Tag: vacation

Introducing Peppermint

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Peppermint Taking a Nap
Peppermint Taking a Nap

So it has been an eventful Christmas – New Year’s Holiday here at the Weathers household. Things didn’t work out how we planned, but we’re hanging in there, and the ride has ultimately turned out fun after all.

Every year, Melinda and I both take off the week of Christmas and the week of New Year’s Day. This year our vacation started after we both left work on Friday, December 19. Saturday, we enjoyed our first day of the break by taking Doobie to the dog park and then doing some last minute Christmas shopping at Fry’s Electronics store followed by some tasty gluten-free pizza at a Pepperoni’s Pizza in Duluth.

Also, on Saturday, we finally managed to get salt delivered for our house’s water filtering system. It turned out that thanks to a tripped wire, our system had not run through its cycle for several months. So in addition to filling up the salt in the tank, the tech guy set the system to run that night.

Despite being on vacation, we couldn’t quite shake the habit of getting up early for work, so Melinda and I woke up around eight on Sunday. We went downstairs, and I made us some breakfast and coffee at which point it became clear that the initial run of our water filter system after months of disuse had left the water in our pipes tasting funny. In fact, the taste was unpleasant enough that we poured out our coffees.

But Melinda definitely needs her coffee in the morning despite not really drinking the stuff much until I came along. So it fell upon me to run out for some emergency coffee orders. The plan was a quick drive to the Starbucks that sits a few intersections down from our neighborhood on Windy Hill Road. Since they have a drive-thru window, I wouldn’t even have to get dressed! Thus, garbed in a bathrobe and a simple coat, I set off on my short trip – it turned out to be shorter than either of us thought it would be. Continue reading →

At The Gates Demolish The House of Blues in Chicago

/ John Weathers / 2 Comments

So I flew to Chicago on Bastille Day to see one of my favorite bands: the Swedish melodic death metal gods At The Gates. Initially, I had my hesitations about traveling from Atlanta to Chicago to see a concert – but ultimately the additional benefit of visiting a friend whom I’ve not seen in many years together with the one-chance-only kind of event that this concert represents (At The Gates broke up in 1996 and this is their “Suicidal Final Tour”), I went for it and purchased my tickets back in April along with a plane ticket and a hotel reservation.

My flight ran a little late so I didn’t actually get to my hotel until around 4:15 by which time I was pretty much guaranteed to arrive too late to see the opening band. This turn of events didn’t really bother me too much as I was only going to the concert to see one band and that band was the headliner. After dropping off my luggage at the hotel, I caught the airport shuttle back to O’Hare airport where I then took a CTA blue bus to Rosemont station. There, I finally caught the CTA blue line train which took me into downtown Chicago where I easily found my way to the House of Blues after a quick detour for some McDonald’s. 

When I entered the building to pick up my tickets from the Box Office, I could hear that the first band was already playing on stage. Apparently, they keep a tight schedule either on this tour or at The House of Blues in general. The concert doors opened at 5:30 and it seems that the first band Toxic Holocaust began playing at 5:45. As one guy waiting in line with me commented, that’s pretty amazing for one of these shows. Usually, you stand around for a long time after the doors open before any music starts and often there are long periods in between bands.

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Tracing The Musical Path

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Tomorrow, I fly to Chicago to go see seminal Swedish Death Metal band At The Gates perform at one of their few US tour dates on the Suicidal Final Tour 2008 which functions as the fair-well tour that the band never had when they broke up in the 90’s just before I discovered their awesome music.

As the show draws near, I’ve been thinking about the musical evolution of various forms of extreme metal music and how sometimes you can pick out a clear path from one end of the spectrum to the other. For example, one can easily trace the development from Black Sabbath to At the Gates:

  1. Black Sabbath Black Sabbath (1970): proto-metal with traces of its blues origin
  2. Black Sabbath Paranoid (1970): early heavy metal
  3. Judas Priest Sad Wings of Destiny (1976): beginning of classic heavy metal
  4. Judas Priest Stained Class (1978): classic heavy metal with first hints of speed/thrash metal
  5. Slayer Show No Mercy (1983): early speed/thrash metal with clear lineage from Judas Priest’s sound
  6. Slayer Hell Awaits (1985): thrash metal – much darker with proto-death metal elements
  7. Possessed Seven Churches (1985): proto-death metal with traces of thrash origins
  8. Death Scream Bloody Gore (1987): early death metal with most thrash elements stripped away
  9. Morbid Angel Alters of Madness (1989): seminal early death metal
  10. Entombed Left Hand Path (1990): death metal with early hints of the melodic death metal sound
  11. At The Gates Gardens of Grief (1991): early At The Gates with only hints of their future sound
  12. At The Gates With Fear I Kiss The Burning Darkness (1993): Early melodic death metal sound
  13. At The Gates Slaughter Of The Soul (1995): Classic melodic death metal album
Now I am not saying that the bands later in the list were directly influenced by bands earlier in the list, but if you listen to these albums in order you can clearly hear the relationships and the evolution of the sound.
That’s our little metal history lesson for today… ‘Til next time keep it metal!