Adventures in the Mitten State

Issue #19: Week Two in Michigan

As the sub-title points out, this week was my second week in Michigan. My car is legal now. That is, I have a Michigan license plate and got all the other car crap taken care of (registration, title transfer, driver’s license, etc..).

I ate at another local place for lunch on Friday. I’ve thought about putting my new food adventures in a separate section but I’m not sure what to call that section yet. I’m leaning toward The either Food Truck or sticking with the “stuff” theme and just call it Food Stuff but I’m not sure. What do you think? Anyway, this place was another little bar and grill type place. It is called Lefty and Romo’s. I had a “Romo” signature french dip. It was pretty good. Their fries were pretty good too.

Saturday evening, I attended my first concert in Michigan. It was a local band show at a place in downtown Grand Rapids called Skelletones.

Interesting little place. If you are driving through downtown Grand Rapids and aren’t looking for it, you would miss it. The entrance is just this green door shown above. Once you enter the door, you have to go down a flight of stairs to get into the venue. It is a pretty cool place. Not at all what I envisioned when I had been told about the venue but it is a pretty cool place for shows. The bands that performed that night were a hip-hop act called Beatrat, a punk band called Mooch Globe, a psychedelic rock band called Old Mountain Acid Test, and a folk punk band called Sorry, Not Sorry. It was a fun time.

In other Michigan-based entertainment news, I have been to two different theaters since I’ve been here. A few days after I got here, my youngest offspring and I went to a theater in Muskegon to see Elvis. The theater is called Cinema Carousel. It was a good theater. You buy your tickets at the same time you buy your concessions (unless you pre-buy your tickets on the app). The seats were nice. The kind that recline. They don’t belong to Cinemark or AMC (which were the two theater groups that I had membership with) but they do have their own VIP membership type thing. I’ll probably sign up for it. Tuesdays are not the day to go see movies at this theater though if you want to avoid crowds. This is the day that they have $4 movies all day long. Anyway, good theater. The other theater I went to was just this past Sunday. I went to a theater in Grand Rapids called Phoenix. I went there with my son-in-law and grandson to see a re-release of the 2007 Transformers movie. Another good theater although there was nothing about it that made me like it more than the one in Muskegon other than they (Phoenix) put the butter on the popcorn for you. There is actually a (very) small theater in the town that I live in (Whitehall) that I haven’t tried out yet. I also found out a couple of days ago that there is an AMC theater in a town just north of where I’m at (the only other AMC theater I’ve found is in Grand Rapids). Anyway, I like to watch movies and I frequent movie theaters so there you have it.

There was no Rogue One Radio this week due to technical issues here at the homestead (i.e. spotty internet that we are in the process of resolving). However, Dave did some a good episode about Chicago’s Rise Against on his One Band 5 Songs podcast. Check it out on Spotify here:

I was at a comic book/anime/pop culture store this weekend and picked up a book I’ve been meaning to check out. I decided to go with a hardcover/physical copy rather than a digital copy of this one. It’s called Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin. It takes place in a post apocalyptic future where the grandson of Shredder rules New York City with an iron fist and there is only one of the original four turtles left and he is on a mission to restore honor to his clan.

Nothing came out on my pull list this week.

This week’s track is a new single from Buffalo, New York’s Goo Goo Dolls. You can check out the video for it on YouTube here:

That’s all for this week. Short and sweet. Have a good one!