a wonderful evening was had by all

On Thursday, Tom and I spent the evening at the Mesa Performing Arts Center. We spent a lovely evening attending dinner and a music performance: a pre-performance Cajun dinner of gumbo, blackened catfish, and jambalaya on the Contemporary Arts Sculpture garden terrace, then an amazing performance by the Wynton Marsalis quintet. What an experience!!! We felt like we were "those artsy-fartsy people" for a few hours- you know, those people you see at an art gallery, or wherever, and you think "they must be so cultured and sophisticated." I happened to see an advertisement for it in the paper, and we jumped on it... The Mesa Performing Arts Center opened last year, and has many spaces for performances, along with a Contemporary Arts gallery and arts studios. http://www.mesaartscenter.com/aboutTheCenter.htm

And, we both love Wynton Marsalis... http://www.wyntonmarsalis.net/main1.html Like Tom said on the way home, "he can do things with a horn that you just don't think are possible." The music was amazing. The musicians he played with were all relatively young; he makes a point of finding younger musicians and giving them venues and opportunities for furthering their careers. After Wynton, we were both most impressed with the drummer. At one point, that drummer was doing four completely different things: using his feet to control the high hat cymbal and base drum, and using his hands on the cow bell and snare drum... I know I could never do four things at once!!!

It's been nice to have Tom home for a longer stretch of time... he's been home all week (got home late Monday night) after spending four straight weeks on the road, with only weekends off to rest/recover. He took a few days off, so will go into the office again tomorrow to find out what's on the schedule next as far as work and traveling. He's spent some time relaxing, and building us a new computer to run the updated version of Flight Simulator. He wanted to buy the components and build it himself "it will be fun!" I don't understand how that could be fun, but that's the difference between us... LOL! It runs fine- much faster (and other improvements that I don't understand, too, I'm sure). Now we just have to make sure we have all the important files off the old computer.