I have a house!

I closed on my house on Friday and started work on it this weekend. My mom came up to help. We went shopping for paint, and I got a few samples to try out for my bedroom and living room, so I’m probably going to start painting sometime this week. I spent most of today stripping wallpaper from the upstairs hallway. It’s almost done, except for a small portion of one wall and the parts that I can’t reach. I’ll probably bring my step stool out there tomorrow to finish it up. We also priced carpet. I can’t believe how expensive it is! Does anyone know any good local carpet shops that aren’t too pricey?

For the curious, here is my French decorating plan:
Living room: Paris, red and black - lots of Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, etc.
Kitchen/dining room: French Bistro, red and black - French chefs, wine, etc.
Master bed/bath: French Boudoir, gold and brown
Sewing room: L’Atelier - signs of French dress shops, hat shops, dress forms, etc.
Guest bed/bath: French country maybe?, some shade of blue
Office/loft: ???

I can’t wait for it to be done. I just wish I had more money to do everything I want to it right away.

Okay, my party decision….

After much deliberation, here is the plan/schedule..

Friday, November 16 (my birthday):
8pm: Blue Man Group concert at the arena
11pm: Birthday celebration at the Big Bang (probably, it was fun there)

Saturday, November 17:
3pm: Housewarming party at the new house
7pm: After-party

People are welcome to come up and make a weekend of it. I’ll have a couple extra beds at the new house, plus a sofa and floor space. Please let me know if you are coming to the concert, so we can coordinate buying tickets so everyone can sit together. If you want to skip the concert but still come to the birthday celebration, please feel free. The bar is a half a block away from the arena on Broadway. If you want to carpool to the concert to save money on parking downtown (it’s usually $5 after 5pm in most lots), then we will be meeting at my house at 6:30pm. If you need directions to any of these places, just let me know.

Edited to reflect change in housewarming plans.

I’m having a crisis.

I was planning on having a birthday/housewarming party at my new house this year. I have been planning to have it on my birthday, since it falls on a Friday, and that never happens, and next year will be a leap year, so I won’t be able to have a party on my birthday day for many many years after this year. However, it just came to my attention that Blue Man Group is returning to Nashville, and having a concert on the night of my birthday. Thus my crisis. I can’t really afford tickets, but it was the most awesome concert ever, and I would love to see it again. So, I present a poll to you, readers of my blog. Please help me with my crisis.

Click the link below to see the poll.
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Two days + two concerts - sleep = *yawn*

I ended up going to two concerts this week at the Ryman. I bought a Ben Harper ticket a month or so ago when I saw that he was going to be in town, planning on going by myself. And then Chance and Wayne decided they wanted to come too, so they got tickets as well. Thus, none of us were sitting together. The show was good, thought I was slightly disappointed that he didn’t play more older stuff, since that’s what I know. I think I only recognized about two or three songs, and he didn’t sing any of my favorites. But the performance was great. I was sitting on the main floor, toward the right, in the next to last row. While seated, my view was absolutely perfect with no heads in the way, but while standing, I couldn’t see. Luckily, people remained seated throughout the majority of the show.

The next night, the three of us returned for Damien Rice. He is one of Chance’s favorite artists, so Wayne and I decided to get tickets for Chance for his birthday. However, when we decided this, the show was sold out, so we weren’t sure if we would be able to get any. The day before the concert, I somehow lucked out and got three tickets for less than face value, so we surprised Chance with them right before the Ben Harper concert. Now, I hadn’t listened to Damien Rice a whole lot, just one or two songs here and there, but after last night: huge fan. It was one of the most spectacular shows I’ve ever seen, maybe second behind Blue Man Group. You know a concert is awesome when you experience an entire range of emotion while there. I know what my first purchases at McKay’s are going to be……

Anyway, I ended up staying up till 3-4 am both nights, so I’m going off of very little sleep right now. So if this post is incoherent, I’m sorry.

McKay’s finally opened in Nashville. *does a dance*

So, now I’ve got my McKay’s and I’ve got my Mellow Mushroom. I can’t think of any other places in Knoxville I miss, so why do all you guys still live out there??

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it or not but I’ve been trying to start up a wedding coordinating business.

So I’ve been working with a few couples for free to get experience in the field. My first wedding was last weekend (my second is this weekend, which is why I’m crazy busy and haven’t posted anything), and it went well. The photographer put up a slideshow of pictures on his blog if you want to check it out: http://clarkproduction.blogspot.com/2007/09/kandace-conrad.html

Thankfully, he didn’t put any of the pictures he took of me in it since I probably look exhausted in all of them, lol. Though you can see me briefly in the background of the picture of the ring bearer walking down the aisle, since was crouched down holding the flower girl’s hand until it was her turn.

