You have come a long way since 2005…
You still act like a young puppy-not sure if that will ever change!
You have become of father many times.
But, you still love your ball and bunnies the best! And, lets not forget swimming…
Happy 5th Birthday Vegas…Your are a big handful, but we love you…
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Happy 5th Birthday BlackJack Vegas
April 25, 2010Roma Splashing @ Ray’s Splash Planet
February 12, 2010
Roma Splashing @ Ray’s Splash Planet-2010 feb 049
Originally uploaded by shee_rah77
Halloween 2009 Roma 14 months old
October 27, 2009@ Romp n Roll
Whittaker farm
October 13, 2009
m/news/video.asp?video=10%2D12%2D09+dairy%2Ewmv%2Eflv&zone=News
Uptown/Downtown-Charlotte
May 21, 2009
There is much confusion brought about by the use of the terms “Uptown” and “Downtown” for Charlotte’s center city area. These terms do not reference different areas of town and are thus interchangeable.
The history of the dual names is contested, yet prior to the mid-late 1980s, the term “Downtown” was used by residents, media and city leaders for the center city area. During the 1980s, a massive campaign was launched to revamp the image of the downtown area and the term “Uptown” was introduced to the general public. On February 14, 1987 the Charlotte Observer began using the term “Uptown” as a way to promote a more positive upbeat image of the center city area.[5] School teachers were provided with “historical” documents justifying use of the term to teach to students.[citation needed]
Another opinion is: Though many feel that the term “Uptown Charlotte” is a new term in the last 10 years, local residents from three or more generations past will attest to having called the center city area Uptown their entire lives. This is due to the main intersection in the original center city, Trade St. & Tryon St., having been the point of highest elevation. When people would come from outlying areas to the city, they would say they were going ‘up to town’, a phrase that was eventually shortened to ‘Uptown’. Despite this, there are many who steadfastly believe that center-city Charlotte was called “Downtown” up until 10 years ago when there was a concerted effort to rename it “Uptown” by various groups that had come from outside Charlotte. These people feel that this was an attempt to improve the city’s image.
Dave Matthews Band’s “Whiskey” a toast to Moore
April 11, 2009I am looking fwd to June 2nd when this album comes out!
By Ray Waddell Ray Waddell – Fri Apr 10, 9:44 pm ET
NASHVILLE (Billboard) – From the bluesy sax solo that opens the album, to the inspired songs and performances throughout, it’s clear that this one’s for LeRoi.
“Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King,” the Dave Matthews Band’s first album since 2005, draws upon a number of sources of inspiration: producer Rob Cavallo (Green Day, My Chemical Romance), the band’s maturation and a focus on creating a studio project on a level with the band’s potency as one of the most popular live acts in rock history. But it’s hard to deny the impact of the loss of founding member LeRoi Moore, who last summer died of complications from injuries suffered in an all-terrain-vehicle accident after work on the album had begun.
“Everything was really hard after Roi’s death,” Matthews says. “But when we were all spending time together and listened to what he had already played, we really had time to think about him and be grateful for the time we had with him.”
Violinist Boyd Tinsley agrees that the sessions helped pull the band members together. “You’re in the studio and you look around, and there’s somebody missing,” he says. “I know there were some moments for me that were really tough in the studio.”
Even so, the energy around the DMB camp is positive now as the members gear up to promote what they feel could be a career-changing album, due June 2 on RCA.
LAYING THE FOUNDATION
The Mardi Gras-inspired “Groogrux” began more than a year ago at the band’s hometown studio in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Moore’s skills as an arranger and idea man were instrumental in putting together many of the musical concepts that led to the songs on the record.
“We had two, maybe three sessions before he had the accident,” says drummer Carter Beauford, “and those were the very crucial stages of this project, because we had to lay down the very foundation of this whole sound.”
After Moore’s accident while on a tour break in July and his death in August, the band resumed work on the album last fall in Seattle. The band took a break for the holidays and regrouped earlier this year in New Orleans, with final work completed at Cavallo’s home studio near Los Angeles.
Returning to the studio after Moore’s death brought practical as well as emotional challenges. “Besides playing the horn, LeRoi was a great band member, a great musical conceptualist,” Cavallo says. “We missed his brain, we missed his presence. We were lamenting all the time, ‘We wish Roi was here. What would he do?’”
