I ♥ the 90's!!!!

OK, so usually when bloggers take a vacation they don't blog at all or less. Well I guess I'm the opposite. Since we are on vacation but aren't actually going away, I have more time to blog.

Being born in 1985 makes me a child of the 90's. Which means I love my 90's music. Well on Sunday night we went to one of the best concerts ever, the Summerland Tour!

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It is a tour that was created by lead singers Art Alexakis, Everclear and Mark McGrath, Sugar Ray.

They decided to get together some of the top bands from the 1990's and create a inexpensive tour. Tickets were only like $20!!!! The line-up included:

Marcy Playground - Sex and Candy

LIT - My Own Worst Enemy & Miserable

Gin Blossoms - Hey Jealousy, Follow You Down, and Found Out About You

Sugar Ray - Fly, Someday, Every Morning, and When Its Over

Everclear - Father of Mine, Be Careful What You Ask For, and I Will Buy You A New Life

The first 3 bands played for about a half hour each and then the last 2 for around 45 minutes each. The crew change setup between each band because they each had different instruments. The best part about this kind of concert is each band really only played their major hits that everybody knows. So you don't have to sit through a long concert with a bunch of songs you have never heard. Also a few times one of the bands would bring either some of the musicians or the lead singers of some of the other bands out onto stage to join them for a song.

I thought Gin Blossoms and Sugar Ray were the best. Mostly, because I know more of their songs compared to the other bands. Andrew and I aren't big fans of Everclear and Art seemed a little stiff and his voice sounded a little off, but the guy is 50 years old. Did you know Mark McGrath is 45. He is full of crazy amounts of energy. He did not stop moving and was hilarious. Everyone put on a great show and I can't wait until they come back again next year. Hopefully they can get some other big names from the the 90's like Smash Mouth, Eve 6, Vertical Horizon, or Chumbawamba.

Have you gone to any great concerts lately. Do you love the 90's as much as I do? Or maybe a different Era?

Let the Games Begin!!!

That's right last night was the opening ceremonies for the 2012 London Summer Olympics. Woooohooooo. The best part. Andrew and I have the week of from work and can hang out and watch the Olympics all day!

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Hubby and I love to watch the Olympics. Our favorite sports to watch are swimming, diving, gymnastics, and I always enjoy to watch a bit of the equestrian competitions. During the Winter games we love to watch ice skating, a little speed skating, skiing, snowboarding, Hubby like to watch hockey and a huge family favorite is Curling. We watched some of the qualifying matches several weeks ago and were a little disappointed that some of our favorites didn't make it, like Nastia Liukin and Alicia Sacramone - both are USA gymnasts.

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Of course we knew the USA swimming phenom, Michael Phelps, would make it and he is a huge favorite of my niece and sister and well I guess most of the family really. Phelps is on his way to be the most decorated Olympian.

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On a completely different subject some crazy things have been happening at home. So for the last year and a half to two years we have heard the little chattering of bats in the attic above our apartment. Well the noisy neighbors as we like to call them finally got tired of just staying in their own space. We have had either the same 1 or 2 different bats decide to visit our bedroom. The first was a week ago on Thursday night. It was around 11:30 at night. We had just got into bed and turned off the lights when it started flying around the bedroom. We were able to get it to fly out the back door within 5 minutes. Should we find it a little ironic that almost exactly the same time we were chasing this guy around the apartment people were lined up for the midnight showings of the new Batman movie? Andrew and I think that he came in through our bathroom fan. We don't have one of those fans with the tiny slit openings. No our bathroom has a round fan that looks kind of like those circular AC vents you sometimes see in business but you can see right up into it a little more. Starting that night we decided to leave the fan running non-stop to keep a bat from coming in again.

