August Break - 2019 - Day 7 - Human

This is a difficult one.  I didn't just want to take a selfie since I do that all the time so it took me a while to come up with something.  Then I remembered that my girls and I went to the Backstreet Boys concert on Sunday and it was for their new album, DNA.  That makes me think of humans so here you go:

They may be getting older and they may not do as many dance moves as they used to but even this 64 year old had a good time listening to these guys. 

They had a really cool stage set up and at times were standing above us all on top of their projector set up.

Tons of cool backgrounds like this one which of course appeals to me a lot.

They did quite a few songs, some from the new album but most from the old ones and everyone was singing along. 

One of my favorites is called No Place.  It is a song about how they have been around the world and seen a lot of things but there is "no place like you" and it shows pictures of them and their families.  They are all married with children now and it was really cute to see their little kids.  

They took their bow after the main set and then drove the crowd wild coming back out with Sharks jerseys on.  

We may all have different DNA but we can all come together to sing and dance!

I know these three humans had a great time!  

Hope you are enjoying my takes on the #Augustbreak2019 prompts.  Not too late to hop on board if you want!  We've got some good ones coming up.  

Awe-Inspiring August - 2018 #AugustBreak Five things about me

Well, I'm not really sure that these five things are truly Awe-Inspiring but that's the theme I've got going on this month so we'll just have to pretend.

August Break prompt for yesterday was 5 things about me.  I started the post but then got busy working and had to take the hubs to the doctors so I never got to finish it.  (He is fine btw).  In any event, I'm sure you'd like to know five things about me so here goes:


1.  I love scarves/shawls and have a bunch of them!

Maybe I use them to hide behind?  (See #5).  I love the colors and they really come in handy when we go places and I can use them to cover my shoulders when it gets cold or my head if it starts to rain (I hate umbrellas).  After taking these pictures I can see I really need to sort through them again.  I used to have them all neatly arranged in color scheme. 


2.  I've ridden a helicopter into the Grand Canyon and had a picnic lunch on the ledge.

Spur of the moment decision to do this and I am SO glad we did.  It was a wonderful experience.  We have read about crashes during this tour but our pilot was great and I was never afraid.  

3.  I've lived in the San Francisco Bay Area my entire life and have driven over the Golden Gate Bridge a lot but I never walked across until my 60th birthday.  Then my family and some friends helped me celebrate and walked with me.  

It was a great day, not too cold but not too hot.  Even my 90-year-old mom came with us.  I'd like to do it again sometime for sure.  It reminded me that there are other sites around San Francisco that I'd like to see, like taking a tour of Alcatraz.  Such fun things so close to home!

4.  In 2006 we started going to concerts on a regular basis and since then we have been to 96 shows.  Some were comedians like Ron White and Jeff Dunham or plays like Jersey Boys, Rock of Ages and Rain but I'm counting them anyway.  Counting the 3 we went to in the beginning of our relationship, that makes 99!  I am making scrapbooks about them.  I showed some of the pages two years ago when I did the A to Z challenge about that subject.   

Last year we went to 13 events! We saw 18 different bands and 1 comedian (Michael Carbanaro - heard of the Carbanaro effect?  He's a magician).  This year we are cutting way back and only have 7 shows.  Tonight is our first one at The Mountain Winery in Saratoga where we will see Rick Springfield, Greg Kihn, Loverboy and Tommy Tutone. 

5.  I am an INFJ but didn't know what that was or that I was one until a few years ago.  I just thought I was shy.  I was in one of the groups like the August Break and everyone was talking about the Myers-Briggs personality test so I took it to see what all the hoopla was about.  

Our daughter (the one who just got the Psych Degree) says that this test really doesn't mean anything since it is all in the way you answer the questions and that you can manipulate the answers any way you want.  I took the test three different times over a period of several months and got the same answer all three times.

Interestingly, we got a new car and the license plate starts with 7NFJ!  It must be true if the DMV knows it :)    

That's 5 things about me.  Learn anything new?  Share something about you!  Play along with #Theaugustbreak2018  

Jumpin' July

July 24 -

Our last concert for July was the Rock, Paper, Scissors Tour with Peter Gabriel and Sting.

