pregnancy vs. a music festival

This past weekend, B and I got the opportunity to attend DeLuna Fest for "free." I use that term loosely because we had to volunteer to sit behind a table for four hours on Saturday to get our tickets.  And we had to pay $20 for parking on Friday night when we went to see our bands (and the $1 toll both days).  At least we found free parking on Saturday.

DeLuna Fest is a 3-day music festival here on Pensacola Beach, and it's only in its second year.  I was originally interested in it because of some of the headlining bands, namely Weezer and Cake.  Linkin Park was also slate to perform, but they dropped out all of 2 weeks beforehand.  Lame.  The tickets were super-expensive, so I'm glad we were able to volunteer our way into it.

The two bands I mostly wanted to see both performed on Friday night, so we headed out to the beach.  The last time I went to a big musical festival with multiple stages was when I was in high school and went to Music Midtown in Atlanta (does that still exist?) and saw Hole, 98°, newly-famous Kid Rock (gag), and a pre-famous Jessica Simpson all in one weekend.  B had never been to anything like this, so I'm glad he got the experience.  The cool thing about DeLuna Fest is that the two main stages were right on the beach, in the sand. This was awesome later when I just needed to sit my pregnant butt down.

We got there on Friday night, just in time to see the last song from a duo called Matt and Kim.  (I'd heard of them before, but don't know their music.)  We realized then that we didn't have a program--actually, I'm not even sure if there WERE programs available--had no idea what stage we were at, and I couldn't remember which band I wanted was coming on first.  We also don't have smart phones, which is probably why there were no programs readily available.  Somehow we ended up running into an acquaintance (we know all of like 10 people in this town, so that was a slight miracle), and she looked it up on her phone.  It was sort of wrong, but I asked some other guy and Cake was indeed playing on the stage we were at in just under an hour.  So we sat around and waited.

Some people around us "lit up" in true music-festival-sense (if you know what I mean).  I knew the smell right away and was trying to get away from it, if anything, to protect my baby.  Somehow B cannot smell this stuff.  I told him to take a big whiff and remember that smell for later (especially when our kids are teens), and he kept saying that he didn't smell anything.  What.  The.  Heck.  The things I learn about my husband . . . guess I'll be the narc of the house.

Another thing that kept bothering me, especially once Cake started playing, was people walking by us and bumping into me.  (This is the opposite of what I thought would happen--I thought we were all going to get pushed forward and smooshed up once the band came on the stage.  Apparently, there is no pleasing me.) I've always been protective of my space, but now it's even more so.  We were pretty close up, and I just don't see why people find the need to mill around to get over there or leave only minutes into a set.  I was trying to perfect a certain stance with my hands on my hips and elbows out so that people wouldn't think I make a good passageway; it was semi-effective.  There were also beach balls and playground balls being bounced around through a lot of it, and one of the more rubbery playground balls totally smacked me in the bump during the first song.  B did a great job of protecting his pregnant wife from falling crowd-surfers though.

via Wikipedia

As for the music, Cake was really good.  Apparently they have some new stuff out, so I didn't recognize that (or even like it too much), but they mostly stuck to their crowd-pleasing classics.  Here's where DeLuna Fest needed to fix their logistics.  Cake ended at 9 and Weezer started promptly at 9.  A large handful of people left Cake early to haul it down to the other end of the beach to see all of Weezer's set, and the rest of us waited until the end, then trucked it down there.  I was in sneakers because I needed the support and hauling butt through sand was not easy.  Also, my knees had apparently locked during the hour watching Cake and it was so hard to move my pregnant behind anyway.  B refused to take me piggy-back.  Almost everyone at Cake went to Weezer, so it was just a cluster&*^$! of people trying to get down the beach as quickly as possible.

I made it through about 3 songs at Weezer before I plopped my butt down in the sand and just listened.  Weezer has a ton of good music that everyone knows, but for whatever dumb reason, they were playing a bunch of not-so-good stuff for most of it.  This included a cover of "Pumped Up Kicks," which is currently on the radio.  It wasn't even a very good cover, in my opinion.  I told B to take another whiff of the air when they started playing "Hash Pipe," and he still couldn't smell it.  Sigh.