Well except then I said well lets just turn it off for a few hours in the middle of the day on Saturday, just to give it a break. Yeah..... bad idea we came back to the house after seeing Batman at the movies and turned the fan back on because we knew were going to be out late and I wanted it running before nightfall. Well, Sunday morning at 5:45 AM I woke up to a bat flying around the bedroom again. We can't figure any other way they are getting in so our best guess is he came in while the fan was on and then hung out until it got dark. He took a little bit longer to get out of the house because it fell behind the bookshelf in the bedroom. But once I moved that I got him to go out the back door again. We decided that day that we needed to take the cats for their Rabies shots just in case they got a little too close to our visitors. This is pretty much what our little visitors look like. It is your basic Little Brown Bat.

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So the landlord was finally able to the bat guy to come to the apartment on Wednesday and look around. He agreed it was probably the fan. He looked in the attic and said he saw at least 2 up there. They are getting in to the attic around the chimneys where the flashing and shingles are pulled up a bit. So on this coming Monday he will be up on our roof at 8 AM installing one-way doors. These special doors will let the bats out at night to feed but they won't be able to get back in and will have to find somewhere else to live. Then he'll wait around a week to make sure they all have time to leave and then he will come back and completely close up the entry points. How much does this cost? $2,400. I know crazy right. Luckily it is the landlord paying and not us. Part of the reason it is so much is because the guy needs to use a 40 foot ladder just to reach our roof and the roof is really steep so it is a bit more dangerous. It was almost going to be more because the guy said he thought he might need a lift to get on the roof instead of the ladder but after checking things out, he is pretty sure he can reach with the ladder. He also told us that the little brown bats aren't strong enough to break through painter's tape so we can turn off the fan and cover it with tape until the bats are gone. So our fan looks like this now.

On a much better note Andrew have been up to something and I'm really excited to fill you in but I'm so afraid if I tell too many people I'll jinx it. So you'll just have to wait. I should know by the end of Monday if things are going work out the way we hope and believe me then I will be spreading the news all over the place. So for now you'll just have to wait. Believe me the waiting is killing me. I did take a picture of something related to it but I can't share it because it would give too much away.

So what about all of you? Do you love the Olympics? What are your favorite events? Have you had any run-ins with bats? Have you tried to keep something secret for fear that if too many people know it wouldn't turn out the way you hoped?

Time Keeps on Slippin' Slippin' Slippin'

.... Into the future. Yeah I know I've been gone for awhile. I have trouble setting up a blogging schedule and sticking to it. Sometimes I feel I have nothing to blog about and other times I do but I just don't make the time to write it all down. And time just seems to fly by. So here are some updates about what I have been up to. Sadly this is going to be a bit of a boring post because I can't find the USB cord for my camera.

Food - I've been baking my own honey wheat bread for sandwiches and honey wheat cinnamon bread for breakfast. I've gotten better but still haven't mastered it. My bread is made with whole wheat flour so it sometimes comes out kind of dense and dry. I've fixed the density issue some by adding more yeast. I just picked up whole wheat bread flour today to see if that makes a difference. We'll see when I make the next batch. It has just been so ridiculously hot that I hate baking, it just makes the kitchen unbearable. I try to do it either in the early morning or before bed.

House Hunting - This is still an ongoing process. I'm online everyday looking at what is listed for sale. Hoping for new listings or price reductions. I haven't had too much luck so far. I found one little house that we definitely could have afforded but it was a tiny 1 bedroom/1 bathroom house. We might have been able to build an addition in the future but for our immediate needs it would have been very tight. The bed room was only like 9x10. We'd be lucky to get the bed and a really small dresser in there maybe.

Life - I've been feeling a bit nostalgic lately. I may have to do with a few things. Next year is my 10 year high school reunion and I'm turning 27 this September. A lot of my high school friends are having their first or even their second child. I've started thinking about old friends. The ones that I haven't seen in over 13 years, all my middle school friends from North Dakota. This past weekend I decided to try and reach out to an old friend from middle school. We wrote to each other for a couple years when I moved to Connecticut but lost touch. So I decided on Friday to write a letter. That's right good, old snail mail. As far as I can tell by doing some googling it looks like Katie's family still live at the same house. So that is where I sent the letter and I'm hoping it will get to her. Now I just have to wait impatiently for some kind of response.

Hopefully, now I can try to get back into a blogging schedule and not disappear for so long again.