On Saturday, we got up and piled into the car and headed to the post office. Why? Well, to mail the wedding invitations of course. If you're on the guest list you'll be getting your invite soon. If you're not it doesn't mean we don't love you, it just means we were successful in staying on budget. The goal was to keep the guest list small. We managed to do that.
Next stop was the kid's father's house. We dropped them off for the day.
After that was the thrill a minute fun of an oil change at Jiffy Lube. My thought at the time was what is the definition of "jiffy" because I thought I knew what it meant but the minutes ticking by obviously meant that my supposed definition was inaccurate in some way.
With our freshly changed oil Jen and I headed up to her mom's house in Rochester. There were two reasons for the trip. The first was wedding related. We are going to try and have a table full of old pictures of the two of us so everyone can laugh at my long hair. Jen's mother had a huge box full of old pictures and we were there to sort through them all and get a stack of younger Jenny pics.
With that completed we moved on to the second reason for the trip. We were going to see The Beatles in concert.
Sort of. We saw Beatlemania Now at the Opera House in Rochester. I have a long and storied history of looking down my snooty nose at cover bands and flat out loathing tribute bands. There are two exceptions to the loathing. Elvis Presley and The Beatles. You can never have enough Elvis impersonators or Beatles tribute bands. Keep 'em coming folks.
They played two sets each with two costume changes. The costumes were song-period appropriate. They started off doing songs through A Hard Days Night in the Ed Sullivan suits.
Then they moved on to the Help era stuff, through Rubber Soul.
Next up was the Sgt Pepper outfits for songs from Revolver through Magical Mystery Tour.
And finally, the Let it Be looks for the White Album onward.
Musically they were pretty good. The harmonies were spot on. "George" was very accurate with his leads. "John" was accurate in his lack of soloing skill, but "Get Back" seemed to show a lack of ability to bend strings and stay in tune. It was a little painful at times. With the exception of a moment where "Paul's" voice vanished from the mix during "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and a synth that can only be described as "cheezy," they handled the more complicated late-period songs very well. The best songs for me though were actually the lesser known ones. My personal highlights were the 2nd set closer, "I'm Down" which frankly just rocked, and the encore closer, "Long Tall Sally" which may have been the tightest, most energetic song of the whole night.
The consensus of the evening was the show was a blast. Ironically, we overheard some Opera House staff talking about the ticket sales for the night. It turns out that Jen and I may have attended the two highest grossing events this season. Beatlemania Now, and Bob Marley. That's Bob Marley the comic, not Bob Marley the dead reggae legend. There were no sheriffs shot that night, nor was there any getting up or standing up for anyone's rights.
This brings us to Sunday. The kids came over a little after eight, and we fed them and piled everyone into the car again so we could go view a couple of houses.
The first one was down south near the Merrimack in Methuen. It's a little close to Lawrence for my taste, but the house instantly won us over. The street is nice, not overly congested like most of the streets in that part of town. The outside is well kept, the fenced in yard is awesome, the deck on the back of the house is perfect, every room downstairs was beautiful, and there was a huge basement with high ceilings that could easily hold a 5-6 piece band. (hehe) The only downside was the second floor. It looked like they took a two bedroom cape and added an upstairs to it for two more bedrooms. The rooms themselves were huge, and the kids were practically drooling over them. The problem was the ceilings were about 6 feet 4 inches high... in other words, about two inches too low for me to stand up straight. They were also steeply slanted on the sides so near the walls it was even too short for the kids. All of that is very doable, it just means that when it comes time for getting stuff done upstairs I won't be of much use.
The second house we looked at was much much bigger. It was heaping with potential. Too much so. In other words, it needed work. The kitchen was a little sketchy, the dining room was beautiful but the floor needed some work and none of the walls were painted. The living room was also beautiful but there was some sort of heating issue and one of the baseboard radiators had leaked crap all over the hardwood floor. The second floor was perfect except for the banister that was ripped out of the wall. The cellar was huge but the ceiling was too low for me to stand up straight, and there was another banister ripped out of the wall issue as well.
It is too soon for us to start thinking about actually putting in an offer on any house. We are just in information gathering/education mode right now, but in these early stages the first house we saw yesterday is going to be hard to top. Jen and I both had the same thought as we walked in. "We could live here."
After the house viewing was done for the day it was chores time. Neither Jen nor I are neat freaks by any stretch of the imagination. We both have a very high tolerance for clutter. On Friday we both simultaneously reached our clutter threshold. The result? Cleaning. Massive amounts of cleaning.
Jen had to go food shopping, which is something we tend to forget about for long stretches of time, so she dropped me and the kids off and we started digging into the mess. After about five hours the living room, dining room, and kitchen are as clean as they've been at any time since we moved in. The kids did a fantastic job helping. They were actually sometimes fighting over who was going to help with what jobs. They both wanted to do everything. It was great. Their new favorite activity may be dusting with Pledge.
That pretty much sums up the weekend for us. After the cleaning was done Jen cooked an awesome Indian dinner for us. Chicken Tika, Naan, the works. Then we watched Lilo and Stitch two, which we brought back from Disney last June and then it was off to bed, with clean sheets for everyone. The perfect end to a very busy fun filled weekend.
I now need to take a moment to sing the praises of a good friend of mine. My 80 gig iPod classic. At about 11:00am I popped the iPod into the Bose dock player we have in the living room. I chose a playlist that consisted of at most one version of every Beatles song. The playlist is titled, Beatles - no repeats. I set the iPod to shuffle the playlist and hit play. Six hours later when the chores were finished it was still going and it never repeated a song. Can a vinyl record do that? Nope. Can a cassette tape do that? Nope. Can an 8-track do that? Nope. Can a compact disc do that? Nope. The iPod may be the greatest invention in the history of the human race.
That is all.
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