nathan jara

Four concerts in a week lent itself to quite the musical mash-up this month. Starting things off on a Tuesday night was the a cappella group Straight No Chaser at the Benedum Center in downtown Pittsburgh. The group performed Christmas tunes along with rock and pop classics. One of my favorites was their version of “You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch.” Thursday night’s stop was Stage AE for Sara Bareilles along with The Cab, Parachute, and Matt Kearney. The opening bands were great with each performing some acoustic sets, but I really lked Sara Bareilles as headliner. She had an awesome band and stage show. Checkout some highlights in the video below. Saturday was next with the Holiday Pops concert at Heinz Hall featuring the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Mendelssohn Choir. The concert reminded me how you truly can’t beat the timelessness of a professional classical performance. I ended the week on Sunday evening with a home-brewed Christmas cantata from my hometown church cluster. My family and church friends had a great performance to end my musical week.

If you can’t play it above, download it here, silly. Chrome/Safari | Firefox

Clearly, this guy knows how to dress. Needless to say, I’m excited for the movie : )

Watching a recent episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert weighed in on the cloud computing craze during his popular The Word segment. It’s worth a watch : )

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that the Caped Crusader set up shop in Pittsburgh over the last few weeks for his newest big screen adventure. Thanks to the gentle cajoling of a friend, I made my way downtown this past week to see if I could catch a scene or two. After a delicious Italian eggplant sandwich with marinara and a side of risotto, we walked around Cherry Way, which was closed off for filming. Walking through the downtown area was interesting in that it really did feel like I was on set. Fake snow lined many of the streets and a fenced in area hid Batmobiles and Bat bikes. A shortcut through the downtown Macy’s to the opposite side of the building gave a good view to the afternoon action where, SPOILER ALERT, the Tumbler tumbled into a giant hole in the middle of the street. Geez, I hope Batman called the Gecko, Flo, or that guy with the blue telephone ahead of time.
 

Summer vacation this year afforded me the opportunity to travel to the sunny shores of Corolla, located in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Vacationing with family, both immediate and extended, provided for a great week of visiting, eating, napping, sunning, reading, sanding, ocean-ing, and general beach bumming. Corolla and the Outer Banks are a beautiful part of the Atlantic shoreline. The beach has certainly become my favorite vacation spot, well, except for maybe that time I went to Italy ; )

In addition to lots of time with my feet in the sand, we stopped in Williamsburg, Virginia and visited the Colonial Williamsburg area. I was able to take a stroll through the colonial town and really enjoyed seeing a glimpse into the rich heritage of our American ancestors. It’s amazing how times have changed. Another exciting aspect for me during the trip was it gave me a great excuse to use my new digital SLR camera, a Canon Rebel T3i. The camera was a ton of fun to play with, hence the pictures below. Check out more of my photos from the beach and Williamsburg on Picasa.

Sand dunes of Corolla

Dragonfly

Ocean evening

Colonial Williamsburg