Vegas Adventures in the Fall

The Joneses at Red Rock

Howdy folks!  Its been awhile, sorry 'bout that.  Lots has been happening and I just haven't had a whole lotta time to sit and write.  We had company through our house for the entire month of August and into November which kept us busy, and November is the annual NaNoWriMo month (that is, National Novel Writing Month), an online challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.  This is my third year doing the challenge, and my second failure!!  Dammit!  I got to 30,000 words and lost perspective and then got self conscious about not having found a job yet and all the other things I've been neglecting around the house, so that kind of knocked the air out of my writing balloon.

I really got into recording over October and November.  It started out as just a promised gift for some friends, but then the whole project turned into something bigger.  I ended up recording a collection of cover tunes for all the parentals and friends for christmas presents, plus I did another collection of all my own stuff that I just needed to get down and get off my plate.  I didn't think the covers and my tunes would work well together as an full album so I decided to do the two.  Its been a lot of work and a lot of fun.  And its made me want to learn more of those old country tunes that Frankie always wanted me to play for the Stokes' family parties, so I'm getting there folks.  I guess once you're over 40 your perspective changes a bit and you start looking back more and more.  I even pondered the idea of heading down to busk on the strip as the 'Naked Maritimer', a play on the 'Naked Cowboy' theme you might know from New York.  Only, the Naked Maritimer would be pronounced 'Nekkid', and have rubber boots, suspenders and rubber pants, a Sou'Wester hat, lots of scruff, a beer gut, and play country and maritime tunes!  Pretty much right up my alley!  Speakin' of beer guts, its finally pants season here in Vegas.  And wouldn't you know it, I came to find out that none of the pants I brought down here with me fit anymore!!  That friggin' sucks.  So I gotta go pants shoppin'... AND lose weight.  Tan's having a ball with that one.

Well, there have been many adventures with our guests over the past few months, so I'd like to give you a quick rundown of the Mountain Man's experiences.  Here we go!

First off, there's an Ice Bar here in Vegas.  If you're visiting and itching to go into a meat locker-turned-ice bar that is carved out to resemble an ice-cave, then you can go there.  And for a mere $18 you can get a 4oz special mixed drink served in a tiny ice-cup that you can't 'Cheers' with.  Never again.  That was only my first experience with the $18 dollar drink.  My second came at a bar downtown, after spending an excellent evening of drunken carousing with the Sackville girls, we made another liquor stop at the Walgreens drugstore to pick up some cheap sidewalk travellers.  We really had too much, I did anyway.  The 4 hard iced-teas I downed took a mean hold of me before I even got to the last bar, Diablos, and when the dude told me "$18" for two draft that was served up in plastic cups, I nearly shit myself.  I felt that icy cold surge of adrenaline pump into my veins that brings an absolute drunken clarity that always precedes something bad happening, which means its the end of my night and I have to go home or else.  One of the girls flipped me a 2for1 card and so it was only a $9 draft, but that was it for me.  Friggin' drugstore beers on the sidewalk are cheaper than drinking at the bars on the strip!  I abandoned the girls and cabbed it home for $30.

Nat and a random group of tourists!

One of the best adventures I've had on the strip so far was with my friends Nat and Dan, who were here on a hockey trip but also their honeymoon.  They had initially planned on getting married here but it didn't work out like that.  So Nat brought her dress to Vegas and got dressed up for a day of photoshooting around town with me as the photographer.  Now, this is something every lady should experience in their lifetime, totally wild and unexpected.  I could never have imagined that a bride would instill such a wild amount of attention from complete strangers!!  It was CRAZY!!!  As soon as we got out of the car at the 'Welcome to Vegas' sign (Elvis was there), groups of people started coming up to her to get their picture taken with her and the cars started honking.  Her dress was beautiful and Nat has such a vibrant personality that she just attracted it all.  She was in her glory!  Wherever she went, cars were honking, people were yelling and everyone was coming up to her and wishing her the best of luck and congratulations, whole tables at restaurants stopped eating and everyone clapped as she passed by, large families would gather around her to get their picture taken with her, and a man got his 18yr old son to pose for a prank photo.  All day long we walked and she beemed like she was queen for a day as people flocked to her like a magnet.  The bottom of her silk dress was blackened from sweeping the sidewalk all day but it didn't matter to her, she'd gotten her money's worth out of it.

The Hoover Dam

I also was out to the Hoover Dam for the first time.  What an incredible structure!  726 feet tall, 660 feet deep thick at its base.  There's 500 feet of water behind that wall.  We went on a tour right down into the belly of it.  Its amazing to think that a superstructure like this was built in 1935, to see all the wood grains in the walls from the framing of the concrete.  What an amazing piece of history and an engineering feat!

Wood-etched Concrete

On the way back we went on another photoshoot with our friends through the Valley of Fire and on the way our car passed over a Tarantula crossing the highway!  He was big, about the size of your hand.  I zipped the car around to go back and get a picture of him but I didn't get out in time.  Adam and I went to the side of the road to look for him but he was off into the scrub, no doubt watching US.  Apparently, we later found out, fall is the time of year when the great tarantula migration takes place across the desert, when the males set out in search of a mate.  We passed over another one shortly after that.  That's good to know, don't tent out in the desert in the fall.

Last thing I have to mention is my initiation into the sensual world of bellydancing.  We went out to eat at an authentic Moroccan restaurant called Marrakech (please check out this link).  Its a dimly lit place with low tables and your meal is served without utensils.  They wash your hands before you begin and bring you your meal in several courses, no menu, just a shared group meal.  The food was amazing.  The music, I don't remember where I picked up these tribal rhythms in my head, but it hit me when I was much younger and it engrained itself in my bones so it seemed somehow familiar.  So entrancing.  Every so often, the music would get louder and you knew the girl was coming out to do her show.  Then she'd appear, swirling out from behind a velvet curtain in a flash of glitz and long, flowing scarves, clicking her finger cymbals (zills) to the music and moving like a shimmering desert fantasy around the room.  She was all curves, a dark skinned beauty with a head full of black curly black hair, a fixed smile and dark, engaging eyes.  She worked the room and when she got to our table she keyed on me... she knew she had me.  I had slipped into a trance like state and was totally disarmed by her, then she swirled her way deep into my subconscious where she could toy with me however she pleased.  My gawd!!  She could see right through me, so erotic, like she and I were the only two people there.  She motioned for me to get up and dance with her and I could not resist.  I must have looked incredibly goofy with her because I don't really dance to begin with and when I do its ugly at best.  But here I am in the middle of a restaurant with people all around watching, doing whatever it is that I call dancing, and just aching to touch her and take her all in!  The girls at the table and all the other patrons got a good kick out of it and my ugly dance broke the ice in the room for others to get up to join the performers.  There were three performers on the night, and they were all incredible ladies, and they all keyed on me when they came around to our table.  They were all very talented dancers, very sexy, beautiful women.  Some of the older guys called the girls over to slip money in their waistbands, but I didn't.  I kinda thought that cheapened the experience.  They're not strippers.  And it interfered with the flow of their dance to have to stop and wait for some old guy to pay for a slight brush with her skin.  Maybe that's the thing to do though, I dunno.  There were other patrons, women who were obviously into bellydancing who got up with the performers to dance with them, and two girls dancing sexily with each other is always better than one!  The music, the moves, the body awareness, the subtle, sensual spinning of the fantasy, fantastic!  Boys, I tell ya, you should encourage your ladies to take up this art!  You will not be disappointed.

