lewis and clark had a journal. you, beth-annie, have a diary.

Monday, June 30, 2003
This was Thursday.
We drove from Columbus, OH to Hershey, PA (Creation was moved there due to wet conditions at the normal locale). It was held at the huge Hesheypark complex, with shuttle buses between venues, an air conditioned arena, and "main stage" was a stadium. I didn't use a portable toilet the whole time we were there. Not exactly Cornerstone. We got there at about 6pm, which gave us just enough time to set up our tent and make our way to the stadium to get decent seats for Sixpence at 7:45. We videotaped all of Sixpence and Steve Taylor, as well as most of Newsboys (we left a little early to beat the shuttle rush). The video they showed right before Steve came out (which was so obviously directed by him) was pricelessly funny, and we were lucky enough to get it on tape, as well. Nah nah-nah nah nah. And Sixpence did that awesome version of "Love, Salvation, the Fear of Death," as well as "Anything," which was a nice surprise. So we camped that night and managed not to get rained on despite the forecast for thunderstorms.

Here are some pictures.

Tomorrow I will give you Friday.
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Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Just a quick reminder that I won't be blogging again until Monday. I hope you will all survive. Sorry I don't have time to say much else. Tootles.
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Saturday, June 21, 2003
Quickies.
1.  Gilmore Girls spin-off go bye-bye.

2.  Happy wedding day to Pastor Kara.  Sorry we can't be there.

3.  Oh dear.  I look at that and see Happy Gilmore.  I apologize.

4.  VH1's 100 Greatest Songs of the Past 25 Years sucked.  No "Total Eclipse of the Heart."  No "Careless Whisper."  No "Mr. Jones."  No "Lightning Crashes."  Not a single Billy Joel song.  What gives?  And what was number one?  "Teen Spirit" of course.  Barf.

5.  See all y'all on Tuesday.  Tootles.
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Thursday, June 19, 2003
Quacky and Quackier.
We have neighborhood ducks. We have no idea where they are from or who (if anyone) they belong to, but they waddle aimlessly around the street and people's yards. One of them woke me up earlier this week quacking outside our bedroom window. It is quite bizarre. But I think they need to be named. It's just the right thing to do. We're reasonably sure one is male and one is female, because they look similar but have different coloring (I'm pretty sure they're mallards). So. I welcome any ideas (as long as they aren't Quacky and Quackier :)).
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Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Our lawnmower is fixed. Yay. I am sick. Boo.
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Tuesday, June 17, 2003
The latest Oscar-worthy films we have screened.
Bringing Down the House--  This can be summed up with these few words:  A Waste of Steve Martin.  It should have been funny.  It could have been, maybe, in an alternate reality.  But it wasn't.  For the most part, anyway.  There were a few elements of the "plot" that just didn't seem to have much point or development or explanation--they were just kind of... there (i.e. Jean Smart as Ex-Wife).  There were a few genuinely funny moments, but not nearly enough to really make the movie worth much of anything.

Malibu's Most Wanted--  Let me explain to you why we saw this.  Um... uh... hmmm....  Okay, maybe I can't.  Is it a good enough explanantion to say I like Jamie Kennedy?  I hope so, 'cause that's really all I got, yo.  Well, that and the fact that when you go into a ($1.50) movie with very low expectations, you tend to be pleasantly surprised much of the time.  Would you believe that this was funnier than the somewhat similarly themed Steve Martin/Queen Latifah vehicle above?  Well, it was.  Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a great movie by any stretch of the imagination.  But it took the joke (white rapper from "The 'Bu") to such levels that it became funny just out of sheer silliness.  It was still essentially a one-joke movie, but Jamie Kennedy, Taye Diggs, and Anthony Anderson just managed to pull off a neutral from both Josh and me.

