Tormentas e tempestades

From a work perspective, nothing of interest happened this week, so I'll avoid talking about that.

On Tuesday night, we went to another Minnesota Orchestra concert. While our seats weren't the greatest (we always buy the cheapest ones available), we really enjoyed the music. Here's what was performed:

Bernstein: Three Dance Episodes from "On The Town"
Gershwin: Piano Concerto in F
Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story"
Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue

As far as Bernstein goes, I was only familiar with a tiny section of the "West Side Story" piece, but I enjoyed what I heard. The "West Side Story" stuff is very dramatic, and I appreciated the use of the vibraphone in the piece, as it's one of my favorite instruments. The Gershwin pieces, on the other hand, I know very well. I've known both pieces for a long time and have listened to them often, so it was great to hear them live. The pianist played extremely well, and I liked the fact that he was visibly enjoying himself. Classically trained musicians usually seem uptight and/or stuck up, so to see a soloist really enjoy himself was a nice change. If the average age of the audience at these concerts (I estimate it to be about 65) is any indication of the state of classical music in this country, then the future does not look too good. There was a lot of empty seats at the show, and it's too bad that people aren't as interested in this music as they once were. Seeing a 4-5 piece rock band is fun, but there's something really special about seeing 30+ musicians play together. If people only knew what they were missing...We've enjoyed the concerts we've been to, and are going to another one next week, and will be buying tickets to more shows when the 2005/2006 season goes on sale in a few weeks.

On Saturday morning, we met Mark and family at the Como Park Zoo, in St. Paul (Lee and Aneta, this is the one we went to when you were here a couple years ago). The zoo is small, but it's free and kids like animals, so it seemed like a good activity for a Saturday. It was overcast, and by the time we got to the polar bears, a couple of announcements had been made that a storm warning was in effect. It's a good thing we stayed there, because it started raining REALLY hard a few minutes after the second announcement. There was a tarp hanging over the outside of the aquatic animal building, and I thought we'd be OK standing there, but the rain was so heavy and the wind was blowing so hard, we decided to go inside the building and wait it out. The heaviest rain lasted 20-30 minutes, and we had to wait another 30 minutes or so beyond that for the rain to let up enough for us to go outside. Holden is a big fan of tigers, so we had to make sure that we took him to see the tigers before we left. Once we found the tiger, we made our way back to Mark's car. We were all pretty wet by then, so the drive back to our place was a little uncomfortable. We had lunch at our apartment, which consisted of deli meat sandwiches, veggies and dip, chips, potato salad, juice, and chocolate cake for dessert. We hung out for a while lunch, and then Mark and family headed back to Rochester. It was nice to have them over to celebrate Mark and Holden's birthdays, and it's nice to have some family a little closer.

Becca and I took a nap after Mark left, and then spent the rest of the day watching Voyager and reading.

We're flying to California on Wednesday, and we're pretty excited about that. Pool party on Saturday!