Vegas Snowball out at Red Rock!

That's all for now.  Thanks for reading.

TRJ

Battle of the Bugs...

More ant bites today.  Somethings up.  The ants might have caught wind of my plans and devised their own devious little plans to bite back.  They know 'the Big Guy' is onto them, and maybe they wanna get onto the big guy.  Curiously, I think I've been bitten in my house, either in my bed or watching TV.  I did find a dead spider that could have been the couch culprit.  Or maybe the ants are finding another way in.  I've watched the dogs around the yard, brushing up against the trees and bushes, maybe the ants are hopping on the big Trojan Dog to sneak in past the poison.  Whatever it is, I seem to be the only one around here getting bitten and I'm getting annoyed. 

I have identified some of my attackers as Fire Ants, and they are the tiniest little ants ever.  Tiny angry ants that pack a really wicked venomous punch.  I've never seen them on me, I just know after the fact that I've been bitten.  I don't think I'll be wearing sandals to do my yardwork anymore.

I never did mention the bugs here in Vegas.  In particular, the cockroaches.  We laughed when we left Canada and the mosquito-land behind.  There are no mosquitos, blackflies, or any of those flying-biting insects here.  What we have are the creepy crawlies.  Cockroaches, scorpions, and the deadly Black Widow.  Haven't seen any snakes yet, but there are signs out in the hills to beware of rattlesnakes.  In our apartment complex out in Henderson, it was the cockroaches that gave us the creeps the most.  They were in abundance from May til August.  At dark you'd walk down the walkway and see their shadows scurrying to get out of your way.  Look in the grass and they're there by the hundreds.  Most were about the size of your thumb-knuckle, but they were pretty much harmless.  Our neighbor used to spray the poison around the perimeter of our ground floor apartments so anything that found its way inside was either dead or dying.  Still, there'd usually be one waiting at our front door and we'd have to shoo it away and get in quickly.  I don't think we'll have them here at the new place because we don't have grass.  Roaches like wet conditions.

These days it is the houseflies that I'm doing battle with, along with the ants.  A couple of weeks ago their population exploded and we have been inundated with the buggers ever since.  The neighbors next door have two large dogs and don't really clean up the dogshit in the backyard, so I think that's helping their population, AND making it a little disgusting when the wind drifts our way.  The dogshit is baked rock hard pretty quickly here, so its pretty easy to clean up.  I don't know why anyone would rather live with it there than pick it up but some people just live dirty.  Back at the apartment I got really fed up with people not picking up their dogpoo and one day I stuck a sign in the ground beside a large pile of it that said "Filthy Humans!  Pick up your shit!"  The sign, and the poo, were gone not long after.  These houseflies though, they just keep coming and coming.  I'm killing them by the hundreds with my trusty ol' weapon of mass destruction, the 'M-D'OR Super-Swatter', Made in Quebec.  It wasn't always a super-swatter, its been modified to become the killing machine it has.

Which brings to mind a battle I had back in Riverview at the old house with the bees.  I don't like killing bees.  They are an essential part of our ecosystem and they are an at risk species.  If we lose the bees, then our food chain will collapse.  There is nothing in nature that can do the job that the bees do for us.  But on this occasion, I was forced into making a stand.  It was an excellent spot for a nest, somewhere under the house beneath the mud room where there was no foundation.  But the bees became really pesky and took over.  We would be sitting out front on our patio and all these bees kept coming in at us.  We'd get agitated, then they'd get agitated and put the run to us.  For a while we stopped using the patio, but that wasn't right.  Something had to be done.

I sat out one day and let the bees come in to me.  They won't hurt you if you don't try to kill them, but if you try and miss then they'll attack.  I watched, and each one buzzed around a bit then made their lumbering way down to the floorboards, landed and crawled under.  I thought that was kinda strange, that the bees were going under there, so I ripped up a few boards and watched to see where they were going.  With the gap opened, the bees just hovered down into the hole, and onto a spot in the insulation where a hole was burrowed and then crawled in through the hole.

"Holy Fuck!", I thought, "there's a bees nest under my mud room!"

All sorts of things went through my head as to how to go about this.  There was probably about two and a half feet clearance under that section of the house, so not much wrigglin' space for me especially if I was trying to take out a bees nest.  I tried to convince my 12 year old Little Brother (BBBS Canada) to go under and get it, I even had my old Ghostbusters trench suit from Halloween 1998 for him to wear but he wouldn't do it.  And so I was left with a dilemna.  Rip up the floor of the mudroom?  Get the Exterminators?

What I decided upon doing was to convince the bees that this was a bad place for them to live.  I set up on the front patio with my guitar, my new swatter, and a few Pumphouse Scotch Ales and set about the killing.  After a few swats and misses and scrambles, I realized my weapon was just not up to par for the task of killing bees.  It was too whippy and I was missing the mark and making the bees angry at me.  So I went into the workshop and reinforced the swatter down the sides with the steel of two cut up coat hangers in order to make it super-stiff, all wrapped up in duct tape.  Now, my precision M-D'OR Super-Swatter was ready for killin'.  A whole new ballgame.  That day I killed a few, but not nearly enough to convince the hive to leave.  But the weapon was a deadly killin' machine now.  I was ready for battle.

Days passed and one day I noticed that just before the rain, all the bees came home.  One by one they all came in from the rain to take cover.  I wasn't killin' that day, just observing their behaviour.  I took note and watched the forecast for the next rainy day, and then I set up my ambush.

The sky grew dull and rain was neigh.  I was a little giddy even, knowing what was to come.  I took a swig from my warm Scotch Ale and waited, with my guitar over my lap and the super-swatter leaned against my thigh.  The sky started dropping and then they came, one by one, burdened by their heavy load and trying to avoid the raindrops.  The funny thing I figured out about a bee is, that if you swing and miss it the first time, the bee will veer away about 10feet as if to say "What the F...???", get its bearings and its hairy eyes fixed on its attacker, and then strike angrily back in a beeline towards its target.  This, is the folly of their nature.  I didn't always get them on the first strike, but I never missed that beeline target coming straight at me for the second swing.  I must have killed 50 bees that day, 60% of those kills were in this hostile angry beeline fashion.

My plan worked, as far as I know.  I killed whatever remained of them all summer, and their numbers were so dwindled that they did not return.

Truthfully, I do feel bad about that.  I don't like killing nature.  Especially bees.  They're a small but important part of our ecosystem that we cannot do without, and we are killing them off.  Like many other parts of our food chain, our species is destroying the fine balance of our ecosystem by sheer ambivalence and ignorance to what is happening on our planet.  A slow, collective, profitable suicide.  We tend to see ourselves as somehow on the outside of this ecological equation, that our planet is and always will be there to serve our needs.  That we are somehow exempt from being just another organism at risk because we are human.  What a dangerous idea.  Time is going to play out awfully for humanity if we don't start paying attention to what we are doing and who we elect to run our governments. 

WE are the invasive species here, not the bugs.  And if we choose not to be part of the ecological equation and continue to destroy the fine balance of our planet, then Mother Nature will most assuredly take its course to get rid of the problem.  We will lose everything, and the bugs will win.

Thanks for reading.

TRJ

•••


Plea for the Sacred Headwaters, British Columbia.

