Granted our seats weren’t that close, and digital zoom isn’t the best, but I was pretty happy with my pictures.  View them all.

And the concert ROCKED!  Daughtry is awesome and Bon Jovi sings non stop.  His vocal are great yet his dance moves are corny as can be.  Still, one Wild night.

Taking a look around, we started to see a lot of Barack Obama stickers and shirts. Sure enough, he was coming to town. 30 minutes later, the line extended through the Minneapolis skyway system for almost three blocks.

But that wasn’t all. Looking outside at the front of the Target Center, hundreds more were waiting for the doors to open.

As we drove away from downtown, the line to get see Obama was unbelievably long. Literally thousands of people were in line waiting to get in to hear the presidential canidate speak.

See that building with the white top? That’s what the are all waiting for.

Just the walk to the end of the line is enough to do me in, let alone the walk back in.  Most probably parked on the other side of, or next to, the Target Center as that’s where the parking ramps are.  I couldn’t imagine the odds of actually getting a seat either.  I hope they all have tickets already!

Now, I’ve tried this before and it’s not an easy task unless your camera is setup to automatically take a picture every few seconds. Mine isn’t, but I was still able to get a few great shots due to the large amount of lighting and lots of patients.

Most of my 200 pictures turned out like this:

However, I did manage to catch lightning a few times:

I have a few more on my Zooomr profile if you’d like to check them out. Overall, I’m very happy with my lightning pictures.

What if I said I live in Minnesota? What if I said we are in the mist of a severe drought?

For some reason, there are parts of our lawn that are bright green and don’t dry out. Not even in a severe drought. I haven’t watered but I did have to mow today and it just doesn’t make sense. How can lawns and crops be dying across the state and parts of our backyard is alive and well!

We are almost 8 inches behind on rain and are in desperate need of water. Our running totals for the summer months so far are:

April - 2.03 inches of rain
May - 1.39 inches of rain
June - 1.56 inches of rain
July - 1.13 inches of rain

The previous owner even said they put in a drain tile system to help rain water out of the back yard. It makes me think the city has water pipes under our yard that are leaking or that there is a spring under there. However, usually it’s just an area that grows really fast and puddles in the spring or in heavy rain. It’s not a marsh normally so that kind of tosses those ideas out.

On the bright side, we are one of the few lawns that looks spectacular in the mist of a drought. Ok, not the whole lawn as you can tell, but still.

Please keep those affected in your thoughts and prayers.

I once lived just a few miles from that bridge and drove it quite often. It’s hard to believe that it’s now gone.

Now, I’m not tying to say that I thought Renegade wasn’t going to be good. It just wasn’t that tall and you didn’t look at it and say ‘wow’. It just didn’t look overly amazing. However, once we started down the first hill, we screamed our way though all the twists and turns and didn’t slow down to the very end. It was one awesome ride! Even my wife, who’s not a big fan of coasters, loved it!

We also got a chance to jump on the Xtreme Swing. Basically, it’s like the swigs at the park, only much faster and much more intense. It was a short ride, but very fun. To make it even more extreme, they don’t give you anything to hold on to!

Even from the ground, it’s just cool to watch. Everything is tightly packed in and even those passing by feel as if the ride is going to take them out.

The two latest additions to Valleyfair are awesome and really bring up the thrill factor of the park. They are definitely worth the checkout!!

View More Photos

With Target as the sponsor, you know it’s going to be good. They have 10,000 pounds of explosives and 45 miles of wire making it the largest of its kind west of the Mississippi!

Get there early though as parking and viewing spots fill up fast!  I know we’ll be there!!

While out in Vegas I got to ride the rides at the top of the Stratosphere tower and the rides are relatively lame, but on top of a skyscraper, they are amazing. Each one sits over 100 stories above the ground and just the thought of them makes most people scared.

First up I tried Big Shot. Big Shot shoots riders up 921 feed to an amazing total of 1,081 feet above the ground. This ride can be seen at many amusement parks across the country but atop the Stratosphere, it’s the tallest thrill ride in the world.

Second I tried X Scream. I didn’t think it’d be that bad, but boy was I wrong. “Shaped like a giant teeter-totter, X Scream is an open vehicle that propels riders head-first, 27 feet over the edge of the Stratosphere Tower and dangles them weightlessly above the Strip before pulling it’s riders back and over again for more!” For some reason, X Scream scared the crap out of me.

Then it was off to Insanity. Insanity The Ride looked the worse of them all. It’s kind of like the swings, only you swing 900+ feet above the ground below. As the ride goes around, the seats angle out and you point down. In the end, this was not that scary and was very fun! A must ride for anyone who likes a good thrill ride!

Thanks to YouTube, you can get a better idea of Insanity with this video:

All three rides are lame by most standards. They don’t go fast and they don’t do a lot. But on top of the Stratosphere Tower in Vegas, over 100 stories in the air, they are amazing, scary and fun all at the same time.

Sadly though, the rollercoaster is gone.

Their thought is that Google should move into the Ford plant in St. Paul. Why?

• Well first of all it’s a large plot of land in the middle of the Twin Cities. It’s hard to find this kind of land in such a big city. Plenty of room for the volleyball courts and such.
• It also comes with its own hydroelectric dam which can help keep energy costs down, power search servers or Google Dances for days.
• It has a train yard and who doesn’t want one of them? Google could create the biggest model train set.
• Lots of free parking as Ford needed room for all those Ford Rangers it was producing.
• The Minneapolis/St. Paul international airport is your neighbor. Great for flying in and out of town on all those important business trips.
• Tunnels. Not sure a good selling point here but I’m sure Google could come up with a creative way of using them. Maybe party tunnels? They are climate controlled after-all.
• It’s also near the Mall of America so employees could go spend their moneys and ride some rides.
• Light Rail stations are not far away so cruising to downtown Minneapolis is a train stop away.
• It’d be a great place to make the Google Ranger truck. Free with AdSense on the side of course.

