Wendy DeCora.com

Mac looked especially photogenic this morning so I took a bunch of pictures of her. If you’d like to see more (including some extreme close-ups), click the picture:

I have a lot to write about, but I thought I would start with the visuals to help add to the narrative structure of my crazy five day trip.

Photos from four of the five shows (nothing from Madison, more on that later…)
If you click on a photo when it is the big photo, it will give you the caption for the photo, with the option to click over to Flickr and see all the sizes.

All my video clips (some short, some long) in one big playlist:

And now a trip overview:

Last Wednesday, my boys of Bonerama came to Iowa City and enjoyed the cozy surrounds of the basement of the Iowa City Yacht Club. Huge thanks to all my friends and family from many parts of my life that came out to enjoy the fabulous music. I know it was tough since it was a Wednesday, but I hope the music and fun was more than worth it for everyone. It was very cool for me to get to see even more people I know see the guys for the first time or get a second or third (or more) taste. I can’t wait for them to come back in July and play the Iowa City Jazz Fest! Mark your calendars for Saturday, July 5th at 6pm! Bring the family!

On Thursday, Julie and I headed for Minneapolis. We stayed with the Whitworths and got a chance to enjoy the cuteness that is Muiread. There was dinner and BC dropped by for a few drinks before the show. Brandon went to the show with Julie and I. I think he enjoyed himself. The Cabooze was a cool club in Minneapolis and the show was great with an enthusiastic crowd.

Friday, we rolled eastward to Madison to our one night in a hotel. I hadn’t been to Madison before and expectations were a little high since the city was so highly recommended, but Wisconsin managed to not disappoint. Jewels and I had a great dinner at a wonderful restaurant called ‘The Icon’ that was across the street from the theater. Highly recommended for both before and after show fun. The concert on Friday was in a real theater. It was sold out and packed with around 900 people! Julie can report on the show as I mostly heard it from the lobby. I was helping out the band and selling merchandise. It was nice to be thought of and asked by Mark. Yes, I know I said ‘yes’ three times, but wow, it was crazy!! I liked getting to talk to people about the show as they came in and out for drinks or the restroom, but after the smokin’ encore, it was pandelrium! So many new fans!! And the guys came out and signed autographs and talked to the eager people. I complained, but they know I loved it. Anything to help out and share the joy of the Bone!

Saturday (and we were surprisingly feeling good, other than some lingering/developing colds), and we had a nice short drive to Chicago. There was cheese and wine tasting along the way (isn’t that required by law in Wisconsin?) and we settled into my home away from home in Chicago, at my friend Scott’s apartment. We went out for a fabulous seafood dinner at a restaurant that I can’t remember at the moment, and then grabbed a tasty (and properly filled) drink before Julie and I headed to the club. Bonerama had played Martyrs last July and I was there and it was a good crowd: dance floor in the middle with tables on both sides and it was all comfortably filled. Obviously the second time around had built up a following because when we walked in at 10:45pm it was a sweaty madhouse! Totally packed from wall to wall with people fired up to see the guys and they definitely brought the goods. The people were dancing and loving it all night. I hadn’t been to a hot, sweaty club show in quite awhile. That’s what they’re like in NYC or NOLA. It was fun. And hot. The music was so good. Seriously, watch some of my shaky video. Revisited the Green Mill, site of one of my best Harry shows ever, later that night which was a great way to end the day (or start Sunday).

Sunday, we hung out with Scott. There was brunch and a lot of walking. Then we headed to DeKalb for an evening of contrasts. A slightly smaller crowd, but no less appreciative. It was kind of like a fan appreciation show. It was nice to have time to chat with people in a calm fashion and be able to sit back and enjoy the show. Though the music was so good I pretty much wanted to crawl out of my skin. What was really cool about the setlist was that it included both ‘Moby Dick’ (with a crazy 13+ minute jam) from the first Bonerama album, which I hadn’t heard for quite awhile, as well as a brand new arrangement of ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ that they had just rehearsed that afternoon. Its going to be so awesome.

And then we said our goodbyes. I cried a little bit on the way home, more from joy than sadness. What an adventure to get to take. We got back to Iowa City around 1:30am on Monday.

I can and will say more… its coming!

… is not the day to get back online to my normal routine after a rather extended absence. I trust no one and nothing I’m reading today.

A tons of posting is coming very soon. So much media to process and upload. So much sleep to find time for. So much joy to still attempt to contain and process. My five day tour was some of the absolute most fun ever. Bonerama is the greatest. I love all of them so much. The music was just beyond. How do they keep taking it to the next level? Julie and I had an indescribable amount of fun in so many places. I am a very blessed person to get to follow my bliss even if its just a few times a year.

How am I supposed to work today? I’m still a musical mess!

