Tonight I get to cross an item off my bucket list: see Paul McCartney in concert.  I have to leave soon, so I’ll update tomorrow with details.

Tonight continues our Dalcher household summer concert series, with James Taylor and Carole King at the Pepsi Center.  I’m looking forward to this concert, James Taylor is one of my guitar idols.  It should be a pretty laid back night, based on the last James Taylor concert I went to it should be a pretty mellow crowd.  Increasingly so in Colorado.

It’s going to be a good night, I really love good acoustic guitar music.  I don’t really know a ton of Carole King music, so I’ll get some new concert-going experience out of it all as well.  For now, it’s time for bed!

As I briefly posted last night, we got the opportunity to see Barenaked Ladies at Red Rocks!

A minor aside – Kris Allen: it is generally not a good idea to continually attempt to compel the crowd to sing along with you when three people do so the first time you try it.  It was rather embarrassing to end “Man In The Mirror” with what was essentially a 1/3 filled verse that you expect the audience to fill in.  Nobody was singing because you were dull as three week old soap.  There was a man sitting behind me literally apologizing to the spirit of John Lennon when you closed with your version of “Come Together.”  Not only did I not enjoy your set, I’m not going to buy your single as a result of this terrifyingly bad showing.

*cleansing breath*

All that unpleasantness aside, Barenaked Ladies were EXCELLENT.  I was a bit cautious setting my expectations since Steve Page left the group, but I quickly forgot any concerns after the show started.  I was armed with a pencil and paper to write down the set list.  I was thrown for a loop when Ed Robertson ad-libbed two songs on the spot (one was about Red Rocks, the other about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). Thankfully, someone else at the concert (YouTuber sadsurferx) recorded it so I embedded it above.

They played so many of the hits that I wanted to hear, including some of my favorite songs that are less popular. They even closed with “Light Up My Room” which is one of my favorite songs of theirs.

Here’s the setlist from the concert, it was a great time and I’m going to see them again if they ever come back for sure. Tomorrow night is James Taylor and Carole King!

BNL at Red Rocks tonight!  Wooooooot!

I was given the gift of sleeping in a ridiculous amount today.  I woke up after noon (woo!) and then proceeded to enter in all of our grocery receipts from the last three months which had been accumulating in a drawer.  That took me about an hour and a half, and by then Tasha was done with our weekly coupons so we grabbed showers and headed out to shop.  Once that was done, we whiled away our evening watching TV reruns and being lazy.

I’m not looking forward to another week of work, but someone’s gotta do it!  My consolation is that tomorrow night is the Barenaked Ladies concert on the Rocks… so I have something to get me through the day.  More soon!

Wow, what a great night.  The venue was a very weird/small music school in the middle of a neighborhood in Denver, and there was probably room for 200 people in the place.  Andy McKee came on and played pretty much all of his YouTube hits, including a lot of stuff from his new album “Joyland”.  Unfortunately, his harp guitar was left home for this leg of the tour since it’s having some technical problems with the internal pickup.

Before the show, I fulfilled my duty to support Andy McKee by buying his new album.  As we were watching the show, Tasha told me that she wanted to pick up his first album “Art of Motion” so we were going to stick around and pick that up after the show.  Imagine my joy (well, you can see it) when Andy stuck around after the show and signed our ticket stubs, chatted with us briefly, and I got to have my picture taken with him.

What a great night.  Tomorrow I begin the process of becoming a fingerstyle guitar expert. 🙂

For those of you that don’t get it yet, go buy one of his albums.  The guy is awesome and his playing is nothing short of spectacular.

Tonight begins the Dalcher Summer Concert Series.  This month we have a plethora of great concerts to see, starting off with the YouTube sensation Andy McKee.  Here he is performing his song “Drifting”, the original recording has received over 31 million views.  He was a late addition to our set of concerts that we will see this summer, but when I found out he was going to be so close I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

Andy is one of a small set of people that play the harp guitar, as seen here in his Into the Ocean video.  I sure hope he has that with him when we see him tomorrow, just because I want to be able to hear it in person.

Enjoy those videos, and if you like it go on over to his official website and buy something.  If he’s got CDs for sale at the show tomorrow I’m buying one, just because I think that musical genius should be rewarded. 🙂

Tonight I made some mods on my ukulele!  I got my clip-on ukulele tuner, and my new set of Grover tuning machines.  These things are really nice, however I had to drill out the headstock to fit them and one of the tuning pegs I drilled out too far.  I had to secure the bushing with a bit of wood glue, so no harm done.  I had a bit of trouble with the small screws that hold the tuners in place.  They are very small and one of them went in crooked, so it was difficult to get seated all the way down without tearing up the screw head.

Eventually I worked it out, and these things keep in tune so much better than the old friction pegs.  My Aquila strings should be here soon, so I’ll have everything upgraded and this thing done!  A happy accident – as I was getting the tuners installed the sound hole decal rubbed off and I like the thing a lot better without it.  Now it looks a lot classier. 🙂

Maybe after my new strings show up I’ll post a video so everyone can hear how it sounds!  More soon!

It’s one of the 65 or so days of rain each year here in Colorado.  The temperature dropped a good 15 degrees today, and now the thunder is rolling in.  Tonight is D&D Encounters, the end of a chapter.  It should be a fun time, and I hope my character survives.

In other news, I got a StewMac catalog today.  They’re making it more and more difficult to not buy the materials to build myself a guitar.  We’ll have to see how the rest of the year’s spending months go. 🙂

Karate night tonight, we opened up the class with some basic combinations done in a circle.  Then we moved on to their Shodan test basics, transcribed from a 2006 dan exam:

• Sanbon tsuki
• Variations on lin-geri (front kicks, round kicks, side kicks)
• Inward block, elbow strike, backfist strike, reverse punch
• Outward block in back stance, front leg front kick, reverse punch shifting into front stance
• Knifehand block in back stance, front leg front kick, reverse punch remaining in back stance
• Standing in place, rear leg front kick and without putting it down side snap kick to the side
• Standing in place, rear leg front kick and without putting it down side thrust kick to the side

Then we moved on to semi-free one time sparring, including a variety of different sweep timing drills.  Basically it was free sparring where one side attacked and the other side could lightly block and attempted to pick up the sweep timing by slightly touching the leg.  Then we moved on to where the attacker could only use sweeps, the defender just offered a good target.

After that, we did kata in small groups.  I was tapped to help one of the adult white belts with Heian Shodan so I showed him some of the bunkai.  He really appreciated it and told me after class that it helped him understand why the pauses were there and helped him visualize a real attacker.  That made me feel good.

After class, Sensei Tarrant and I traded some more war stories (he sure does like to do that) and we shared some thoughts on sweeps.  I got to brag on how Sensei Brewer always stuns us with really great sweep timing, so that was fun as well.  It was a good workout, much needed after all this work stress!