Ridiculous

I might be dropping this blog. Blogspot is making me nuts

Ain't no Sesame Street that's for sure

Well our tour of live kid shows concluded yesterday afternoon at the State Fairgrounds. We saw Dora The Explorer Live : The Pirate Adventure. I think Brooke enjoyed it, but it was pretty lame compared to the Sesame Street Live performance we saw a few weeks before.

First of all the arena wasn't nice at all. It's where they do barrel racing and such at the state fair. It's just an old concrete building with worn out seats. They had the stage sitting a towards one end and then had rope strung from one each side of the stage towards the upper deck seating with black sheets hanging off.

The setup of the stage was terrible. The Sesame Street Live stage was big and open and they had a piece of the stage that jutted out off the main stage. So basically every seat could see everything. Not at Dora! We were up in the first few rows in the stands and couldn't see things on the side from time to time. The worst part was the last act with the pirate adventure boat. For some unknown reason, the didn't have the boat in the middle of the stage. It was off to the side... so we couldn't see Ilsa The Iguana at all during her performance of 'Ilsa Turn The Wheel'. There was no point in not having the boat in the middle of the stage, but that's how they did it.

The characters weren't very good either. Boots was a black guy that whined alot. Dora looked pretty good. The other characters really sounded nothing like the animated characters in the TV show.

You also weren't allowed to take photographs because it could harm the performers... so apparently the people playing Cookie Monster, Elmo, Big Bird, etc can handle photographs better than the Dora performers. Sheesh!

As usual we bought some merch. We ended up getting her two stuffed animal characters that we have never seen anywhere. A Benny The Bull and a Tico The Squirrel. They also gave little Pirate Adventure flags to every ticket holder.

We went to Earls afterwards for dinner which was pretty yummy. Chopped brisket sandwhiches... and Brooke ate two french fries, a bunch of ketchup with a spoon, and spit out her brisket (crazy kid!).

Summer Nights, Hot Dogs, and Butt Candy

well... the baseball season is upon us. As most of you know I really love baseball and I'm excited like every year... but this year more so than the last few. The Mets had a pretty good year last year, and without losing what I think are key pieces and filling holes (First base offensive production and a closer -- filled by Carlos Delgado and Billy Wagner), I think the Mets have a real chance to win the NL East this year and FINALLY put the Braves to rest. I'm so stinkin sick of the Braves winning the NL East every year, and basically wasting the playoff spot by losing in the first round. NO MAS! The Mets won their first game with a nice pitching performance by Tom Glavine. Hopefully he continues to pitch well and our ridiculous amount of offenseive potential (Beltran, Delgado, David Wright, Cliff Floyd, Paul Lo Duca) will put up 6 or7 runs a game and lead us into the post season. I'm excited. My DirecTV package is in order and I'm ready to fall asleep every night to the sweet sounds of west coast games. I'll be keeping up with the A's a little bit as always since my Dad is an A's fan I've always rooted for them as my American League team.

Here are my season predictions so you can make fun of me in October when I miss it :

NL East - Mets
NL Central - Cardinals
NL West - Dodgers (could easily be Giants... depends on how Barry does without steroids)
NL Wildcard - Braves

AL East - Yanks
AL Central - Indians
AL West - Angels
AL Wildcard - White Sox

Yanks - Cardinals .... Cardinals win in 6.

The other big story about this year in baseball is Barry Bonds. A book is coming out that continues to pile on the allegations that he loves the "juice" and has been hitting Steroids for 6 or 7 years. He is also 8 home runs away from passing Babe Ruth to move into second all time on the home run list. He needs 48 to pass Hank Aaron... I hope he doesn't do it, because he cheated to do it... yes I probably cheated (I have to say probably because my mom and Grammy read this) on a test sometime in my life, but Bonds is going to take one of the most precious records in sports and make it his own because he cheated...that's worse! Besides, my grades never really reflected that I was cheating, or cheating effectively anyway.

We've been getting our yard ready for Summer too. When I say we, I mean Heather. She basically redid the entire front flower bed. She raised it a little, put a two level brick border around the bed, and planted 3 bunches of annuals around the border. It looks great! We're also trying to get the weeds under control, get our yard ready, and our patio ready. I'm sure it's going to be hotter than crap this summer since it was 70+ degrees several times in December, January, and February.

Till next time . . .