ahhhhhh…wings. i really love monday nights. there's just something about $.20 wings, $5 pitchers of beer and hanging out with friends. it really can't be beat.

well…maybe being able to get more sleep beats it, but it's a toss up.

other than that, nothing really interesting is going on. after wings joe and i went over to blaine's house and ended up watching the wall in high definition. it was…engrossing. to say the least. i didn't end up getting home until after 4:30am.

and then i was back up at 10am (and then back to sleep until 10:30) to go to lunch with my grandmother before work. right before i left the house, blaine called to tell me that his impending spawn will be a boy. yep…there will soon be "son of blaine." i told him i'd buy the baby an assault rifle if it's a boy. guess i better start shopping.

man…i'd love to get derek hess to design a show poster for L&N…

not much else going on. i'm going to columbus on friday or saturday to spend the long weekend with the girl. just takin' it easy until then…

seems like the last month has been a major upheaval, lots of crap going on, but it's mostly just busyness, frustration, and happiness.

the band's been practicing, and though i've totally neglected the site since before the last show, we're really not dead. in fact, we've a show coming up this weekend, which i've only just finished making flyers for, that i hope to get up around town tomorrow before practice. our second show with a drummer, and we've been coming up with ideas of how to change things around to make us happier… more on that later.

sara's and my wedding plans are proceeding apace, and we've actually been talking about the possibility of buying a house or condo prior to the festivities (once the lease is up at the current abode). we're getting ready to send out "save the date" cards, and she's been dress shopping. we finally finished "catholic wedding school" so that's thankfully out of the way, and we didn't even have to endure a great deal of that "natural family planning" crap the popesters like to foist on people. yippee.

add to all that fun the fact that sara's finally started back to school, and our schedules have been in major flux trying to adjust back into that whole routine. we're starting to settle in now, so i'm hoping to start getting some work done again.

which leads me to the next exciting thing (for me, anyway). i finally, after years and years of wishing, finally bought myself a swanky new laptop… an AMD Athlon 64 beast of fury and brilliance, that has caused me no end of heartache the past couple weeks mainly due to my insufferable need to wrest complete control over my machines from the great satan (Windows). So i got the machine and proceeded to poke and prod at it, uninstalling as much as possible and deleting a bunch besides. It was becoming a stripped down monster, but then i made some networking change trying to surreptitiously get a 'net hookup at work, and then i couldn't connect to any of my machines on the home network… so, a couple reinstalls later, a much more cautious takeover attempt, and i've finally got it in order again. i'm still installing some of the day-to-days, but it's mostly up and running. thus, this, my first blog post on the new champion. (named the hard drives after the members of Mudhoney, for those who wonder those things)

also, somewhere in there, i got to hang out with my brother who came up to the fair with the FFA, and i managed to get myself in to see the eye doctor, who told me absolutely nothing helpful. in fact, he said that, not only was there nothing that he could do about the problems that i'd come to see him about, but there is another issue that i wasn't even previously aware of, and which, surprise surprise, he also can't do anything about. some retinal specialist, eh?

and the last bit of life complicating news is that i managed to get started working on a little freelance project for some friends (and with an old Corvus coworker–ben), a thing which is currently moving slowly, but positively. i've been wanting to try to take on some freelance stuff, so this should be a good opportunity to see if i can manage to balance the leisurely bits of my life with actual obligations to others.

so, bunch of stuff going on, a lot of it just tedious, time consuming, and schedule wrecking, but thankfully enough of it happy and fun that i've not minded the other bits too much. so, here's to another 'bout of time wrestling.

yesterday was one of those awesome late summer days. my buddy brent had a small little pool party. we all converged on brent's house on what was supposed to be a horribly rainy day and ended up having a blast. the rain held off and the sun even came out for a little while (giving me a bit of sunburn on my shoulders and some on my face). many games of pool volleyball were played, and it was just a whole lot of fun. we're hoping to have another one the weekend after next, as a "last pool party of the year" kinda thing.

prior to yesterday, i had not been swimming at all, this year. my legs are now profoundly sore. i really need to start getting more exercise.

the show went pretty well on friday night. we butchered (or rather i did) the second to last song we played, but brought it back home with a new song. i broke a string on the second song and dropped about a million picks. oh well. there were a lot of people there, we didn't sell any shirts, we met some new friends (a band called christine from nashville)…everything worked out.

speaking of L&N, we've finished the demo (aside from mastering) and posted one of the songs on our myspace page. we may offer the full demo up for download when we launch our full website.

and now we're playing another show at woody's on sept. 24th. we're keeping to about a show a month, at this point. i'd like to play somewhere besides woody's, but at least we're not having to expend any effort to play these shows. all we have to do is show up and play. not a bad deal, really.

even though i'm at work and i hate it, i woke up this morning to an email from the girl. i'd say that balances out just about any amount of crap i get dealt today.

jesus. i've completely dropped the ball on posting, this week. i wish i could say i've been busy, but i really haven't. i've just been sitting around the house the past couple of days, doing nothing. i've had a shitty stomach thing going on, so at least i have a quasi-excuse.

i did go see garden state with the girl on tuesday, though. it wasn't half bad. i'd even say it was good. but brooksie seems to think it's the greatest thing since they started slicing bread, which i'm not really agreeing with. he's also saying it was better than eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, which has me thinking he's gone completely insane.

for the record, i actually started a post on monday, but i closed out of firefox without saving it, so it was lost. oddly enough, it had the same title as this one.