Phone Booth--  I think that it goes without saying that this is in a totally different league than the first two movies.  I didn't like everything about it, but it really was effective for me.  It sucked me in and kept me riveted (Kaly please read that as the opposite of what we usually mean;  everyone else, it means exactly what it says).  I never knew what was going to happen next, and truly believed it could be absolutely anything.  Colin Farrell, someone I don't particularly care for in real life, gave quite an impressive performance considering the limitations of his character's situation.  It wasn't perfect, but it was definitely well executed and made me feel a real emotional investment.  That's plenty for me, and more than most movies manage to do, even ones that are entertaining.  Josh didn't like it quite as much as I did, though I'm not sure why specifically.  His neutral is a high one, though.
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Monday, June 16, 2003
"Let me explain.  No.  There is too much.  Let me sum up."
Thursday evening we drove up to Milwaukee to hang out with our friend Steve, who we don't get to see too often.  We had dinner at a very cool italian restaurant with absolutely scrumptious food, and then caught the end of a latin jazz concert in the park across the street.  It was a total blast (and not a "sacrifice" in the least, Steve--we drive almost that far every time we go see a movie!).  Hopefully we can get our paths to cross at Cornerstone, too.

***

Our garbage disposal is fixed.  Yay.  Our lawnmower is broken.  Harrumph.

***

We wainscoted this weekend.  That's right.  We actually did it.  We are almost completely done--what we have left is the part we need to move the refrigerator for.  What fun.  Anyway, I think it all looks quite smashing considering we didn't know what the heck we were doing.  The bare wood actually looks quite nice the way it is, and we actually briefly considered leaving it that way instead of painting it white.  But there's already so much wood in there with all the cabinets and the floor and everything that it would just be too... woody.  Plus, there a few imperfections we just couldn't hide without painting it.  So we will (although I'll take a few pictures beforehand).  Now we just need to figure out what color(s) to paint the rest of the wall above it.

***

Annika did not win her third tournament in a row.  Though she tried by having to go to a play-off again, this time when she was just about ready to collapse from exhaustion (or so I hear, since not one single hole of the tournament was televised [grumble]).  In not-as-important-but-still-related news, I'm glad Jim Furyk won the U.S. Open and not Vijay Singh.  And that is all I will say about that.

***

"I've created Lutherans!"
As of yesterday, Josh is now officially a Lutheran.  And I am now officially an ELCA Lutheran instead of a Missouri Synod Lutheran.  I'm glad we are finally done with all that.
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Thursday, June 12, 2003
I feel so guilty when I don't blog.
So I guess I have to come up with something to say today... um... okay. You can all go listen to my Yahoo Launchcast radio station. A taste of some of the artists you will not hear because you will never actually go there: Sixpence None the Richer, Howie Day, Guster, Josh Rouse, Evanescence, Duncan Sheik, Neil Finn, The Electric Soft Parade, Collective Soul, Lifehouse, U2, Beck, Pete Yorn, Jason Mraz, Bush, Dishwalla, Chris Isaak, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Widespread Panic, Stereophonics, Chantal Kreviazuk, Travis, Jeff Buckley, The White Stripes, Wilco, The Juliana Theory, P.O.D., Dispatch, Moby, Sigur Ros, Belle and Sebastian, R.E.M., Depeche Mode, Grandaddy, Badly Drawn Boy, CCR, Eagles, Ryan Adams, The Flaming Lips, The Cure. And if certain record labels were less stoopid, you would also not hear Counting Crows, Sheryl Crow, Coldplay, Foo Fighters, Doves, No Doubt, Ed Harcourt, Burlap to Cashmere, Garbage, David Gray, Sarah McLachlan, Live, Jars of Clay, Norah Jones, Maroon 5, and LaRue. But you won't. I mean will. I mean won't not. Oh, whatever. How was that for boring?
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Tuesday, June 10, 2003
More stuff I care about but you don't.
You really didn't think I would let an LPGA major pass without a mention, did you?  Foolish children.  Annika finally won one of the majors that had eluded her all these years, though she made it interesting by having to go to a playoff hole.  She was so excited when she finally sank the winning putt that she did a spontaneous silley little dance and had tears in her eyes during her post-win interview.  It was so nice to see her show that kind of emotion--something she really never used to do.  I was absolutely thrilled for her.  And thanks to ESPN's broadcast of the LPGA Skins Game last night and tonight, that's six straight days of being able to watch some kind of annikagolf.  I could really get used to this.