Please take a moment to read this and sign this petition.  Every name helps.

Shell Oil has a big plan, backed by the Harper government to enter the Sacred Headwaters in Northwestern British Columbia and begin drilling for oil using hydro-fracking, a destructive process that involves pumping chemicals into the ground in order to bring oil to the surface.  In a sensitive environment such as the headwaters of three major river systems, doesn't this seem a bit insane???  Doesn't the name SACRED mean anything?  That's where they will begin fracking if the Harper government is not stopped.  WE are the only thing standing in the way of this happening, so please lend your voice to this cause and let Harper know that we will not be passive bystanders to the destruction of Canada's wilderness. 

Thank you.

We have landed...

We have finally landed!  Up until now we have been living in an apartment complex in Henderson but we knew it was only a temporary situation, Tanya was on the hunt for a house before we were even unpacked.  The search took 2 months, and then the business end took 2 months to complete.  But finally, we are now officially living in Las Vegas!

It feels like I've been in a constant state of moving since February of last year.  Getting the house in Riverview fixed up for sale and that whole process, then packing, then picking up and moving into a temporary place for a while, and then moving again into here.  What a long, drawn out process.  Hopefully this stopover will be for a while.  Now its back to fixing things up, buying new stuff, unpacking and getting settled.  Its so nice to have my own space again, I can breathe easy and sing out loud... AND play electric guitar out loud too!  One thing is for sure, the neighbors know I have arrived :) 

The house is great.  Its old, 1989, which is old for Vegas.  It felt good the first time we walked in, like this was our place.  Its not a huge house but its cozy and laid out nicely with lots of open space.  There are tiled floors throughout the main floor, a big vaulted ceiling in the living room for entertaining (with a fully mirrored wall), lots of light can come in through interior-shuttered windows, a sitting/TV room which is open to the kitchen, marble countertops, 3 bedrooms on the second floor, 2.5 bathrooms, a big garage and a backyard with a pool and a hottub.  Enough rooms for me to have my 'office/music/chaos room' and Tanya, who is better at keeping her project rooms tidier, will get the guest bedroom for all her knitting and spinning stuff.  We are about an 8 minute drive to the Strip and not far from all our needs.  Not far, still meaning we have to drive to get there.  Nothing is close in Las Vegas.  But we are close enough to the action so that it will be a much cheaper cab ride to get home when we end up down on the Strip with visitors.  We already know there will be lots of people coming into town and stopping over with us so being able to get back from the Strip was important for us.  We want our place to be a good hosting spot too, nice enough just to hang out at the pool if we don't feel like going anywhere.  We can see the lights of the Strip from our bedroom window, so that's kinda cool.  Its going to be great!  

The pool was the one thing we really wanted to have here.  We're still consistently hitting the 100F (38C) every day so its still really hot here.  Neither of us have ever had a pool before so its pretty cool.  Our pool guy tells us that our pool is quite unique, a glass-tiled mosaic pool with custom tile work on the bottom, maybe one in a thousand pools are like this.  Somebody spent a lot of money to have it installed and it is a gorgeous piece of work, with an in-floor cleaning system.  Mind you, its showing its age.  In the fall I am going to learn how to replace missing tiles and do some maintenance.  Its not a huge pool either, just big enough for Tanya and I to get in and frolick around a bit to get cooled off, and we've been enjoying it pretty much every day since we moved in.  At night the lighted pool and the hot tub are awesome.  Sitting in our backyard with the warm Vegas night air all around us, watching the planes lit up like stars circling to land at the McCarren Airport, the golden hue of the city lighting the sky and the big, spotlit sky-beam of the Luxor shining its beacon straight up into the heavens.  It didn't feel like Vegas where we were living in Henderson.  It felt desert'y, but it was like living in a park, outside of the vibration of the city.  Here, in our backyard at night, you can see it and you can feel the energy.  Its close. 

The backyard is big enough for the dogs to roam but there is no grass, only crushed rock.  We have a small stone patio but its not nearly big enough for our needs.  I've got big plans for our backyard but first we have to see what the water situation will be like back there.  We also have a lot of plants and trees on the property which makes the backyard semi-private.  We have neighbors to the sides of us but none in back.  There is a city drainage-wash in back of us so its open to see across the city's rooftops right over to the mountains on the far edge of town.  All of the plants have been terribly neglected for over a year so there's lots of trimming and cleaning up to do.  I like that kinda stuff so I'm game for it, although I'll add that I'm currently suffering from being stupid and not protecting myself better from the nature of the desert. 

My favorite tree is our pine tree.  It was terribly bushy and rusty looking from all the dead needles and branches that had gotten caught up in itself.  So I mounted it and gave it her a little TBone Special TLC, trimming her back and shaking the hell out of it to get rid of all the dead needles.  It looked great when it was all cleaned up.  Then I got cocky and decided to trim up the palm tree with the saw on my Swiss army knife.  You'd think palm trees were friendly, given how they just sit there looking pretty with those big sweeping, green leaves, swaying in the breeze.  But to my astonishment, this tree's long limbs were lined with sharp, jagged teeth not unlike those of a shark.  Deadly.  I can't find the actual name of the tree, but some have called it a Sharktooth Palm.  Yep.  I got a few good chomps on my hands and head but stubbornly kept going til the job was finished.  Beer does that to ya.  Lesson learned... kinda.  I was also warned, after the fact, that scorpions like to hide out in palm trees.  Good to know.

A few days ago I tackled the Pineapple Palm in front of our house.  Again, with such an elegant name you'd think 'Friendly Tree' right?  Oh that Pineapple Palm.  What a mean bitch!  I know now why people pay people to come and do these things.  At least for this session I had purchased some hardy leather gloves and a professional pruning saw.  But I should have worn headgear and a body suit, and I especially should have worn goggles for the task.  The Pineapple Palm has deadly wooden spikes, 6" to 24" in length.  Palms are super efficient trees, and as new leaves grow on top, the limbs on the bottom die off and become the hardened bark of the tree.  And in this tree's case, the slender interior leaves turn to wood as well and become menacing wooden spikes.  This tree hadn't been groomed in a long while, I faced the dangerous task of crawling under it to trim it up.  I'm sure the experts use mechanical tools for this and don't crawl under it.  I got poked everywhere!  Bloodied again, right through the leather into my hands, into the top of my head, my ear, legs and ass!

But I'll tell ya, my worst experience so far has been with my good ol' friends the ants.  They are the tiniest little ants I've ever seen, so I never paid them much attention rather than to say, 'Holy, look at all the ants!'  We knew there were ants around, even when we looked at buying the house there were ant traps everywhere.  I knew I'd be battling them, so it was no great surprise when we found the little suckers searching our cupboard for food.  I laid out some poison that fried their raiding parties, sprayed the perimeter of the house with more poison, and set about destroying their habitats wherever I can.  The battle is on!  I've fought ants before, you never win.  But I have to at least try to keep them on the outside of the house.