I’ve got a completed timesheet, 1/2 a glass of water, and I’m not wearing sunglasses.

Hit it.

Its time I come out of hibernation since spring officially started yesterday. That was the longest. winter. ever. I had things to blog about over the last few months but yet I didn’t. I will next week for sure. For now, everyone join me in a brain dump from the last three months, some of which I’ve previously mentioned:

• Iowa Caucus was very fun and exciting to participate in. Yes We Can! Go Obama!!
• I went to Columbus for training. My brain was educated on MySQL. The Iowa basketball team sucked epically.
• Thumbs up to Cloverfield, I Am Legend: IMAX, and 27 Dresses
• LOST came back on! Yea!
• The Writers’ strike sucked and then ended and I hope the writers got something that they deserved in the end.
• I worked 100 hours in one week (it felt more like in 3 days) at the end of January/beginning of February and finally finished our server migrations that I have seemingly been working on for the last 15 months.
• I saw BB King at Hancher. It was so great. I needed a live music fix.
• Bonerama was on Letterman!
• I got a new camera (Canon S870)and improved my standings in the camera category of the technology arms race:
  
• Doogie turned 30 and there was tasty eating out. Ben remains cute.
• As per usual, I saw all the Best Picture nominees. For once the Academy agreed with me and I was very pleased when No Country for Old Men won Best Picture.
• I read a bunch of books. I need to keep better track of those.
• My mom turned 60 and Sara turned 30 on the same day.
• I surprised my mom with a new iMac from myself and many family and friends. It was a great surprise to her and it was fun setting it all up. She also came up and spent part of her birthday weekend in Iowa City hanging out with me.
• I met a woman at my caucus who introduced me to a local hospice knitting group. They make prayer shawls and blankets for people in hospice. They find me amusing and I am nearly finished with my first shawl for them.
• Last week I joined Weight Watchers and after one week I’m down 1.5 pounds.
• I’ve started rewatching The X-Files in its entirety before the new movie this summer. One season down, eight to go.
• I upgraded my Mac to 10.5

And there you go, that’s what I’ve been up to, mostly. Quality time has been spent with Netflix and Turner Classic Movies. MacGyver is hanging in there. She’s rather thin for my taste (but you can’t really tell unless you pet her because she’s still very fluffy) but the vets think she’s as good as she can be, so she continues to be very spoiled.

Hopefully I’ll be more consistent going forward. I also must catch up with my pictures. I got out of the habit of taking them when my old camera was so flaky. Now I have to start posting them again.

If you haven’t already seen my favorite band, Bonerama perform, today is your lucky day as they will be the musical guest on Late Night with David Letterman tonight!!

The guys will be performing with the lead singer from OK GO to support the release of a five song EP entitled “You’re Not Alone.” The album is available exclusively from iTunes for only $3.49 with ALL money raised going to support New Orleans musicians as they continue to recover from Hurricane Katrina. Do yourself a favor and get this album today!

They’re going to be hitting several midwest locations in March, hopefully many of my midwest readers can join me for a show or two.

Dig the Bone!

In preparation for the fourth season of LOST premiering tomorrow night, if you haven’t seen this already, I suggest you catch up with LOST right now via this brilliantly clever video:

LOST in 8:15

Jack is a doctor. He has a compulsive urge to fix things.
On the first night there is a monster in the jungle.
There’s other weird stuff too. Like polar bears.

Heh.

Holy crap, the weather in Iowa has lost its ever-loving mind!

This is a true statement, I am not exaggerating for effect:

When I drove home from work yesterday, one of the various business clock/thermometers I pass by read 56 degrees.
Today, at basically the same time of day, that same thermometer read 0.

Yes, Jenniffer, I am alive. I’m currently sitting in the airport in Columbus, Ohio waiting to see when/if I am going to get out of here tonight. I’ve been here since Sunday night for MySQL training for work. Four full days of classes along with attending the worst loss in Iowa basketball in the last thirteen years tends to leave a person a bit drained. Dude, we’ve got problems on the court.

I know I totally fell off the map after my good blogging in November and Mac’s illness. I was pretty much completely consumed with going to work and coming home and staring at my cat. Then I was knitting. Then it was Christmas. And now its January. Yikes.

Mac is much improved. She’s got a heart condition and is on various meds, but she seems to be doing fine for her advanced age. All the vets (yes, she’s seen all five) at Bright Eyes & Bushy Tails were really wonderful and got her and me through many nights of panic. I’m sure she’s curled up asleep on her heating pad on her side of the bed right now.

I wish I was there too. I’m so tired. The hotel bed was comfortable, but I miss my own pillow after two or three nights.

