Weekend Notes

A very busy weekend is complete with lots of different events. A few thoughts on very divergent subjects:

• Celebrity Sighting

The wife and I decided to get a little exercise Friday night, so after a good BBQ dinner we headed up to Disneyland to walk around both parks, something we often do even when the parks are busy. On our way through Downtown Disney as we were leaving I saw a Disney escort followed by the guy in the photo at left - Guy Fieri, host of the Food Network's Diners, Drive-ins & Dives, and also current starring in commercials for TGI Friday's restaurants. He's a great host and has a really fun show (on Monday nights). We stumbled on the show by accident one night and enjoyed it so much we started TiVOing it every week.

He had the Disney escort and a couple of other guys with him, and I'm not the type to bother celebrities, but I would have enjoyed saying hello, given how much we enjoy his show. We've seen a number of celebs at Disneyland, including Brad Garret a couple of times (at 6'8" he sort of stands out) , and Ricky Schroeder and his family enjoying a day at the park.

• Offering Origami

The big event of the weekend was the concert Saturday night featuring moi and The Crimson River Quartet. I'll have more on the show later, but here's a shot of the boys in action:

We didn't sell tickets to this event, but did it on a "love-offering" basis, meaning that during the evening we took an offering to defray expenses. Frankly, it's not the best way to go, but the trade-off is having far fewer people in attendance, and since part of the group's income is dependent on product sales, you hope having more people will pay off in the end.

One interesting thing about love-offerings is the way people handle their paper money. The offering was just dumped into a briefcase for me to sort out later, and it usually takes me upwards of an hour just to straighten up and unwrap all the bills. I've noticed something interesting.

People who give $20s might fold the bill in half, but usually nothing more than that. They've got nothing to be ashamed of and they don't mind if the person sitting next to them sees what they put in the plate. As the denomination of the bills decreases, the level of origami increases until you get down to $1s where amazing pieces of artwork are created. People who give ones know they're cheaping out on the deal and do their best to hide the value of the bills they're dropping in the plate. I must have unwound twenty different paper sculptures that consisted of just 2 $1 bills.

It never ceases to amaze me that someone can come to a concert, listen to 2 1/2 hours of pretty good music from three artists, and then put $2 in the offering. If they get to heaven and find an unfinished mansion, the angels will probably tell them they're sorry it's not done, but they did the best they could with the money they sent.

• The heat, my gosh, the heat!

Here's a somewhat out-of-focus shot of the outside air temperature guage on my car taken about 2pm this afternoon:

104 degrees. And on Wednesday it's supposed to be 67. This is a weird time of year.

To beat the heat we went over to South Coast Plaza Crystal Court where they were having a flower and garden show. Lots of cool stuff, including an elaborate floral display that looked like something you'd see at the Bellagio in Las Vegas:

They also had a cool little garden railroad set-up with a bunch of LGB trains running. I grabbed a couple of shots:
I grabbed one more flower shot:
Those are George Burns roses, and I didn't take that shot at the flower show. They're growing in my front yard.