it'll be a breeze

oh memorial day weekend, how thou kicked my bootay. it all started thursday night when an old college bud was in town for work, and we hit up lodo because it was his last night in town and technically my friday night. after a couple happy hour drinks at kokopelli's, we hit up the Chophouse for some company-paid-for filets and a bottle of francis coppolla merlot. then it was a couple bars and drunkenness.

friday casey and i drank way too much before band practice and thus everyone played really loud and sloppy. but that's fun sometimes. afterwards i finished my bottle of ravenswood zin. it is my new favourite wine.

saturday i had to go out to the field to do a bit of work but i was done in a half hour so it wasn't that bad. that evening the chica took me to sushi hai, and for dessert we walked across the street to the coral room for a couple glasses of reisling. then we watched shopgirl at her place which i found to be ok. jason schwartzman is hilarious as always.

sunday i went to church and had an awesome time as usual, then began to prepare for the gigantor fish feed hosted by a member of the drews. my uncle sent me about 25 lbs of fresh-caught salmon and halibut from alaska. my uncle rules. so i deep-fried the halibut for a little fish & chip action and cooked a couple kings on the barbie and the oven. we also had muscles provided by casey's neighbor, and CV himself cooked up some shrimp. there was also a shitload of white wine involved and as soon as a i had a chance to sit down and socialise i started slugging white wine and subsequently got wasted. it was a good wasted, though, with casey and i sitting on the patio playing songs to a candle-lit crowd on a lovely sunday night.

monday i sat around the house and did laundry and ordered pizza and watched a movie or two. here's to you, memorial day weekend. you don't come around often enough.

i clung to the stretcher and drew them a heart (part 2)

i clung to the stretcher and drew them a heart (part 1)

The Nancy Drews: Rock & Dine!

thanks to everyone who came out! you all made it a special night of food, music, and fun! i'll have more pics soon, the above are courtesy of kath. when i post the other pics i'll give a short review.

got the new chris harford album and i think it's pretty damn good. produced, engineered, and arranged by michael melchiondo aka mickey melchiondo aka dean ween aka mickey moist, and mixed by andrew weiss of ween, butthole surfers, and rollins band fame, Looking Out For Number 6 is a lovely album which is par for the course for chris harford as far as i know. the only other album of his i've listened to is 1992's Be Headed which was released by Elektra. Number 6 starts out with the apocalyptic "what we do not know" and moves right into the lennon-esque "this moment is all we've got". my favourite track thus far is "teach me" featuring harmonies by gene ween aka papa gener aka aaron freeman. the album ends on kind of a low note with "the glider to the queen". i've never been a fan of closing an album with a slow song, it just seems rather anticlimactic. while the technique does work on a number of records, i don't like it here and that's my biggest complaint. and that there are only eight tracks, which makes it feel like it ends abruptly.

anyhow, the album (released on Ween's own Chocodog label) just got picked up by Sony/BMG so the official release date has been pushed back i guess. i did the preorder thing so that's why i have it. i didn't mean to sound like i was bragging. i'm just going to stop now because i am so scatterbrained from the weekend's shenanigans and the beefeaters & tonic i had last night at barry's.

followed me down the neck to D

i've been sitting on this post for like a half hour now. so let's talk some rockies baseball!

the rockies are playing out of their collective heads right now, and maybe o'dowd and hurdle are on to something. except why did hurdle take Fogg out of the game last night? colorado's starting pitching is freaky at the moment, with Jennings and Cook almost throwing back-to-back complete games, and Fogg pitching very well into the 8th last night. low pitch-counts, excellent ball-control, great catching, timely hitting -- these are all factors that have put your Colorado Rockies at the top of the NL West!

