On Tuesday, Malin and I got a chance to go see the sold out Coldplay show here in Atlanta. We saw them during the X&Y tour a couple of years ago, too. The production quality was even better this year with lots of lighting effects. They put on a very good live performance. The opening band was decent, too – but I can’t recall their name. They were five guys from Texas whose musical style was not far from Coldplay’s.

Before the show, we went to eat dinner at Holeman & Finch  Public House – a gastro-pub that cures their own meats. It was a good dinner, but a bit pricey:

  • The cheese plate was good and reasonably priced. We had the plate offering five cheeses – a really nice blue, a somewhat-interesting cheddar, a mellow and very creamy goat cheese, Humboldt Fog (sorry, I only remembered the name of this one), and another creamy and soft cow’s milk cheese.
  • The house-cured meat was very tasty – but incredibly over-priced. Before ordering, we asked how much would come, and the server said that it was a pretty good amount. I don’t know what he was talking about. There was very little meat. And for $15, I definitely won’t be ordering it again if I ever return to the place.
  • We also had fried sweetbreads served over grits. This was a delicious dish – the highlight of the evening. The grits were very creamy, and the sweetbreads were good. We’d never had sweetbreads served this way: all in a big, fried hunk. Usually they are broken into morsels and then cooked, but this was a big ol’ hunk of ’em. Yummy.
  • The fried oysters weren’t bad. The fried pickle chips that came with them were probably the best part. They were very soft and gelatinous which I did not particularly like. I’ve had raw oysters and fried oysters in the past that were much more firm and think the texture is much more pleasant when it’s less mucilaginous.
  • Another pleasant dish was the hen of the wood mushrooms with polenta. I don’t know if I’ve ever had this type of mushroom before, but they were good. The only regret: not enough polenta.

It felt odd coming home Tuesday night knowing that we had to return to normal life the next day. Midweek events feel kind of strange that way.

And then yesterday, Hump Day, was another highlight of the week. Will was well-behaved all day, so he got to take advantage of a special privilege reserved for well-behaved boys: video games.

A couple of weeks ago, he bought Lego Indiana Jones for the Wii using his allowance. He’d been saving up for a few months. We went to GameStop to look at used video games, and they were a complete rip-off: a new copy was $50, a used copy was $45. Will was very upset that he didn’t have enough money to buy the game, but we found a copy on eBay for a reasonable price that he could afford: $29. And for some reason eBay gave us a 10% coupon that brought the total down to around $26. Will had only saved up $22, but we gave him an advance on his allowance.

So yesterday while I was at work, Malin and Will finished the second of the three parts of the game: The Temple of Doom. After dinner last night, Will and I played a couple of levels of part three: The Last Crusade. For any that might be interested in the game, I highly recommend it. It is very fun, and knowledge of the movies can help you beat some of the tricky parts – which makes it feel authentic.