The next day we saw a band that we'd never heard of (more on them later this week), and then The Shins later that night.  We made it an hour through that set then left because we were both really exhausted.  We also realized that we're getting old, especially being around all those beach-bum-hippies.  B's back was starting to hurt, and of course I had the normal pregnancy woes.  I've pretty much decided that my rock concert days are behind me as I didn't really enjoy the concerts as much as I once would have.  That's probably the last "standing up" concert I'll go to for a long while.  The next concert I see I will be sitting in a comfy chair/church pew with a bunch of gray-haired ladies around me.  And the only standing I'll be doing is for the Hallelujah chorus.

As for the volunteering we did, we were right next to the USO tent and they gave us Girl Scout cookies.  Can't argue with that!

 

a 5k and a song

This has been one of the harder ones so far, but it was awesome!

✔ 21. Run a 5k with B - use the Couch to 5k training plan to do it

If you just recently joined me here, or if you forgot, my first few weeks of Couch to 5k were summed up in this post.  Around Week 6 of my 9-week plan, I started getting shin splints.  The shoes I had been running in were ancient and didn't have much support to begin with.  I found some new shoes, but because of the extra support, they weighed more than the old ones.  I ran just fine with them, but it sounded like I was slapping the pavement the whole time even though I was running in proper form.  Some days I absolutely loathed running.  Other days, I was neutral about it.  I don't think I ever fell in love with the sport.

Anyway, I purposely got up super early Friday morning to catch the Royal Wedding and also as a way to adapt my internal time clock for the next day's race.  Saturday morn, we got up around the same time and headed to downtown Pensacola to catch the bus for our Fiesta 5k race.  It was a point-to-point race, so a bus took us to the starting line, and we would be finishing near where we parked the car.  We ended up catching the very first bus and had to wait almost an hour at the starting line.  B was whining about it the whole time.

I didn't bring my camera--this was taken after we got home and I'd taken off my knee brace by then.

However, it was a beautiful morning and a beautiful course that was mostly downhill.  I had a few goals for this race: not walking, not puking or feeling like I needed to do so (this happened the last time I attempted a 5k because I hadn't trained at all).  Another goal was to finish with B and maybe even hold his hand across the finish line.  You can imagine how he felt about the latter.  He picked up some speed on the downhill part, so I had to work really hard to catch up.  At the very end of the course, a 9-year-old boy bolted with the two of us to the finish line.  I was sprinting against B, and he was trying not to beat the kid and have everyone hate him.  I did grab his hand as I finished slightly ahead, so it kinda looked like I was dragging him.  We both finished with a time of 31:08, coming in 161st and 162nd.  It definitely helped that all the really fit people were running in the 10k and not the 5k part!  Also, the first 10k finisher did not beat us, so that's a triumph right there (his time was 37:26).

My sweet race bib, with electronic timing strips on the inside.  Fancy.

As much as I thought I hated running, I felt AWESOME after this race.  We even got free bagels from Bagelheads!  I think I might even do some more this summer, if I really love the charity where the money is going.  I may not do them with B though, since he'll just whine the whole time.  His co-worker likes to run though, so maybe I'll just do them with her.

So this weekend also included my two choir concerts.  While we were waiting around for the start of the race, I started singing one of our songs to myself.  It's called "Guide My Feet," and I know it's cheesy that I took a metaphor completely literally like that.  But I convinced B to record it yesterday, so here's the Gulf Coast Chorale singing it.  I'm toward the top left, behind everyone, the youngest-looking one in the group.



(Yes, this was at my fabulous church here in P-cola.  I love the color, and the acoustics were impressive.  It's hard to find a Catholic church built in the past 15 years that isn't stark white.  Also, B was sitting too close to get the whole group in the picture. This is about half of us.)

he's singing this song for you

This past week, I got to do something amazing.  And not only did I get to do this amazing thing once, I got to do it AGAIN the next day.  Yes, I had the chance see and to hear the angelic voice of Michael Bublé in concert not once, but TWICE.

NOTE: This post may have some "spoilers" - so if you have tickets to his show and want to be surprised, check back later to read my review!

Basically, I entered a contest to win good seats online sponsored by Nordstrom, and to up my chances I entered for both Norfolk and Richmond.  Well, holy smokes, I won the Richmond tickets!  My friend Charlene and I had already bought "cheap seats" (Row Z, of course) tickets to the Norfolk one, which pretty much sold out two days after they went on sale.  Here are both of my tickets, and note the $0.00 above that FLR2 on the top one:

I will forever KICK MYSELF for not bringing my camera to the Richmond night.  We were in the 11th row!  Amazingly close.  I'm pretty sure that the last time I was that close at a concert, I was getting pushed around in a mosh pit by my fellow high school sophomores.  When we got to our floor seats, there was a middle-aged couple sitting next to us, and the man asked my friend Monica and I if we were gonna hoot and holler and scream when MB came on stage.  "No," I replied, "but I just might throw my panties."  His wife got quite a kick out of one of my best-timed one-liners ever.  (Note:  I did NOT actually throw my panties, but I probably could have.)