I just wasn't dressed for it, shorts, sandals, shortsleeve t-shirt.  I was dressed for the weather not the task at hand when I decided to trim back some of the flowers and tackle the bushes.  There was a foot of debris, dead leaves and such built up within the bushes which was impossible to get to with a rake, and so I went in, all Rambo-ish with my gloved hands and bare arms to accomplish the task of sweeping out all the dead stuff and cutting out the dead branches.  When it was done my arms were all scraped to hell.  I didn't consider the scrapes to be much and it never occured to me that there were bites mixed in with those scratches.  I later realized a couple of my scratches were not scratches, but rashes.  Like a poison ivy rash, but not that bad as it was gone in a day.  But then the itching kept getting worse and I realized I was covered in bites.  I didn't know what had bitten me because I hadn't seen any of them.  But after two restless nights of increasing itchiness the bites became red welts, I did some research and found out I had been stung by ants.  I got some baking soda (the best thing you can do for a sting) and spent an hour neutralizing the poison from all my stings.  I counted 23 bites from my feet and up the back of my legs, a couple on my arms, and Tanya says there's 4 or 5 on my back.  I tell ya, I don't know ANYONE who has been bitten by ants as many times as I have!  I have so many ant bite stories, and usually, to tell the comedic truth, they were bites from ants who were trying to get out of my pants!!  Seriously, on three separate occasions I have had an ant, or ants, trapped in my pants and have tried to bite their way out.  Such is my life.  The Mountain Man likes to get into the wilderness and be one with nature, and sometimes I suffer for it.  Its all part of the adventure.


Cheers all, thanks for reading.

TRJ

Updates from the Office of the Mountain Man

Well, just a slathering of little updates for y'all today. 

I got my motorcycle license two weeks ago.  What a blast!  No cycle yet, I just have to make it official and go write the drivers test to get my license changed to Nevada, then start shopping.  Our two final days on course were very hot on small 250cc machines.  The afternoon we did our testing the temperature hit 118F (48C), while sitting atop of a motorcycle pumping out its own heat, in jeans and winter boots and a longsleeve shirt.  Wow.  That's a record heat for me so far.  That takes a lot out of ya.

I was up to my biking playground in MacDonald Ranch this morning.  The temperature was at 91F (33C) by 10am but the big difference is the humidity at 25%.  That's alot for here, and the air is like molasses, HOT molasses that you have to chew first.  It was probably too warm for me to be out biking in the desert, but I had a trail I wanted to try and... well, on a side note, I noticed my weight has been increasing slightly since I got here.  My body has pretty much stayed in the 152-158 zone my whole life, but I think all those cheep beers are beginning to tip the balance because now I've jumped to 169.  I see it, and I feel it, and I dont' like it.  So I'm in training as of now.

I played 2 games of ultimate frisbee last night which is another story I'll get into when the season is over.  So today, my legs were a little rubbery but I went on my biking adventure anyway.  5mins from home I was climbing the mountain into MacDonald Ranch, and 15mins in I was absolutely done.  But I never turned back, I never do.  Somewhere early in those hills my body just completely ran out of fuel and it became a very exhausting, long trek back home.  I had to walk my bike out of the valley, up a craggy knoll to get up on top of another hill.  It took me another 45minutes work to get home.  So I'll have to give the mountain this one:  Jones-3, MacDonald Ranch-1.

An old haunt revisited me last friday as I was trying to back up all our photos onto DVDs.  My machine has been getting a little twitchy so I decided to clean up some space.  I once had this nasty little habit my buddy Boris used to call 'The Delete Monkey'.  Y'see, computers have never been my strong suit, and sometimes bad things happen because I'm a little trigger happy.  And the Delete Monkey reared its ugly head once again.  I backed up all my photos up to 2012, but was going to wait til the 2012 folder was a little fatter before backing those ones up.  But then, in trying to remove all the backed up photos from the Mac, I deleted EVERYTHING!!  All our christmas pics from last year, the move, and all our Vegas pics to date, maybe 2000 photos in all, gone.  Tanya was supremely not impressed, and I was pretty hard on myself for being so stupid.

However, I found a program online, the 'Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery' program, and launched the scan of my hard drive.  It scanned for 32hrs and retrieved 195,000 jpgs and video!!!  So my weekend and monday were spent sifting through a ton of crap to recover those missing photos.  All of the video files were wrecked.  I had no idea that my computer got imprinted with all those little internet jpgs, facebook photos, internet sites, kijiji and craigslist pics, and every freakin' googlemap search we've done... it was all there.  And in an almost random, sectional order, not linear at all.  It took a really long time to sift through all that mess, at least 10hrs of work, but I got all of my missing photos back.

It was quite a trip back through all those pics, it made me a little homesick.  Our little green house in Riverview and its lush green backyard, our since-passed dog Cozmo, our families, the music guys and the times we had, the Mannstock parties on the Restigouche and all that beautiful water, all our vacation trips.  We had a great life back there in NB, and I wish it could have worked out a little differently to allow us the opportunity to stay and grow as individuals, but it wasn't in the cards.  We hit the end of the road and it was time to go.  We are looking forward to getting home for 2weeks in august and seeing everyone again. 

Thanks for reading.

TRJ

Celine Dion @ Caesar's Palace

Celine Dion will be finishing up an 8yr run at the Colosseum at Caesar's Palace in august to spend more time with her family to raise her 3 young boys.  She has her hands full, so it was now or never for us to go see her live in the theatre they renovated especially for her show.  It was a grande evening.

What can I say about this...  I'm not a huge Celine fan or anything, but we just couldn't pass up an opportunity to go and see her live before she is gone from Vegas.  She is a big ticket item and it was expensive, but it was well worth it.  I've learned through many regretful experiences that you have to catch these acts when they happen or else you miss out on the magic.  As a musician I've learned this lesson too many times, for hardly as much money.


I knew she was great, but I wasn't expecting to be struck so deeply by her performance.  All I can say is WOW!  It still chills me to think of it now, that voice... it echoes in my inner ear in such a sweet memory that fills my soul.  A thought passed through my mind as Celine gripped the audience and ripped the heart out of me, that every human being should get the opportunity to experience her talent live.  What a powerhouse!  Not just power, but such incredible control and such a wide range of vocal qualities that she was just an absolute pleasure to listen to.  The band was spot-on, and she soared, from her big theatrical numbers to jazz and rock, there isn't anything she can't sing.  And those numbers that we knew so well from so many of her hits and movies struck sooo much deeper in the live performance.  It was unreal!  Celine's ability is beyond human, and at 44yrs old she can still deliver a soul shaking performance that puts a lump in your throat and makes tears well up in your eyes.  And then she speaks...

Ohhh Celine.  That awkward, good natured, french-canadian accent with facial expressions that make her seem so very odd... quirky, and not very funny at all – but she tries, and in doing so reveals her very endearing human characteristics that you can't help but love.  Everything else is so professional and calculated, but when she speaks its as though you were sitting in her living room for tea.  You feel that you know her a bit because she gives you that and leaves it all out there on stage.  So on one hand you have the mega-talent which can just floor you, and then on the other, you have this ugly little smalltown girl from Quebec, who never ever forgot where she came from, and who is very humbled and is so appreciative that you would come to see her sing.  Such a potent combination of sweet and profound pummeling. Wow!


