Sunday, January 17, 2016

Well, Hello Again

So… it’s been a while, but my friend – Kathy – kind of inspired me to get back into writing.  It’s not like I quit writing, I just stopped blogging.  Why exactly,  I don’t know, maybe I ran out of things to say?  It happens right?  Ideas come in and drift out of thought on a constant basis, but the drive to commit them to permanence hasn’t been front and center.  When I quit blogging, I quit all together. Quit reading my friends’ blogs.  The blogs of those I greatly admire, you know those smart and funny writers of whom I wanted to grow up to emulate.

Writing, on a daily basis, has consisted of segmented word runs limited to 7, 30, 45 and 60 seconds in length – liners, commercial copy and news stories. Yep, that boring.  But I want to try again and if nobody notices, so be it.  The effort must be made and hopefully it will be done with humor, good punctuation and some consistency.  If I work hard enough at it I will actually get the first 100 things about me (since 2011) written.  I’ve just not been that interesting… this despite vacations to Seattle, Arizona, and Las Vegas. Life with a wonderful husband, charming grandson, three beautiful daughters, and my retaliatory pisser of a Bassett, Arlo.  I’ve have acquired four tattoos since my last post, but I guess it wasn’t important to document and share outside of Facebook.  To be blunt, I’ve been boring and apparently uninspired.

So here I jump in, and maybe not on the most positive note…

My favorite event of the year happened this weekend, Winter Music Festival.  Once known as the Winter Folk Music Festival, the new powers that be felt the word Folk limited the range and therefore limited the interest in the festival’s offerings itself.  Last night co-headlining the concert was 1970’s, one-hit-wonder Jonathan Edwards of, Sunshine Go Away Today, fame. Which is an appropriate song, if he could have sung it… but he couldn’t…. very well.  In fact his entire show sucked.  Now this comes from a person who use to sing, cannot sing anymore and recognizes that fact.  Since the release of his sole hit song in 1971 he’s produced eighteen albums with cuts I’ve never heard before.  HE SUCKED. 

Past Winter Folk Music Festivals have featured the likes of the Brothers Four (disclaimer – My Favs – I’ve seen them all four times they’ve preformed at the festival), Barry McGuire (twice and he rocked both times), The New Christie Minstrels (which aren’t new at all but still rocked), John York, Chad and Jeremy (these two were hysterical), We Five (not too damn bad).  And more that are un-remember at the moment.  Each time the house was packed.  Now the Florence Events Center can only seat 457, with the orchestral pit turned into seating (as it was last night)m, with that said, easily the back two rows (if not most of three rows) were empty, not all of the orchestra seats were filled, and there were open areas where sponsor seats weren’t filled.   In years past the house was rocking, people were singing loudly, stomping their feet, tapping their toes with every seat full.  Last night, people sang one song – well okay the refrain.  He was less interesting than my life… and that says a lot.

You did note it was a co-headlining concert?  The Shook Twins were the second bill.  Now I know none of their music... except their song Windows, which I used for their commercial.  We didn’t get to see their half of the concert.  Why you ask?  I got called away on an emergency. The picture is just the beginning as to why.  

Earlier in the evening the power blinked - really hard, causing a small outage of both lights and power to my cable box, causing Roger to wonder what happened to his game when he walked back in the living room.

Apparently the idiot behind the wheel of a vehicle, lost control of said north-bound vehicle at the intersection of 16th and Highway 101.  I don’t know the circumstances, driver’s name, or vehicle type (and it’s not shown in the photo), but the damage I know.  The power pole was sheered off and rammed into the southeast corner of Maryanne’s Natural Pets (now before you thinking pets might have been injured in the making of this blog, it’s a pet supply store and not a buy a pet type store.)  This caused Central Lincoln PUD to call out crews.  Who needed to shut power down causing an outage from 13th to 23rd streets in Florence.  How does this effect Roger and I you may ask?  This require emergency messages to air from 8:10 in the evening until 1am, ergo I had to go produce and schedule emergency notifications for our listeners on both KCST and KCFM.  

So we were rescued (albeit for only the remaining ten minutes of the “concert”), by my boss who needed me to go to work.  While we were rescued from any more of Jonathan Edwards, it did mean we missed the Shook Twins.  This was the group I wanted to see, an up and coming, rising star in the Folk music world. 
Drats!  I hope you enjoy.

Now we are off to see the Revanant, please no emergency text for the next few hours.

Sith,

Cele