Milestone

Well, here it is. For those of you that haven’t been counting, which I assume is all of you, this is my 100th posting. Woo! Who knew I could have that much to say? Ok, that might be all of you for that one. Anyway, I thought about maybe having something special for this occasion. How does nothing special sound? Cause that’s what I’ve got.

Actually, I am getting ready to leave town for a long weekend, which I am very excited about, so tonight begins the packing ritual. I’m sure I’ll have fun stuff to write about when I get back. I miss traveling a lot now that I don’t really do it for work any more.

Other news this week has to do with family. My brother-in-law is in town this week working at a corporate event for an international cosmetics company. I’ve been able to squeeze in some face time when he wasn’t busy putting out last minute fires. The really cool thing is being able to waltz right in to the large arena at the hotel without having anyone stop me or ask me what I was doing. It’s been fun. Chances are I wouldn’t be able to do that if some celebrity was there, but it’s cool going behind the scenes anyway.

Steve and I are continuing to experience scheduling conflicts. At this point, we have given up on the remainder of this month and are looking toward May. It’s discouraging, but not totally insurmountable. Phone calls and text messages have to do for now. Now for a profound observation: dating someone you don’t get to see is lonelier than dating no one. At least if you are alone, what you’re missing doesn’t have a face or personality associated to it. Knowing what you’re missing makes it worse. It’s odd to me that I would forget something as simple as that, but it’s been a while. Ah well, time will tell the tale on this one.

Coming up next is Keane on Mother’s Day weekend. Heidi had something come up, so she’s out. That means I have an extra ticket. I know all of you probably want to go with me. Looks like I may be on my own for this show. No big deal. It keeps the dream alive that Tom and I are going to meet up and then I would just have to ditch you anyway. Right now the band has been touring South America and they have been keeping the fan site updated with blogs of their own.

I have also been working on one of my yearly projects for my sister and brother-in-law. Each year they host a scavenger hunt for their friends. I provide the music. I put together a CD with songs they have to identify with song, artist, and other random bits of trivia. I have done this for a couple of years and I love it. I love making it as hard and annoying as I can. Last year I did popular songs covered by other artists. To get full credit they had to name the original artist, the covering artist, as well as the song title. I was struggling with a theme for this year. I had thought about using songs that sample other songs in them, but I didn’t have much of a list for that. Inspiration struck this week and the CD is done.

I don’t think anyone that is playing is reading this, but you never know. I don’t think it is going to hurt if I tell what the theme is for this year. I decided to go with songs that have repetitive lyrics. I mean really repetitive lyrics. These are the songs you will leap across furniture and small children just to get to the radio to change the station so the song doesn’t get stuck in your head. Naturally, I’ve also made sure they are going to have to listen to each song more than once. If they aren’t counting, then they are listening for an answer to a trivia question. I also made sure that they couldn’t cheat by looking up the song lyrics online. Most sites I found don’t go the distance when it comes to putting in repeating lyrics.

The downside of course is that in order to get the correct answers to the questions, I had to go through the same painful process I am making them go through. Then after I burned the CD I had to listen to it again to make sure it didn’t skip anywhere. It is going to be a long time before I listen to any of those songs again. Still, it will be fun to get the feedback from the players on how much they hated it. Makes it all worth it in the end.

That’s it for now. I’ll check back in next week with an update on this concert weekend.