Spessas Week #87

The Spessas & Family came to visit me for a week and left just yesterday. As usual, details are sketchy. On Monday we did The Phone Show on our brand new station, Manic Radio! That was a blast, because the regulars in the Manic Radio chatroom didn’t like us at all. The PLA listeners were saying hilarious things to the mods and other regulars, which was easily upsetting them. The station owner was woken from sleep and told to come in the chat room to see all the craziness going on. Things were crazy, both in the chatroom and on the air. Two days later, Manic Radio fired me. It was the best thing ever! More details are on the PLA Forums.

Wednesday I went to the Veterans Day parade with the kids. Eventually we jumped into the parade and started marching with everyone else, walking the entire length of the parade. Last year we kind of blended in, but this year we were in sort of an empty section so we were more noticeable. We got frequent claps from people and even cheers a couple of times. We had a little candy with us, so we threw that at some little kids. Some old guy yelled at us to throw some candy and Emily says “Okay!” and threw Nerds at the ground in front of him. Not boxes of Nerds, but open candy. It was great. There’s a small video clip of all this on my Facebook, which I will attempt to embed below, but I’m not sure if my privacy settings will allow it.

I think it was also Wednesday that we drove to Portland, sans kids, and saw the Mountain Goats. It was a pretty small venue and we were just 20 feet or so from the stage. Was an awesome concert. On either side of the stage there were giant flatscreen TVs and while waiting for the show to start I tried turning one on with my keychain remote and it worked. On the screen there was a Verizon page that allowed people to text words and pictures onto the screen, which people immediately started doing. I managed to get a few messages on it myself before the show started.

As the show started, the TV was turned off, but I kept turning it back on during the show. Since the lights were down, it was really bright on the crowd. The staff eventually decided to shut off the Verizon feed, so that the screen was black when I turned it on. But after about 30 seconds of blackness, the screen would turn bright blue, flooding the crowd with light. It was enough to make everyone squint. I kept doing it in between songs, hoping the Mountain Goat guy would say something about it, but he never did. Finally the staff cut the power to the TV so I couldn’t do it anymore. I resisted the urge to make my way to the other side of the auditorium to start in on that TV. I need to get a more powerful TV-B-GONE.

A lot of other things happened throughout the week, mostly kid-related. We took the kids to Wonderland (the nickel arcade) and to see 2012 and some other miscellaneous things that I can’t remember. On Saturday we went to see The Pixies in Eugene, which was really great. They played the entire album Doolittle, in order. Halfway through the lady announces, “Okay, here’s side B.” Then after that they played a bunch of stuff I didn’t recognize.