The Colosseum theatre was incredible.  Caesar's Palace renovated their Circus Maximus Showroom to host their new venture with Celine Dion at a cost of about 90 million dollars, a state of the art facility.  The theatre was designed to be an intimate setting, accommodating 4100 people with the furthest seat being only 120feet from the stage.  Every aspect of the show was extremely well done and Celine was the larger than life centerpiece, backed by a 32 piece orchestra and 180,000 watts of amplification.  She doesn't need it, but the venue was designed to douse and control the amplification of the sound of the theatre, and the sound was pristine.  Onstage, the orchestra sat upon risers which were sectional and could move completely off onto the wings of the stage and out of sight.  There were also stage-lifts and all kinds of movable sections to the stage itself, above and below.  The backdrop of the show was a $10million, 40x120foot LED screen, one of the largest in North America.  The show was incredibly visually stunning, and there were lots of things happening to draw your attention across the whole spectrum of the stage the entire night.  Her final number was especially tricky, the Titanic theme song in which Celine was raised on a column above the stage and a veil of water cascading from above... 2 veils of water actually, encircling her and rotating in opposite directions to form some really weird effects with the lighting...  I never figured that one out completely.


Celine also did a duet with a projected illusion Stevie Wonder which was filmed to be in perfect perspective from the crowd's angle so that it appeared as though he was sitting right there at the piano beside her onstage.  He wasn't there of course, but a less critical eye would never have known the difference.  It looked just ever-so-slightly skewed from our angle, but it was extremely well done.  Stevie's face appeared on the big screen beside the stage as though he were right there, sweating and playing live at the piano, singing with Celine to drive home the effect.  It was an all around flawless performance for the band, and Celine, and the whole show was quite spectacular.


I'm very happy to have gotten the opportunity to see one of Canada's most treasured artists live.  She is a truly amazing, beautiful woman and we are so much richer for having been there in her presence for an evening.


Thank you Celine, you were wonderful.


Thanks for reading.


TRJ

BurlesqueX... Carlos'n Charlies...

We bought some discounted tickets from TicketXpress for the BurlesqueX show at the Flamingo and set out to kickstart Tanya's extended long weekend.  There was a bit of a parking snafu when we tried to find parking at the packed lots of the Flamingo, but ended up finding a pretty damn'd good spot at Bills' Gamblin' Saloon.  Apparently, Bill's parking lot is a bit of a town secret, so lesson learned.  It takes us 20mins or so to get to the Strip, then about 35 minutes to find our way around to park. 

We had a lot of time to kill before the show so we decided to get some beers at the corner store and wander the strip til we found a place to eat.  I LOVE the fact that you can just buy a cornerstore beer and wander down the street with it.  Such freedom!  It brings out the maritimer in me.  The most notable street-freak of the night was a character dressed as Homer Simpson in his underwear... a very drunk looking Homer, with a satchel over his shoulder, a bottle in his hand and his other arm slung over the fence to hold himself up.  They'll do anything for money. 

After wandering a bit we decided to eat at 'Carlos'n Charlies', a pretty wild ride at this place.  The energy of the bar hit us in the face immediately so we decided to stay, the DJ was kickin' out the tunes and the staff were given to spontaneous outbursts of dancing, getting the patrons up out of their seats to join them.  Everyone was pretty happy to be there, and a couple long tables of parties kept the babble at a constant level above the music.  It was a great party atmosphere and great service.  The meal was moderately priced and quite good, but the liquor was expensive.  The food on the bill cost us $26, and the liquor on the tab for 2 drinks was $42!  I ordered a Dos Equis Amber, large of course, and Tanya ordered a Long Island Iced Tea, large, and they came out in these huge freakin' bowls of booze!!  It was more than we expected, especially at $15 and $26 respectively, but not unwelcomed by any means.  We were OK with having a good primer to see the hot dancin' girls of BurlesqueX.  Happy Friday to us!

We made it to the show just in time to get seated before the lights went down.  BurlesqueX is one of the shows I have wanted to see, and one of the cheaper shows you can see in Vegas.  This was Tanya's first experience at a 'strip' show, and I'll add the disclaimer for her benefit that we don't really do the stripclub scene, nor was this a strip show as the name burlesque implies.  This was a dance show with nearly naked women, set to kickass contemporary tunes that rocked the small theatre.  The hard edged music selection and the incredible sound in the room really drove home the show for me.  But I never really got the sense of 'the tease' like you would in a regular strip show.  They didn't strip, or tease, really.  They were pretty much nearly naked the entire time, and the girls danced choreographed numbers set to the tunes.  So the burlesqueness of the show was lost in this Vegassed-up rendition of burlesque and their time-honed recipe for success – dancing hotties to great music for mass-appeal.  It works every time.

There were only 6 performers and they were AMAZING women!  I think everyone can appreciate the pleasing nature of the finer creatures of this world, and you couldn't help but be moved by these fine ladies.  The theatre was small and intimate, maybe 200 people in attendance and a mixed crowd of young and old, male and female, which added up to be an absolutely toothless crowd!  I rocked in my seat to the music, I wanted to scream out to the dancers to let them know how amazing they were, but that would have been way out of line for this audience.  Nobody said much beyond polite clapping at the end of each number.  Most sat stone-faced on their hands or with their arms crossed, looking like they had gone to the wrong show, or uncomfortably not knowing what to do with themselves having nearly-naked women performing so close.  There was even a bachelor party there that sat still and quiet the whole time.  What the...!?  So it was a good, wholesome, nearly-naked dance show with a very respectable crowd.  For $30, it was a good night out with Tan to see some of Vegas' finest, and we both got a great charge out of it.

After the show we decided to spend some money on the machines.  'Research', as Tanya calls it.  She builds and designs the games for the video lottery machines and it is part of her job to know what is out there so she has to play and experience them.  I have gained a better appreciation for what Tanya does in doing her game research with her.  Its a game all on its own to design something appealing to the masses on a casino floor of hundreds of other options for a gambler to spend their money on.  Why would they choose YOUR game?  Its a combo of all things, the artwork and presentation, the math and physics of the game, the sounds and lights, and the slight trickery that makes the player 'think' they have a leg up on the game that make it appealing.  It also helps to have a recognized brand such as Spielo's 'Deal-or-No Deal' game with Howie Mandel as your spokesman.  The games are getting better and I can appreciate that much more now that I've spent some quality 'research' time with Tanya.  We lost some and won some and came out pretty much even on the evening.  And in the case of these VLT machines, if you come out even, then you've won.

We wandered the strip some more and ended up just sitting and watching the people.  Its still surreal for us to be here, to look down Las Vegas Blvd at all those lights, and the thousands of people still walking around after midnight.  Its a beautiful city at night, and it never sleeps.  The party continues 24-7 in every casino around the city.  Time does not exist in the casinos.  Its incredible to be here and have the time to sit and enjoy this time in our lives, with Tanya leaned in against my shoulder and the warm desert night all around us.  Its pretty cool that this is our new reality.

Thanks for reading.

TRJ

Lita Ford... Poison... Def Leppard

Our first trip to the outdoor ampitheatre at Red Rock Casino was a trip back in time, Def Leppard's 'Rock of Ages' tour featuring the openers Poison and Lita Ford.  We (I) shoulda listened to Tanya and left earlier to have supper out there but in my mind, I knew we had lots of time to get there.  We did, of course, but we (I) didn't calculate for the traffic snarl at the off-ramp to the casino.  The traffic was backed up for a mile and we completely missed joining the queu in the lineup to get off the highway.  So we drove for a bit, hit the next turnoff to turn around and come back, which was actually quite a bit quicker.

