"It's been a why-yul!"

I hate that song, but it's fun to quote every once in a while in a deep Darius Rucker-type fashion. Anyway, I'm back, and I'm feeling a bit under the weather today. Better this weekend than last weekend (I'll tell you all about it). It sucks because when you come back to work after 10 days off, you want to be all full-fledged, refreshed, and back in the saddle. But right now, I'm dragging. Please, don't cry for me. "Oh, boo-hoo! So you had 10 days off...3 of which were spent abandoning every responsibility you have in favor of paying $100 to stand for hours listening to extreme music that will probably make you deaf by age 35." Okay, so things are not bad at all. Things are great to my knowledge. Just have a cough and sore throat and achy muscles, but I have a friend in Advil and honey-herb Ricola. I'll live.

Bella is doing better. For all we know, she has kicked her ear infection, but we learn from our mistakes. So that means that we will continue to give her her apple-flavored antibiotic for the recommended 20 doses so that it doesn't return. Hey, as long as she's willing to accept, it makes our lives easier.

Trent still has a good attitude about baseball. He hasn't started complaining (at least not to me anyway) that his purple team sucks. If it gets that bad, we'll have to apply the nickname "purple people eaters" or something similar to ease the tension.

I'll let Patrice speak for herself about how she is doing, but I would like to take this time to thank her for a wonderful evening at the Salvador Dali exhibit complete with catering and live entertainment last night. The whole family enjoyed it...including Bella, who was staring and smiling with mouth agape for most of the evening. Trent was really into it despite all of the hidden meanings and not-so-hidden phallic symbols that typical 12-year-old boys hit the floor laughing about. Patrice and I did the parental thing by worrying more about getting through the exhibit before Bella decides she doesn't like it anymore and starts wailing and disturbing the peace. You know that Bella. She's a wild card with her unpredictability. 45 minutes was not nearly enough time to absorb all of the nuances and morphing and little details and hidden images Dali inserted into his works, but from what I did get to see and absorb...quite impressed. I was so impressed that when we got home, I immediately grabbed our book of Dali paintings and studied what I missed at the exhibit. There are some people (other surrealists for one) who don't have too many good things to say about the work of Dali, but I am now a huge fan and highly recommend the exhibit, which has been extended to run at the Philly Art Museum until May 30. I know I'm not the only one since he is probably one of the more known and popular painters of our time. Before last night, I was only familiar with the Great Masturbator (Motz and I had a poster of that in our dorm room at Millersville...heh...how appropriate, right?) and the Persistence piece with melting clocks. Now, my world has been opened to all kinds of other images that I think are way ahead of their time. Many of these paintings were done in the 20s and 30s, but they look like they could have been concocted by some starving artist scrounging for a buck today in Manhattan. Not that any general artist has the painting skills and imagination that Dali possessed, but his works do transcend time. For example, if you compare movies before the 70s and movies today, you notice a huge difference between styles and cutting-edge techniques and realistic dialogue that weren't available/acceptable back then. Similarly, if you compare recent, modern art with some of Dali's, it looks like they both could have come from this decade. I could be totally off on this due to my lack of art knowledge/abundance of art ignorance. I'm not an art aficionado or anything, but it did leave an impression on me. I thought I'd tell you about it. For that reason alone in my humble opinion, I consider it good art.

When I started this post, I intended to give you a run down of the metalfest (something I haven't even given to Patrice yet), but Dali has me all sidetracked. So, let's make this a double blog day, and I'll tell you all about it in my next more recent post.