Collective Soul

After months of anticipation, the night arrived and we headed to Salt Lake to see Collective Soul.  This was my second time seeing them, and the concert was a lot better than the last time (not to say that my first time was bad because it was still freaking awesome).  There were several factors that made this time so much better--longer anticipation time, longer concert time, no nature guy.  For those who aren't in the know, they played their Dosage cd from front to back without any break between songs.  It was so awesome!  For some time I have been conflicted about which CS album is my favorite; however, after the concert Dosage takes that spot.  It was really that awesome.  Only one not so great song on the album, which they omitted anyway.  I didn't take a lot of photos, mostly because my camera is terrible, and I found it hard to take pictures and enjoy the concert at the same time.  I would have done a lot more video too, but I happened to have the smaller memory card, and I only had enough space to take like 4 minutes of video, dang it.  Here are some pics from the first half of the show.

Before the show, center and almost front!

Ed explaining how the night will work.

The rest of the guys walking on stage pre-show

Like I said, my camera is kinda crappy.  Still have no idea how this picture happened.

Joel tuning up

I had a really hard time getting many good shots of Dean.  He had a nasty habit of moving as soon as I took a picture, and he was on the dark side of the stage.

Ed

Will on the Bass in the background

Dean and Will

Heavy

An attempted close-up of Dean

Heavy

No More, No Less

Needs

 

 

 

Here is a little bit of a video of Needs.  This is the fourth song of the concert, and my voice was already almost gone.

 

 That is the point at which I quit taking pictures during the first half of the show, partially due to a battery not being charged all the way.  But as I said, Dosage was awesome.  It is really hard for me to pick favorites.  One of the most surprising to me was Slow, that song kicked major butt live.  I also loved Generate and Crown, which had a freaking sweet intro and outro that put it over the top.  Another favorite was Not the One which has become one of my favorites recently.  I've actually learned to play that one on the guitar recently, and it is one of my favorites to play.  Of course I loved She Said as well as the other regular concert songs.  Just too freaking cool!  That made the show completely worth it alone, but...

The band took a short break and came back and played all of their standard concert hits.  In total the show lasted 2-3 hours.  The band does get a bit a of a minus for not playing Where the River Flows, but they made up for it by playing Forgiveness.  Forgiveness is another one of my all time favorite Collective Soul songs, and to hear it live was just amazing!  It is another song that I have recently been learning to play on the guitar and is one of my favorites to play.

Welcome All Again

Like I said, that side of the stage was too dark for pictures

Yes, I feel Better Now!

The world's done shaking me down

Ed likes us!

At this point I quit taking pictures and just enjoyed the concert.  Right before the encore, December and Shine, Ed came out and told us that they were looking forward to coming back to Salt Lake next year while promoting their next album!  He even mentioned something about starting the tour in Salt Lake.  Gonna hold 'em to that!

Snuck in a picture before they kicked us out

Immediately after leaving the stage, I told Geoff that I was ready for round 3, and I was.  One of the best nights of my life!  It was totally worth standing out in the sun for several hours and standing inside a bar for an hour.  Such a great birthday present, thanks Geoff and Mandy.  Thanks again Geoff, Scott and Kristin for the great night!

The Noise

Perhaps the funniest memory of Sophie came one night while we were gathered for family prayer.  We were kneeling around our parents' bed, and Sophie was on top of the bed.  One of the more irritating habits of Sophie was her incessant need to clean her nails.  She wouldn't just lick her paws while doing this, but she would bite into her nails with her teeth and start chonking on them.  It could get quite annoying to listen to.

While we were gathered around bed in prayer, Sophie laid on the bed cleaning her nails.  We put up with it for a while, but we were finding it increasingly difficult to refrain from interrupting prayer to get after her.  Finally, Dad, who was offering the prayer, had enough and stopped praying for a minute.  In my curiosity I looked up just in time to see him flip Sophie in the nose.

The result of this small flip is something that none of us could quite understand, but it created an epic moment for the four of us who were there to watch it.  When Dad flipped Sophie in the nose, it created a noise that reminds me of the sound a racquetball or a tennis ball makes when it is hit.  Kind of a suctiony, poppy sound.

As soon as the sound occurred I had a hard time controlling what little seriousness I possessed at this point.  It didn't really help that Dad, the one who got after on more than one occasion for being too noisy during prayer, struggled to finish praying because he was laughing too hard.  When prayer ended, we all enjoyed a great laugh at Sophie's expense.  We never heard such a noise again, although it may or may not have been attempted.

This wasn't the only time that Sophie interrupted us in moments like this.  She was often an interrupter during prayer and scripture reading, and we quickly learned that we needed to play board and card games at the kitchen table.  Whenever we would play a game on the family room floor, she would suddenly show up and trample right through the middle of the game.  I think she may have even laid down on top of games occasionally.  Funny thing is once our games were ruined, she would often leave us alone.  I don't think that she liked being excluded.

Sophie #2

As promised in my last post, I am going to post some of my favorite, or most memorable, memories of Sophie.

One of the first things that I thought of when I received the news of her passing occurred when I was in eighth grade.  This story fits into the most memorable category rather than favorite.  For some reason, I didn't have school while everyone else did--I think it was the time that the junior high plumbing kept belching, and school was only cancelled for the junior high.  For most of the day Sophie and I were alone together.  Sometime in the morning, I let her outside to use the facilities.  This was before the garage was built, and we let her out in the front yard to take care of business.

At this time there was a stray dog running around the neighborhood.  For those who knew Sophie knows that letting her out into the front yard was an open invitation for her to explore the world, and she always took off quite quickly too.  With that dog running around the neighborhood, Sophie immediately ran after it and chased it around the neighborhood.  With no one else home, I was left to chaser alone.  Because I was able to stay home all day, I was still in my pajamas--a t-shirt and a pair of shorts.  I didn't have any shoes or socks on, and there were a few inches of snow on top of a layer of ice on the ground. 

