Billy and Elton Part Deux (and with insane pictures to boot!)

So I'm officially ridiculously lucky. My mom's best friend Kathy happens to live next door to Elton John's personal steward (read: flight attendant). As I was walking to the show on Thursday, I got a phone call from Kathy's husband, Gordon, offering me FREE FRONT SECTION tickets to the Tuesday night show. Did I mention the tickets were free? And in the front section? What?!

Tonight was the Tuesday show and it was officially the best concert I've ever attended. Not only were the tickets in the front SECTION, they were in the front ROW!!! I was literally ten feet from Elton and Billy. I've wanted to see Billy Joel my whole life and I was TEN FEET from him (yes, it's right after the concert got over and I'm still on an adrenaline high and can't stop my pinky from hitting the caps locks and the exclamation point)!! I've never seen anything like it. The men are living legends. I took my friend Jessie, and between the two of us we've probably got about 100 pictures. I already went through mine and put the best ones below. You can tell the difference in seats by the quality of the pictures...

Sigh...did that experience really just happen? I swear I made the whole thing up.

Cake Progression

Yesterday I went to my friend Lindsay's little boy Miles's first birthday party. I had a great time meeting lots of Lindsay's super-nice friends and seeing all their really cute kids. The birthday boy was adorable as always, and after playing with his friends, opening presents, and being sung to, he was all ready to dive into his first cake. Below are a sequence of shots from this monumental event. Happy Birthday, Miles! :)

The Bear is Famous!

Ok, so the dog in this Traveler's Insurance commerical isn't really Clara, but it sure looks like her! I got a kick out of it, so had to post. :)

Checking off one more item on my life long To Do list...

Last night I saw Billy Joel perform at Wrigley Field, a concert I had been wanting to see since high school. He performed with Elton John as part of the Face-to-Face tour. I love Elton too, so together they couldn't go wrong. I went with my friends Cary and Katie and we were not disappointed. They peformed pretty much every major hit between the two of them, and the concert was about three hours long! They started out playing together, and then Elton did an hour-long set, Billy did an hour-long set, and then they closed the concert by playing together again. The very last song they performed was "Pianoman." The crowd went crazy. At one point they stopped playing and the entire stadium sang the refrain together. When I looked at the upper deck, the whole thing was filled with people swaying back and forth. It looked like waves. I actually got a bit choked up... When we bought our tickets back in March the concert seemed so far away, but it was definitely worth the wait. If you ever get the chance to go to one of these concerts you should make it happen. It was amazing. Below, some pics/videos of the show:

One lucky town.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2009/07/11/vanderveen.ladybug.infestation.kusa

Breakfast of Champions.

Cary and I went to a candy store called Candyality in her new neighborhood tonight. I hadn't been to a real candy store since I can't even remember when. They had all kinds of fun stuff like retro candy, individual flavors of Jelly Bellies (I couldn't resist getting a bag of my favorite--blueberry), and gummy fill-in-the-blank-with-anything-you-can-imagine. But my favorite was this breakfast in a bag: gummy eggs and bacon. Mmmm...bacon...

Must be a slow news day...

http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/07/07/mf.toilet.paper.history/index.html

Three Reasons I Love Target

1. They have absurdly cute paper products for events such as the baby shower I'll be attending on Saturday

2. They have such things as coconut M&Ms, which I didn't even know existed, and which my hand involuntarily grabbed as I was passing through the check-out line (wonder how many points those are...)

3. They put a HANDLE on my TOILET PAPER!!

Thunderworks!

Happy Fourth of July! This was the first year I haven't spent the Fourth with family (as I wasn't told what our plans were until it was too late to get a reasonably-priced plane ticket), but I made the most of it by inviting friends over for a summer dinner of fried chicken, homemade salsa, fruit salad, and brownies with ice cream. Afterwards, we ventured up to the Lighthouse Beach in Evanston to watch the fireworks. Owen, my friend Ann's three-year-old kept referring to them as "thunderworks" as in "These thunderworks are really pretty!" We had a great spot to see the fireworks, though it was a bit chilly out after having rained all day. Nonetheless, it was a good Fourth of July made even better by the fact that I still have the whole day tomorrow to sleep and read my time away despite the fact that we've already had two days off now. Gotta love those three-day weekends.

The lighthouse of Lighthouse Beach

Becky, Katie, Ann, and I waiting for the fireworks to start

Owen goofing off for the camera

Ann and Steve

Becky and Owen racing on the beach

Fireworks finale

Rainbow Cloud

I saw this cloud the other day at the beach. It was a cloud made out of a rainbow. I've never seen anything like it. I felt like I was in Care Bear land.

Look-alikes

The jury's back and they've reached a decision: Joel Madden and his daughter Harlow (with Nicole Richie) are the cutest father/daughter pair I've seen in ages. They look so identical it's a riot! I just had to share this picture because it cracks me up.

New Song Obsession