Holiday Weekend Roundup

Oy....four days since the last post. Well, I've been fully engaged in doing a whole lotta nothing, to be honest - and posting just didn't rank up there in the activities. I found out on the date of my last post that I actually got the 3rd and the 4th off, so that was an unexpected bonus. The only downside was that on the 3rd, I had to finish up my defensive driving course. Boo. Other than that, though, this weekend was pretty fun and interesting.

First up, I saw a couple of shows this weekend that I wanted to tell you about. After DSC, I met up with Justin and Travis to head down to see Language Room (with special guests The Orange from Dallas and some other band which we missed) at the venerable Stubb's BBQ. They did a phenomenal job and I'd highly encourage you to check them out on myspace if you can't hit 'em here in Austin. The highlight of their set for me was bringing a string section up on the stage for their last song, which was full of emotion and really powerful.

I also saw Rooney with Locksley and The Bridges at Emo's. I really enjoyed Rooney's set, although in my mind they were almost upstaged by Locksley simply because the latter is such a high-energy band and was a ton of fun to see and participate with as they have a really good rapport with the crowd and know how to get people involved. Rooney got famous due to The O.C., I believe. They started off a little slow, playing some of their less energetic songs at the beginning (which I found odd) and then slowed it down even more to do some of their acoustic stuff, but finally found both their groove and their volume by ramping things up to hit (what I consider to be) their best songs to end the show and do a whiz-bang encore. Made for a really late night, though, that's for sure.

As for the holiday, I was able to catch lunch on Thursday with my Uncle Sim who was passing through town on the way down to Mexico, and then was able to get some errands run before DSC. Friday was a big cookout with the GHBC family followed by a pretty decent fireworks show in a park nearby. The fireworks were kind of scary, though, as there were two rockets that went off in the launcher right at ground level - the first one was just one and so it wasn't as scary as the second that went off right near the beginning of a big barrage of rockets, which knocked over at least one of the launchers during the explosion that sent a rocket shooting out sideways which exploded at ground level. It was pretty crazy and everyone was a little tense there, just waiting for one of those bad boys to shoot off in our direction, until it was clear that the pyrotechnics team had things under control and had shut down that launcher. The rest of the show went off without a hitch and I'll hopefully be uploading some phonecam pix that I took to Flickr soon.

Other than that, the rest of the weekend was spent hanging out (Happy Birthday, Chuck!), watching TV, and just bumming around in general. Tomorrow, all goes back to the old grind and let me tell ya - it's already getting me down. A long weekend is really, really nice but I could use about a year and half of them before I think I'm really going to be ready to return to work without a sense of....bleh. But, as Lowell once said, "Well....back to the old salt lick."

Salt lick, indeed.