Last night Jessica and I went to see Jeff Bridges and The Abiders at the Moore Theater in Seattle. Although he is much better known as an actor, Bridges is also a talented musician with an album that we regularly listen to in the car. We’ve known about this upcoming show for a while but weren’t able to purchase tickets online unless we wanted to pay double face value. We decided to risk it so Jessica took the night off and we just went to the box office to see if tickets were available. Luckily they were and we ended up seeing a great show.
I’ve been a big fan of Bridges ever since seeing The Big Lebowski many years ago, and then I had the pleasure of meeting him one evening at El Gaucho. I was bartending when he and his wife came in for dinner, which was shortly before we moved to San Diego in 2010, and I ended up buying him a drink. We chatted for a moment and I remember loving how genuinely friendly he was. He took the time to ask me about myself and couldn’t have been nicer.
It was immediately obvious at last night’s show that I wasn’t the only Lebowski fan in the audience. The first time he made reference to his character "The Dude," the place erupted. He played a couple songs from the movie, one of which was saved for closing out the night at the end of their encore. In between songs he told stories about his life and where a lot of these songs come from. We ended up having a really nice time so it’s good we took the chance and decided to go.
Ava stayed home with a babysitter last night, which meant she insisted on staying up later than normal. I was fine with it though because today is Saturday and she allowed us all to sleep in. My new quarter at school begins tomorrow so I’ve got to get back into homework mode. Five quarters to go until graduation and this is my final quarter with any type of prerequisite class. After this quarter I’ll be doing nothing but programming in Java, which is what I joined for and have been looking forward to for a while. This quarter will include Macro Economics, Systems Acquisition and Sourcing, System Integration and Organization Deployment, and Math 305, which is a statistics class. In other words, this quarter is going to suck, but it will be sometime very shortly after this quarter that our new baby girl will be here, so we have something very big to look forward to.
Jessica is working tonight and tomorrow night so it looks like Ava and I are in for the weekend. I’m flying to Southern California for two days this week to conduct user experience tests with our fulfillment center associates on a new web application I’m working on. It’s going to be two very long days with minimal sleep in between, but it should be really interesting. I’m expecting our findings from these tests to be pivotal for the development cycle. Everything is going very well in the world of Amazon. I’ve been there long enough now to know what people are talking about and have been able to get started on multiple projects. I have a manager and a mentor that are both dedicated to helping me advance within the company, so everything is on the up and up.
Going out twice in one week is most uncommon these days but it was our anniversary week and both nights were super fun. We’ve now got Vancouver B.C. for Jessica’s birthday weekend later this month to look forward to. Grandma Amy will be coming out to visit and watch Ava while we’re gone, then my Mom will be visiting next month. Lots of good stuff around the corner.