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Legendary concerts are often few and far between. Well, that is unless you’re Cher or Garth Brooks, who hook you into seeing their “last concert ever ever EVER!” and then decide to take up residency in Vegas. (No, I’m not bitter about being tricked at all… at all!) A couple of weeks ago, I hopped down to San Francisco with my mom to help her relive HER legendary concert experience. You see, she was lucky enough to see the Beatles on the first stop of their first US tour at the Cow Palace back in 1964. So when the opportunity to see her favorite Beatle (aka. Paul McCartney) in concert came up, she just couldn’t pass it up and decided to take me along!

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Here’s my super awesome and hip mom – beaming when she saw how amazing our seats were (Tourists take note: this is what you wear in San Francisco in the summer.)

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(Just imagine Paul standing right behind us… well.. 20 rows up at least)
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I’m sure you had no doubts in your mind, but the concert was entirely amazing and awesome. He had just come off a 2-week break, so his voice was outstanding, and he just looked like he was having the time of life performing on stage. Sure, there were probably more WINGS songs performed than most people in the crowd had heard during their lifetime, but anyone that can perform for 3 straight hours is amazing in my book!
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The set list for the concert:

1. Venus And Mars
2. Rock Show
3. Jet
4. All My Loving
5. Letting Go
6. Got to Get You Into My Life
7. Highway (The Fireman cover)
8. Let Me Roll It
9. Foxy Lady (Jimi Hendrix cover)
10. The Long and Winding Road
11. Nineteen Hundred And Eighty Five
12. Let ‘Em In
13. My Love
14. I’m Looking Through You
15. Two Of Us
16. Blackbird
17. Here Today
18. Dance Tonight
19. Mrs Vandebilt
20. San Francisco Bay Blues
21. Eleanor Rigby
22. Something
23. Sing the Changes (The Fireman cover)
24. Band on the Run
25. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (HIGHLIGHT of the show!)
26. Back In The USSR
27. I’ve Got a Feeling
28. Paperback Writer
29. A Day In The Life / Give Peace a Chance (John Lennon cover)
30. Let It Be
31. Live and Let Die
32. Hey Jude
    Encore:
33. Day Tripper
34. Lady Madonna
35. Get Back
    Encore 2:
36. Yesterday
37. Helter Skelter
38. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)
39. The End 

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And when the show was over, we all piled out of stadium in jubilant awe of what we just saw. Old and young alike, we all had a blast and stayed up way past our bedtime and got rained on by the fog to see a legend in our midst. The guy in aisle next to us paid $650 for his ticket. I heard from others in rows ahead of us that they had spent over $1000 each, and they remarked at the bargain they had gotten. In all, it was pretty darn awesome and I’m happy that I got to enjoy Sir Paul w/my mom!
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If you want to see a glimpse of the concert experience, I mashed up the little video clips I took during the concert into a movie below. Enjoy!
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But what’s even better? There’s someone on the internet keeping track of all these menu items and places, and has plopped them on a great big Google map for all of us to explore! You can actually see how many “best things” there are near you, or in a city you’re bound to visit shortly! Pure genius to have the information translated so easily for everyone else.
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There are also maps for Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives and Throwdown with Bobby Flay … and maybe others out there as well!
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So the old yellow car is gone… and in her place is this spiffy new blue one! I could go into the details of how our new car buying experience was anything less that ideal, but Mr. M has already gone on that that rant, so I thought I’d share things from a different angle. I’d like to share some tips on getting the new car you want for the best price you can… who knows if we got the bargain basement deal of the century or not, but I do know that we got the car to a price we liked and that was what mattered in the end!
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Tip#1 – Price out every version of the car you want to buy on the manufacturer’s website. Go and add the things you want/don’t want and see what MSRPs pop up at you. In our case, you couldn’t get a navigation system without buying both the upgraded speakers, towing package and rear lift gate. Strange, but that’s how it goes. So a feature you think would only be a small cost increase ends up being bundled into a bunch more. Special colors can also cost more, and some models of the cars can’t be upgraded the way you want. You’ll also walk into the dealership WAY MORE knowledgeable about available features than the car salesmen on the lot. They deal with their inventory, not the entire stock of cars that exist in the country, so be the expert in the situation and know all the ins and outs of your model!
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Tip#2 – Scope out what the invoice and dealer costs are for the car. There are quite a few places on the internet that allow you to find information on the invoice and dealer costs of certain cars. MSN Autos has an easy to use invoice price option for specific cars and options, as does Yahoo!Autos. The easiest to use system that we found, however, was TrueCar.com. Enter in your make/model and options along with your zip code, and you’ll get a nice distribution graph of what the GREAT/GOOD/OVER priced options are based on the sticker, invoice and dealer prices! They even have a great little button where you’ll be shown the BEST PRICE option for the car you’ve selected and dealers willing to confirm that price for you! Also, visit the forums at edmunds.com and see what others are paying for the model right now.
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Tip#3 – Walk in with your firm price, knowing you can go elsewhere. Go into the dealership armed with the price you want and know that if they can’t beat it that you’re walking away. With all of your research, you’ll know by this point what you want to pay, and you’ll know of other dealerships that will give you this offer. Sadly, this doesn’t work if you live in an area w/only one dealership, but it’s perfect when you can travel up a few hours for the right price!
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Tip#4 – Research what the past incentives have been, ask about incentive periods, and see if it’s worth it to wait. Our new car is financed through payments, but as a completely risk averse person, I wanted to make sure we got the best rates we could. In other words, 0% financing was a must for any car we wanted to get. It didn’t matter if another model was “cheaper” in sticker price if we were going to end up paying more for it in the long run. Ask about their incentive periods and most dealerships will be happy to tell you when they are. Most have annual promotional periods that run in the same months every year, and some sales are centered around holiday weekends and such. It doesn’t hurt to ask!
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Tip#5 – Buy the car when it hits your comfort zone. Just like any sort of price negotiations with big purchases (i.e. homes?!?), you’ll never know if you got the perfect price. When you’ve got all the information you can at hand, and you decide on what’s a reasonable price for you, go with your gut and do it.