Moore’s work is all over the album, culled from performances he had already put in for the project. “We created a giant ProTools file that had all of his parts, even if he was just tinkering around during a demo phase off-mic,” Cavallo says. “We scoured the hard drives to find all of these moments he had.”
At its heart, “Groogrux” is a musically ambitious record — and certainly one of the band’s most accessible, likely not only to please longtime fans but to draw in plenty of new ones.
“If someone tells me, ‘I don’t like it,’ I can say, ‘That’s your problem, because it’s good, bro,’” Matthews says.
Highlights include the funk-rock rave-up “Shake Me,” the stirring ballad “In the Hands of God,” the swampy rocker “Cockadile,” radio-friendly fare like “Why I Am,” which features playful horns over a solid rock riff and a hooky chorus, “Funny the Way It Is,” which parlays a subtle intro into a soaring, syncopated anthem, and set pieces “Skworm” and “Time Bomb,” the latter featuring some of Matthews’ most fiery studio vocals in years.
It seems everyone in the group was inspired to make a landmark Dave Matthews Band album, one that lives up to their legendary onstage alchemy. “I think we finally managed to get it,” Matthews says. “It doesn’t make sense that you could do something sort of extravagant live — if that’s where your strengths are — (and) that you shouldn’t be able to do something even more wild when you’re in the studio. I just think we managed to find our groove.”
Matthews’ lyrics explore familiar DMB themes of spirituality, love and social issues, but they feel more emotional this time, even if “Groogrux” isn’t an overly dark album.
“I don’t think there’s any need to be lonely and overtly, self-indulgently mournful on this record,” Matthews says. “That wouldn’t serve us, Roi or anybody. One of the things about playing music for all of us is that it’s a source of joy. So even if we’re singing about death or loss or the end of the world, at the very core of everything there’s got to be hope.”
NEW ORLEANS STATE OF MIND
Cavallo says the trip to the Big Easy was a positive creative influence. The Mardi Gras-influenced album art, drawn by Matthews, is an intricate and compelling parade scene and will be incorporated into tour imagery. “New Orleans rubbed off on the record a lot,” Cavallo says. “You can see its influence on the cover; you can see it in different songs, different lyrics, different attitudes. A lot of it came from that city.”
New ideas are crucial to a band nearly 20 years old. “I think that’s important, and that’s one reason why we keep changing our live set, because we never want it to get repetitive,” bassist Stefan Lessard says.
DMB will begin its 2009 tour April 14 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The group’s status as one of the top touring bands remains a core element of its identity. Dating to 1994, DMB has rung up grosses totaling more than half a billion dollars and attendance of 14 million from 760 headlining shows reported to Billboard Boxscore.
The band plans to make new material part of the set list and, as is typical, the “Groogrux” songs will find a new life onstage. “We’ve played them all, but we’re going to have some extensive rehearsals before the tour starts — get them all oiled, lubed up and ready to go,” Beauford says. “By the time we step onstage for the first show, these tunes are going to be ready. By the middle of the summer, it’s going to be a whole other story then, because most of the new tunes that we do develop and grow into something fresh and new by the middle of the tour.”
Keeping things fresh is essential, Lessard says. “As a musician there’s this saying that you never stop learning, you never get to the point where you play music and you kind of know it all. There’s always places to go and new things to learn, so it’s impossible in anyone’s lifetime to become complacent.”
The band members seem to be approaching this next chapter with renewed vigor. “We all pulled together, stronger than we’ve ever pulled together before, and we made it through,” Beauford says. “We still have a journey ahead of us — it’s not over. But we were all there for each other and will continue to be.”
So if the new album is for LeRoi, it’s also for the future of the band and its recording legacy. “We did, I think, stand up for him on this record,” Matthews says. “He was always the one saying, ‘Man, we’ve got to get it right in the studio. If we fulfilled our potential in the studio, it would be a whole different thing. That’s where we should be excelling.’ The really sad thing about this is he’s not here to see the finished product, but I think we came up with a record that he would have been really happy with.”