The concert started out with this FABULOUS opening act called Naturally 7.  I've seen a lot of a capella music performances in my day, but this blew them all out of the water.  They mimicked instruments flawlessly (even an electric guitar), and they pretended like they were playing them, even going so far as giving the vocal percussionist his own drum stool.  My favorite was their "bassist" - his name is Hops, and he is super skinny with a ridiculously deep voice.  He's on the far right in this shot:

As for Mr. Bublé's set . . . whew.  Well first, let me go back in time and tell you about when I started listening to this boy sing.  I was in my last semester of college, the year was 2006, and I was taking a class called Voice for the Non-Major.  It was a great class for "recreational" singers like myself.  And in that class, the professor would often play a song or two by a famous or sorta-famous singer, and then he'd have us discuss what makes that singer good and what sets them apart.  One day, he played some MB, I believe it was his cover of "Moondance" (which ended up being me and B's first dance at our wedding, btw), and what I really recall from the discussion is the fact that you can hear his PASSION through his voice.  I know that all my past choir teachers had emphasized emotion, but I never realized just how well it could be done until that day.

And that passion that I heard through the speakers of the class stereo came through ten-fold at a concert with him there live.  I guess if you were to classify him, he's a jazz singer, and he had all those fun jazz moves and a great band.  He slid down his sloped stage, he twirled his microphone, and he gave witty commentary in an accent that I can only describe as "Old Hollywood."

  And his stage looked pretty cool, too.

 One thing I really like about MB and his concerts (or "parties" as he tells the audience to think of them) is the multi-generational appeal.  Gals my age were there with their mothers, ladies could take their husbands, and at the Richmond show, a 20-something guy two rows in front of us even proposed to his girlfriend during an adorable love song called "Everything."  You just don't get that at a Hannah Montana concert, folks.

I wonder if my husband would look that good in a suit with a skinny tie?

 As any of his fans can tell you, MB just seems like that boy-next-door kind of likable guy.  I loved the excitement he has for his band.  He goes through and introduces each member to us, saying insanely funny things about each guy that are hopefully untrue for the most part.  And for being such good sports, MB gives us a chance to just hear what they can do.  Here he is enjoying a solo from his trumpeter:

A real crowd-pleasing part of the evening is when he comes out into the audience, accompanied by our new friends Naturally 7 (they back him on one of the tracks on his Crazy Love album).  He involves the entire audience in the singing of his biggest hit "Home" - a song with which I have had quite the interesting relationship.  That song got a lot of radio play during that spring of 2006 time that I first heard of MB.  During that class discussion, I remember one of my classmates explaining that he also sings the song "Home" (which I had already heard but hadn't cared for much).  I still didn't like it--it wasn't in his jazz style, it was too sappy for me, I couldn't dance to it, and I really didn't relate. 

Fast forward two years to Summer of 2008, and there I am in my car, crying to this song, thinking about my Navy boyfriend who had been deployed for three months with many more to go.  I ended up including it on my "Deployment 2008" mix CD, and have appreciated the song so much since.  I'm sure the Norfolk concert was chock-full of current and former Navy spouses, and I hope Michael and his band know just how much that song has probably meant to every single one of us.  It was definitely a more emotional experience in Norfolk than Richmond.

 Me and Charlene, both wives of deployed submariners!

For those of you who think MB will be singing you to sleep every night as your future husband, I have some bad news.  He's actually engaged to this Argentinian bombshell.  Oh well, maybe Hops is single for ya.

Each night, Michael Bublé sang his pipes off for two glorious hours, and we're all left wondering how he can even squeak a word out the next day.  And how could listening to his silky-smooth, clear, and passionate voice be anything less than awe-inspiring?  I think my personal highlight is how he ended the night - his un-miked voice, nothing else, filling the entire arena.  It'll give ya chills, folks.  So nice I loved it twice!

And even though he dropped an F-bomb (or two), he's still a class act to me.