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Friday, 8/15 - We had dinner with members of the Roberts clan as Aunt Trish and Uncle Neville passed through town on one of their freakishly long car trips. We had a fun dinner at El Fenix with them, John, Susie, Luke, and Uncle Mark. We ogled John, Susie, and Luke's brand new iPhones and went back to the Roberts house and watched Michael Phelps get another gold medal.
Sunday, 8/17 - Matt and I joined Mom and Dad for an early dinner at Peggy Sue and heard all about their trip to Mexico.
Monday - Nine Inch Nails concert at AAC!!! I drove to Matt's old parking lot downtown and we took the DART train to the West End and had dinner at TGI Fridays. Our waiter was seriously jealous that we were going to the concert (I was wearing my concert shirt from the 2006 NIN concert so he figured out where we were headed). After dinner we took a quick jump on the train to Victory Plaza. The train thing was super easy and we only spent $3 for my daily pass compared to at least $15 for AAC parking. We got there a bit early, because that's just what we do. We picked up our super-cool nin.com fan tickets (they are even cooler looking than stupid old boring Ticketmaster printouts, sporting embossed red foil logos and everything) and went inside. The opening band, A Place to Bury Strangers, started at 7:30 and we lasted a few songs before retreating to the lobby to save our ears. They weren't bad for an opening band but we wanted to be fresh for NIN.
Our seats were amazing! Here's the seating chart:
You can see the annoying guy in the right of the picture.
Yeah, sorry, the pics are crappy...I was taking them with my phone. It's funny though - apparently the band didn't have a problem with people taking pictures, because tons of people had their digital cameras with them, taking photos, videos, right in front of the event people that usually yell at you if you try that sort of thing...had I known, I would've brought mine! They did do a good job of keeping people from smoking though, which I appreciated.
The above picture is from the slower, calm section during the middle of the concert. They brought out a bunch of different instruments. Here I think it was the guitar player who was rocking out on the xylophone. It was awesome.
I can't convey the amazing stuff they did with the lights, but I'll try to explain a bit. They had three separate "curtains" that were see-through and made of tons of LED lights. They were spread out so one was behind the stage, one in the middle, and one at the front. They lowered them at different times and did "simple" things like in the first pic - they each had a light behind them that pulsed with their music and changed color. The more complicated things they did were making an alien landscape with sand dunes behind them and the front curtain lowered about a third to make roiling clouds above the musicians' heads. It was ridiculously cool and it all added to the music.
The final picture is the entire front curtain filled with the band logo, which was the final image of the concert.
Aside from all the cool stuff they did with the lights, my favorite part was probably the always-moving "Hurt" near the end of the show.
We took the train back to the parking lot. They had a very long one waiting at Victory Plaza to take us all back, and it wasn't crowded at all. We got home a little before midnight and went to bed with music running through our heads and ears majorly ringing.
Tuesday - dinner at the Petroleum Club
On Tuesday night we had a dinner hosted by KPMG to celebrate the promotions to manager. It was downtown at the Petroleum Club and there were probably 60 people there. It included all the new managers in advisory, audit, and tax, and their significant others, and then some company bigwigs. I met the head of Dallas tax and we sat with the head of audit at dinner. The conversation at our table got the most animated when we started talking about the Olympics. Also, Matt and I discovered the audit partner has two kids in HP schools so we talked about that for a bit. We also got to say hi to Nick and Rachel, but they weren't at our table. The dinner was quite yummy (can't go wrong with filet mignon and chicken) and the three head partner guys each gave a nice toast at the end. All in all, it was a nice night and I came away with renewed appreciation for their appreciation of Matt and his hard work. :)
Wednesday - a trip to Arlington
A couple days ago I picked up Susie and we took the trek to Arlington to visit Emily at their new apartment. We managed to find it okay (thanks to Emily's good directions and Google maps). The complex is really nice - lots of smaller buildings spread out over green lawns and mature trees. It's like our old AMLI place in that the apartments have garages, and Em and Rick picked a second floor place so that, unlike us on the third floor, they have a private access to their garage from inside their apartment. It's a two bedroom/two bath apartment with a patio. The rooms are fairly small, but having two bedrooms and bathrooms makes it plenty big for two people. Em already had the furniture in place and some decorations up, but she was also leaving some projects for her dear husband, who was suffering through a conference in Hawaii this week. =P Speaking of Rick, a big congratulations to him for finishing his masters thesis! So we got the apartment tour and went to Double Daves for lunch (pizza rolls, yummy) and then hung out at the apartment a while longer. Emily hadn't had her internet hooked up yet, so she borrowed Susie's iPhone to look up the two bakeries she was interested in for work opportunities. And now it's time for congratulations to Em, for getting a job at the cake place less than a mile and a half from her apartment! Score!
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And so, that's all, I think. We got over five inches of rain in the last week. The lawn even recovered from my chronic neglect! I may actually try watering it more now that it's proved it has a will to live, since the super hot, baking days of summer are numbered (I hope). We're happy for the US teams that have pulled off gold medals recently - men's and women's beach volleyball, women's soccer. We're bummed about the softball team...that was supposed to be a sure thing. And we're following the IOC investigation into the Chinese gymnasts' ages with fiendish delight, although I doubt anything will come of it. It is going to be rough TV viewing for the next month, in the dead space between Olympics and new fall shows. We plan on watching lots of Netflix, including season 2 of Dexter.
Ah, speaking of Netflix, that reminds me. The Thomas Crowne Affair, 1968. Blows. Hard. Matt and I both like the 1999 version with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo. Our main complaint with it was not really liking Rene Russo. So we rented the 1968 version because we were curious. Oh my goodness. We had failed to appreciate how much they changed the story. For those not familiar, in the 1999 version Thomas Crowne steals an expensive painting; in the 1968 version, he robs a bank, twice, and keeps the money. In the 1999 version he pulls off the heist with finesse and wit; 1968 -he hires five thugs with guns. And there is nothing appealing about Steve McQueen's Thomas. And Faye Dunaway's character has nothing resembling a conscience (and she's a whore). So basically it is an awful movie. Now we realize too that there may be a reason we hated Rene Russo's character - she seems to be trying to channel the 1968 version and does a remarkable job at it. We figured we wouldn't love the 1968 version, just because older movies move at a slower pace and don't have the special effects and superior technology that modern movies have, but everything about the original version is pretty much awful.
Oh yes, and one final thing: Final Fantasy IV (DS) rocks!
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