Ceter Stage at Red Butte Gardens

This week has been great. Running wise I fit in all my runs and strength work outs. They were all pretty normal, which is why I haven’t written too much about there here, but here is a quick summary:

Monday: 8 miles, sluggish first half faster second half, average mile pace 9:06

Tuesday: 6 miles, easy, average pace 8:50

Wednesday: 7.25 miles, 6 X hills aka running up and down the big hill in my neighborhood 6 times, average mile pace 9:05

Thursday: 9 miles, speedy, first 2/3 was a breeze last 1/3 a bit rough and cold, average mile pace 8:43

Oddly enough the most exciting thing in my life this week was not running. Weird I know! I have had a really great week at work with some exciting opportunities. Although it has kept me exceptionally busy it has been a really great chance to be reminded how awesome my job it and how lucky I am to have it. 

The start of the week was pretty normal. The only notable exception was that it officially is cold enough in the mornings that I have to wear a hat, scarf and jacket while I wait for my bus.

Then came Wednesday. Now for my job I work at a PBS affiliate in the programming department. I am actually technically shared 75% programming and 25% creative services. I do fun stuff like write reports on our ratings, preview upcoming programs and coordinate our social media to our programming. I also do not as fun stuff like enter information into databases, copy edit our programming schedule guide and answer viewer phone calls and e-mail. 

When it all comes down to it the bulk of my job lies in the social media arena. I attend most meetings around the building so I can chime in trying to incorporate creative ways to use social media in all different ways. Well this Wednesday I got to use it in the best way so far! I got to go back stage at The Piano Guys concert at Red Butte Gardens to collect content for when we air the official PBS special in December. 

The night started with a delicious pasta dinner, ceaser salad, veggies, rolls and other delicious food. After dinner they put out treats like tootsie rolls, red vines, peppermint patties, trail mix, granola bars and rice krispies. Oh, they also bought pizza. Throughout the night I literally ate some of everything. I almost typed “a little bit of everything”, but I ate way more than a little bit. 

The concert started at 7, but I was there getting behind the scenes stuff from about 5:30 on. I had this idea to give away wrist bands to audience members if they tweeted to us, but it didn’t really work out so I saved them for promotion in December when we air the show. Before the concert started I was able to go on stage and get some shots of the audience. I only felt like a superstar for about a second.

To give just a little background on The Piano Guys they are a recent YouTube sensation that have somewhere around 170 million views. The group got together when the owner of a piano shop down in St. George asked a musician who would frequently come in to visit to make a YouTube video with him. The name is somewhat deceiving because 1) There are only two actual musicians in the band -- although they consider the piano guys to be all 5 of the guys who help manage and produce their videos and album 2) Out of the two musicians, only one actually plays the piano! The other is a cello player. Anyways, the guys are super nice. I didn't officially introduce myself, but they did happily let me follow them around a posed for pictures when I asked. They were also very nice to everyone back stage and would be dancing and smiling between takes.

Oh yeah, that was the other thing. Since this program was being filmed for a PBS special (sort of like the 25th Anniversary Les Miserables special minus 20,000 people give or take) they had to repeat many of the songs to get the shots that they needed, change set pieces, put candles on stage, re-tell stories between songs, integrate an orchestra flashmob oh, and a small cameo from Chewbacca.
 

The concert went until about 10 o'clock. By the end it was very cold and very windy and I had stress eaten my way though cold pizza and rice krispy treats to feed... well to feed a television crew.

Thursday I got to come into work and hour late due to the concert. That hour made all the difference in my day racing by. Not to mention I kept my Diet Coke Thursday tradition alive, which lit a fire under me. That night Ben took me out to a fancy date at Denny's. In all seriousness, Denny's is one of my top 3 favorite restaurants and I had to beg Ben to go there (it is not his favorite). We wrapped up the night watching our returning Thursday night shows! 

This morning I woke up early way before my alarm and ended up heading into work an hour early. Today has been a great day. Tomorrow I only have 14 miles on the agenda so it should hopefully be a pretty easy run. I can't believe Chicago is only two weeks away!