Last night CG and I headed to uptown Charlotte to see Panic! at the Disco in concert for the second time in less than a year. Last summer it was in Raleigh, and this time around it was much, much closer to home. We went to the Raleigh show because at that point they had not announced a stop in Charlotte, and since it is my daughter’s favorite band, we made the trek there to see the band. When Charlotte was announced, I immediately went online and found that the Silver VIP Package would allow us some really good seats as well as some band merch that she otherwise could not get. I bought the tickets, which became her Christmas present this past December.
In Raleigh our seats were near the back of the arena. In Charlotte we were in the 8th row center. What a difference a good seat makes! CG’s phone was dying just as the concert started, so she asked me to take a bunch of photos. Between photos and videos, I ended up taking over 250. I’d say that was enough. But here’s a small (very small!) sample of some of the photos I took:
Sadly, even though I have the latest Samsung S9, I’m not a great photographer in general, so my close ups are grainy despite our VERY GOOD seats. The energy was high throughout the show, and it was still thoroughly enjoyable even though the set was a 95% mirror to the one we saw in July 2018. The opening acts were different and we only saw one of them because our dinner went long. The one we did see, Two Feet, was very mellow and stayed near the back of the stage the entire time, which caused us to be completely disengaged from his performance, which is a shame because musically he had some decent stuff. I’m just not sure a two-man guitar/keyboard opening act is the best for the high energy of P!atD.
For our pre-show dinner we headed to a pizza joint and had a good time talking and laughing together. I was stunned when my 15-year-old daughter said, “I am really glad that we get to go out and just spend time talking every once in a while.”
ME TOO, HONEY. ME TOO. How cool is that though? I may not be a perfect parent by any stretch of the word (I fail regularly), but I’m a parent that she doesn’t mind talking to and hanging out with in public. Her love language definitely continues to be quality time (something I realized about 8-9 years ago).
We talked about school (it was her first day with an all new schedule for the semester), and her Film & Fiction class that she was taking (sadly, Hallmark Movies will NOT count – apparently her teacher wants her to view only AFI Top 100 or previous Best Picture winners. Pfft.).
We didn’t eat all of our meal, so we dropped off the boxed up leftovers in the car and then enjoyed the concert. This morning as I headed out to work, I retrieved the pizza from the garage fridge where we stashed it upon our arrival home, with plans to have it for lunch.
Today we had a company-wide conference call to wrap up 2018 and find out the vision for 2019. We had lunch brought in, but I dutifully heated up the leftover pizza. Halfway through, I bit down on something that clearly wasn’t pizza. I promptly spit out one of the temporary crowns that I had put on last week in preparation for the permanent crowns I’m getting in a couple weeks (I never got permanent crowns on a couple root canals I had 8-9 years ago and my new dentist demanded I permanently crown them). I was horrified that it might be the visible tooth, but I rushed to the bathroom and saw that it was actually the back molar. Phew. I’ll call the dentist in a day or two to find out if I can just leave it off since I don’t have any pain (thanks, root canal – I knew you were good for something even if you cost an ungodly amount of money because dental plans don’t fully cover root canals (or crowns, for that matter, which is why I never got them done)!).