We wound our way through the casino and into the stadium grounds, entered under the bleachers and into the venue.  Its a really nice little 10,000 seat ampitheatre, with high aluminum bleachers on 3 sides, the stage on the end and chairs packed into the green carpeted floor area.  The stadium reminded me of a pro tennis venue, or somewhere they might hold a national dog show or professional dodgeball competition.  But we were in for a rock show.  Lita had already started up the evening and was laying it on heavy.  I didn't know she was the lead guitar player of her band, and had her Warlock guitar fired up full blast!  The sound was loud, with ear splitting squealing of the high gain guitars.  There was no doubt this would be an intense night of music.  Lita lit the fuse and left no prisoners, the crowd was primed.  As the sun set to the right of the stage and dusk filled the air, anticipation for Poison vibrated through the crowd.

Seats on the floor were $100 or more but we opted for the $50 seats up in the stands.  Waaay up in the stands.  It was steep, row U!  But there isn't a bad seat in the house.  Well, except for having to sit on aluminum for 4hrs, crammed in like sardines.  I don't know what the deal is with people claiming other people's seats.  You have your ticket, sit there.  Don't fuckin' wander and look for something better, especially if the place is sold out.  Some squatters claimed the whole row of seats beside us and a mexican jackass elbowed in beside me.  I never questioned whether it was their seats or not, but I might have shot a look for jostling into me like that... I never did figure out if it was a boy or a girl.  It was just a very hard and worn person who looked maybe 30, spoke like a woman but looked somewhere in between and acted like a cocky 18yr old jackass.  I looked at him/her, and he/she looked back, as if daring me to say something.  They didn't stay, the ticket holders came and claimed the seats at the end of the row and they moved on.

These concerts make me feel old.  I'm feeling less tolerant of people as I go, it might be the crankiness of not being able to let 'er rip like back in the good ol' days, which is also a blessing because I can remember the shows better by not indulging.  And I've missed some great shows due to my own stupid misbehaviours.  But I'm edgier with people and that's not good.  I must appear to be one of those clean-cut, uptight, well dressed and respectable middle age gentlemen sitting there without a drink, with his pretty little wife beside him with her head glued to her cellphone.  That makes me feel old, sitting there, sober, confined and controlled and unable to groove to the music like I would like to.  Its a different experience, the music isn't nearly as good as when the senses aren't skewed a bit, at least not a show like this from our bird's eye point of view.  However, it was a good perspective to watch the crowd, and it was a pretty good crowd-show.

Sooo many hot women here!  All the 80's kids came out to see the bands that made being bad sooo good.  Tight shirts, short skirts, big tits, wild hair, tatooes and denim and loose women... y'know, that pretty much describes the Vegas locals.  The locals really like to have fun, but so do the visitors to Vegas.  I'm honing in on the scent of who and what the locals are now, although sometimes its tough to tell who's local and who is not.  I'm guessing the older couple beside us who never looked up from their cellphones the entire night except to get that token picture to say, "I was there", they weren't locals.  The sour fat kid wedged in front of us with his mom, they weren't locals.  The boy/girl mexican fuck with the attitude and that crew, they were locals.  It was a pretty rowdy crowd all around with a lot of drunks and a lot of cheering.  Beer was spilt and flung on me on two different occasions.  I hate drunks when I'm not drinking, listening to that drawling babble all around.  Idiots.  Old Man Jones just wipes the beer away and sighs back to the memories of the good ol' days.

Tanya, and I think a lot of the crowd there, were there to see Brett Michaels and Poison.  I mocked her a bit, because what I knew of Poison... the hair band, the bad boy attitude in makeup and girls clothes and hairspray, the show... I just never respected that image or their cock-rock style of music.  But I'll say this now, that that was a great fuckin' show!  I've also gained some respect over the years for the bands that went that way, who put out this image that grabbed your attention whether you liked it or not, and let the world know they didn't really give a shit about what you think.  They wanted to party and they wanted you to join them, so if you didn't like it, you could fuck off.  It was your women they were after anyway, so you either accepted it or you let your women go it alone with those greasy bastards.  That attitude and their cock-rock anthems gets in your bones, and I guess that's why the girls get so horny over it all.  I never realized this either, that Poison is mostly a 3-piece band, with a keyboard player in a supporting role off to the side of the stage.  The sound was huge but  murky at times which could be attributed to the slight desert wind coming through the stadium or our alignment with the speaker system to our seats.  The bass was super heavy.  The boys worked the crowd pretty good and got everyone in a frenzy.  C.C. DeVille whipped the crowd relentlessly with his intense guitar virtuousity while Bobby Dall (!!) pounded us in the balls all night with his big bass!  There's no denying it, theirs is a straight up, no frills or gimmicks hard rock show.  Poison can still deliver the stuff that made them famous, and Vegas loves Poison!

Their final number of the night was one of their biggest hits and a song I've been covering for years and had relegated to my 'cheeze' list... 'Every Rose has its Thorn'.  What a joy to stand up there and sing along with the band and 10,000 other adoring fans who knew all the words.  A classic moment that somehow felt I'd finally come full circle after all this time!

I was anxious to see Def Leppard.  Something about their music is in my blood, maybe its because its been a soundtrack of my life for the last 25yrs... twenty five years!!!  We got up to stretch our legs and go for a walk around the top of the stands, and when we came back after a few minutes, a whole new crew of people had claimed our seats.  Jeezus!  We managed to get the reluctant cows moved down a few spaces so we could squeeze back into our designated spaces and soon the crowd came back and crammed in all around us again.  Why that lady brought that sour fat kid back up there I don't know.  He wasn't enjoying it, and was quite disgusted at my bare feet on the seat beside him during the Poison show, which I thoroughly enjoyed.  They switched places for the Def Leppard show and took up valuable knee space.  The girl beside me seemed quite unimpressed with the tactics I had used to move them over, but whatever.  She was a dancer-girl, so she was up for most of the show which gave me some room.  We were elbow to elbow, knees-to-back to knees-to-back, everyone sitting angled, way too confined for my liking.

Joe Elliot came out and told us that Def Leppard had been coming to play Vegas for 30 years, since the very beginning, and that it was the 25th anniversary of their breakout album 'Adrenalize'.  Now I know for sure, I'm getting old!

Def Leppard is renowned for their light show, and that was really cool to see.  But its not your stand up and groove type music, and was a bit of a letdown after the energy and the grit of the Poison set.  Their guitar player, Phil Collen, comes out shirtless and, well, I don't mind saying that this guy has a freakin' amazing body!  He's 55yrs old and cut like a 25yr old.  I aspire to look like this when I'm 55.  Tanya was thrilled over him.  He is a great guitar player and a master at using his effects to create artful, screeching solos, making his guitars wail over the music even more so than what we've come to know on the recorded versions on their albums.  It was really interesting to hear a master like that in action and hear those chilling Def Leppard riffs send electricity through the night.

Noticably missing from the Def Leppard's sound was the sailing vocal range of Joe Elliot.  Maybe he can't hit those high notes anymore, or it was all studio trickery on the albums, I don't know.  He's 53yrs old so maybe my expectations were too high.  But that was a huge missing piece of the Def Leppard sound and Elliot more often than not elected a lower octave for vocal leads and choruses that used to define those songs and set him apart as a lead singer.  He was still amazing and performed excellently, but unfortunately those missing pieces were the parts I had come to hear him sing.