***

Our garbage disposal is broken.  Harrumph.

***

For anyone who hasn't checked it in a while, Kaly is posting to her blog again.  Shocking, I know.

***

As if I don't have enough other stuff to keep me more than busy right now, what with home improvements and yard improvements and learning to golf and helping Matteo with his next film and planning a few summer road trips etc. etc. etc., I am having a hankering to resume work on our potentially neat-o abandoned homepage, as well as finally really organizing and resizing all our photos into a nice online album with thumbnails and everything.  Because I honestly don't think the Virginia Prinses (as well as non-relations) have ever even seen our photos from our two-week trip to California et al.  From A YEAR ago.  That is very bad of us.  We will fix this.
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Monday, June 09, 2003
More than you ever wanted to know about wainscoting.  I promise.
I realized recently that if I had delusions of getting our kitchen/dining area refurbished before we potentially have company at the beginning of July, I should perhaps get serious about actually starting that.  The biggest obstacle to this project was finding and buying the wainscoting we wanted to put up.  We had initially been planning on getting prefinished white panel type stuff--basically just particleboard with a nice finish and the vertical grooves we wanted.  It seemed like such a good idea because it was relatively inexpensive, but after inspecting it closely we realized why it is relatively inexpensive.  Because it isn't real wood and has a shiny finish, it would have been very easy to scuff up and difficult to touch up any such imperfections (since we couldn't just use paint).  Plus, the seaming between sheets might have been difficult to make look good as we would have just had to butt them up against one another--there was nothing to make them fit into each other.

So we realized we wanted real wood.  Almost twice as expensive, more time consuming to install (since they come in four-inch sections instead of four-foot sections), and requiring us to prime and paint them ourselves, but they fit nicely together in a tongue-and-groove fashion and the end result will look much nicer and be much more durable.  It was relatively easy to find such wainscoting, but what wasn't easy to find were the mouldings (chair rail and baseboard) that were notched for use with such wainscoting.  Darn near impossible, actually.  So we knew we had to get our hands on some of the wainscoting kits (that come with mouldings designed to fit perfectly with the wainscot panels) we had seen at the Lowes in Ames.  The problem?  We don't have a Lowes anywhere near where we live, and we would not be back in Ames anytime soon.  So we did something a little crazy.  Being sure it was really our only option, on Friday night we drove down to the Loweses in Dekalb and Rockford, Illinois.  The first one didn't even carry them.  The second one, which we got to 15 minutes before it closed, had five.  We bought them and now have *almost* as much as we need.  Good enough for me.

This weekend we pried off the old (and very crappy, I might add) baseboards and the obviously much newer chair rail.  We peeled off some nice, deep chunks of paint in some spots in the process (down to some kind of cardboard-type substance--no idea what the heck that is...), and have been sanding and spackling and sanding some more (I knew that electric sander would come in handy).  And hopefully later this week we can start actually installing it.  Then we can worry about removing the wallpaper border, painting the rest of the wall, and making new curtains.  And maybe by fall I'll get to stripping and painting our table and chairs, not to mention repadding and recovering the chairs and, I don't know, rebolting everything or whatever we need to do so it's not so wobbly.  I think I'll let Josh do that while I handle all the pretty stuff.

You know, I think I could cosmetically redo just about our whole house if it wouldn't cost so much.  It's really a bummer.  I like the planning and designing, and I really don't mind the work itself--it can be quite satisfying.  But it gets to be kind of an expensive hobby after a while.  Kind of like golf.  It's really too bad.
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Wednesday, June 04, 2003
So you can get me what I want.
In an effort to make things easier for my family-type-people, I will now list a few things you may get me for my birthday in two weeks.  How nice of me.  They are in order starting with what I want the most.  And anything available online will contain a link.

