hands up and touch the sky

See you next year, summer. I'm a little sad to see you go, but I'll be glad to see 90+ degree days leave us. It's been pretty laid back, but a lot of stuff snuck in there -- the best kind of summer I think.

Summer 2012 tally:
- 2 weddings (with #3 coming up in a few weeks!)
- 4 Lou Malnati's pizza parties
- 5 concerts in Prospect Park (Laura Marling; Ghostface Killah; Childish Gambino/Danny Brown/SchoolboyQ; Wilco; Wild Flag)
- many first times including a trip to LA, hanging out in Jersey City, standing up in a friend's wedding, swimming at a NYC beach (the Rockaways!), and going to a bachelorette party (this is that scary part of our 20's where there's some kind of snowball and everyone gets married, isn't it?)
- a visit from two of my favvvvvorite people ever
- plus, 12 weeks of fresh summer vegetables (CSA!) and subsequent super delicious stuff being made
- this also just might be known as the summer of the frozen zombie fishbowl...we had a few too many.

I have no way to quantify the number of times I actually listened to Starships, but it's way more than what I recorded on last.fm. It definitely wound up being my song of the summer. I tried my hardest to avoid Call Me Maybe, but it was totally inescapable, particularly watching any sort of Olympics swimming coverage. yikes.

bring on it on, fall -- I have a sweater and some new shoes I'd love to wear. thanks. ::cue exit music::

sky blue sky? (not quite)

Better late than never? I wrote this and forgot to post it, so...
I'm playing catch-up and am going to backtrack to a few Mondays ago when Wilco played the first of three NYC shows. This particular show was in Prospect Park, making it the fourth(?) show I've seen there this summer alone. Wilco made the space their own, with their now-standard backdrop/lighting system. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the show was that starting about 4 songs in, a steady rain began to fall. Lightning was in the area, but it never actually stormed over the bandshell. Wilco played for two and a half hours, including two multi-song encores, but no one budged an inch. They sounded great (and possibly worth noting, they were also dry because the stage area is totally covered) and checked in on the audience to make sure we weren't too wet or...chafing. Thanks? Their catalog is so extensive that of course they couldn't possibly play every single song that we wanted to hear, but everything they played was so great that I didn't even realize what was "missing" until well after. It was a lot of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and a good sampling of all the other albums. They closed the regular set with A Shot in the Arm, my all-time sentimental favorite.