From Dragon*Con TV…

Re Your Brains
Wii Safety Video

Back from Dragon*Con!!

Wow, what a weekend…I didn’t take nearly as many pictures as I would have liked, but the ones that I did take are up in the photo gallery already. I took some video as well, which will be up as soon as I can wade through it and edit it.

We arrived in Atlanta on Thursday evening after being stuck in a traffic jam in Chattanooga for about an hour. We located the Hilton quickly enough, parked the car, and checked into the hotel. There were already people in costume roaming about, even though the con didn’t officially start until Friday afternoon. After we found our room, we relaxed for a bit and then went down to registration over in the Hyatt. The line was really long, but it was moving quickly, so it only took us about 20-30 minutes to get our pre-reg badges.

On Friday, we went to a panel on how to build combat robots (for stuff like Robot Battles and BattleBots, etc.), which was pretty interesting. Later that day, we saw Michael Winslow, the “Man of 10,000 Voices” from “Police Academy” and “Spaceballs.” He was really entertaining and did a scene from Star Wars using only his voice, as well as Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix performances (I have all this on video). Friday night, we went to the Mystery Science Theatre 3000: A New Hope showing. Ben wasn’t finding it as funny as I was, so we ended up leaving about half way through. After that, we caught up with my friend Chris and some of his friends and hung out and walked around a bit.

Saturday morning, I meant to get up to see the parade, but was too tired. However, the Mythbusters panel was at 11:30, so I got up for that and headed over to the Hyatt. The line was crazy and no one really knew where it was, considering they had decided at the last minute to move the panel to a different room. I finally made it inside, but Ben was away at the consuite getting food, so he did not before they closed the doors. They showed a Blooper reel (which I have on video) and then did a Q&A session. They revealed some of the things that would be coming up on the show and Kari showed off some bobble head figures of the team she apparently made and would be selling at the Walk of Fame. I stopped by the Walk of Fame later that afternoon and got a picture with the three of them. Yay!!!

On Saturday night, I went and saw a showing of “The Last Unicorn” with commentary from the author, Peter Beagle, which was really interesting. I had heard that a live action movie was being made, but what I didn’t know was that Peter doesn’t have the rights to it anymore, and they are basically planning on screwing up the story. They are trying to raise money to get the rights back. When I was at the Walk of Fame earlier that day, I was going to get an autographed copy of the book (with the proceeds going toward this purpose), but he was away doing a reading, so I decided I would come back on Sunday.

After that, we were going to try to catch one of the costume contests, but the fire marshall had shut down the Hyatt because of the number of people in the hotel. When we finally got inside, the room was full. We decided to go back to the hotel and ordered pizza and watched the Dawn costume contest on Dragon*Con TV.

Sunday, Ben was going to be in the Heroscape tournament. It was at 1:00, so after eating lunch at the consuite (I’m so sick of PB&J sandwiches….), we went over to the Marriott to find out what was going on. There were about 15 people that showed up for the tournament. They played four rounds of games. Ben ended up only winning one of his four, but came SUPER close on two of them (only one guy was left on the map at the very end). If they had ranked everyone by points instead of games won, he would have come in fifth. He still got a prize of a wooden box to put miniatures in and a t-shirt.

While he was playing, I went back down to the Walk of Fame to get my autographed book. But….they were sold out!! I wanted to kick myself for not going ahead and buying one the day before and just coming back to get him to autograph it. He said that if I signed up for his email list, they would be selling them to everyone who was unable to get them at the con, autographed and everything. Which is cool, but still not really the same as having him autograph it in person. But I guess it will do.

After the tournament was over, we went downstairs to wait in line for the Whose Line Is It Anyway? finals. It turned out to be a lot funnier than I was expecting, although there were a few parts that were just kind of painful to watch because of how bad they were doing, hehe. Then we went back to the Hilton to our room and watched the Masquerade on Dragon*Con TV, where these really awesome Wallace & Gromit costumes won Best of Show for the Masters category. I wanted to run over to the Hyatt to get pictures, but didn’t figure I would have time, so I guess I will have to wait until they put out the DVD. Chris and a couple of his friends came over after that and we played several games of Fluxx before we went to bed.

On Monday, I wanted to go watch the Robot Battles, but Ben had to be at work at 5 that evening. So after going around the Dealer’s Room once, we headed out.

Overall, I had a ton of fun!