Family Fun

This was actually a fairly interesting week! Hooray! What made it interesting was that my family was here for a few days and boy was it nice to see them. It was way too short and I miss them now that they are gone, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted. They came late afternoon on Sunday. It felt like such a long time waiting for them on Sunday. I went to church and came home hoping that my family was close, but they were still over 3 hours away, so I watched the finale of Harper’s Island while I waited. When they finally arrived in Provo, I immediately drove to their hotel and we talked a bit before going to the Lemleys for dinner.

I was a great, fun time at the Lemleys since the Troncales were there as well. We ate chicken salad sandwiches and talked for quite some time. I talked to Kevin for a good portion of the time and I was very impressed with his latest lego Disneyland video he did on The Haunted Mansion. He showed several of the videos he has done to my family and everyone was very impressed. Afterwards we went back home and just talked some more in the hotel room and I got home pretty late. The unfortunate side effect of my family being in town was that I got home late every night and still had to get up early for work, which really got hard, especially after the third day in a row. I was excited on Monday because my Dad and sister came to my work during my lunch break to have lunch with me. I was able to show them my workplace and to show them a little bit of BYU campus, mainly the Wilk where we ate lunch. After I got off work that day, I raced to the hotel and went with my family to a great hamburger place called 5 Guys and then to see Star Trek. Star Trek is one of my favorite movies of the summer, so I was very excited to see it with my family, and they all seemed to love it (except maybe my sister Lauren who said she didn’t really get what was going on most of the time). After we got out of our theater, we ran into Erin who was there seeing Transformers with her family. After a quick hello and goodbye to her, we went back to the hotel room to just hang out and talk some more and once again I got home late and had to wake up for work early.

On Tuesday, I got off work an hour early so that we would be able to get to our concert at a decent time. The American Idol concert was the main event of my family being in Provo. On the way to the E-Center, I showed my dad some of the new Dream Theater album, and unfortunately he didn’t seem too excited by it. Hopefully he’ll still find some enjoyment out of the Dream Theater concert we are attending at the end of the Summer. We parked at the e-center and then left to go have dinner at Costa Vida. The concert itself was tons of fun! I was pleasantly surprised by many of the American Idol contestants, many who didn’t impress me all too much while they were on the show. I especially liked Scott MacIntyre, who had a very pure, strong voice and did a great version of Vanessa Carlton’s A Thousand Miles, Anoop Desai, who sang really well on a couple of ballads and then had more fun during the upbeat My Perrogative, and Matt Giraud who played some mean piano and did a great version of Hard To Handle.

But, the highlight of the show was the second half which featured the top four contestants of the season. Of course, as I expected, the standout set was Adam Lambert, who proved that he is already a superstar. He did several songs that were popular during the show (Whole Lotta Love, Mad World, and the duet with Allison- Slow Ride). But, what impressed me the most were the songs I hadn’t seen him perform before, Starlight by Muse and the David Bowie medley. Adam looks like he has been performing all his life, and his voice is perfect, there were no flaws whatsoever with his voice. Kris Allen had the difficult task of following Adam, but he did great as well and proved why he deserved to win, I especially liked his rendition of Bright Lights. The concert was a lot of fun and it was fun to talk to my family about the performances and see what everybody liked the best. What I loved was that before the concert even started, there was a monitor that would show certain idol themed things, and whenever Adam’s face appeared on screen the crowd would go crazy. It is nice to know that my favorite contestant of the season is widely appreciated, even in Utah.

That night, I had to say my sad goodbye to my family. I stayed as long as I could, and impressed my family with my “name that tune” skills. But, the time came and I left. What made it not quite as sad is that I know I’ll be seeing them again in a couple of weeks when I go home around my birthday for the Rewiring Genesis concert. The next morning was very difficult since I had stayed up so late, so I struggled to stay awake while I worked. Needless to say, that night I went to bed early to attempt to catch up on the sleep I had lost during the first part of the week. The other interesting part of my week was on Friday when Kevin and I went to go see Harry Potter. He had already seen it at the midnight showing, but it was a new experience for me. The show we wanted to see at 7:45 was sold out as well as the next showing at 8:40, so we ended up having to see the movie at 9:45. I was happy with this because it gave us time to go to FYE and shop for CDs, a favorite pastime of mine.

The movie was great! One of my favorite of the Harry Potter movies for sure. I loved all the humor they included in the movie and I really thought the actors did a great job, especially the actors who play Draco and Snape. I found the movie very entertaining and was mostly very faithful to the book. It is one of my favorite books in the series and I feel it sets the stage perfectly for the thrilling conclusion that will be split up into two movies.

And that is really about it for the week. I really enjoyed having my family here for the week, it definitely will be a highlight of the summer for me, and the only negative consequence of it is that I’m going through a little bit of the blues after having to say goodbye and going through my relatively lonely usual routine throughout the week this week. But, I should have hope because I’ll get to see them again in about a week from when I am writing this (ok, a week and a day…don’t want to get ahead of myself). So, that is all! I will write again next week :D