Solid Sound

This past weekend was the Solid Sound Music Festival, which is a music and arts festival that's put on every other year by the band Wilco (so the last one was June 2013). It's at a really cool venue in North Adams, Massachusetts called MASS MoCA, which has lots of outdoor stages for all of the bands and performers, and there's also lots of buildings and indoor areas for art installations. Some of the art installations are really cool, and some are wayyyyyyy over my head and I didn't understand them at all. But it's such a cool and fun festival. It isn't too crowded and it has a very family-friendly vibe, and everyone there is really chill and just having a good time.  There was a group of 7 of us that went, and we had another very successful Solid Sound!

That's Jason (Ben's friend), Ben, Sarah Fro, Kaitlyn, Timmy, McGee, and me! 

Here's the Wilco sign! They always have it somewhere random. For the last festival, it was hanging from a metal scaffold area. 

Right next to the Wilco sign was an art installation that was called "Adam's Apples", but it... uh... looks incredibly phallic.  I'll just say it: It looks like a group of penises. But this was the area where we would eat lunch (it's where they had the picnic tables set up).

Adam's Apples?  

Here's Wilco performing one of the nights! They performed both nights. The first night was an acoustic set and we stood pretty close to the stage, and the 2nd night was a normal set but we stood towards the back on a concrete area because it was quite rainy.

Here was the 2nd night! It was quite rainy, but Wilco started their set an hour earlier than they were supposed to so that we would miss the crazy rain that came late that evening! 

 

Here's one of the cool permanent art installations! It looks really cool at night when the lights are hitting the orbs. 

I took our picture in one of the orbs on that art installation! 

Here was an art installation called "Encampment" that was wayyyy over my head. I didn't get it. It was all of these tents you'd walk through, and they had really bizarre paintings on the inside. 

These are fun little paintings on the posts in a parking garage downtown! I saw these when we were walking to a fun dive bar called The Mohawk. 

The coolest art installation was a video that you had to stand and watch for maybe 5 minutes.  It had no sound, and the video was projected onto a high wall. It told the story of the Passenger Pigeons, which were pigeons that existed in mass numbers (estimated at 5 billion) when the Europeans first arrived in North America, and there were a lot of stories that the masses of them used to black-out the sky when they flew because of the large quantities of them. The Passenger Pigeons began to slowly go extinct after the arrival of the Europeans, and fast forward to the 1900s when the last Passenger Pigeon (her name was Martha) died at the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914. Anyways, the art installation showed a bare tree (no leaves), and slowly you could see the outlines of these pigeons start to flock to the tree (and they blacked out the sky/ceiling, just like it was said they did back in the day), and they filled up the tree (so it looked full of leaves, but it was actually full of birds). And then quite rapidly you see all of the birds flying away from the tree on the ceiling over your head (this is to represent them going extinct) until one lone bird remains (Martha), and then she eventually flies away too. It was really cool and powerful. 

Here's the tree with a bunch of pigeons on it. 

This was the birds flying away from the tree, and you can see how they're going on the ceiling/sky.

Here's part of our group! I'm on the bench, and McGee is right next to me. Timmy, Jason, Ben, and Kaitlyn are all in the picture too. 

Our boy spent the weekend with McGee's parents and sister (Mo), and they took Guinness to a dam that's near them. He had fun playing in the water! 

Our Weekend, including Sir Paul

We had a very busy weekend! I feel like I always say that... but that's because we always DO have busy weekends!!  We were just saying yesterday that we're really looking forward to having a weekend of doing NOTHING sometime soon... Hopefully in the Fall. I think our whole summer is pretty jam-packed with plans - plus our house is keeping us soooo busy.

On Saturday, I had kind of a funny-yet-embarrassing thing happen, so I might as well share.  Well, we're going to be taking my car to the Solid Sound Festival this coming weekend, so I figured I should probably get an oil change since I knew the last time I had my oil changed was over the winter. Usually Jiffy Lube will put one of those nice reminder stickers on my window so that I can keep an eye on the date and mileage and stuff, but they forgot to do that last time... so all I knew was that it was like January or February when I last had my oil changed, and since Solid Sound is in Massachusetts, I figured I should definitely get my oil changed! So McGee went with me bright and early on Saturday morning, and we were sitting in the Jiffy Lube waiting room when one of the mechanics opens the door and says to us "Umm... Did you know that you've only driven 800 miles since your last oil change?", and it took me a good 10 seconds to even process what he was saying, and then I felt like a total idiot because my car runs on full-synthetic oil which means it's good for about 5000 miles between oil changes. Yes, five THOUSAND... and I was at eight HUNDRED. So... whoops. I was pretty embarrassed. But, that's what happens when you work from home! You just don't need to drive much... So, it was very clear that we didn't need an oil change, but we felt bad for wasting their time, so we told them to go ahead with the tire rotation but that we didn't need the oil change. We figured we had to have SOMETHING done since they'd already wasted some of their time...

