Jumpin' At The Woodside

I think all the trick or treaters have gone back home to fill their bellies for the evening and I’m enjoying a glass of the Concha y Toro Casillero Del Diablo wine I forgot to mention in the Halloween Mix post. It’s the Carmenere, which is kind of like a spicy Cabernet – very good. We got slammed with trick or treaters tonight, especially since we thought we might not get any. We were prepared for them though and even have a lot of candy left over. We always get what I referred to as a kid as “the good candy” – in no particular order, Reese’s, Snickers, Three Musketeers, Hershey’s, KitKat, Butterfinger. The mini-size of course, but I remember when I was a kid and the word got out that a house was handing out full-size candy bars, that was like the Holy Grail of Trick or Treating! That house didn’t have candy left for long. Lago is at choir practice right now singing Christmas songs. She’ll be part of the Carolina Voices Singing Christmas Tree this December. She loves that she gets to ...

We carved pumpkins tonight! And now for the scariest photo of them all...

Each year I update my Halloween Mix. It grew to two CDs a few years ago and it may grow to 3 CDs soon. Last year I created a companion CD of classics from all the classical pieces and movie soundtracks which I had incorporated in small snippets into various tracks. I think it was also last year that I decided to make the first CD more laid back and the second CD more rockin’. The tracks are listed below, but this does not do it justice since most tracks are peppered with Halloween sound effects and movie clips. However, most of these tracks are available on iTunes for downloading. One of these years, I may bring “The Martian Boogie” by Brownsville Station back to the Halloween Mix. It appeared in the first couple mixes, but I decided to cut it a few years ago. I mixed in a clip from the original radio broadcast of “The War of the Worlds” which fit in perfectly in the beginning. The track is really long and even when I did have it in the mix it was edited down to four minutes. I cut “In...

I know this isn’t a very “spooky” post considering the time of year and not to mention I’m not even a NASCAR fan, but I had lunch with Jimmie Johnson the other day. He was down at our corporate HQ just south of town shooting some TV spots for us. My pal Sammy invited me along to go down to the shoot. He had to take a script down so I tagged along. We got there just before they broke for lunch and we were invited to sit down with Jimmie for lunch – something the crew who were shooting the spots weren’t even invited to do. We were introduced to Jimmie and we shook his hand. He talked a little bit about last weekend’s win at Martinsville and that he expected to get bumped from behind in the final laps, but “that’s short-track racing.” Sorry Monkey, I didn’t get an autograph, but I saved my pickle from lunch. It’s in the mail. :~)

Halloween is our second favorite holiday and last night we went to the Queen City Ghost & Graveyard tour. I was hoping it would be more about telling ghost stories and walking through old graveyards, but it was more theatrical going from haunted place by bus with actors taking on ghostly personas at each location. Still good Halloween fun. We went to dinner after at the LaVecchia's Seafood Grille . It was our first visit to the four-star restaurant. They’re a seafood and steakhouse with a funky décor and live music on the weekends. We discovered a new Pinot Noir – new to us – in the Lange Pinot Noir from Oregon. It was very nice. I started with the she crab soup and Lago had the oysters rockefeller. Then Lago got a lobster done LaVecchia style, which is all the meat pulled out and saute’d in a buttery wine sauce over veggies. I had the filet and crab cake. All the food was excellent and so was the service. We asked the waiter to take his time and he did just that. We like to ta...

Back on Tuesday, Sept. 26, we had two trees removed from the backyard. Over the summer a tree came down behind the house during a big storm, before we owned the house, and was removed by the former owners. That left this one tree with all its limbs on one side kind of leaning over the house. Our plan was to definitely remove that tree. The other tree we removed wasn’t near the house, but it was dying. It looked like it may have been damaged when the tree came down during the storm. We have a third tree on the side of the house that we also had trimmed. The tree crew did a really good job. The tree that was trimmed has a nice balance and you wouldn’t notice it was trimmed unless you saw it beforehand. We’re having the stump nearest the house removed, and they’re coming back to do that next week. They mulched the limbs and the tree trunks were hauled away by a lumber company. I decided to keep the mulch and spread it around the trees in the front and one on the side. It was a lot more mu...

Dave Matthews Band at UVA's John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville, Va., 9/22/2006. We got back from Chicago just in time to watch football on Sunday afternoon, what luck! Then it was another short week before we were heading off again, this time back to our old stomping grounds in Charlottesville, Va. We drove up. We stopped at Lago’s parents place on the way there and the way back to drop off and pick up JP Stinkerbutt. We stayed at the Day’s Inn, about a mile from the new arena at the University of Va. (UVA) where we were going to see the Dave Matthews Band (DMB) perform Fri. and Sat. nights, the last two nights of the tour. We picked the hotel for location, not for amenities. Wasn’t bad, but wouldn’t have stayed there if not for its walking distance to the arena. We checked in and then walked about halfway and had dinner at the Ruby Tuesday’s in the Barracks Road Shopping Mall. That was our plan from the get go. We got there early and got a table. People who came in after us ...