Land Between the Lakes

I was in charge of our activity schedule this weekend and, after paging through a couple of books about "Things to do in Tennessee," I decided that we really should drive up to Land Between the Lakes and check it out.

It's about a two-hour drive from our house through some very rural parts of TN, but I thought it was well worth the trip. There are some great hiking trails and lots of cool wildlife to look at, including elk and bison! Les took the photo above of bison crossing the road at twilight (artsy!). Those bison are pretty large when they're standing next to your car, especially if you're driving a little Ford Focus. I felt like we could have been trampled in our car by those hairy beasts!

In mid- to late-September, the elk apparently start getting territorial (annual rut season) and you can hear them trumpeting and see them clashing their racks. If you were ever thinking about visiting LBL, a month from now is a great time to do it!

You mean WE represent "the hipsters"?!

We went to the Ernest Tubb Midnight Jamboree last night. This is our fourth visit to the ETMJ in two months because it's free (and we're in money-saving mode right now) and because it's consistently a great show with really talented musicians and a great variety of country music. We wondered aloud as we were driving home last night why we never see any "hipsters" at the Jamboree. Could it be that WE represent the hipster crowd? We're not really very hip (the loss of "coolness" is a blog topic I've had on the back burner for a while), so that was a scary thought to the two of us. The audience is comprised of retirees, tourists, and a smattering of people between the ages of 10 and 30. But it seems like there are very few college students or late-20s/early-30s "cool people" in attendance at these shows.

I wonder if everyone is out attending more-traditional Saturday night venues (bars, clubs, etc.) or if people just don't know about the ETMJ because it's so far out of the way of everything else, out by the Opryland Hotel.

If you have never been to the Midnight Jamboree, give it a try one of the Saturday nights when you're tired of the bar scene or sick of standing in a smoky venue, waiting for the band to set up. It runs from midnight to about 1:15 a.m., is free of charge, and is a nice snapshot of the roots of country music. Be sure to wear your Converse sneakers, funky glasses, mod hairdos, and retro t-shirts so that I recognize you for the hipster you are!

Fantasy Football Fever

Well, everyone, I am now among the ranks who are enjoying Fantasy Football Fever. I have never played Fantasy Football before, but my friend Jason twisted my arm into joining his league this year. Our league includes maybe one stereotypical jock, so at least I'm not going to be swimming in testosterone during this football season, and probably won't hear too many, "You're doing really good . . . for a girl!" comments either.

I'd like to believe that I'm going to "pull a Lisa Simpson" in that episode where she and Homer bonded over watching football (she was using her smarts to research the teams' stats and would tell him who to bet on), and really get into managing my team so that I can insure a few wins this season. In reality, I'll probably let everything just go on auto-pilot and hope for the best, checking my rankings every couple of months, and getting annoyed that I'm not winning more games. The great thing about Fantasy Football (or so I'm told) is that this is an okay approach to participating in a league. I'm going for it (the laissez-faire attitude, that is)!

The "theme" of our league is Star Wars, but since "Tatooweenie" was already taken, I chose a regional theme for my team instead. My team name is "Deb's Dixie Darlins" -- "We put three D's in DDDefense!" Although my name is not Deb (as most of you know), my friend Jason calls me "Debbie" because I bought a cool bike in college and it came with a personalized plate that said "Debbie" on it. Viola! The nickname is born!

If anything exciting happens during this Fantasy Football season, I'll let you know.

Season Ticket Holders

Yes, folks, it is a dream come true! After ten years of hard-core hockey fan-ship, we are at last official season ticket holders! We could not be more excited! (Note all the exclamation marks!)

I have to admit that we're not really "Predators fans," however. Not that we don't like the the Predators, because we do, but we're bigger fans of the Detroit Redwings -- our home team during our years of hockey addiction. When the Red Wings come for a visit this year, we're probably going to wear our Red Wings jerseys to the games. But for the rest of the games, we can wholeheartedly support the Predators -- our new home team.

Although we are big Wings fans, the bad thing about the Red Wings is that they're so popular (what with their recent Stanley Cup wins and all) so it's difficult and expensive to ever see them live. In addition, we lived over an hour from the Joe Louis Arena, so it was quite a time commitment to go to a game, especially on a weeknight. We attended two Red Wings games in "Hockeytown," but were never able to get season tickets to the games because they were either not available or so expensive that they were out of our price range. And adding an extra two hours of driving to a three-hour night at the arena was pretty unappealing. When we moved to Nashville, one of our first realizations was, "If hockey teams ever end their strike, I bet we could actually get season tickets!" In addition, we live less than 15 minutes from the Gaylord Entertainment Center, so the drive time is nil. Like clockwork, the strike ended, the Predators lowered their season ticket prices, and suddenly we were official season ticket holders!

