The day I got the bad news, I wasn't in the mood to do anything. You ever feel like that? Doing anything sounds awful and doing nothing sounds worse, so you just sit there trying to figure out what to do with yourself. TV sucks, all songs suck, work sucks, writing sucks, obviously, right?

Still, my sister was able to convince me to make good on going to see Rodrigo Y Gabriella at Ravinia with her and her three boys as planned. Last time I was this miserable, somehow being around the kids made it worse. I was so irritable that I couldn't take it, and they never annoy me. This time, they were just so great, and they helped me without even knowing they were helping. I envisioned them getting bored and being loud, but all three of them were perfect gentlemen.



Here are some highlights:

- The littlest one says some words funny, but some of them are too cute to correct, such as jumpoline (trampoline) and Scooby Diver (SCUBA diver).

- The middle one said that one of the policies there was "crud," and I fell out laughing because nobody says that word. People always default to crap, but crud is hilarious. You certainly never hear anyone say, "Excuse me. Where can a guy take a crud around here?" Tremendous word.

- The band was incredible. It's just two people, a guy and a girl, and they play incredibly intricate instrumentals, banging on the guitars for all the percussion, and it sounds like there is a 5 piece band up there - at least. I was thrilled that they played Orion by Metallica, which is always awesome to hear.

- I convinced the littlest one that the music was being played by Diego from "Dora the Explorer," and the older ones got on board with messing with him too. I just thought it so cute that he's still little enough to think a cartoon character could be playing flamenco guitar for us.

- After the show, Heterosexual Life Partner (HLP) and I met up at a karaoke party, and the two of us ripped through song after song and beer after beer until I was good and shnockered and not thinking about how miserable I was every other second, just around every five minutes or so, which was great.

- Now I'm back to the every other second variety.