Looks Like That

This morning we rose to find that things outside looked about like the icon. There had been a very light dusting of snow last night. Oddly, there were little flakes of snow falling out of a clear sky — presumably having blown a long way from the clouds to the west that dropped them. We're not expecting much bad weather, however, and am not changing our plans to head to Reno/Sparks to do our grocery shopping and then on to Boomtown for the Al Stewart concert this evening.

Al Stewart at Boomtown

Lisa and I went to Reno for shopping today, then out to Boomtown (the casino ten miles west of Reno at Exit 4) for the Al Stewart concert (with Dave Nachmanoff). I've seen Stewart twice before, but Lisa's never been to one of his concerts. In effect, she wasn't at this one either. Unfortunately, as soon as Nachmanoff started his warm-up set, Lisa realized that there was no way that the amplified sound and her tinnitus-hyperacusis tortured hearing were compatible, and, as we thought was likely, she left travelswithkuma with me and fled the ballroom. She tried listening to some of the concert from the lobby and back hallway, where at least the sound wasn't painfully loud, but there just wasn't much she could actually hear and appreciate. To her, most of the sound inside the room sounded like mud. It's not like she can't hear music — she'd listened to lots of recorded music — it's just that most amplified sound like you hear at a concert (and it's not as though to my ears as though Stewart was particularly loud) is viciously over-amplified to her and overwhelms her hearing. I suspect that if she heard Stewart and Nachmanoff up close with no amplification, she'd have no problem with it. Also, while she had to keep her ears covered most of the time during The Game Show Show, most of it was audible and intelligible to her, while this music was impossible.

Although I was worried about Lisa, she had told me that if she left, to stay and enjoy the concert, which I did. Stewart performed some songs I'd never heard him do before, mixed with some of his classics including my personal favorite, "Night Train to Munich," before finishing with the song most people know him for, "Year of the Cat." There was no encore, because they had to clear the room for the second showing, which was separately ticketed.

Although tonight was the monthly Lightning Loot drawing in Sparks, by the time we were passing the Nugget, it was 8:50, and as we recalled, you have to have "tagged in" with your club card no later than 8:45 in order to be in the 9 PM drawing, so we skipped this months drawing and simply headed home to Fernley.