Sick Day

It's Day 4 (or maybe Day 5) of being sick. I stayed home from work today and lounged about in my oversized mint green pajamas. They are so ill-fitting (no pun intended) yet extraordinarily comfortable. And they were cheap. Costco-cheap.

I slept 12 hours, and I feel better. Nothing beats taking nighttime medicine during the day.

Work Hard, Play Hard

I'm still sick. I'm still producing endless snot. I still have a ginormous stack of stuff to do at work. Any sensible person would've gone home early and rested.

I'm not sensible.

We went to the Arcade Fire concert tonight at the Greek Theatre. Call it a musical prescription for my cold. The band was excellent. This is the fourth time we've seen them (previously, we saw them at Inland Invasion, Vegoose, and Coachella) and the first time we've seen them headline. What a treat!

I love watching this band perform. Very few bands these days are so musically innovative and numerous in members. Arcade Fire consists of seven semi-regular members and tours with an extra three musicians. Instruments used include the usual guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard; the less usual saxophone, trumpet, tuba, clarinet, French horn, violin, double bass, organ, and xylophone; and the almost unheard-of accordion, celeste, and hurdy gurdy.

Seriously. A hurdy gurdy.


That makes 10 peeps running around, going crazy onstage. And I'm not exaggerating when I say "going crazy." The hubs and I always enjoy seeing Richard Reed Parry (we call him "the redhead dude") go nuts and bang on everything on the stage, whether or not that thing banged on is actually an instrument. We're talking the ground, speakers, other band members, anything. It really must be seen to be believed.

Frontman Win Butler was commanding and welcoming at the same time, while his wife Regine Chassagne was totally bizarre and charming, as always. (She's the one who plays the accordion and hurdy gurdy, among other instruments, and encourages Win to compose with atypical chord progressions.)

The best performances of the night included the energetic and fun "No Cars Go" from the band's latest album Neon Bible, the epic "Intervention" also from Neon Bible, and the back-to-back-to-back melding of "Neighborhood #3" and "Rebellion (Lies)" from the band's first album Funeral and "Keep the Car Running" from Neon Bible. Oh! And the encore performance of "Wake Up" was so uplifting and exciting that it got a bunch of old people out of their seats and dancing. I guess I liked the concert so much that it's hard to pick favorites.

And I get to see them all over again tomorrow night. No rest for the wicked!

Nothing to Sniff At

I hate being sick. And I hate being sick even more, knowing that I have a big pile of work waiting for me tomorrow. My nose is red and raw from constant blowing. If my throat were a surface, it'd be scratchy sandpaper. I feel like a taxidermist stuffed my head.

I'm so sick that I infected my car. The old Honda blew a tire this weekend, its A/C went out, and its alignment went wacko. It cost over $400 to fix everything. Thank God it's just a Honda. I can't imagine how much fixing a luxury car would've cost.

Of course, maybe if I had a luxury car, I wouldn't have these problems.

But the Honda is fixed. Hooray. I wish I could pay $400 to fix my cold.

Rebirth of Slick

I've started a new blog 'cause I'm cool like dat.

All blog entries prior to this one were moved from my old blog, which I started and maintained while I was a beta tester for The Knot (hence the abundance of wedding-related posts...and zero shout-outs -- there were comments on the old blog, I swear!).

Now that I'm no longer beta testing, I've decided to stake out my own little place on the Web. There won't be quite as much wedding chatter as before, but I hope you stick around, even if you first started reading for the nuptial narratives.