We had seats on the floor but not too close.  Still, we had a great time.  Fortunately, the big screen allowed me to get some pretty decent pictures.  Both Peter Gabriel and Sting stayed on stage for almost the whole show.  There was no intermission and they just sang song after song.  

There was a little playful banter between the two and although there were a lot of songs I wasn't familiar with, most of them I knew and could sing along.  

They had an interesting stage set and they each had their own band members so there was a lot of activity. 

 I made a rookie mistake, though and didn't completely charge my camera batteries after the last concert so my camera died before the end of the show.  I also had very little room on my camera, but I deleted some apps and managed to catch some more pictures and a video.  I'll try not to make that mistake again! 

Sledgehammer was the finale and it was a good one.  

We have three more shows coming up in August, with the first being ADELE.  Stay tuned!

Jubilant June

June 3 -  Who Are You?

On May 19 we saw The Who in Oakland.  This is another one of those bands that we wanted to make sure to catch because while the name of the tour is The Who Hits 50, the founding band member are more like in their seventies and how much longer can they keep touring?  

They did pretty much cover all their hits and we had the added excitement (?) that it was Pete Townshend's 71st (told you!) birthday that night. 

He certainly didn't do any of this!

They had a large screen behind them and showed lots of pictures from their 50 years of hits.

This was the one during "Behind Blue Eyes."

                                          Peter stopped a few times during the show to chat up the crowd and seemed to enjoy bringing up the fact that "It is my birthday..." to which the crowd cheered, and to pay tribute to fallen band members, Keith Moon and John Entwistle

Roger Daltrey shared a few of his own stories (like the time he got a girl pregnant early in their career and then married her but it didn't work out).

But mostly it was about the music and after 21 songs, there wasn't one I could think of that they missed.  

Pinball Wizard

It was a great start to our 2016 concert series.  One down, eight more to go.  

What about you?  Ever seen The Who?    

A to Z Challenge - 2016

T is for Tickets...

Thank goodness for Sundays!  A day to catch up a little.  I have been really busy with work the past few days and have not had time to prepare posts and/or check out any of the other blogs I've started to follow through this A to Z Challenge.  If I'm going to be able to afford the tickets to the concerts we see, I better do my real work first!

Which leads me to today's topic, the search for the Golden Tickets.

  I wrote a post in January about this subject.  In it I describe my concerns and recent frustration with getting tickets to see Adele, which sadly we were unable to do!

In the "olden days" there were Ticketmaster outlets in the "record shops" and you could get tickets there.  No more record stores means no more outlets.  You can go to the venues directly and wait in line on the days tickets go on sale, but not everyone lives close enough or has the time to do that.  You can try calling Ticketmaster, but in reality, I believe that is just a person in front of a computer the same as I am and they have no special powers to getting good seats.

The whole process of getting tickets can be stressful.  I find myself breaking out in a sweat, mind racing, fingers flying on the keyboard, eyes on the clock, waiting for it to hit 10:00 (that's the time most tickets go on sale around here).  Once I actually get in to the ticket selection part, I have trouble sometimes making a decision...can I get closer if I give these tickets up?  I have learned that they usually start offering the seats in the back first and work their way up to the close seats but if you miss that window or the tickets are popular, the good seats can be gone and you'll get stuck with the upper deck.  Oh the horror!

As I've said before, we have 9 concerts planned for this year, running from May to September.  I have gotten spoiled and I want to sit as close as I can and for the most part I am willing to pay for those good seats.  I do not want the "VIP" or "Fan club" experience so I know it will be hard to get in the first 10 rows most of the time, but I'm willing to pay almost up to $200 a ticket to see someone we really like.  I would have paid more than that to see Adele but wasn't even given the chance!

Because we saw four shows last year at the Mountain Winery, we were given "Loyalty Club" benefits this year which meant that they were having a pre-sale just for people who had done that.  Since the venue itself only holds about 2500 people, our chances for good ticket selection turned out to be great.  We got tickets in the front section for each of the four shows we are seeing there this year and I am particularly excited for the Foreigner concert where we are in the 2nd row!  Since we are seeing four shows this year, our "Loyalty Club" benefits will extend to next year.  Now if we could just get Adele to go there, we might have a chance!