Their drummer, Rick Allen, is a one-armed tour-de-force.  If you don't know the story, he lost an arm in a car accident in 1984.  That should have been the end of it, right?  No, he came back and became an even better drummer than he was before, or so claims Joe.  His is an amazing tale of perseverance over the odds, and it was amazing to see him in action.  Especially his drum solo, his feet worked the double bass pedal so fast the beats melded into one another.  His drums too, were heavily effected with reverb.  One pound on the eighth count was a super-beat, so freakin' heavy and oppressive it threatened to cave in the eardrums.  It must have been overwhelming on the floor cause it shook the stadium from where we were.  There again, a little slurring of the mind might not have noticed that or thought that it was really cool.  I've never been a real big fan of heavily effected guitars or overly produced sounds, I like my rock gritty and honest.  That's not Def Leppard.  They are in a league of their own in the music they create and that's what makes them special.

Halfway through their set, all five members came out to the middle of the crowd on the extended stage and sat together with Joe on a flight case for an acoustic singalong session.  The wind whispered over the crowd as the boys played a four-guitar acoustic medly of songs for ten minutes.  Rick was on the shaker.  Then it was back to the audial assault of the hits, and they played them all.  They had a great light show and stage setting with a full LED backdrop behind them so the visuals were great, but on the whole it was missing a certain something.  Maybe the excitement of being on the floor watching the show up close?  Maybe a good, skewed mental state for full effect?  Or maybe Def Leppard is just not your get-up-and-groove type music, just really good listening.  I really enjoyed the show, it was very fulfilling to see the boys live and experience the music that has been with me for so long. 

Thanks for reading.

TRJ

I Love Suishi... Battista's... Lindo Michoacan

One of the things I like to do when we travel to new places is to visit the restaurants that reflect the local flair and try the wines and micro-brewed beers of the area.  Well, since the world exists in Vegas in every sense of food, it is nothing short of spectacular the choices we have to choose from.  Tanya suggested I could even dedicate an entire blog itself on critiquing the restaurants here.  Perhaps.  But who am I really?  The Mountain Man, uncultured and uncouth.  Who am I to lay it down on those establishments and rate them?  I know what I like, and I know when a restaurant sells high and falls short.  With so many to choose from, we will never have to eat at the same place more than a couple times, but we do have some favorites.  Here are 3 of our favorites so far.   

Our favorite suishi place is called 'I Love Suishi', which is right across the street and one of the best suishi places I have ever experienced.  The service is great, but the atmosphere can be quite annoying.  The ladies are dressed in traditional Japanese silk robes and are very efficient at what they do, but they greet every new customer that walks in the door with a high pitched, ear-splitting three sylable Japanese welcome that sounds eerily contrived to reach some level of authenticity.  If its a real Japanese welcome and this is customary at Japanese restaurants, then I will claim my unculturedness and apologize to the fine girls of 'I Love Suishi', but it sounds horribly contrived and it kills me every time.  The music kills me too, the tin-can sounds of plucking and off-beat rhythms descend from the ceiling designed to relax and transcend, but it only winds me tighter and tighter until I'm a little ball of stress and fidgeting with my empty chopsticks.  It makes my fillings ache.  I let Tanya do the ordering at the suishi places.  Its always complicated and she knows better what all the items are and thankfully, you don't have to sit there very long before your food arrives.  I think the atmosphere is OK, and these comments are generally stemming from me going there hungry and easily agitated on a last minute, let's-eat-out decision.  Its one of the best suishi places I've been to, the service is slick and the food will blow your mind!!!  Wow! 

Another great little spot we were directed to is 'Battista's Hole in the Wall', an authentic Italian spot.  You'd never know it by its locale inside a little strip mall just off Flamingo, but it is well worth seeking out.  You are immersed in the atmosphere as soon as you get in, the dimly lit restaurant transports you back to another era.  Thick Italian accents could be heard in the room and the place felt like it was from the 50's.  Literally thousands of artifacts jam every space on the ceiling and walls, so it is endlessly interesting to look around.  There was a main bar area with seating and several dining rooms of varying sizes down a hallway.  We were led down the hall to one near the end which had 5 tables in it.  The menu was very simple and straightforward, permanently written on a placard on the wall, and the meal came with a bottle of their house wine.  I felt myself questioning whether my server's accent was a true Italian...a thick Brooklyn Italian accent.  It just didn't feel right to me at all, so I tried to engage him in conversation to get a little more but he was busy making his rounds and never got back to me until it was bill time.  I'm pretty sure he was faking it.  Before our meal came out, one of the treasures of this restaurant stopped by our table.  An old man, I would put him in his 90's, came out slumped over with the weight of his accordian and chatted us up, found out we were Canadian and played us a short tune.  I forget what he played us, but I was kinda taken with him and wanted to chat so there was a moment of awkwardness before Tan kicked me under the table, I retrieved $2 from my pocket and thanked him for the tune and he moved on to the next table, who turned out to be a crew from Edmundston NB.  I would have liked to talk to him more but he was working, he worked every table in the room then moved on to the next room.  Cute little old guy, there were pictures of him all over the walls in his younger days, so I figure this has been his gig for maybe 50years or so.  The wine was excellent, the food was amazing, and the atmosphere was spot on.  Very enjoyable meal, so we'll definitely be going back to Battista's. 

Last place on a quick trip around the Vegas globe of restaurants is 'Lindo Michoacan' gourmet Mexican cuisine.  Our buddy Andy was in town so we wanted to get him off the Strip to where the locals eat.  The restaurant sits on a hill overlooking the city, so we were able to watch the sun go down and see the city turn to gold over the course of our meal.  Its a spectacular vista, and what a meal!!  Lindo Michoacan is a beautiful restaurant, and a huge menu of things I've never even heard of.  I was quite taken with the complimentary appetizers of chips and mexican dips.  Everything was so fresh and tasty!  One of the dips was insanely hot, so Andy and I enjoyed a few Negra Modelo's to chill the palette.  We ordered some guacamole as an appetizer and the waiter came right to our table with the raw ingredients and did it up right there in front of us.  I was full before my meal even came, so when I left I was really full.  Maybe too full to enjoy my meal properly, but it was damn'd good!  The servers were super friendly too, very happy to have us there.  The thing gets me about some places, is that I never expect a higher end restaurant like Lindo to bring out a sombrero and shots of tequila and have all the servers break out in a big clapping, singing session for someone's birthday.  It has always struck me as a low brow thing to do, for a restaurant to have a staff-staged, festive blowout, but I'm learning now that that's just part of their culture.  The Mexicans like to celebrate and are loud about it.  So are the Acadians.  So I guess I will relent to being wrong about this whole celebratory thing in restaurants and accept it as a traditional part of the culture and not turtle to it anymore.  Just let it all in and accept it as is.  And, I will try not to fill up on the chips the next time we go back.

Thanks for reading.

TRJ

Las Vegas 51's

We got an opportunity to go see a pro baseball team thursday night.  The Las Vegas 51's, Triple-A farm team of the Toronto Blue Jays!  We got tickets through Tanya's work and were seated in the 'Party Zone' right down the the third base line.  The Party-Zone could also be called the 'killer-foul-ball-zone' for all the baseballs that landed in the area.  We were warned as we went in, and it didn't disappoint.  Next time I'll be bringing my glove.