i've come to the conclusion that i really, really hate my fucking job. even after having a rather long mid-week break from it due to my illness, i hate it. i think i actually hate it even more. i swear…if my job were a human being, i'd kill it. i'd kill it and spend the rest of my life in prison laughing to myself, saying "i got you in the end, job! you ain't ever gonna fuck with me again!"

or maybe i'd just punch "job" in the face and tell him i fucking quit.

either way, we have a show tonight, which i will probably be late for, due to my ridiculously shitty job. i asked them if i could squeeze out a little early, due to the fact that i have an obligation to rock a few total strangers over at woody's, but they declined, saying "we're too busy."

yeah…i'd also spit in "job's" face right after i quit.

man…i really need to stop listening to so much queens of the stone age. otherwise i'm going to completely hate the band in another week or two. then again, hot snakes is still one of my favorite bands of all times, and i've overplayed them to death. hmmm…

danny cash whipped us up an awesome flyer for next friday's show. it was based on a design idea that i had…

[ click for larger version ]

danny is the man. If you ever need any screenprinting done, drop him a line through his website. he's the guy that did our kickass L&N shirts.

tonight after work, i'm going straight to q'doba and then to the rud to catch the debutantes and your black star. as brent said before, i'm killing two "friend obligation" birds with one stone. killer!

until then…work work work work work…

it appears the secret to getting wings is to go on wednesday. spring street has half price appetizers on wednesday night (the pitchers of beer, on the other hand, are full price). included in the "appetizers" are wing baskets of varying sizes. last night we got a 20 wing basket and barely finished it. those fuckers were huge.

i really don't know why i've been so obsessed with wings lately.

i think i've had the same headache for a couple of months now. i only seem to have this headache on days i work, though. i wonder what could be causing this…

my buddy mike has a new site up and running, slowsong.com. thanks to him, i now know that they have a web/java-based version of the old hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy text game. awesome. i wish you could save it, though…

i'm drawing blanks, here…i can't think of anything interesting to post…

oh. i'm beta testing a new game for the playstation 2 called killzone. it's actually pretty good. i didn't like it, at first, but it's started to grow on me. unfortunately, the public beta is riddled with bugs (which the dev team has assured us it is working on) and the loading times are pretty slow. other than that, the graphics look pretty damn great. i may even buy the game when it comes out. how's that grab ya?

i got nothin' else…

wow. took me a little while to recover from this weekend. i spent the whole time getting shit for sleep and then walking around a comic convention all day. three days, two of which were followed by all night drunken buffoonery. a good time, indeed.

we got back sunday night. monday afternoon, right after i got up and had some lunch, we headed back into the studio to start polishing off the recording. i got vocals done on three of the songs and then we kinda quit there. i was left with pretty much no voice for the next day and a half. my throat still kinda hurts. something tells me i may have to alter the vocal style of the band a bit…maybe i'll talk to kevin about that when we go back in to finish up and start mixing on saturday.

other than that, it's been business as usual. except that on monday night spring street didn't have any fucking wings. shit…we even went in there early. what gives?!

and now i'm back at work. and hating every minute of it.

nothing resets the happy clock like a quiet night of sitting at home, doing nothing. man…i loves me some relaxin'. and let me tell ya…relaxing is a lot easier now that i have this awesome bean bag chair thing that the girl bought for me. it's my new videogame chair. it rules.

we're not going to get back into the studio until monday. it's kinda disappointing on one level and for the better on another. we've now had time to listen to things and see what needs to be fixed, as well as time to finalize the lyrics, since they've changed every show we've played. more time to get things right will never be a bad thing, i don't guess.

another reason we won't be back into the studio until monday is because i'll be in chicago at the wizardworld comic-con all weekend. i must have a sick fascination with revealing incredibly geeky facts about my ridiculously pathetic life. i need to seek help.

that reminds me, though…i really need to burn some cds tonight for the trip. i'm used to my car's mp3 player. the girl's car only has a standard cd player. it's like being back in the stone age…

time to get to pretending to work…

oh, sweet weekend…why must you end? why must you rain on my parade and force me to face the horror that is monday?

that pretty much sums it up. we did precious little this weekend and it was great. there was a good amount of sitting around the house. a little bit of hanging at the bar. quite a bit of napping. some eating…just a good ol' time. we did discover that spring street (or normal monday haunt, due to the $.20 wings) has an awesome turkey burger on their new menu…delicious!

of course…i'll be back in there tonight for those wings. can't get enough!

i started getting back into final fantasy xi this weekend. just a little bit of running around and killing shit. everyone needs a "killing shit" type of release, right?

i'm supposed to be beta testing a new ps2 game called killzone soon. i hope it's good. the last two games i beta tested sucked (resident evil: outbreak and monster hunter). i've heard good things, but i guess i'll just have to wait and see.

still waiting to get back into the studio to finish up recording. i haven't talked to kevin in a few days, so i don't even know when he'll be available. i'll be gone all this weekend, so i hope it's in the next day or so…

back to work…

someone (i think it was danny) pointed out that there's currently an open source "history of punk rock" being developed, which has a huge amount of info on the louisville "scene." I've added a few things over the past day (a page for L&N, one for brooksie's old band telavet, a few other odds and ends) and i just generally think it's pretty cool. you should check it out, in a non-beastie boys type way.

last night the girl and i ventured up to spring street for some half price appetizers. we met up with dave and the viking and had a good ol' time. we went home right after that and called it an early night.

i will say that zucchini sticks and hot wings together sound great, but in practical application, they have the tendency to make one's stomach quite…unsettled.

i have nothing else for today.