I need to wrap this up and deal with what the flight status is. Here’s a cute, if somewhat blurry picture of Mac taken recently:

Also, my camera is barely holding together these days. I have to be like the other cool kids and upgrade after/if I get a tax return.

Today my office is closed because of weather. Yay, free vacation day! I don’t know the last time I had a snow day. Iowa never canceled classes because of the hospital (they couldn’t let the professors not work and still make the doctors/nurses) and my high school would just have us start two hours late rather than give up that whole day. Remember the big ice storm in like 1993? or 1991? The entire state of Iowa was basically shut down, but I went to school. And my school required every single student to be bused there. Good times.

Though it would’ve been better if I hadn’t learned this by driving into the parking lot and finding no one else there. No one but some random guy from Illinois looking to talk to someone about an issue he had with something. The hell? It was obvious that no one was at the company. If he had called the main number (which surely he would’ve found when he found the address to our headquarters??), he would’ve known we were closed. He wanted my name and phone number so he could talk to me about the issue tomorrow. I was nice to the guy (as we were standing in the wind and the sleet), but that’s not my dept. We have an entire dept of people who can answer the questions/concerns this guy had. I gave him the main phone number and told him where he could find the info he wanted on our website. He seemed happy to have talked to a real person and I went home.

I watched the TV scrolls this morning, never thinking ACT would be listed, and it wasn’t. Apparently I had to call in or check the TV channel websites to learn this information. I just didn’t think they’d close work. Its very wet out now, not icy yet, though I get that it could become icy. Oh well. Free day off. Though I did nearly just stay and do stuff since I was already there. But the cafeteria wouldn’t have been open, and I hadn’t brought my lunch…

For my final NaBloPoMo post, I present the ‘100 Things’ list that I have honestly been composing off and on in my head for the last three years. Final purge!

