I’m not one of those who follow his career. I don’t even have any of his songs in my iPod. But I loved the concert so much that I’m thinking of buying one of his albums as soon as I get a chance. And I hope they’ll come up with a “Live in Manila” release soon.

The hubby and I were lucky to be among those who received invitations, courtesy of Smart Infinity, to his concert last October 17. Since it was a gala, we prepared ourselves for a prim and proper evening of ballades.

Thankfully, the concert had a lot more energy than we expected. He sang the soulful songs he’s known for, of course, but a good spiel and some crazy antics made the concert so much more fun!

At one point, he walked through screaming fans on the second and first levels of the concert hall. He sang while shaking hands, getting kissed and hugged. He did a hilarious karaoke bit and sang parts of Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive, Elton John’s Tiny Dancer and Rihanna’s Umbrella. He also played the drums and a vocoder (a synthesizer that makes a single voice sound like a choir).

For me, one of the best parts of the show was when rock violinist Lucia Micarelli, uber sexy in her shimmering gown and bare feet, jammed with the band in a remake of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir.

Other highlights of the evening were Groban’s performance of The Prayer with Lani Misalucha; Lullaby/Weeping, a two-part composition inspired by his trip to South Africa; and To Where You Are, which he sang in an episode of Aly McBeal five years ago. People say the last one made him famous.

If our count is correct, there were 14 numbers in the main show. But, he had such a long encore, with five songs that included Broken Vow, You Raise Me Up and She’s Out of My Life. I think he ended the evening with 19 songs in all. He showed signs of tiredness by then but he seemed to have truly enjoyed the evening as well.

The event was such a big hit that, just halfway through the concert, Groban already hinted at a comeback.

When I realized that the WordPress.com TOS prohibits me from putting AdSense codes on this blog, I bought two domain names, signed up at BlueHost, downloaded the CMS from WordPress.org, exported my files and chose a new theme.

Two weeks later, I am back at my WordPress.com address.

I’m extremely frustrated! So much has happened – watched the Josh Groban concert last Wednesday, Glorietta 2 was bombed last Friday (or at least that’s one of the angles investigators are looking at), and Tessa Prieto-Valdes won in Celebrity Duets last Saturday.

There’s so much to blog about but I can’t get into my Admin page! Worse, I had been looking forward to a week of “serious” blogging this week since the hubby’s off to the Tokyo Motor Show.

It all started with a buggy theme called Beautiful Sunrise 1.0. It’s apparently so buggy there are several threads on it in the WordPress.org TechSupport Forum. Well, I finally figured out how to fix it for good– trash the theme “manually”. Unfortunately, for some odd reason, now I can’t access my BlueHost cPanel.

Well, serves me right. I’ve been making one mistake after another in this exercise.

First, I bought a couple of domain names for $30 when I could have gotten them for free if I had immediately signed up with BlueHost instead of buying the domains first from Automattic (the folks that run WordPress.com). Then, I downloaded a theme and implemented it without doing some research first on its compatibility with the latest WordPress version. Lastly, I tinkered with the troubleshooting tips from a forum thread on the buggy theme when I should have checked out the moderator’s response to my own thread. The response – trash the entire folder containing the theme’s files and WordPress reverts back to its default theme.

So, I’m back with WordPress.com until I get technical support from BlueHost, and trash the Beautiful Sunrise theme.

Oh, by the way, I finally got my Google AdSense account today. The irony of it all!

I can look at it as some cosmic cruel joke. But, I prefer to look at it as light at the end of the tunnel.