Garrett Atkins, Matt Holiday, Clint Barmes, Todd Helton, these guys are slugging with everyone else in the National League, and i think baseball is better for it. remember when Colorado was a new ballclub in the early nineties, and the Blake Street Bombers were raking homers like it was going out of style? Castilla, Walker, Bichette - hell, i wasn't even a Colorado fan and i knew of those guys. well this is not that team (although the aforementioned Four can hit the long ball when need-be) and that's not such a bad thing. home runs are fun to watch, especially when you're at the ballpark, but they won't buy you a decent run in the playoffs. a nice post-season is backed by good pitching - starters and the bullpen - and clutch hitting. what i mean by clutch hitting is not necessarily a walkoff home run, but a perfectly placed bunt, a long sac fly, a timely single with a man on second. the Rockies this year are not relying on the home run to help them win games, they're doing it by playing smart baseball and by getting the most out of their pitchers.

although when you play against the Cards, sometimes you'll get Pujols'd.

angels (russian) where i fear to tread

as usual i have nothing to comment on...

IF YOU'D LIKE TO ATTEND ROCK & DINE AT KOKOPELLI'S BY THE NANCY DREWS, PLEASE CONTACT ME VIA EMAIL FOR TICKETS - UNLVTOGS_at_YAHOO.COM. THIS IS A SPECIAL NIGHT OF GOURMET FOOD AND GOURMET MUSIC BY THE NANCY DREWS AND JT NOLAN & THE LOVELY AND TALENTED. YOU DO NOT WANT TO MISS OUT BECAUSE YOU WILL BE SAD YOU DID! I SHIT YOU NOT! TICKETS WILL NO LONGER BE SOLD AFTER WEDNESDAY MAY 17 BECAUSE THE CHEF NEEDS TO KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE TO COOK FOR. IF IT SEEMS LIKE I'M YELLING, I'M REALLY NOT, EXCEPT PERHAPS WHEN AN EXCLAMATION MARK FOLLOWS THE SENTENCE.

...except to pimp my band.

i can forestall the sun when two of the raiders come

so tomorrow is cinco de mayo. i always call it Cinco de Rob because a friend of mine from college, his birthday is May 5th and his name is Rob. so every cinco de mayo he had a party called Cinco de Rob. it was pretty fun; we'd make up a bunch of margaritas and daquiris and get all wasted outside playing this card game that i can't remember. but i do remember it seemed like an east coast card game.

i probably won't be going all out or anything tomorrow night because just like St. Patty's Day, it's friggin amateur night. i'm still waiting on brahburns to upload pics of the nancy drews to glide, which is where we store all of our media. it's cool. and also i always forget about the pics kath sent when i get home.

it looks like the fog is lifting a bit so perhaps i'll be golfing with joe today. i don't know though, i'm pretty slammed at work which is not cool on a friday. fridays are supposed to be lackadaisical and i am missing The Smack Off on the Jim Rome Show. it's a great day to listen to The Jungle and i'm stuck in the gas chamber.

you melt chocolate hearts

i've been waiting to post the post-Drews show report for some pics but i can't access any from my work computer. saturday night the Nancy Drews rocked the shit, bad sound system and all, to a lively, exuberant, slightly drunk crowd. it was awesome. thanks so much to everyone who came: kath, hdw, hubs (& later on G), brahburns and a-bomb, pez, etc. i'm trying to think of anyone else who reads this and can't think of anyone right now cuz it's still early in the morn. we truly appreciate everyone's support and i hope you all had a good time.

so we went on after the Lords of Fuzz (not the Captains of Fuzz) who did a nice job rocking the stage. by the time we got on stage, all of our people had arrived (which kicked the two other bands' asses i must say) and we did the best we could with no sound check and one monitor that faced zach the drummer. i mean the sound system was really a joke, and the sound man was all, "well i'll let you know how it sounds after the first song and then you can adjust." um, excuse me? what the fuck is that all about? that was the most ridiculous statement i've heard in a long time but we rolled with it. it's quite difficult to sing when you can't hear yourself but i think i pulled it off. as for the rest of the band, they're pros, what can i say.

my favourite song of the night was probably "touch my tooter" because it's rockin and i don't have to play guitar on it. also, we had to cut four songs which ended up costing the Old Curtis Street Bar a lot of money, seeing as how the entire bar cleared out after we stopped playing. it's bad karma to tell the Nancy Drews to stop playing.