1. I collect spoons.
2. Chocolate mint is my favorite flavor, but please, none of that fake green ice cream.
3. My first food was Cheerios.
4. I still have Cheerios for breakfast most days.
5. I prefer to go to the movie theater up to an hour early so I can get the specific seat I want in the middle of the theater.
6. I keep all my movie ticket stubs in a notebook.
7. On average, I see twenty four movies a year in the theater.
8. My high school English teacher, Ms. Holcomb, taught me to spell out numbers rather than write them numerically if they are under one hundred or so (I don’t remember the exact cut-off). To this day, if I type a number with numbers instead of words, while I may do it, I still think about how to spell it out.
9. I am good at baking and obsessed with cupcakes.
10. I have a birthmark on my right shin that resembles the state of Indiana.
11. I am not a night person or a morning person.
12. Schindler’s List and The Princess Bride are my two favorite movies.
13. I was a statistics major when I started college, having never had a statistics class in my life.
14. I thought I would be a sports statistician and wanted to work for the Chicago Bulls.
15. I changed my major to computer science after one semester.
16. Now I do website work and have had the same job for the past seven years.
17. I find genealogy fascinating. (Love Geni.com!)
18. I am a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. I am half Native American.
19. I am a quarter Welsh.
20. I have kissed the Blarney Stone.
21. I have been a Dallas Cowboys fan all my life.
22. I sleep with a teddy bear I got when I was around ten years old. His name is Charmin.
23. I love to take pictures and think I’m pretty good at it for an amateur.
24. I have season tickets for Iowa Hawkeye football.
25. I have seen Harry Connick, Jr. perform 47 times (really). I am familiar to him when he sees me.
26. I play the tenor saxophone. Though these days it’s only once a year for Iowa Homecoming.
27. I wear the same jewelry/accessories everyday: three rings, a necklace, my ReNew Orleans bracelet, and simple gold wire earrings.
28. I take my rings off the minute I get home and put them on my dresser.
29. On my necklace is a gold cross and a tigerhawk. I got the cross because it looked like the one Dana Scully wore on The X-Files.
30. The X-Files is my absolute favorite tv show. Ever.
31. When it originally aired, I wouldn’t answer my door or my phone when The X-Files was on TV.
32. My cat MacGyver is named after the television show which was still airing when I picked her out of the litter.
33. When I was fifteen, I wrote an angry letter to the ABC network in response to the later seasons of MacGyver because I didn’t like the changes they made to the characters on the show and thought the quality of writing had really declined.
34. When I was a teenager, I wrote a letter to my favorite mystery author (Lilian Jackson Braun) to inquire if she was sick or dead after she didn’t publish a book for awhile. She wrote back and said she was fine (and has since published many more books).
35. I dislocated my kneecap twice in high school; once in Spanish class and once at a speech contest.
36. When I was in 5th grade I burped regularly for about two months.
37. I was unconsciously swallowing air and once I learned to control it, I could burp on cue.
38. I was once commended for my burping prowess at a large group speech contest.
39. There were thirty five people in my high school class.
40. I was the valedictorian of my high school class. My speech was Star Trek themed.
41. I must have plain Colgate toothpaste in order to brush my teeth.
42. I met some of my best friends online.
43. I met my oldest friend in first grade. We’re still close.
44. I didn’t drink until several months after my twenty first birthday.
45. I am allergic to live pine (makes me break out), but I insist on having a real Christmas tree. Which should touch the ceiling of whatever room it is displayed in.
46. I am an unabashed fan of Apple and all the fabulous products they produce.
47. I was in marching band in high school and college and I still miss it.
48. I loved wearing a uniform and was insane when people didn’t have their pants hemmed to the right length.
49. I love love love wearing fancy dresses and gowns.
50. I cannot stand uncomfortable or cheap shoes.
51. I learned to read when I was three or four.
52. I come from a family of readers and Scrabble players.
53. I have a tattoo of a fleur de lis on the inside of my left ankle.
54. I am alarmed at the number of people who don’t know what a fleur de lis is. Like they’ve never seen one ever before.
55. Clue is my favorite board game.
56. I know how to stage a crucifixion pageant and how to make fake blood several different ways.
57. I danced (ballet and tap) for many years as a child and then again for a couple of years as an adult. I wish I was still dancing.
58. I was a wrestling cheerleader in high school.
59. I worked in a couple of research labs in college. I had no clue what anyone did in the labs.
60. The only bone I’ve every broken was my left pinky finger. Emily DeWitt broke it when I was in eighth grade because I threatened to tell her boyfriend what she got him for Christmas. I couldn’t play G# for the Christmas concert that year.
61. I collect movie posters.
62. I was conceived in Guam.
63. I studied abroad in Wales for a semester.
64. Hearst Castle is probably my favorite place in the world to visit for a day. I think I could give the tours there.
65. I have a very good sense of direction and rarely ever get lost.
66. I hate that I say the word ‘like’ all the time.
67. My other bad habit is biting my fingernails.
68. I designed and created decorations for a lot of my band and choir concerts in high school.
69. I redesigned the music stands my high school jazz band used based on the design that Harry’s big band used at the time.
70. I am very opinionated when it comes to hymns and how they should be sung.
71. I love to sing Christmas carols.
72. I used to be a good singer and could hit really high notes.
73. I have been to a Britney Spears concert. It was hilarious and mended a friendship.
74. I cannot abide plain walls with nothing hanging on them.
75. I essentially stopped listening to the radio in 2003 after I got back from Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
76. My favorite band is Bonerama. I used to fly to New York City just to see them play for a night or two. (But now they come closer to me. Thanks guys!)
77. Peanut butter sandwiches are to be constructed thusly: if using white bread; first butter, then peanut butter; if using wheat bread, first peanut butter, then honey; finally, fold in half, one slice at a time
78. I would love to get dressed up for Halloween each year, but I never have anywhere to go if I was dressed up.
79. Other jobs I’d like to have include: wedding planner or make-up artist.
80. I love snow!
81. I am a bit obsessive about recycling. I have been for years. I just find it so satisfying to sort things and then put them in all the separate bins at the recycling site.
82. I love to iron. It drives me nuts when guys have wrinkled pockets on their shirts.
83. My best physical attribute is my hair.
84. The first thing I notice about guys is their hair. I love good hair.
85. I think live music is truly one of the joys of life.
86. I attended several Star Trek conventions when I was in high school.
87. I love a good roller coaster.
88. I have been caving in underground caves in Wales.
89. My mom taught me how to knit a few years ago and I’m working on my skills.
90. My favorite real castle is Llansteffan Castle.
91. A dream of mine is to travel to Egypt. I’ve been interested in ancient Egypt since I was young.
92. I never know how to describe my interest in literature and films relating to the Holocaust. Its not something one “enjoys” and saying “fascinated” also seems wrong.
93. I’m obsessed with organizing my photos (both real and digital) and all my music (very large iTunes library).
94. I like to eat bologna one slice at a time, by itself, rolled up. My Aunt Margaret taught me to eat it like that when I was a kid and no other way seems right.
95. I could eat chocolate chip cookies everyday. They are the perfect dessert.
96. My favorite food is fried chicken.
97. My favorite comedy bit ever is called ‘The Four Yorkshiremen.’ There were ‘hundred and fifty of us living in shoebox in middle of the road. I’m laughing just thinking about it.
98. In high school my favorite singer was Bing Crosby and my favorite musician was Benny Goodman. This was in the 1990’s, not the 1940’s.
99. This year I completed a life goal of seeing every movie that has won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
100. One of the coolest things ever was when I got to attend the Red Carpet arrivals for the 2007 Academy Awards in Hollywood. It was surreal.