well, i took a couple days off work last week (thurs. and fri.) for a little post-birthday mini-vacation at the ol' homestead. had a nice visit with my parents, and managed to not do a damned thing for two days straight. never even got dressed. i happily wandered about the house in my ratty robe, watched a little (ok, a lot of) TV, helped my little bro get his computer back in working order, and also taught him some guitar exercises to help hone his skills. of course, this is not to say that my skills are anything to write home about at this point, but i have picked up a few things here & there. altogether it was a very nice, fairly mentally healthy visit… my parents and i didn't get into a single argument. of course, we didn't talk about any "controversial" subjects either, but that's beside the point.

we (that is, the band and i, that is, lucifigous prick) attempted on sunday to get a recording by just mic'ing the practice room using a single mic and jim's crappy tascam 4-track cassette recorder. needless to say, the setup was sub-optimal. right now, we're hoping to copy-cat Old Man (that would be our dear blog-departed paul's musical concern with family funny-man neil) and rent a multi-track digital recorder so we can… i was about to say "do our songs justice," but i hardly think that applies… i'll just say "get a decent recording," and leave it at that.

but, at the very least, we do seem to be happy with the songs we've got so far, and everyone we've played them in front of has enjoyed them (at least, they've told us that…). we're thinking it's time we got out there to strut our stuff a little bit. we're also very seriously considering duping out whatever eventual "good" recording we can hack together, with the intent of supplying our friends with copies, sending them off to a bazillion independent labels, and possibly sneaking them onto the racks at the local record stores. perhaps i'll upload some tracks here for your listening pleasure as well.

but enough self-promotion and acting like i'm some silly rock star.

i've been attempting to motivate myself today (having nada to do at work) with getting a new (non-amazon-specific) wishlist together for the upcoming holiday season, but i can't think of a damned thing that i want and that anyone would be willing to purchase for me. not only that, but i can't think of any damned online stores to go to to even find the stuff i might want. i'm drawing a total blank. i'm never good a this sort of thing. but, i have installed the wishcentral.com bookmarklet in my browser, so now, whenever i find something i want, i can just click a little button and add it to my wishlist… wherever i am. ooh! i just thought of something! TDK Mojo MP3-CD Player. there's one thing.

anybody got any suggestions? what cool cheap stuff do i need?

ah well.

the puffin's gone now, it was fun while it lasted. if you do as brian says and , perhaps we can convince him to at least keep the a-go-go going as a record review repository. the man's got a taste and a knack for music, and his reviews to date have always been enjoyable reading in themselves. anyway, sad to see paul hang up the blogging hat, but sacrifices must be made sometimes in the interest of things you're more… uh… interested in. yeah.

fortunately, immediately after he wrote his last post, and shortly before i read the damned thing, i spent 15 or 20 minutes getting his archives fixed up real nice so they're accessible again. so, (and since i'm the proprietor of coffeemonk.com) we'll probably keep puffin-a-go-go up as long as we can, so you can all continue to visit and seek its wisdom.

anyway, i've given my assurances to the concerned mr. hall that i have no intention of turning bipolar into an unbalanced "unipolar" (his words, folks… well, i added the "unbalanced" part). i won't lie. i may be sporadic as fuck, as i have been in the recent past, but i'll keep doing it until my stalkers finally corner me and chain me up in their basement (or, y'know, i really get sick of the whole thing).

boy. what the hell kind of post was that?