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I drive Mr. M crazy with my financial purchase indecision at times, so for this one, once I had done all my research and had my comfort price, I let him take over. It was much easier than having me fight for pennies while signing papers, and he didn’t have to stress along with me. And thanks to him, we have a shiny new car. Phew.

I’m making a guest appearance on “back to the basics” today! Julie has a wonderful blog, and she’s been an awesome reader here for quite a long time! Go pay her blog a visit, see how adorable her son is and tell her I said “hi!”
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My first step into Sweet Valley was through the Twins. I started reading the books only a couple years after the debuted, so I had a stash of them ready to devour when I got hooked. Once I had worked my way through each and every new book that came out, I took a short sidetrack into the Babysitter’s Club. I stayed long enough to get annoyed with certain characters and skip their chapters entirely, and then found my way back to Sweet Valley through their high school adventures. They were scandalous, salacious, and oh so fun to read… and I loved those characters to pieces. Before our annual summer camping vacation, I would check out 20 or so of these books to read… and would rarely make it through a week before finishing them all! I wanted to be Elizabeth so badly… but wouldn’t have minded being Jessica for a bit as well.

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So with this little insight into my childhood, you can understand why I let out a squeal of delight when I found out the series was being resurrected as: SWEET VALLEY Confidential: Ten Years Later. And even better, yet, the first chapter is online and ready for you to download. I won’t lie… I already read it and I’m marking March 29, 2011 on my calendar. Sad, but oh so true. Especially since the writing is atrocious… but you want to get through it just to know what happens at the next turn.
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Anyone else wants to revisit Sweet Valley?

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If you have an iPhone… you needed to purchase Hipstamatic yesterday. Now I’m sure this is old news to so many people out there, especially all of you insanely creative readers (yes you!), but I didn’t take the leap until my iPhone was capable of taking non-grainy photos.
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Basically, you choose your camera lens, your flash, and your film type, and take photos that remind you of your family’s old dusty albums. The best part, is that when you take the photo, you have to wait 3 seconds for it to develop, and you have no idea how it will turn out. Imagine that… savoring that magical moment of opening your photo envelope and seeing what was inside for better or worse. It’s a feeling I’d forgotten until this app appeared and revived the spirit of photographic mystery again.
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The app is $1.99, and you can buy extra “hip packs” for $0.99 each that add to your library of lenses/film/flashes. You can upload the photos directly to your Flickr account or share them on facebook as well! Nice on the pocketbook for such a fun and useful little app!
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So who has more fun Hipsta-prints that they want to share?!?