November 9-12th

For Ari’s birthday, she asked last summer to go see Alessia Cara, her favorite singer. She wasn’t coming to Utah, so we had to pick a place to travel to. She was playing in Santa Barbara two days after Ari’s birthday AND she was doing a meet and greet. Perfect!! Ari quickly bought the tickets the second they went on sale. We flew out Saturday morning, since she couldn’t miss the football game on Friday and then rented a car and drove up the coast. We made a pit stop at Neptunes net. The day was amazingly warm and beautiful and we listened to Alessia the whole way up.

This was Ari’s absolute dream come true to meet her and get to talk to her her one on one.

This was the first time in all my years of concert ticket buying – and I didn’t even buy them Ari did – that we got front row center. We honestly could have tapped on her feet to the beat if we wanted to. It was also the first time ever I felt my age, and wished we had brought Lelu to be in the front row with Ari and I could have sat a few rows back. There’s always some weird characters about too. We had an extremely tall over 50 year old guy carrying a gift bag to meet her and I’ll be honest – I was doing my best to surveil him and make sure nothing harmful was in his bag (it was a mug) and then we had a Sue Ellen Mishki shusher (if you are a Seinfeld freak you know what I mean) right in front of him. The concert was awesome and she is a very talented girl.

Meanwhile the boys (TT, B and two of tt’s friends Blake and Calder) took the Ark and headed to AZ for their first test run. I only got one video out of them, so I took some snapshots from the video. TT was cursed with food poisoning one of the nights but they loved the boat and they loved Lake Pleasant. They drove back on Monday. It was the perfect weekend for the twins to spend it doing things they love and B and I were there to facilitate it.