TSO, baby!

Last night Sweet Hubby and I went to the city's big sports/concert arena for the first time since it was renovated several years ago, so that's one Something New.

We were there to see the Trans Siberian Railroad, which I'd never even heard of until I saw an advertisement recently for this concert.  Some good friends, including a dear cousin, really like TSO and so, without knowing much of anything about it/them(?), I bought us tickets.

The music didn't do much for me.  It was harder, more electric rock than I tend to like.  It was a Christmas show, so there were new interpretations of some classic carols, and also some songs I'd never heard, all of them sung jazzed up and rock-y.  The performers were talented (one man held a note for what felt like 2 minutes without wavering) but it just wasn't quite my cup of tea.

The tech, however, was amazing.  There were projections, moving stages, every color of light going in every direction, and big set pieces moved on and off stage so skillfully, I was never aware of them appearing nor disappearing.

All in all, I'm really glad we took this night out on the town to see Something New.

Well. That was different.

I haven't posted in a while because I was on a cruise to Hawaii during which I caught my second bout of COVID, then a trip to upstate to NY to visit Sweet Hubby's dad and family, then rehearsals for and leading a program for journalism students at the U to give them an experience of interviewing people going through a traumatic experience.  Whew.

I was about to post about Something New I did last Friday, which was seeing the movie of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour.  Here she is, the biggest recording star of today, and I hadn't heard a single song of hers (except one my traveling companion played while we were cruising), don't own any of her CDs, have simply managed to miss her as an entertainer.  So I saw the movie and was going to post about it when

Saturday morning the lower half of our split level house was flooded.  There had been a day of rain, which isn't unusual in Seattle, and sometimes when it rains the creek that flows along the back border of our backyard overflows into the yard, making sort of a bog of the back half.  This time one of the creek outlets must have been clogged because our backyard had turned into a deep enough lake that ducks were swimming on it.  How on earth the ducks managed to find us, when there isn't usually a lake here, is a mystery to me.  It was kind of cute to see - until the water started seeping into the garage, the storage room, the laundry room, and Sweet Hubby's carpeted office, which happens to be the largest room in the house.  What a mess!  Our two south neighbors were likewise flooded.

We live in a small Seattle-adjacent city, and fortunately for us the city responds almost immediately to calls for help.  They must have managed to unclog the creek because by the end of the day, the water was already receding.  But the damage had been done.  We spent the next day working to pump out the water, suck it out of the carpet, save what hadn't been ruined.  Today was all about moving everything out of the office room so that our carpet guy could pull up the soggy carpet.  The room was stuffed with all of Sweet Hubby's, well, everything.  This room has needed a thorough going-over for a long time; a fiesta of sorting and recycling and donating and throwing away and re-organizing was long overdue, so the silver lining of the flood is that SH has been forced to take stock of what he owns and how he wants it organized.  

We're still a long way from being back to normal.  All the other rooms in the house are now home to boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff.  We still need to decide if we want to re-carpet downstairs or just live with the linoleum that has been revealed by the removal of the wet carpet, or put in hardwood flooring, or what.  And then we'll need to put all the furniture back in order and find a place for everything that's been moved out of the room.

This event has made me much more sympathetic to those people who have gone through or are going through similar and worse disasters.  At least in ours no one was hurt, and we have the resources we need to deal with this mess, and neither of us is traveling for a few weeks so we can continue to face this trouble together.  At some point, this will just be a story we tell, a more dramatic than usual chapter in our usually quiet lives. For now, I have to go back to carrying boxes.  Cheers!