We went to the arena tonight to select our seats. Based on your history with the Predators organization (how many years you have been a season ticket holder or how soon you put your deposit down for seats this year), you get to be the first, middle, or last group of people to go in and pick seats. Our select-a-seat time was 7:00 p.m., and we felt like there were still a lot of seats left to choose from when we got to the arena. We had a certain section in mind because one of the Predators employees had suggested it to us when we visited the arena for fan appreciation day -- the 313 to 319 section of seats is at the 300-level price range but actually at the same height as the 200-level bowl. In other words, you get closer seats for a less expensive price.

We sat in seats all over the arena, and ended up selecting the following location: section 314, row B, seats 7 & 8. You can check out our seats on the seat chart here. The Preds attack twice on our end, which will be great!

We tried out two seats in row 1 & 2, right behind the Pred's bench. We almost lost our heads and got them because they were such great seats! But, in the end, logic prevailed when we realized that one of those seats was the same price as two of our seats. Maybe next year...

We are going to commit ourselves to being super hockey fans this year and attending all of the home games. It's quite a commitment because there are a lot of them, but we're going to try to "do this up right" this year in case this is our only year as season ticket holders (it is a lot of money, after all).

See you at the arena!

Pop CD Pet Peeve

I was just looking for the new Coldplay CD on my shelf and couldn't find it. Why? Because the spine is printed green on black, making it very difficult to read. I had to pull multiple CDs off the rack before I found it and by then I was annoyed.

If you're making really inaccessible artsy music, I could see that you might not care very much about the readability of your CD spine. Who cares if the three people who buy your CD can find it later. It's not like anyone would want to listen to your CD more than once anyway.

But if you're a popular band with a whole marketing team designing your cover and creating a "brand" to keep your band "front of mind" for as many people as possible, you'd think that finding your CD among a rackful of other competitors' CDs would be a high priority, wouldn't you?

Simultaneously, two thoughts occur to me:

1. A story I read long ago about zookeepers hiding lions' food so that the lions have to "work for it," making their environment more stimulating as a result, thereby leading to greater lion happiness. Maybe locating your belongings is "hunting" for modern-day humans and I should be thanking Coldplay's marketing team for making my environment more stimulating.

2. If the CD had been easy to find, I never would have blogged about it.

Maybe those high-paid marketing people know what they're doing after all.

Garbage Art

This morning, Les and I were planning to head over to Cheekwood Botanical Gardens for their studio art session (something came up and we didn't make it). We were going to be able to make our own art out of garbage (yes, I realize this would be easy to do at home, but it would have been fun to see what other people were making).

When I told Les about this plan, he said, "Do you throw it away afterwards?'

I thought this was a great philosophical question and started laughing.

I found out afterwards that it was merely a practical question. We have a very crowded apartment and he couldn't think of a spot for one more piece of art.

Tupperware Beware!

I don't mean to be an alarmist, but I really think that Tupperware is out to get me. I've been suspicious of it for some time, but I feel that its true intentions have only become more clear now that we've moved into our new apartment.

Let me break it down for you. The other night, I had just put away the clean dishes and was rinsing the dirties to start another load when I heard a small thunder-thud in the cabinet above my head. Something moved in -- you guessed it -- the very same Tupperware cabinet which you see in the photo above. Having been in the kitchen to hear this container-shift I had two choices: (1) pretend I didn't hear anything and hope that my husband would be the next sucker to open the cupboard, or (2) take one for the team and set things right before someone (else) got hurt.

I would never confess here that I finished rinsing the dishes, closed the dishwasher, dried my hands, and left the kitchen without another glance at the Tupperware lair. That is a tale for whispered confidences with perfect strangers and anonymous late-night phone calls. Instead, I'm here to tell the story of what really happened when I opened that cupboard above the sink.

Things fell out. At my head. With such orchestrated precision that I was unable to appropriately shield myself from the plastic barrage. Or rather, I made the mistake of trying to catch everything before it hit the floor.

Here is what transpired exactly. Initially, well . . . nothing. When I cautiously opened the first of the cupboard doors, everything appeared at least temporarily unshiftable. Maybe it was nothing after all, I thought. Some lids rustling against each other, a few bowls nestling more deeply into larger bowls, nothing to worry about here. This apparent lack of impending doom, of course, fed my false sense of security, setting me up for "the surprise behind door number two."

