I'm Batman, But You Can Call Me Bob

You'd think that during the week I had to move, I wouldn't plan much else. Well, you could think that, and I could also think that if I put on a kimono and a mask, I'd be Hong Kong Phooey. Either way, we'd both be wrong. With Wednesday the 2nd looming as the day Josh and Matthew would rent the U-Haul and we'd move the majority of our furniture out of the Elms, I ended up going to a concert all the other nights of the week except Monday.

The first was Guster at Wolf Trap with Gerritt. I can now scratch the Trap off the list of local venues where I haven't seen a show. It also gets a rare A+ rating from me in terms of atmosphere and location. It's so close, many good acts come there, and it is amazingly easy to leave once the show is over, unlike Nissan. In fact, the Nissan parking lot people should come take some lessons from the National Park Service or whoever it was that was directing traffic after the show. Kudos to them! The lawn isn't the greatest for listening to a band you really care about, though, but it is a great party. Gerritt and I decided we'd have to return and sit in the pavilion. The sound was still incredible, though overrun at times by the talking teenagers. As for Guster themselves, their new album is one of the best of the summer, full of catchy classic Gusteresque songs that both evoke their old stuff and advance their music even further. It's hard to beat that kind of a combination with a band you already really like.

Josh's dad and brother Brian teamed up with Matthew to get most of the moving done before I even got off work on Wednesday. All that remained was my computer desk. After that, we went to our new local neighborhood Subway and chowed down on sandwiches. My roasted chicken was, in fact, frozen - but that didn't stop the guy from making me an entire new one. I think we're going to like this Subway.

Thursday night was the long-awaited Buffett show at Nissan, which was a blast as always. It had been too long since I'd seen him live, that's for sure. We didn't quite get to hang out in the parking lot as much as the last time, but we did manage to meet up with Steve and Mandy. Gina, Katie, Gerritt, and I had a good time on the lawn. We would've brought our own chairs, but some doofus in the back parking lot said they weren't allowed tonight, probably in a futile effort to keep people from bringing lawn chairs in. We rented some anyway, which proved to be a good move, because the oppressive humidity made me dizzy partway through the first set. After a few more songs, though, I was back up and grooving. One guy behind us constantly yelled "Jimmy Buffett!" the whole night, which never gets old. Especially when he yells back at Jimmy's stage banter, like so:

Jimmy: "Thanks for coming out tonight!"

Random Yelling Guy: "Thank YOU, Jimmy Buffett!"

By Friday, I'd recruited Gina to help clean out the old apartment and begin to help organize the new place. However, Martha and JC from work called us during the day to offer us a couple of tickets to the Dixie Chicks show at the Verizon Center that night. We're normally not the jetsetting type to go to shows on back-to-back nights, but the Chicks are some of Gina's favorites, so the offer ultimately proved too good to pass up. It was good fun hanging out with my work friends again, too, and the concert itself was interesting and entertaining. The Dixie Chicks have gone toward a more rock-edged, even-more-pissed-off sound after their falling-out with country fans as a result of the infamous President Bush remarks of a few years back. I was waiting for some kind of reference to that, and when they came out to the tune of "Hail To The Chief," they made it clear they had not forgotten. When Natalie Maines commented later that they'd "like to say hello to President Bush's family up there," the crowd let them know that not everyone agreed with them with a few resonant sections of booing. Ahh, shows in DC. I normally don't like the political elements overtaking the music, but in this case it was interesting.

The Dixie Chicks' show was also high-energy and well-done, though I'm not really familiar with their songs that much. Their opener, Bob Schneider (hailing from Austin), was pretty wild. His songs seemed to range widely from blues to jazz to Texas swing while keeping it basically country, but the closing cover of "Natural Woman" made me wonder what the heck was going on. His song about Batman, however, was a tongue-in-cheek classic. Or cheesy. I can't decide.

So that's it for tonight. Part 3 of the catch-up is tomorrow, where we'll learn about some other things. I'm out of steam.