When I was finally able to corner her and pick her up, I started to carry her home from the other end of the street.  Keep in mind that I was probably only 12, and she was a very large dog.  I got a few houses away from ours when I had to put her down for a second because my arms were really tired.  She immediately took off again.  I don't remember how long I was actually chasing her, but I do think that I was a little bit cold by the time a neighbor finally assisted me in getting her in the house.

If I remember right, this was the same day that she chewed through a pen and got ink all over the carpet, and I tried desperately to get it out before Mom got home.  Speaking of Sophie and pens, I happened to find a Sophie pen soon after she died.

She was just like me and like to chew on those things.  Sorry for the bad picture, my cameras didn't want to take a very good picture of it.

In Remembrance

Two weeks ago I had to face a day that I knew was coming for some time.  My heart just sank as I woke up to the e-mail and saw the subject line.  Our beloved Sophie past away.  I knew it was coming for some time because the last time I saw her she was in terrible shape, and I kept receiving reports that she wasn't much better.  It was a very hard day for me because we all knew that I was her favorite, after all she would only roll over for me.  I've been wondering for some time how to say goodbye to someone who has been a part of my life for 11 years and was my best friend for much of that time.  She was always there to comfort me when I was down, and she made sure to stick her nose in my face when I was asleep while sick.  I don't think that it was quite as painful as losing a sibling or a parent, but I would say that it is pretty close.  She will definitely be missed.  With this post I have collected all pictures of her that I could get hold of, and will post some of my favorites.

Just a few years ago

A rare moment when we caught attempting to sleep

Another great picture of her trying to sleep

Another of her favorite activities, removing the squeaker from toys

This picture and the next were among several that I found in a batch of my old pictures, unfortunately many of them were of Sophie in the shadows.  You can't really see her.

Another favorite activity, putting up with the grandkids until she had enough and ran away.

Protecting Kirsten from her date

She will always be our Dodger Dog

Will definitely miss the Big Red Rock Eater, Kung-Fu Puppy, etc.

Thanks for the memories Sophie!

In case anyone happens to have other pictures of Sophie, I would love to have them.  Also when I get more time, I will post some of my favorite stories of Sophie.  I would also love to hear favorite stories that others have.  Thanks for taking this trip down memory lane with me.

My Miracle for Yesterday

Last Friday I spent a couple hours writing an essay for the Huntsman scholarship application.  Like the fool that I sometimes am, I didn't save my work at all.  I had some minor editing still to do on it, and I had a few parts that I needed to add.  I was planning on finishing it up that day, but never got back to it.  It was left open in an unsaved state when I woke up Saturday morning.

I was working on another assignment in Word Saturday morning when I had major problems with the program.  It suddenly crashed, and my page and a half essay and all the work I had put into my assignment were closed without being saved.  The nice thing about Microsoft Office 2007 is that it will automatically retrieve automatically saved copies of documents in case crashes happen.  Because of this I wasn't too concerned.  I re-opened Word and told it to restore the shadow copy of my essay--I hadn't even been working on my other assignment long enough to have it automatically save, so I wasn't too worried about that document.  In its attempt to open my essay, Word crashed again.  This is where Word fails because the program viewed this as me closing Word without saving the restored copy, even though it was not my intent to have it close, and the shadow copy was deleted forever, never to be seen by myself again.  Needless to say, I was somewhat mad at Word.  I tried everything I could to find where the file may have been sent in hopes of saving my work, but this was one of the few times that a Google file search failed me.

I finally resigned myself to the fact that I would never see this file again, and went to continue work on my assignment.  I got two to three questions in when Word crashed again.  Suddenly Word wouldn't even open without crashing.  I was getting just a bit frustrated at this point.  I was beginning to get annoyed at having to do the first two questions from my assignment over and over again.  Eventually Office tells me that Word may have a problem, ya think??!?  Word ran some diagnostic and fixed Word so it was working again.

Fast forward to yesterday.  Yesterday was the deadline for the scholarship application, so after classes I sat down to re-write my essay.  Remembering my experience last week, I made it a point to save my document after writing a paragraph.  I then just took off and wrote about a page, taking no thought of saving my work.  I was getting near the end, and I was taking a moment to decide where to go next in my paper when suddenly the thought appeared in my head to save.  I immediately hit CTRL+S and saved my work.  Less than ten seconds later Word crashed, and we went through the same rounds as last week.  Word would not open any documents without crashing.  Had I not saved when I did, I would have lost an hour plus of work, again.  I am pretty sure that had I relied on shadow copies, I would have had the same issue as last week.  I even tried recovering data from the document, but what I got was a bunch of characters, and I didn't have my Urim and Thummim with me.  After giving up I was able to upload and finish my essay in Google Docs, Google wins again.

Although what happened was a relatively small thing, and some may say that it was merely a coincidence; I believe that someone was trying to save me a lot more work by not having to write that stupid essay for a third time.  Had this happened, I may have been forced to kill Microsoft Word.

I suppose that there are two morals to this story.  First, if you use Microsoft Office, make sure you save often because you never know when the program will decide to go paper shredding on your documents, Google Docs automatically saves your documents whenever you make changes so you don't have to worry about it.  Second, always be listening because you never know when the spirit may tell you to do something that could save something or someone.

When I was thinking about this, I was thinking about my Mom's blog.  Every once in a while she will post about certain miracles in her life and shares them with others.  She has encouraged anyone and everyone to post their own miracles, so everyone feel free to post and share any miracles in your own lives!

http://burley-itsagreatday.blogspot.com/