I recall now that I quite carelessly opened the other cupboard door -- a fool's move, I admit -- and was immediately greeted by an airborne Tupperware bowl, sans lid. I caught it in my left hand, simultaneously glimpsing a larger square container plummeting towards the floor. I dove for it, successfully snatching it out of the air. I felt triumphant. The worst was over. All was quiet, and a container in each hand, I stood up straight, looking into the cupboard to see where exactly I could re-stow these two errant food-holders.

And here is where the aforementioned "orchestrated precision" comes in: with a few miniscule shifts into the gaps once filled by the two containers I held in my hands, the entire top layer of the cabinet tumbled forward en masse upon me. With both hands full (as the Tupperware King knew they would be), there was nothing I could do to catch any of the tumbling tops and bottoms, and so I instinctively did what no sane person would do in the same circumstance. I stuck my face up to the cabinet and stopped a falling bowl with the bridge of my nose. It was my bad luck that it happened to be the only metal one in the collection.

I have never been punched in the face, but if it's anything like having a metal bowl rim smashed into the bridge of your nose, I hope I never am able to check that treat off my "Things To Not Do" list. My eyes started watering and lost focus, I felt dizzy, and I was convinced that my nose was broken or was at least going to start gushing blood at any second.

When my nose showed no outward reaction to this severe trauma, I ran into the bathroom and rushed to the mirror, convinced I would find a purple-yellow-green bruise spreading quickly across my face like a vivid sunset. Nope. No bruise, no scratch, no cut, no protruding bones. Just a whole lot of nothing. It still hurt, certainly, but you don't get much sympathy for something no one can see. I didn't even bother to mention it to my husband at this point. What was he going to say other than, "Well, at least you were unscathed. And the Tupperware can be re-washed. No harm done."

The bridge of my nose hurt for the next week, not that anyone would know it to look at me and my perfectly normal-pink sniffer. And that was the insult to injury which I'm sure will keep the Tupperware in fits of giggles for a long time to come.

The moral of this story: Keep your Tupperware in a low cabinet. It's not too good at jumping up. But wear steel-toed shoes and shin-guards just in case.

How Hot Is It?

Sure, August in Nashville is warm, but it's not as HOT as the hype would have you believe (for instance, June in Florida gives a Nashville August a run for its money). Yet people complain about the weather here as if we were all living in Death Valley at high noon.

I just read this article in the free weekend paper called Nashville Scene. This perfectly describes the current summer vibe down here and the general way that news agencies love to work up the public.

I wonder if living in a relatively temperate climate makes people react more strongly to smaller fluctuations in the weather? Do you think people who live where it is continually hot complain year-round?

Starch + Linen =

"Unfortunately, starching your linen clothes doesn't make them less likely to wrinkle. You just get 'sharper' wrinkles."
-- My friend Sandra, sharing her linen laundry knowledge

Cheap Date Saturday Night

Looking for a night out on Saturday, Les and I wandered up the road a couple of miles to the Grand Ole Opry, planning to buy tickets to see Junior Brown perform. We have always enjoyed Mr. Brown's music and have never seen him live, and it seemed like a great opportunity to see him in Nashville, just a few minutes from our own front door. Coincidentally, we arrived to find Junior doing a free summer concert outside the Opry in between his two evening performances. We got to hear about nine or ten songs by him (including one in Spanish which we'd never heard him sing before, and another that sounded exactly like old surfer music) and decided to save our pennies for a later date when we knew more people on the Opry roster for the evening.

Instead, on a whim, we headed over to the Ernest Tubb Record Shop #2 just across the street to kill some time before going to the Midnight Jamboree at the Texas Troubadour Theatre next door. We couldn't believe our luck . . . country legend Charlie Louvin was the MC for the evening! He put on quite a performance, dancing around the stage, making jokes, and just charming the pants off the audience in general. We were so impressed at the number of performers they rotated on and off the stage that evening -- at least six special guests/groups set up on stage, performed one song, and then tore down during the show -- and the music was of superb quality. Junior Brown, just fresh from closing out the late show at the Opry, even appeared and performed two Ernest Tubb songs with Leon Rhodes, former member of the Texas Troubadours!

It really was something to see how it all happens on the other side of the radio broadcast, and I highly recommend the experience to anyone who can stay up late enough to see it. Interesting to me was the fact that most of the audience was over 55 and seemed to have no problem staying alert for the show. I wondered then if I needed to start taking more supplements.

The whole evening was unplanned and accidental and we had a great time!