August 2005 Archives

Gerritt, Josh, and I caught Glen Phillips at Jammin' Java in Vienna last night. Thanks to the Post's daily free Express commuter paper, I noticed Glen's name in a small blurb in the lower-left corner of a page. Slowly, the realization dawned on me that he was playing in Vienna, a few scant miles from my apartment. Shortly after that, I noticed that the show was that same day!

This is the kind of thing I've been waiting for after moving up here. Where I grew up, the prospect of just going down to the local coffee shop to hear an open mic night or see an up-and-coming artist was just not possible, because there weren't any. So this whole notion of being able to catch live music at your whim, without having to drive an hour to get there, is still pretty new and exciting to me. With that being said, I couldn't have wished for a better guy to start out my northern Virginia / DC concert-going experiences than with Glen Phillips. Thanks also to Gerritt and Josh for coming along even when they hadn't really heard many of the songs before.

I've mentioned Glen before on this site, alluding to his side project with Nickel Creek. I wasn't into Toad The Wet Sprocket that much during their heyday (I'm only starting to look into their back catalog), but I became an instant fan of Glen's when I picked up his first solo record, Abulum, in a going-out-of-business sale at the NRV Mall's old music store. My admiration of his work continued with his recent album, Winter Pays For Summer, which is, quite simply, fantastic.

Watching Glen as a solo act, I was expecting some heartfelt performing, and he certainly delivered. Humbly taking the stage, sporting a beard and setting up his own mic stand and guitar, Phillips was friendly and interactive with the audience from the start. His songs can be disarmingly simple, but at the same time, they speak to the everyday emotions that normal people feel. This is the kind of songwriting I always wanted to be able to do, because I think this is the kind that reaches the most people and achieves greatness without holding on to any pretense.

Just look at some of the lyrics from "Duck And Cover:"

"Everybody here has got a story tell Everybody's been through their own hell There's nothing too special about getting hurt Getting over it, that takes the work"

Or from "Courage":

"There's an ocean of unlatched windows And a world of unlocked homes The only reason anybody can still feel safe Is most people still knock on the door"

I could probably go on for a while picking out snippets of lyrics, but it still wouldn't really do the songs justice. Check out some of his albums or see him live when you get a chance. If nothing else, if you were a fan of Toad the Wet Sprocket, you'll get to hear solo versions of a few of their hits at his live shows. Not all of Glen's songs are necessarily uplifting, so watch out for that if you're not in the mood for thinking deep - but by golly, the man knows how to craft an interesting song, he performs it well, and he clearly enjoys doing it. What more can you ask for?

A lot of people have their eyes on Hurricane Katrina tonight. Josh and I have been following it on the news, off and on. I'm hoping that the buildup the media is giving this storm isn't completely true, but the trouble is, not that many Category 5 storms have hit the U.S. all that recently. And none have certainly hit New Orleans almost directly. My thoughts and prayers go out to all of those caught in the path of this storm, including all of those in the Superdome-turned-emergency shelter. This situation is brought all the more closer home to me since my friends and I just visited N.O. about seven months ago. Seeing the places where we walked and toured and watched football now facing real danger is, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Stay safe, everyone.

To put a bit of a lighter spin on this evening's weather, at least Jim Cantore is there in Gulfport, MS (one of Team Sugar Bowl's stops, incidentally). Although we didn't see him on the Weather Channel coverage for a few hours this evening, we only expected Jim to maybe be going out to face the storm bare-chested in a boat. The man is the Zeus of severe weather forecasting and reporting. To tell the truth, if I were in New Orleans right now, the first thing I'd want to do is find out where Jim Cantore is and go wherever he goes. Once he appeared on the screen tonight with his baseball cap and blue raincoat, we knew we could at least rest easy.

... A belated weekend report: I joined Gerritt on his boat last night, and along with Mel, we ventured out into the rainy streets of southwest DC. We managed to go up into the Old Post Office Tower before it closed. The Post Office is a nice holdover from DC's early days, and it offers the best panoramic of the district's highlights, even while it's raining. We ate dinner at Gordon Biersch, a microbrewery/restaurant. It was delicious, espeically their home-brewed root beer, but I'd recommend staying away from the garlic fries. Later, we caught an IMAX movie at the Museum of Natural History, before heading back to G-Dock to watch "Mars Attacks" on the small screen. All in all, the evening was a nice re-introduction to DC for me, and it reinforced the still-not-quite-lucid idea that yes, I actually do live up here now.

