a friend at work sent an email out to the company, "I have 5 free tickets to Saturday's Billy Joel concert. If anyone is interested, stop by." Needless to say, they went quickly... and before I was able to lay claim to two of them. She said she could make a call and land a few more. She ended up passing out 15 plus extra tickets for us at work... nice hook up!

What a great show! I liked him a lot when I was younger but lost interest over the years. When the ticket offer initially came up, I wasn't paticularly keen on going, even though the tix were free. I'm so glad I changed my mind, Amy and I had such a fun time. He was funny and engaging throughout the show, often poking fun at himself, his age, & his "auto-insurance rates".

I can't remember the order, but here's a set list of songs that I can remember:

Angry Young Man
My Life
An Innocent Man
Everybody Loves You Now
The Entertainer
New York State of Mind
Zanzibar
Allentown
Don't Ask Me Why
Movin' Out
Keeping the Faith
The Downeaster Alexa
Go to Extremes
She's Always A Woman
The River of Dreams
We Didn't Start the Fire
Big Shot
Root Beer Rag
You May Be Right
Only the Good Die Young
It's Still Rock N' Roll to Me
Piano Man (encore)

There were more that I can't remember, but as you can see he played a ton of his classics! I was hoping for my fav's "Pressure" and "Longest Time", but they didn't make it. And as an added bonus, their guitar roadie, "Chainsaw", came out and sang a uncannily Bon Scott version of AC/DC's Highway to Hell! Billy grabbed a Gibson Les Paul and shredded like Angus Young. For me, it was the highlight of the night.

I totally didn't expect to leave the show with my ears ringing, but hard as it is to believe, Billy rocked the joint.

Our free seats ended up not being bad ones either... Even though we were third deck, we were behind and to the left of the stage, which gave us a great view over the stage, plus with Billy's piano spinning around every few songs we felt like we were far from nose-bleed caliber seating.

Thanks for the tickets, Kim! You're the coolest.