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Ok...and now for a happier topic that doesn't garner so many personal insults thrown my way....more HOOTIE!! They're such a happy band. One of the things that I really respect about them is that they don't really have any "skeletons in their closet." They're just four friends who hang out and like to play music together. You know when you watch VH1's Behind the Music and all these bands talk about their dirty laundry? It's either about one guy's excessive drug use or another guy cheating on his wife with all the groupies. There are stories about breaking up and guys getting kicked out of the band. They talk about destroying hotel rooms and whatever other sort of debauchery you can think of.

One of the top five nights in my lifetime happened in May 2004, right around my birthday. No, it wasn't the night I got married. No, I didn't have a brat born that night. May 13, 2004 was the night I had front row tickets to see Hootie and the Blowfish at Soaring Eagle Casino in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan.

I was reading an article about..what else...Hootie and the Blowfish. I was doing research for my aptly titled, "All Hootie, All the Time" blog when I came across an interesting piece of information. Well, I found it interesting anyway. I noticed that Hootie and the Blowfish's third album release - Musical Chairs - "dropped" (that's record industry lingo for the day they go on sale) on September 15, 1998.

I used to have a van. It was an Astro van to be exact. It was perfect – bigger than a car but not as big as the typical “Uncle Chester” van that your parents always warned you about. It was a dark blue van with six stripes of varied widths that wrapped horizontally around the middle. There were a lot of good times in that van. I named it Abigail – Abigail the Astro Van. She was my baby.