Click here for a photo essay of our Foreigner concert experience
Tuesday night at the Nebraska State Fair, we went to see the third of their free concert series, Foreigner. Held in the outdoor amphitheater, the free shows are being used to draw people to the fair which has struggled in recent years. And based on the huge crowd for Tuesday’s show — the theater was jam packed, and the fire marshall came through several times to make sure paths were clear — its succeeding, at least in getting people in the door. I’d peg the crowd, conservatively, at 2000 people. It could easily have been more, but from our vantage point in the SECOND ROW, it was kind of difficult to gauge.

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Once upon a time, three guys from the Kingdom of Good and Awesome stood in the kitchen at a house party and decreed that they would trek through a wilderness of concrete and vehicular obstacles to attend a Def Leppard/Bryan Adams concert, for It would be good. But as the time to depart on their journey neared, one of the guys deemed himself to be slightly less Good and Awesome than the others, and fell on his sword of complacency, thus bowing out of the awesomest show of the year.
From that moment forward, the three Good and Awesome guys decreed that for this unspeakable transgression, the following punishment shall be enforced:

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Friday, Dick, Continental and I decided we needed to go out to celebrate the launch of Dick’s company’s new website, and to get prepared for our weekend of partying in Minneapolis in three weeks. So we planned on going to the Homy Inn on Saturday evening.
When I got there at 9:30, it was the most surreal moment I’ve experienced in a while. Two groups of people, neither of which had any clue who the other was, waved to me as I walked in the door. One was Dick and Trudy, who I was meeting there obviously. The other was Janell’s (my bro’s wife) cousin and his wife, who were there with some people. Paired with the rock star parking — front row, right in front of the door, which in absolutely unheard of at the Homy on a Saturday — and I was living a charmed life.
Dick and his wife had apparently been there since 7-ish, when they headed there after dinner with their dinner guests, who had left just before I arrived. A pitcher of Bud Light was already at the table. I introduced everyone to everyone, and we had some beers. And made the first of several phone calls to people who weren’t there, each of which got increasingly more and more bizarre.

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Its massage day here at the office. They pay to bring in two massage therapists, and you get to sign up for a complimentary 20-minute session. Its great. The room is all dark, and there’s one of those weird nature CD’s that Target always has on display — the one that some kid will always go push play on, driving everyone in the store nuts when the sounds of frogs and water and hippos come out of the speakers.
And today, believe it or not, one of the therapists didn’t bring a CD player. So they put out an All-Points-Bulletin for someone to give up their desk stereo for the day. Problem is, there’s only a handful of us who actually have a CD player. Most people are too serious to listen to music at their desk, or have to concentrate too hard to let music interrupt their train of thought.
I’m a graphic designer. Its not physically possible for me to work without music. I’ll fall asleep if the sounds of Rico Suave by Gerardo are not providing the background soundtrack for my day.

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Those burgers I mentioned earlier today? Yeah, I got home from work last night and decided to grill out. Only all the hamburger in my freezer was, well, frozen. So I took out the patties, made by me at some point in the past and then placed in baggies for future enjoyment, and attempted to pry them apart.
Only these things were really, really stuck. I did a no-no and ran them under warm water to loosen the ice, hopefully just enough to wedge a knife in between them to bust ‘em apart. But these patties weren’t having any of it. I defrosted them in the microwave. Managed to get a few pieces unstuck, which is actually worse, because how do you re-make patties out of frozen matter? And it was 6:54, almost game time.

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