Sunday rolls around, and another week has done and gone. Been a good week, though.
The work week was pretty uneventful, for the most part. It seems that the opinion is that I’m catching on to things rather quickly there, however. John (the person I’m replacing) has decided that this week he’ll only be working half-days, and will make this Friday his last day…then I’ll have the shop to myself. Pretty cool. I also talked with Shelley (my boss within Xerox), and the impression I got is that while I’m not using my DocuTech training at this position, there are good possibilities for that in the future. This was great to hear, as it makes it sound even more possible that I will be getting hired on by Xerox on a permanent basis at some point in the future. It may be a while before that happens — as I understand it, they’re currently in the midst of a hiring freeze right now — but with any luck, I might be officially part of Xerox sometime after the first of the year.
Earlier this week I went out to see American Pie 2. I’m not entirely sure why that ended up being my choice, as I am no great fan of the first one, but that was where I ended up. Pleasantly enough, it wasn’t that bad. I wouldn’t label it a classic by any stretch, nor will it be a ‘keeper’ for me when it comes out on DVD, however it was surprisingly funny in spots, and I ended up enjoying it much more than I did the first installment. Much of it was a rehash of the original, but it felt to me like it held together better this time around…more of a real story connecting the characters, rather than merely placing a bunch of misfits in screwball (and often disgusting) circumstances one after the other. And, I gotta say, Alyson Hannigan (as Michelle, the ‘band geek girl’), was great — stealing the film, in my eyes, at least. So, all in all, not as bad a film as I thought it might be.
I also went out Friday night for the midnight show of Poltergeist. Very cool…it had been years since I’d seen this film, and along with many other horror films that were beat to death with sequels, it’s always pleasant to revisit the original and see just how good it actually is. Probably very much due to the production (and uncredited co-direction) of Steven Spielberg, the film is much more along the lines of what I like to see in a horror film — a slow build that allows you to make some connection with the characters before things start getting freaky, followed by truly innovative ideas as these unexeplained events start affecting the family. Quite nice.
I’ll try and get around to at least moving these mini-reviews into the Movies section of my messageboard soon…kind of tired now, as I’ll explain in the moment, so didn’t do that part yet.
Saturday, I headed out with a full crew of people (Casey, Dez, Chad, Don, Karl, Tim, Jenny, and Wendy) to go see the Barenaked Ladies in concert out at the Gorge (a gorgeous [no pun intended] outdoor amphitheater by George, Washington). Casey had bought me the ticket before I had even made it down to Seattle as a ‘welcome to Washington’ present, which I thought was all sorts of cool. We all loaded into three cars Saturday afternoon, and undertook the roughly 3-hour drive to the Gorge. We eventually made it out to the campsite at Potholes State Park — apparently, it was the closest one available, even though it took us another 45 minutes or so after passing the Gorge to get to it — and set up camp there. Admittedly, it was a very pretty little campground.
After getting everything set up at the campsite, we packed ourselves into two cars, and headed down a quicker route back to the Gorge for the show. The way there was fascinating — currently, huge amounts of the state of Washington are on fire, and there were amazing clouds of smoke from the fires just 40 miles away or so in the sky. The smoke turned an otherwise clear night to a completely opaque murk. Just fascinating to see — and the smell of burning pine in the air was an added reminder that all this stuff wasn’t that far away.
We got to the Gorge during the first opening act (who, unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of), found a spot and got settled during her last couple songs. The second opening spot was The Proclaimers! All sorts of cool…though I’ve only ever picked up one of their albums (Sunshine on Leith), I’ve enjoyed their music since I first heard “1000 Miles” in the movie Benny & Joon. They played a short (or so it seemed to me) but very clean set, with a nice mix of songs, some that I recognized, and some that I didn’t. After a short break while the stage was slightly rearranged, BNL came on.
This show was great. While I’ve never known much of BNL before this (most of my exposure has been their radio tracks — ‘If I Had A Million Dollars’, ‘One Week’, and ‘Pinch Me’, all of which I’ve liked), so didn’t know many of the songs, these guys put on an incredible show. They obviously have a lot of fun with their music and their concerts, and spent a good amount of time between songs joking around and generally having a lot of fun (from the lead singer while relating a story: “We were celebrating Christmas. Sure, I’m Jewish, but we’re big fans of presents…we’re not big fans of a kind, benevolent God. We like the Old Testaments wrathful, vengeful God. So now we celebrate Easter, too.”) Bouncing back and forth between their songs, with frequent jaunts into random snippets of other music, plus three encores, the show was an absolute blast.
After the show ended at about 11:30pm, we all went back to the campsite, and ended up sitting up and talking until sometime after 2 in the morning. We started out just sitting and talking, still pretty jazzed from the show, then Karl, Casey, Tim and I got into a discussion covering everything from Economics to Politics to whether or not the human race is breeding itself into extinction, and didn’t realize how long we talked until someone actually thought to look at a watch. The night was absolutely beautiful, too — I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Milky Way as visible as it was last night.
This morning we all got up, slowly got ourselves ready to go, packed up, and headed back into town. Now I’m back at Casey’s just long enough to put this post up, then it’ll be time for me to head back to my apartment and crash out before it’s time for me to work tomorrow morning. Very good weekend, though…was a whole lot of fun, and a nice change from kicking around my apartment. So, this is it for now…until later….