My Flickr photos are bearing fruit: Chelsea, a producer, for the Masachusetts-based radio program Open Source is using my picture of the Hershey candy guys for an article on their blog. The article ties into a show about candy that they're running on Thursday night at 7PM Eastern. Check the site for broadcasting listings; it's going out on some NPR stations, is distributed by PRI, and if you've got XM, it'll be on Channel 133. Perhaps they'll mention my photo... who knows?

From radioopensource.org :

"Christopher Lydon hosts Open Source, a live hour on the radio that sounds like a live day on the web. We値l be working with bloggers and podcasters and featuring ideas posted and recorded to our own blog; the idea is to capture the sound of conversation on the web, share it with a radio audience and then invite that audience back to the web to contribute."

I've got commuter lag, so I'm looking forward to an early bedtime tonight. The first day's orientation went well; I'm just trying to absorb everything in my new environment so I can make the most of it and do my best job. It's a similar feeling to when I started my first co-op rotation, except I have less jitters and more confidence. Plus, I've been on time so far!

... All of my fellow Hokies will sleep well tonight. In case you haven't heard or aren't at Virginia Tech right now, our very own Lane Stadium was voted the "Best Home Field Advantage" by Rivals.com. Hey, we always knew it, now we're just getting national confirmation. (This is on the heels of our engineering school jumping up to 14th in the nation, which is also cool.) This announcement just makes me hungry for football season even more.

... And on a sad note, Daryl of D103.com fame announced today that he'll be ending his blog at the end of August. Give a look through his archives, 'cause he's been blogging for years and years now, and it's always been interesting. As I mentioned in the comments over there, his site - along with several of my other friends who preceeded me - gave me inspiration to start this little humble piece of work right here. D103 will be missed.

I'm still alive, folks. The last two weeks have been a whirlwind of activity, naturally. I haven't had much time to do much posting as I've been in my brother's wedding and helped Gina move in to her apartment. Now, all this traveling and moving is culminating in my first day of work tomorrow. I won't be able to blog much about work, but I'm sure there will be several adventures in the weeks to come as I become further acclimated to the area. August, after all, has pretty much become the month of change around these parts. This fall should prove interesting.

There's been a change of plans, but tomorrow will still be a day of much traveling for Gina and me.

In the meantime, Virginia Tech, my good old alma mater, seems to have gotten itself into some bad publicity this week. Now, I can understand that if the Saudis are paying for part of the classes, there would be an understandable need to make sure their needs for teaching the classes are met. However, whoever thought it'd be a good idea to go ahead with gender separation at a state-run university AND didn't figure in the possibility of any backlash from, say, any of the female employees of the university... well, I lost my train of thought on that sentence, but a similar lack of focus must have been what let this whole thing go through in the first place.

Well, I doubt there will be any lasting repercussions with all of this, but as much as I love my school, sometimes the administrators goof up big time. It's a good idea to promote unity with some of our Middle Eastern counterparts, especially at a time like this, but you certainly don't want to unintentionally sow seeds of discord with your own employees at the same time.

Who's got their new DSL service up and running in their new apartment? These guys. It's been a wacky, fun-filled, adventurous few days here in beautifully crowded Fairfax County, but I'm definitely feeling settled in, for the most part.

In fact, it seems these past few days have been ones of change and travel for several people, not just me. Who else, you might ask? Well, I think the Discovery astronauts are glad to be back on terra firma (and I'm certainly glad there were no further complications, though I do think it's time to start pushing for a post-shuttle space program, whatever that might be). Amy's been traveling across the U.S. on her way to her new home, and she's been encountering strange and wonderful people along the way. One of my old friends from my first couple of years in college, Jess, got married in Kentucky, though I was unable to attend.

So, maybe there were favorable conditions for change up there somewhere. The Man Upstairs had his PDA in fine form, making all the schedules run right. I'm just glad that everything went smoothly.

... Even though this did happen a few days ago, I couldn't let this story slip by. If you haven't heard about singer Marc Cohn's survival of a bullet to his head, then read up on it. He really must be living right, because not only did he survive the shooting after an attempted carjacking, but police have also arrested the man thought to have been behind the shooting. Is Marc Cohn a Christian? Maybe he is tonight.

... With all this talk about getting settled into the new place, I think it's time to go on another trip. Say, back home to be in my brother's wedding? I'll warm up the car, you pick up the donuts. I'll post if I get a chance!

Just a quick post from Gina's before I head back home for the night and the upcoming week. It's already been a whirlwind up here in just the few days since I arrived! I'm way too tired to go into detail, but the apartment is great and everything else is going well. I've been through two days of intense unpacking and a Nationals game today, so it's been a full weekend. I want to give a special shout-out and thanks to Gina and her mom for cooking and bringing my family dinner on Friday night; it was spectacular. Also, thanks to the Oteys, Sarah, Josh's friend Jessica, and Gerritt for helping with the final unloading yesterday and hanging out with us while Josh and I started getting things together.