So, that's my T story and I'm sticking to it.  What about you?  Any special tricks to getting good tickets?  Willing to wait in line 30 minutes or more? Love to hear about it.  
 

A to Z Challenge - 2016

R is for Radio

I have a love-hate relationship with the radio.  When I was a teenager I loved listening to the radio.  Of course, at that time I had few options, it was the radio or records (as in the vinyl type).  I mostly listened to KFRC or KYA which were the "rock and roll" stations at the time.  I could listen all day and it never seemed like they repeated the same songs, or maybe I just didn't notice.  I never remember hearing useless chatter between the DJ's either, or again, maybe I just didn't notice.

Along came CDs and iPods and the like and when I was able to download songs on my computer and listen to them that way, the only time I really listened to the radio was when I was driving in my car.  All of a sudden the stations kept changing formats.  It seemed like the stations I was used to listening to started playing hip hop and rap instead of my usual rock.  The disc jockeys started playing stupid games and making prank phone calls.  When I did find a station I liked, they played the same songs over and over.  I kept thinking that if I was able to have thousands of songs on my iMac, which would take me days to play them all without repeating, why couldn't the radio stations do the same?

And then there was MAX.  In 2006 MAX 97.5 FM, which was a relatively new station on the dial in my area, actually did something wonderful.  According to a newspaper article at the time, the executives did a market research and found out that "...announcers weren't adding much to the listening experience...MAX listeners are people who were not satisfied with traditional stations and said they'd just as soon have just the music."  WHAT?  Someone actually listened to their listeners?  MAX got rid of all the disc jockeys and proclaimed that they were the "station that plays whatever it feels like!"  They got John O'Hurley (the actor who played J. Peterman on "Seinfeld") to do spot promos and they just played the music.  All the time.  They did have a spot about every hour or two where they would run a few commercials but it wasn't even five minutes worth it didn't seem like.

I was in HEAVEN!  I even called the radio station (something I had NEVER done before) to tell them how much I appreciated their programming AND THEY USED THAT ON THE AIR!  Several times I was driving and heard my voice on the radio saying how much I liked it.  How cool is that?

MAX did have contests to win concert tickets but instead of having to call at a certain time or answer a trivia question or be a certain number caller, all you had to do was send them an email with your name and address.  That's it!  So, of course I sent them an email, but didn't think too much about it because I never win anything.

And then one day, after sitting through a jury selection process (I did not get interviewed but it was getting close), I came home to find a letter from MAX FM.  At first I thought it was just an advertisement and then I read the letter:

OMG!  I had actually won!  I was SO excited.  I had only been to three concerts in my life and the last one had been three years before.  The seats were in the second level so it wasn't exactly front row and no one made a big deal about my husband and I but that didn't matter to me.  Huey Lewis and the News were fantastic.  We were a little disappointed with the Chicago performance but the whole experience was just a thrill.  Of course I made a page in my concert scrapbook for it:  

The pictures I took were not the greatest but I remember every bit of that night.  The next day I called the radio station again to tell them thanks for the tickets and let them know how much fun we had.  They used that as a promo spot too!  I did not hear it but one of my friends did and told me they had heard me on the radio.  Wow, I was almost famous!

I had such a good time that I decided I wanted to start going to more concerts.  I had not gone to them when I was growing up and now that our kids were older, I figured my husband and I deserved to have a night out once in a while.  I got us tickets to see Journey and Def Leppard later that year and since that time we have gone to at least four concerts a year.  This year we are going to 9!

Sadly, by the next year 95.7 had changed again and had become a country station, the WOLF.  While I don't mind country music sometimes, it's not my go-to and so I went back to using CDs and then eventually my iPhone as my music in the car.  Nevertheless, I blame the radio for my concert addiction.  I guess it could be worse.

How about you?  Ever won a contest?  Have a favorite radio station?  Miss the Oldies?  Love to hear about it!