1)  CD:  Neil Finn, One All
2)  Annika Sorenstam Commemorative Tin
3)  Divine Discontent Songbook
4)  August and Everything After Songbook
5)  CD:  Maroon 5, Songs About Jane
6)  CD:  Josh Rouse, Dressed Up Like Nebraska
7)  CD:  Doves, Lost Souls
8)  CD:  Ryan Adams, Gold

Okay, so I guess everything was available online.  If anyone would prefer things you can, say, go to the store and buy (which I don't think any of the above really are), let me know and I'll try to think of some stuff.  In general I still like, you know, California and San Francisco and Spanish/Mediterranean architecture and... well, I don't really know what could come from things like that, but I guess you never know.  Oh, and I like those bamboo wind chimes at Worldly Goods in Ames.  That's pretty much all I can think of right now.  Tootles.
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Tuesday, June 03, 2003
The one thing I did not want when we bought our house.
Anal neighbors. You know, those people who have their lawns chemically treated twice a year, use an edger along their sidewalk and driveway to make a perfectly straight line, promptly remove any debris (twigs, lawn clippings, tree buds) that might find their way onto said sidewalk or driveway--and heaven forbid if you let any dandelion seeds from your yard blow into theirs. Puh-leeez! I'm all for trying to make one's yard look relatively nice (something we're now tackling and will be a posting topic in the not-too-distant future), but the world will not end if your bushes are not shaped into a perfect sphere. Give it a rest.
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Monday, June 02, 2003
This is getting serious.
I had so freaking much fun at the LPGA event on Saturday that yesterday Josh and I went out into our backyard and hit whiffle golf balls against the house (so, yes, I have now officially swung a golf club.  Not particularly well, but still).  I've talked about wanting to learn how to golf for a while now, but I guess I was never serious enough to actually do anything about it.  But now I have been inspired.  So I am learning.  Sort of.  First I will learn how to correctly swing.  Then how to actually make contact with the ball (which I accomplished some last night).  Then I will actually get some loft, and, if I'm lucky, eventually even some distance.  Then I can finally worry about aiming.  I think I have a lot of work ahead of me before I can consistently actually hit the ball, which will be the requirement that must be met before we go to a driving range.  It will be even more difficult considering that  1) We only have two woods, two irons, and a putter that we somehow inherited and are not necessarily the right size for either of us (though certainly better than nothing);  2) We can't so much ever hit real golf balls in our small backyard, so we can't practice with them until we go to a driving range; and  3) because our yard is not a golf course, it is essentially like every shot is from the rough rather than, say, a fairway (although, come to think of it, that's probably more realistic ;)).

Oh, and if anyone is interested in the tournament specifically, we were there for about 10 hours (cloudy, cold, and very windy in the morning; a bit warmer, mostly sunny, and a little less wind in the late afternoon for Annika's round), walked about 8 miles (much of it speedwalking in an attempt to keep ahead of the worst of the unfortunately very big "Annika crowd" so we could actually see her putt--the best opportunity one has to see a player in action up close), and got to see Annika get back-to-back bogeys on holes 12 and 13, yell at the ball, and then proceed to birdie her last five holes for a total round of 66 and a two-shot lead.  I wanted to cry when the day was over.  I even tried to convince Josh on Sunday morning after church that we could still go to the final round and get there well before the last group teed off, but he (rightly) convinced me that we should not spend another $80 on it.  Who is he, me?  ;)  So I waited FOREVER until 4pm when TV coverage started, watched Annika build a 7-shot lead and then try to blow it on the 18th hole with two very bad shots and an unplayable lie penalty.  But she somehow managed to salvage bogey (on the hole she eagled on Friday) and won the tournament by 3 strokes.  Of course, we had to leave for a meeting at church in the middle of that horrible 18th hole fiasco, so we had to wait until we got home to watch it and find out she had pulled off the win after all.  It was painful.  But all is well.  And you do not care.  But, hey, it's my blog and I'll write about what I want to write about.  The internet is a wonderful thing.
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