I'm still sorting through boxes of stuff in between all of the hang-out and downtime. It's getting there, but the getting's slow. Give us a couple of weeks, and our apartment will look like an actual place to live.

And finally, thanks for the other comments from Thursday night's entry. Take care until next time!

There's not a lot of time to post tonight, 'cause I've got to get to bed. The Salmons family is going to be on the road well before many of you get up, and probably before a lot of you even get to bed. We've got a long drive ahead of us tomorrow, naturally.

I've got the normal hyperactivity in my mind that usually accompanies the night before something big is going to go down, which also usually makes it hard for me to get to sleep at a decent hour. I do have something in my favor, though: I've been moving all of my stuff into a trailer all day long. I'll probably strike a balance sometime in the next hour or so and rely on caffeine during the legs of the trip when I'll be driving. As I mentioned before, I'll post again when everything gets settled down at the new place.

Tomorrow, I will officially be a resident of Virginia... this is going to be cool!

Hey folks. Thanks for indulging me in my recent trips into the past, with photographs of my hometown. I'll be uploading the rest to Flickr sometime, but this seemed like a good way to keep up blogging while I'm otherwise occupied with packing up and moving. Speaking of that, I should actually be back up and running relatively quickly after Friday, given that our Internet works when it's supposed to. Excellent!

Today's photo is my old middle school, which was a high school before that and dates back to at least the 30's. In sixth grade, the first year I was there, there was no air conditioning. I remember buying one of those little battery-powered fans with the foam blades that attached to my desk so I wouldn't die of heat exhaustion in the early weeks of the year. Luckily, the weather evened out after a while, and over the next two years, the A/C was welcomed.

Middle school is a very transitional period for a lot of kids. I hated sixth grade for the hormonally-fueled ridicule I endured as the "brain" of the class. It got a little better during seventh and eighth grade, when my friendships with my best friends like Stuart and Joe strengthened, but it was still a difficult time to get through. I imagine it's even worse today, but it's during middle school that girls and guys really start getting serious in relationships, people are still cruel to each other, and in my school, those of us that weren't jocks were left trying to figure out how the world was really going to work when we grew up.

Luckily, I turned out just fine. The crowning achievement of middle school was our eighth grade class' production of Grease. By the end of the eighth grade, we were kings. It was all part of the cycle of school years.

If you're ever near my old stomping grounds and want to try out some local cuisine... there's not a whole lot to choose from. But, one place has survived from the days of my short-and-youngness: Dee's Drive-In. It still has the curb service flair, and a gigantic menu, both in terms of the variety of items offered and the size of the sign. It's also got footlong hotdogs; need I say more?

I will anyway.

Gigantic hot dogs aside, the best things about Dee's to me are the milkshakes. I can remember nearly passing out as a kid trying to drink my whole shake through a straw. My flavor of choice is peanut butter (sorry Tom and Ben), but they've got a pretty wide variety. Now, Dee's doesn't have quite the legendary reputation as a Carl's or a Kline's, but it's still a pretty cool staple around here, even though it's actually in Louisa, KY. I'll bring you by sometime.

I'm back-dating this post to Monday, because that's when I meant to actually make the post active. With all the running around I've been doing, though, I neglected to do it.
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Just imagine that playground with some rusty swingsets and a lot less grass growing through the cracks, and you'll have the scene as it appeared when I was in elementary school. I seem to remember a circle being painted roughly where the picture was taken, for games of duck duck goose and the like. It was on this particular playground that I distinctly remember one of my classmates pushing me down during one of our rough games of playing spies (or something like that) and making me land on my nose. I remember eventually calming down about the nosebleed, but everybody else freaked out about the sight of so much blood, especially when mom took me back into the classroom that afternoon to collect my things. I remember the guy felt pretty bad about pushing me, too.

In third grade, we were big enough to be allowed onto the big playground down the hill, on the other side of the main elementary school building. This playground wasn't kidding around, since it had an endless supply of jungle gyms (of the sort that probably aren't allowed on playgrounds today because they were so freakin' dangerous), swings, and basketball hoops. My friends and I usually bypassed all of that, though, and made for these ramps on the annex buildings. They made excellent sewers for our games of Ninja Turtles (I was always Donatello), and when that craze faded, they were always a good home base - even after I nearly swallowed a bee while I was sitting on one of these ramps, drinking a Pepsi.