(Editing by Sheri Linden at Reuters)
Happy Valentines Day!
February 12, 2009Put your hands around your neck…..
November 20, 2008When is enough enough? I understand why the democrats wanted to bail out the failing financial institutions (though I never agreed with it), but now the automotive industry? This is sending the message, “The government is here to bail you out if you are doing a crappy job running your business”. The banking industry failed because mis-informed consumers applied for home loans they could never afford. In turn, the banks inflated the appraisal value of the property in order to approve the loans. This is actually illegal on the part of the banks. Not only did we let it slide, we rewarded the banks for it. The point here is that it was the American people (the commoners) that caused this mess and the banks went along with it. I’m not sure anyone was counting on the bleeding hearts to bail them out, but they did…
And those same heart bleeders now want to bail out the auto manufactureing industry. Only this time, it was not the commoners that caused the problem, but rather the simple rule of supply and demand. The auto-industry executives did not see the writing on the wall. Gas prices are rising and people are trading in the $40,000 guzzler for a $20,000 Geo Metro…. Here’s an idea, stop making the $40,000 guzzlers… instead, they keep making them, and selling them to the dealerships, and shipping them to the dealships, but no one is buying them. That means the dealers are stuck with the supply of guzzlers without any demand… and without the capital to purchase any salable cars from the manufactures.
So, I will plead with all the idiots out there that are entertaining the notion of giving $25B to the auto manufactures…. Put your hands around your neck and pull your head out of your ass! Try it, it works! Stop taking my money and giving it to the corporations. In fact, stop taking my money and giving it to anyone. It is mine. The more money you take from me, the less money there is for me to spend on baby clothes. This will cause all the Baby Gap stores to close. Not only will by baby be naked, they will take more from me and you to bail out Baby Gap. You’ll see, it will never stop.
Supply and Demand. You saw it with the gas prices… it worked. Gas was expensive, people stopped driving aimlessly looking at house they couldn’t afford. When you stop buying gas, it becomes cheaper. In fact, gas is cheaper today than it has been in the last two years. Why? Because people stopped buying $40,000 SUV’s and started buying 30 mpg Honda Accords. Yes, the same Honda Accords that are made in Kentucky.
Some will say “oh no, if we don’t bail out the auto industry then 10′s of 1000′s will lose jobs. Guess what? They will. But don’t kid yourselves. The auto manufactures will be bailed out, but those people are still losing their jobs. I promise. The republicans would give us commoners another $800 this year to help us stimulate the economy, or just buy more beer… they don’t care what you do with it. The Democrats wont give you $800, but rather take it away and “spread it out”… and just because we bailed out the financial institutions didn’t mean all the jobs were saved. And it doesn’t mean America is going to start buying cars again. In fact, you will have less money to buy a car, and the new regulations the Dem’s will place on the banks will make it nearly impossible to get an auto loan…
I will urge all not to let Brother B take your money. It is your money. You worked hard for it…. or at least worked for it… well, most of you worked for it. And in any case, it is yours. Try to take another penny from me…. I wont pay. I might stop paying tax all together if these government idiots don’t get their heads pulled out soon.
And one final thought… when are we going to bail out the failing dot coms? I hear Yahoo and Google are both struggling this quarter. YAHOO was worth $40 Billion just 5 months ago. Today they are barely worth $12B. They have dropped in value at the same rate as Ford and GM… in fact, nearly every corporation and ever 401K retirement plan has seen a 40% to 70% loss over the past 5 months. The whole world is worth 40% less than it was worth in June…. So what??? The only one that should really care is the Alien Planet that bought Earth a few months earlier.
Well, in closing I should remind you all that our economy was doing better before Obama was elected. Once he won the presidency, the DOW average dropped a total of 2200 points, or roughly 25%. Such a drastic drop in the economy has caused other global economy’s to fail. This is causing record job loss… and again, those that still have a job will be told to bail out Victory’s Secret and “Build-a-Bear” once XMAS sales numbers are in. The only industry that has seen a rise in sales in the past six months is the firearm manufactures and gun shops. They have seen a 10% increase in sales compared to last year…. wonder why???
I can only say “If that SOUTH would’ve won we’d have it made”.
BoNY out
