Nine inch Bear Claw Nails

This weekend, Jess and I took a trip out to Houston, TX to see Nine Inch Nails (NIN) in concert. We left on Saturday afternoon after Jess had an evaluation for Roller Derby. They do a couple of those and everyone who makes it to the end of the training season and passes gets brought into the league. Woot.

Right after the eval, we hopped into the car and drove to Houston. It's a 3 hour drive, and we stopped on the way to have some dinner and then again to check into our el-cheap-o hotel. The concert was going to be late, and we didn't want to be driving home until 3 in the morning.

We had floor tickets, which meant we got to get down in the middle of the stadium with a whole bunch of others. We also got really close to the front, which was nice. Lucky for us, NIN has been around long enough that the mean age of the concert-going-crowd had gotten out of high school, and that meant that, all in all, it was a pretty civilized concert. I got bumped a couple of times due to proximity, but for the most part people just stood around and listened to/watched one heck of a good performance. There was some amazing stagecraft, including huge interactive light screens. My favorite part was when the drummer came out and started touching a bunch of squares on the back display. It turned out it was actually a massive, interactive drum machine, and he built up the drum loops for one of the last songs. It was a pretty long concert, lots of great songs, and a really good vibe. Jess, of course, was totally enamored by Trent (lead singer, composer, and all-around musical guy.) I gotta admit, the man looks good in a black t-shirt.

After the concert, we went back to the hotel and slept. We got up in the morning but, since we were in Houston anyway, we decided to try and check out the Zoo. It was a bit of a trail to find the darn place, but perseverance paid off and we tracked it down. I'm really glad we did, it was pretty spectacular. Most of the animals were awake and being interesting, so we got to see a lot of neat animals. My favorites included the primate exhibit, which held a bunch of small primates with bat-like faces. Cute, but I can just imagine people 1000 years ago assuming they were demons.

Other highlights: a family of giraffes. I only came up to their legs. The african elephants were awake, and the mommy and the baby were rolling around in mud to keep cool. Then they got their daily bath. They had been trained to lift up a leg on command so that the zookeepers could get all over with the hose. There was one small-cat exhibit with a wildcat about twice the size of a house cat that woke up while we were watching. He was very cat-like, he even did the 'wake-up-and-stretch-out-with-clawing' thing that our cats do, except that when he did it, he dug some pretty impressive furrows in a log. There was a petting zoo with some goats that were so fat they were nearly spherical. We got to see a nautilus, too, a crazy, deep-water crustacean that propels itself with a jet of water and always swims backwards. There was a family of orangutan in one of the displays, too. The mom and dad were busy being lazy, but the kid was playing around with a empty, plastic, tidy-cat bucket of litter. He would jump up on it and then fall off, or crawl around inside. It was all very entertaining until dad got annoyed and started coming after Jr. Mom rushed to his defense. Crazy but amazing.

After that, we had some diner, drove home, and wrote this. Coming around, full circle.

-N