The Boss is too loud

I was selling beer at the Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert last night at The Schott. I tried adding a concert sample to my Cinch audio blog, but it seems that The Boss was too loud for either my cell phone (where I tried to make the recording) or the BlogTalkRadio stuff making the recording on the receiving end. Either way, the recording just didn't work, so you'll have to take my word for it - the concert sounded good. Well, good for a concert in The Value City Arena at the Jerome Schottenstein Center which has horrid acoustics. To be honest, I heard most of it from my post at a beer cart as far away from the stage as one can get in the arena. We did close up shop in time for me to watch the encore from a better vantage point. I love Max Weinburg - he is so not the prototypical rock-and-roll drummer, the guy just lays down a solid groove. After two and a half hours of pounding the skins, he did look like he was about to die, at least in the giant TV screen close-ups. Maybe they're Bruce's core fans, or maybe they're the only ones who could afford the ticket prices, but it was an older crowd. Hardly had to card anyone.

I'll try the audio blog thing from Nationwide Arena if I get to work the Hank Williams show next month.

Happy Pi Day

Who knew today ( 3/14 ) is Pi Day. I've even read we should eat a piece of pie at 3/14 1:59

Weekend from hell

Let's review:

Friday: Chimney fire. It's out by the time the fire department gets here. They get stuck in the mud leaving, and call a neighbor/farmer with a monster tractor to pull the 42,000 lb. truck out of the ditch. That's after lightening the truck's load of 1000 gallons of water into the yard. Now we can't have a fire in the woodstove until I get things inspected - and of course, it's blizzard weekend.

Then I drive downtown to work selling beer at the Blue Jackets game. The Jackets score with 8 seconds left in the game to tie it up - and still manage to loose in regulation. Not really sure how that happened.

Since there's an underground leak in the barn water spigot, the drain pit filled, so the standpipe doesn't empty, so the water froze. We're carrying buckets of water to the barn from the house again.

Saturday: The "Blizzard of '08." It's pretty and everything, but, as mentioned above, the house is cold and I am now carrying buckets of water through thigh-deep snow.

On the up-side, we took the horses for a walk last night. That was fun. Then Lilly colicked. We were pretty much on our own. The vet was snowed in, and if he wasn't, he'd be snowed out of our place. She's fine now.

Sunday: The "Blizzard of '08" after effects - AKA, digging out. My back hurts just thinking about what's in store this afternoon.

Telephone Blog

Take a look to your right - see my Cinch Telephone Blog? I'm experimenting with a new service from http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/, where I can phone in, record a message, and voila, it shows up over there. I think this might be pretty cool. I wish blogger let me customize the format more than it does, though I've been experimenting with some code that will slip the recorded blog entries right in with my typed stuff. Maybe this will be neat. Maybe not. If you want to subscribe directly, my URL is http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/littlewoodEd. Man, the web can be fun, no?

Drowning

Water. Can't live with it, can't live without it. My soaked saga of the past week.

1. Last Wednesday I stopped in the barn on my way out to work the Blue Jackets game. Casey needed some water, so I opened the spigot to fill a bucket while getting hay for the horses. One thing led to another, and I forgot about the running water. About an hour or two later Robin came home to find a mess. Perrin, god love her, bailed water for who knows how long to get things cleaned up.
2. By Friday, Robin noticed that water was percolating up from underground around the standpipe. Bummer. We have a leak. I don't know if it was precipitated by Wednesday's flood, or that I forgot to anchor the standpipe to some rebar when when I installed the spigot last summer. You'd think that being buried three feet would provide enough stability, but I know that every time I open/close the spigot, the whole standpipe wiggles, so I guess not (hence the rebar hint in the installation directions). This is going to be a major hassle to fix. In the mean time, we have to remember to shut the water off in house when not filling water buckets. And the gravel-filled pit below the standpipe to absorb the water that drains down when you shut off the spigot is probably full. Hope it doesn't freeze.
3. It's raining cats and dogs. The ground is a saturated mess, and the Direct TV guys, who came down the drive looking for an address drove through the grass while turning around. The barn is flooding (natural causes - and at least Casey has a dry stall now that he's moved into Pony's old digs). There's standing water everywhere. The french drain in the basement is gradually clogging with silt - I hope it holds up.

Just to make life more interesting, the horse trailer lights/brakes have quit working. I think I need some ice cream.

Ouch!

Madeline got hurt at last Wednesday's Twistars practice. No, that's not a photo of her knee, that's her ankle. Fortunately, it's not broken. Just a very bad sprain.

After a couple days she could almost put a little weight on it. Naturally, by the weekend with a mere 2 ibuprofen, 2 acetaminophen, and about 50 yards of tape she was competing at the Arnold Classic. The girl is a rock. Of course when it was all over, vicodin was the only way she could sleep with the pain.

I'm not sure what hurt more, the injury, or soaking her foot it in a bucket of ice water after getting home Sunday night. I bet she feels the 1st place finish was worth it. No pain, no gain, right?

While I'm at it, this was the first time we went to the Arnold Classic. What a hoot. Watched fencing, table tennis, ballroom dancing, and of course the cheerleading. Perrin was bummed because the body building competition was over at Veterans Memorial - though there was no shortage of bulky folks at the expo. Got to see Lou Ferrigno too!