CrossRoads Blog

Kimberly and I headed up to one of our favorite spots yesterday, the West Fork trail in Sedona. It’s an amazing place and we thought it would be a great backdrop to shoot some Belly Dance Pictures.

We headed out a few miles on the trail, found a couple of spots and took some great pictures. Here is one of my favorites from the day - a beautiful woman in a beautiful location.

The rest of the Photo’s can be seen here: GALLERY 2 (on Kimberly’s Belly Dance Photo Pages)

We recently had another typical (non-typical) Vegas few days. Some business and some fun, and some fun business.

Aside from the work we got to catch up with a lot of good friends and had a great night out with Kip and Shane (and clan) at RumJungle in Mandalay. Seems this place is fast becoming a trouble spot for us. This time we skipped the Brazilian meal and did sushi at a place round the corner.

On Saturday night we were able to get to see a fun dance and entertainment show and awards event. It’s basically the Burlesque annual event where they have the best performers do routines and then pick the winners in each category. We saw probably 20 different artists and groups, all great in their own way. Though fairly tame, it’s pretty cool to see the creative ways performers and dancers come up with to present an erotic yet mild strip tease (always emphasis on the tease).

Had a nice day at the pool with a couple of foo-foo drinks, hit Cesar’s Forum shops (of course), and actually finished ahead gambling (small…)! All in all another great few nights in our home away from home.

Added several new Robert Cray Band Videos - check em’ out here. I’m planning on getting the rest of the RCB pages complete (or at least updated) soon, but the videos are about done.

Here is one of the new ones. I’ve been diggin’ (and relating) to our friend Jim Pugh’s message right now and hoping it’s my next week anthem.

MY LAST REGRET

A clip of Kimberly’s recent show at the Maricopa County Fair. She has performed there for 3 years in a row now. She of course is the 4th from the right.

Our Technorati Profile

All those that know us, know we are HUGE Robert Cray Band fans (yep ‘fan is for sure short for ‘fanatic’ here), hence the pages we have dedicated to the band here on our website. But we are also HUGE fans of Mr. O.V. Wright - the greatest Deep Soul Singer that ever blessed song. Man, when you are in the mood for that soulful vibe on your player, there is none better.

Anyway, MySpace seems to be more and more a venue for musicians and artists to share their stuff. Heck, even long since passed artists have pages with pictures, music, info etc. So not too long ago I did a search for Mr Overton Vertis and to my sadness there was no page giving props to the legend. So, I just had to set one up - which I did HERE. So if you are a MySpace user, come on and join the friends and fans

Kimberly and I got a chance to get to a Tommy Castro show recently at the Rhythm Room here in Phoenix. We had seen Tommy a couple of times, and not knocking his studio work, but Live is a whole better vibe with Tommy. Tommy has a new band, in fact I’m not sure any of the old group remained. A real nice treat was that he had a great horn section with him – the guys from the new album ‘Painkiller’.

The show featured Painkiller, with live versions of at least 4 or 5 tracks. Seeing the CD is just out, we really hadn’t even heard any of it. Gotta’ say… it was quite the treat. Not only was the live show excellent, but the studio version tracks really hold up too. Tommy may still be a “live band”, but I think he really has put together a great disk. In particular a couple of tracks stood out for me: “I’m Not Broken” and “Big Sister’s Radio”. The later just a great old school vibe with Tommy’s guitar channeling Chuck Berry. ‘I’m Not Broken’ has a groove and lyrics that just about any man who has went through a tough stretch here and there can relate to – no doubt an out loud sing-along track. Some really nice other songs on the disk as well; the title track ‘Painkiller’ is classic Castro with an up tempo rock-groove-blues approach. ‘Lonesome And Then Some’ is kind of swampy, Philly Soul, Blues mix that provides the sway, and ‘A Good Fool’ has some great guitar licks featuring both Tommy and Coco Montoya.

Overall an excellent night of music and friends (Dan and Debbie were there too!). You should pick up the new CD, a great mix of Blues, Old School Soul, excellent (Stax/Muscle Shoals) horns, and Tommy.

Of course the Ms. had to weasel in for a picture. The cheesy smile makes me wonder where Tommy’s other hand is?

We decided to get rolling with a blog for the family site. We are not new to blogging as all the family has been doing some on various sites like MySpace, Tribe, etc over the years, but it just seemed logical to get one going here too.

We set up the design and now it’s time for the first post. We plan to just use the blog for whatever various thoughts, news, etc comes about. Over the life of the blog we expect content will vary greatly: some posts surely will just be little blurbs and some important discussions for us. Having said that, you always want your “first post” to be a little more special, really have something to say, etc. Which brings us to the first message. Not necessarily special, not necessarily relevant to a lot of folks. But I suppose timing is everything, and basis that, our message in the first post comes from some old thoughts that have been revisited as of late. We’ll let the picture below tell the story. I made this for a tribe group Kimberly set up awhile back. It expressed our feelings then, as it does now. We promise less somber messages in the future: