Smackdown at the Forum

Well it's been a wild and woolly past few days. After the gelato equipment's arrival on Monday I thought we might have a day to chill a wee bit. Wishful thinking. Wednesday we began experiencing ghosts in the water pipes...cold water, then scalding hot water, then spitting and spurting water. The water heater in the basement needed both repair and exorcism.

Then the local newspaper online forum, one thread of which I have been recently and occasionally posting concerning the singing competition Lakeshore's Rising Stars! (Stumpjack is a sponsor) started getting some real skunky and vitriolic attacks on yours truly (to paraphrase the verbose Mr. T, "I pity those fools...they don't know who they messin' with!"). After verbally smacking those ne'er-do-wells back into the stone age we have heard nary a peep...thanks BigJ and Bored for the extra help in spanking those naughty little tykes . It never ceases to amaze how some people seem so eager to tear down others and only ever succeed in looking like fools themselves. It's that old law of sowing and reaping in action again.

And today I was the guest on our friends Terry & Riley's radio program, "Rising Stars Replay," a show that spotlights the previous night's performance of Lakeshore's Rising Stars! Those two cats are the producers of LRS. While these kinds of media things are always fun and easy for me (they are little breaks in the routine and are really just hanging out and chatting with friends) I also find them to be a bit inconvenient in that the time traveling to and from is greater than the time actually spent on air. But like I said, they're light-hearted fun.

Riley pretending to be an International Male model and Terry pretending to be a dot.com executive.

I told Terry that I was going to hijack the show in the name of Stumpjack Coffee and that's just what I did! Each question about Rising Stars was an opportunity to interject the name "Stumpjack" ("Carli's voice was dry after her song last night? Well she was obviously in need of a cup of fine Stumpjack coffee!") and when the guys would banter with each other about the show I'd be in the background chanting "stumpjack...stumpjack...stumpjack..." (not-so-subliminal advertising, baby!). By the end of the show they're rolling their eyes and cussing at me during the break and we're all laughing. It was fun...thanks Terry and Riley for being good sports. After all the crap those guys have also had directed their way in the chat room I think it was nice for us to just laugh and let go a little bit.

Next week Wednesday is the finale of Lakeshore's Rising Stars! What a great production, what great fun, and what a great thing for this area this event has been. I don't talk to much about LRS here on this blog...I guess because I seem to constantly be talking about it or doing something related to it almost daily anyway...but it is a fantastic accomplishment and I'm very pleased and proud of our friends Terry and Riley for what they've been able to do with this, and I'm grateful to be a part of it in whatever way that I might be. Well done guys!

Check the LRS site and blog to get the gist of things.