So after that huge waste of time, we went back home and started on some house projects. McGee has been working on our hall bathroom, and on Saturday he was opening up the wall to work on electrical stuff to hook up a vanity light, and he also worked on the placement for our new medicine cabinet. He still has the oh-so-fun task of dry-walling to close everything back up, and we have to hook up our new sink. So, while he was having tons of fun with all of that, I decided it would be a good time to tackle another painting project. So, I painted our dining room! It's a greenish color, and I love it! Our dining room is really coming along - We still need a new light (not a fan of the chandelier that came with the house...), and we're looking for a few more furniture pieces (including something to hold all of our barware and booze...).

The lighting was really bad today because it's stormy outside, so it was tough to get a good picture of the color! I had to turn the chandelier on... You can really see the chandelier quite well though! haha

You can kinda see the color a little better... but not really. The stupid chandelier puts the weirdest shadows all over the wall (the paint is NOT stripey... it just looks that way because of the shadows). It's a nice color though, I promise! 

And on Sunday evening we went to see Sir Paul McCartney!!  McGee was able to get 4 tickets before they sold out (they sold out in 7 minutes!), so we went with McGee's parents. It was SUCH a great show! Paul McCartney played some new songs, but he mostly played his many, many hits. My favorite was probably Live and Let Die, because there was an INSANE pyrotechnic extravaganza during that song! Towards the end of the song I was getting worried that Sir Paul was going to catch on fire! But, he thankfully did not. There was a piano on stage, and he played the piano for at least 10 songs. The show started around 8 (he didn't have an opening band or anything), and he didn't finish up until after 11pm. He may be 73 years old, but the man has definitely still got it! He put on an amazing show, and he sounded GREAT.

This is a picture before the show started

The lights made it pretty hard to get any good pictures during the show, but I tried! I'll just post a few.

Here's a picture I found online that was from the beginning of Sunday's show (before he took off his jacket! The jacket didn't stay on too long - it was a warm evening!)

California Trip: The West Coast Party

The West Coast Party was SO much fun!!  It was so great to be able to celebrate with everyone, and it was just a total blast. Mom and Dad had done a ton of work on the ranch and the house at the ranch, and everything looked SO beautiful and amazing!!  And Mike (my dad's cousin's husband... We call him Uncle Mike) did a lot of work on the ranch too, and he helped to make everything extra beautiful! I absolutely love the ranch and I love the house at the ranch (my parents have done a PHENOMENAL job of fixing it up!), and it was so special to be able to have our West Coast Party there!!

The grass was looking amazing and we had beer pong and cornhole set up, and people had SO much fun playing those!!  My brother was the champion of beer pong, but he had some WEIRD rules so he may have been cheating. JUST KIDDING, Brad!!  Brad had some crazy beer pong skills, and I just had a fun time giving him a really hard time about some rules that some of us hadn't heard of before.

This is McGee's family, including his cousin Ryan that drove up from SF for the party! 

Posing with Grandma! She was such a trooper and stayed for a lot of the party. 

My adorable niece Cassidy!

My other adorable niece, Addison! She's showing us how dirty her foot is. Haha :)  

I'm aiming very carefully! Or as carefully as you can after drinking lots of wine. 

Lizzy, Claighton, and Adriana were watching Timmy and Nelson play against me and McGee in beer pong!

It was quite a hot day, so McGee and I started out the party in just normal clothes (t-shirts, etc) but later once it cooled off we switched to our ceremony clothes for our "first dance", etc., and then we switched back to jeans again after awhile so we could go crazy with our dancing. There was a new patio in front of the ranch house, and that was our awesome dance floor. And Lizzy and Claighton did SUCH a great job with the music and the sound system (thank you SO much!!). There was tons of amazing food that was brought by everyone, and my mom had set-up a spread of local foods which included Oakdale Creamery cheeses and lots of Blue Diamond almonds (that's where the almonds from our ranch go!). And my mom made the delicious and beautiful cake, and McGee and I had purchased a cute little cake topper (featuring Guinness!) to put on the cake.

Our cute little cake topper! 

Cassidy's showing us how to dance properly. Haha :)


Brad and Cassidy dancing!

Me and my dad's dance! McGee and his mom danced at the same time. 

My dad :)  

McGee and his mom dancing

Everybody dancing!!  

Everybody's boogying down! 

Addison dipping herself, much to Timmy's surprise! Haha

Brad and Amanda are dancing! And Mo is dancing with Cassidy, and I think that's Adriana dancing with Addison in the back!!  

Adriana is dancing with little Addison! :)  

This is when I thought it would be AMAZING to lead a conga line around the dance floor (yes, I'd had a lot of wine...). Everyone was a great sport and joined the line though. Haha :)  

Timmy's getting down! And Lizzy and Claighton look like they are cracking up (maybe because of Timmy's amazing dancing?)

Traci, Kevin, Rhoda, and Jim!!

The lights looked SO pretty!!  The whole ranch looked beautiful!! 

We had such a great time, and the party flew by so quickly!  I didn't get to spend nearly as much time with everyone there as I wanted, so I'll have to remedy that at Christmastime. I'm so excited to see everyone again in December! Or if any of you would like to come visit me before that, just let me know!!  You're all more than welcome :)  And the East Coast party is in August, so you're all invited to that (just make sure to RSVP soon so I know!). Thank you so much to everyone that came!!