Labor Day Holiday

My Labor Day Holiday really wasn't anything interesting.

Friday I had a few webchats with friends who happened to be online when I was. I tried to tune my guitar because I had heard a new song I wanted to learn. As I was tuning, the G-string snapped with a loud *TWAANNG* and scared the bejeezus out of me. I didn't have a spare set of strings, so I was thoroughly bummed.

I completely overhauled my apartment (it was a huge mess) and made no bake cookies. Isabelle arrived and we proceeded to knit and watch SEVEN EPISODES of the L Word. Those are hour long episodes, folks. Yeesh. We stopped only to go have some dinner at Big Bamboo, then came back for wine and more L Word. She left around midnight and I crashed.

On Saturday my big excitement was going into Puxi to the music street and getting new strings. I got two sets because I don't ever want to have the urge to play and have something stupid, like a string breaking, being the reason I can't. I also got a new tuner which I LOVE. I can clip it onto the head of my guitar and it tunes it by the vibrations. Neat-o. I wandered around Puxi for a bit after that, then went back to my apartment.

I had all the fixings for an italian dinner (I was planning on hanging out with Zeno, but she had to go home for family reasons) so I decided to make myself a nice dinner on Saturday. I got fresh bread from the French bakery down the street. Made some garlic dipping sauce. Had carbonara pasta with steamed brocoli. Yum yum. I also watched "Bolt", which was a decent movie and made me miss my dogs.

Sunday I was stupid. I completely forgot that I had a ticket to go see The Chanticleer's concert*. I was about to take a shower and work on my lesson plan when I got a text message form Nicole asking when I was planning on "getting there". So I responded "getting where?". When she wrote back "the concert" I assumed she was talking about the MIDI music festival that she and Megan and Isabelle were thinking about going to. Then it dawned on me. I showered and dressed like a madwoman, then jumped into a cab. I made it there just on time.
The concert was good. The Chanticleers are a vocal ensemble group and they did a variety of stuff. They sang barbershop stuff like "Beautiful Dreamer", they did jazz like "Love Walked In", and they also did a Native American chant and some folk music. They were REALLY good. It made me think of going to acapella concerts back in college. The last song they did in the main performance was about a rooster and all I could think was that for anyone in the audience who didn't speak good English (which was probably the majority considering there were 8 foreigners in the whole audience...including me and Nicole), that song must have been very confusing. They crowed like roosters and mewed like cats and barked like dogs. At the end one singer came forward, squatted and pretended to lay a couple plastic eggs. It was hilarious. They also sang two encores, both in Chinese!

Now I am back to worky-work. I am going to play "You're So Vain" in class today and have a discussion about vanity. I am trying to estimate exactly how long this exercise will take, cuz I don't think it will take up the whole class period.

Anyway, enough boring all of you.

Much love,
Stephanie

*Am I the only one that thinks that's cool? Chanticleer? As in the rooster from the Canterbury Tales? Anyone? No? Bah.**
**Chanticleer was also the name of the rooster in Rock-a-Doodle...that just occured to me now. Man, I haven't seen that movie in forever. Probably a good thing.