Moot Thoughts & Musings

Our life has been full of adventure lately.

First of all, Chris installed OSX on my Mac and is setting up our home network to be wireless, which is all fun and exciting for him, since he loves tinkering with all this computer stuff. (The funniest thing about having a wireless access point, though, is that we still use a dial-up modem...until alternatives get drastically cheaper we will be for a long time.) I just like a machine that works. I'm a user. I do like OSX, though. The advantage for me is that it's unix based, and thus I'm much more compatible with his Linux machine, and there's a lot of open-source software that is now available to me. My favorite is the Gimp...the best open-source image-editing software. There is nothing I can do in Adobe Photoshop that I can't do in the Gimp. And the Gimp is free.

Second. I had a baby shower with the church ladies yesterday. It was a very nice time. I'll write more later when Erica sends me all the pics she took; she took some good ones, and I didn't get a chance to take any.

Third. We got free tickets to the House of Blues tonight. We'd never heard of the band, but thought, 'hey, who cares, it's a concert at the house of blues!". Well, after evening service we were all excited, drove down to the Quarter, found parking, and made our way over enjoying the warm spring evening breeze.

Getting in line we noticed something. Here we are dressed in church clothes...hip, but still church clothes...and everybody else in line is punk kids. Then security started coming through checking IDs. When the guy got to me, he noticed that I was pregnant, and escorted to the front of the line and got us connected with another security person with the explanation "expectant mother." Though it was fun to be given such treatment, it did cross our minds to wonder why it was necessary to receive such treatment. As we're standing outside the door, we realize that the restaurant is separate, and peering through a door painted with red flames and plastered with "no moshing" warnings we saw the music venue. Then, of course, it didn't occur to me that there would be two hours of cover bands before the real one started. As the reality of the situation added up--punk kid audience, careful treatment, the possibility of difficult access to a bathroom, and hours and hours of loud music we were unsure of--a cozy place on a bar stool started sounding like a better alternative.

So as not to make the evening a total waste, we ordered drinks (Perrier is my new pregnancy fave) and chips, walked around the Quarter catching tunes coming out of bars, and came home at a respectable hour. We now know that the House of Blues, New Orleans institution that it is, is not the jazz club joint we thought it was and to check out bands before we go see them. I just looked up the band we are missing--they are not jazz funk as we had hoped, rather heavy metal. We also know that we are hopelessly nerdy.

(Pics: top--having fun with the Gimp on the pic of Chris I took while waiting outside House of Blues; bottom--the Quarter at night from the parking garage.)