Overall, I think that it’s a great opportunity for any big business that wants a lot of land, cool features and a prime location. If Google doesn’t go for it, maybe Target will turn it into the campus they want to create.

I didn’t realize that you could get HDTV over the normal airwaves too. I was delighted when I got one HD channel with the antenna on our house that was probably installed in the 1950s. With a little playing around, I ended up with 8 HD TV channels! One of which is a 24hour local weather channel. Sweet.

What I can’t figure out is that if all the HD channels come from the same area in the Twin Cities, which I hear they do, then why do I only get ABC, NBC, CBS and the CW but I don’t get FOX in HD? I’d re-run my channel detector thing, but I’m afraid of loosing one of my 8 that it already found. Anyone know why this might be or what the trick is to getting more HD channels?

I also have to figure out how to run the antenna cable though the VCR/DVD player and still get the HD channels on TV. That way I can record shows. I fear that my VCR technology is just a bit out of date.

Down the street with the flash on.

The snow drift on the deck.

View off the deck.

Neighbors ice cycles.

Side of our driveway, but you can’t really see it, or the street or the car.

A look down the street. Check out the snow on the roofs.

Down the street the other way.

And it’s still snowing, just a little.

Something tells me, that ain’t gonna happen. However, if we do, we’ll be happy! We have lots of movies and TV shows to watch and are looking forward to be stuck in this weekend.

[update] Well here we are, the storm is over and it wasn’t as big as they expected. We got around a foot of snow but not what I’d consider a massive amount. Now my parents in SE Minnesota got 20 inches or so and that’s a LOT! Still, a nice storm none the least.

This conversation was sparked by the Superbowl performance. After watching the half time show, the questions popped back into our heads. Since we live in the same general area, I want to know.

So I headed off to Google do do a few searches and found out.

To make this a bit more interesting, here is a bit of background on this. We moved out of the city to this area almost two years ago. We’ve been exploring the communities and know where pretty much everything is. However, there is one building we pass all the time that we didn’t know what was. It was white and I mentioned that it looked like it needed to be washed before. We also thought it kind of looked like a padded building for crazy people or what not. (not being serious) We never really knew what it was but it intrigued us. Guess what, it’s the world famous Paisley Park Studios that Prince built.

It’s a $10 million dollar building where many artists record albums, videos and much more. It’s one of the most historically important studios in the world and we never knew what it was so we made fun of the building.

I find it really amusing that I’ve stared at this building many many times in the past two years and never knew. Next time I drive by, I’m going to pay a bit more attention.

Looking up Prince’s house also turned out to be quite productive. It’s only a few miles away, if it still exists. Rumors are that it was torn down. I’m not sure if it’s true or not, but maybe sometime this summer we’ll go investigate.

However, it’s so cold that I think my airbag is frozen. This morning my little airbag light came on and hasn’t gone off since. It has an appointment on Wednesday to get looked at but just to find out what’s wrong is more than I want to pay. Maybe I should just let it thaw out.

I haven’t used my airbag in seven years, maybe I don’t need one. Ohh right, safety first. If the time comes, it sure better work.

So what have I been doing while it’s so cold? Well coding of course. I have a new Wordpress plugin to release later today at my blogging blog. I also have a new theme in the works. It’s got a long ways to go yet but I’m liking where it’s headed. And I’m a bit disappointed that Mozilla hasn’t approved PinkHope yet. I was hoping for that to get a little traction and attention over the week and yet nothing. Might be time to put in a request to a friend. Either that or become an addon approval person. Hummm….

Then today came. It was raining pretty good all morning while I was out looking for a Nintendo Wii and as soon as I got home, it started to change to snow. A few hours later we had a few inches and it’s coming down hard. We should have a good 6-8 by the time this evening comes along. The bad part is, I don’t want it today!

It’s New Years Eve and we have tickets to spend the evening at a concert with Carrie Underwood. I really want to go and we have both been looking forward to it for months. However the roads are past the point of safe. There is to much snow for my little Ford Focus to fly down the road. I’m keeping up hope that they’ll be cleared and drivable in the next few hours, but I doubt it.

I love the fact that we are finally getting snow, but yet it’s stopping us from going to our first ever, full-blown New Years Eve party.

After that we went to Severs Corn maze and walked though corn. It’s not quite as exciting as we were hoping but it was fun non the less. For those that don’t know, it’s a corn field that they turn into a giant maze and you work your way though. Unlike most corn fields, this field is planted in two different directions to help confuse people. They do give you a map though.

Here is what you see when you are in the corn maze:

It was a lot of fun and it’s nice to get away from the computer every now and then.

He claims that about five minutes before the storm there were signs. There was a small hook echo, however nothing that was well defined. If we sound the sirens at every nasty looking storm, we’ll need to spend a lot of time in the basement.

The tornado formed quite fast and was over before most people even knew it was coming. Mr Dayton needs to realize that the weather is not an exact science. This isn’t like Accounting where the numbers add up, this is the weather an no one really knows what’s going to happen.

Mr Dayton also blames the inadequate equipment and thinks that the National Weather Service in Chanhassen should have better equipment. According to reports, they have the best they can get.

I know that it’d be nice if we could predict tornadoes, but lets face it, even Weather.com can’t get tomorrows forecast right half the time.

The weather is wild, unpredictable and amazing all at the same time. You can’t avoid it, can’t control it and can’t predict it. That’s just the way it goes.