Cashman Field is located in North Las Vegas in an area that we hadn't been to before.  This is 'old Vegas', the decayed and decrepit part of town that progress moved away from and left for dead, the part we were warned not to venture to.  Every city has their run down areas with low income housing and hollowed out businesses and buildings that house all those sorrowed souls.  It is an unfortunate fact of life that for some to rise to such heights, civilization will pay their ultimate price.  

You can always count on a baseball game to get a true, cross-sectional representation of the community.  I don't think there would be many tourists at Cashman Field unless they were huge baseball fans.  North Vegas ain't your touristy part of town.  The stadium was filled up with locals, and I felt for the first time here that we were now part of it, part of that local showing coming out to support the team.  And its just too funny that the 51's are Toronto's farm team. 

You get a good sense of the local pulse at a baseball game.  Even more so than hockey, per say, because you don't get all walks of life at a hockey game, and the vibration isn't there like it used to be.  In baseball, its a social engagement in the stands and the babble of the crowd is ever present above whatever is happening on the field.  A hockey game is more serious and confined.  Most eyes are glued on the action all the time and the social babble is doused by the newly adopted arena policy to gag its audience with shitty loudspeaker music in between every whistle.  Shitty music to gag the rowdies and prompt some kind of crowd response, as if they didn't have anything to say, just there to react.  I hate that.  In my day, when we went to the Campbellton Tiger games as kids, the crowd was rabid.  Teams hated playing in Campbellton because it was OUR rink.  If the Tigers didnt' get you, the crowd would eat you alive.  The crowd is part of the overall energy of a game and a huge part of the home team's identity, but when they are not allowed to let their voices be heard it loses a part of that community vibration and character.  Hockey has gone to great lengths to clean up their show to make it a family-friendly event by keeping the rowdies out, gagging the breaks, keeping beer prices insanely high, and pushing the promotional gimmicks to sell the corporate ticket, hammering everyone in attendance into submission.  In baseball, I get a sense that the riotous spirit is alive and well within the community.  Dollar-beer nights, unleashed fans, the free spirit to smoke a doob and enjoy the night.  In baseball you can still yell insults at the opponents and at the officials and everyone will cheer to back you up.  Hockey has adopted the facade of some corporate, goody-two-shoe'd event which hides what every hockey fan feels in their heart... only to suffer another round of 'Cotton-Eyed-Joe'.  Its a good thing the game is so entertaining.

Cashman Field

People in the States love their baseball!  I never understood their fascination with it.  Its a boring sport really, so much sitting around and waiting.  I could never watch it on TV.  But the game last night was pretty cool to see.  Cashman Field is very nice, as are all the ballfields here.  Finally I understand that a bit more... that here in the States, you can play ball year-round, their fields don't get wrecked by winter, so the game is deeply engrained in their psyche.  Now it makes more sense to me.  Even the little league fields here are immaculate.  Now I understand. 

Our seats in the party zone were a little too close to the action for me to watch the game, but still really cool to be there right up close to see the guys warm up and work on the little things, the things that make their game special.  It was cool to be right there when one of the guys at bat drove a line drive past the 3rd baseman which hit about a foot inside the foul-line and rolled way back to the corner of the fence, the left fielder scrambled it up and ripped it in to the shortstop in a flash.  Holy shit!  The arms on those guys!!  Wow!!!  It was just neat to see the whole field in motion at the crack of the bat and the team working like clockwork to make the play at the base.  One foul-ball of many came into our area and it was dropping right at us, no one at our table was paying attention ...  I watched this ball dropping and let out a warning ...  it landed just behind us, a chubby fellow with a ball glove reached over top of the elderly couple sitting there but missed the ball completely and it smashed into the table right in front of her, knocking her water bottle flying.  Holy fuck, that was too close!  Why don't people pay attention when they're at these events!!  People must get hurt all the time at ball games.  I don't think there's enough safety netting at the Cashman Stadium.  Not so much in the area where we were, but back in the stands many low foul-balls rocketed into the stands and into the concourse of people.  Crazy!  We moved up to the bleachers for the last 3 innings to get a better view of the scoreboard and the field and a better feel for the crowd.

Too bad we couldn't have enjoyed dollar beer night like we would have liked, we had a long drive to get back home.  It was a damn'd great night for drinking beer too, the warm Las Vegas night is sooo comfortable, like a big warm blanket of air surrounding you!  The crowd was having a good time, so I was happy to live the experience through them.  A couple parties were making cracks at the Colorado boys but they just shirked it off and didn't pay them any attention.  It was a beautiful night for a ballgame.  The home boys couldn't bring it back though, and lost out 6-3 in the end.

After the game, as the crowd filtered out, the stadium lights all went down and the sky lit up with a fireworks show that lasted way longer than expected.  I don't know if they do this every night or not, but what an amazing show!  Maybe they have a fireworks sponsor or something, because it was way more elaborate than I would expect for just an after-the-game sorta display.  Pretty cool.  We then made our way back to our car and had no problems getting out of the area.  The cops were everywhere making their presence known.

One thing I think I'll never get tired of is driving down the highway past the Strip at night.  The night lights of Vegas are spectactular, such a beautiful city.  Its a long drive past the strip, and you get a better sense of how big it all is when you're cruising by at 55mph and the city just keeps going and going.  From the distant hills the Strip sits like a jewel set amidst a sea of spotted gold, everything is shimmering.  But perspective is one thing that's tricky here in the valley.  It may look close, but its not very close at all.  I gotta get a better camera to capture some of that magic. 

That was our first trip to North Las Vegas, probably a 25 minute drive home.  I think we'll be back to see more ball games, I really enjoyed that.

Thanks for reading.

TRJ

The Valley of Fire

Our first weekend excursion out of Vegas was to the Valley of Fire.  This natural phenomena occurs 2 hours northeast of Vegas, straight out into the desert and into the heart of the world itself, where the bones of the very planet have been thrust up high into the sky to reveal its inner secrets.

Some 200million years ago, the sea retreated for the last time from the Valley of Fire, and Nevada, leaving in its wake vast beds of red mud, silt, sand and gravel.  For tens of millions of years after, extreme desert conditions carved and sculpted the land.  Desert winds capable of ripping apart mountains constructed mountain-sized sand dunes, which were then fossilized under the extreme desert sun and eroded away to form the exotic red and white rock formations we find today in the Valley of Fire.

About 70million years ago, during the Paleozoic Era, a great tectonic shift occurred.  An oceanic plate on the west coast was thrust eastward under the continental plate, which resulted in a complex series of compression shifts far inland.  Great slabs of limestone which had been buried deep in the earth were forced out and over top of younger rock beds, forming what is known as the Muddy Mountain Thrust Fault.  From that time til even today, harsh desert conditions have eroded 10,000ft (3km) of rock deposits and spread them across the far reaching valleys.  The very bones of the earth whittled down to sand.  The Valley of Fire is a geological wonder, in all its vibrant color and history.

We were in awe the whole time we travelled through the park.  The rock formations are surreal, the colors, the grandness of it all.  Words escape me to be able to describe it to you, and my camera can't capture those colors.  But I'll just have to let the pictures do the talking for this one.  Enjoy!

Red Rock Campsite

Fossilized Log

Barrel Cactus

The sand was too hot for Zuma to stand on.

Petroglyphs

Petroglyphs

Petroglyphs

Zuma

Clancy

Zuma, Tanya, and Clancy

Me, looking for a way up