in one fell swoop

i went out to beans and bagels and cashed my paycheck yesterday and went straight out and got i'd say about 80% of my christmas shopping done. i intend to do some shopping for stefanie today- i've almost got her done for christmas. i've ordered her something online. i'm going to go out today in the hopes of reducing the number of items i have to special order for her so as to avoid that whole 'will it/won't it?' question.
the acoustic show is fully on- i just got a confirmation email about it today from mike. it's going to be us, ad astra and two hardcore punk bands. pretty sweet right?
so things aren't quite as bad as i had thought. i am going to be working on christmas eve- i am opening and the store is supposed to close by noon. it'll be really sweet- it'll be me and my two favourite people that day- anthony and jenee. i have another opening shift on tuesday- those will both be a bit of an ordeal (i'm going to have to get up at 5:15am or so) but i figure it's the least i can do since i'm going out of town and everyone's going to be covering for my ass when i go home. a little sacrifice is definitely in order. plus i'll be completely dusted by the time i get on that plane so ideally i'll just sleep through the whole fucking thing. that'd be really nice. our flight doesn't leave until 4:40 so i'm not sure what we're going to do with that extra hour or so. it would be quicker for me to leave from work because it'd be an hour long ride as opposed to a 50 minute trip back to my apartment and then an hour and a half long ride to the airport. i don't even think there's time for that in the equation.
so i'm all good i think. for now. i'm sure something else will rear it's ugly head.
a few things from yesterday- 1) 'christmas song revisited' is done 2) the 'dandelions' ep is completed 3) unfortunately my cd-burner went on the fritz so mixing them down will be very tricky. i did a bunch of sweet sounding mixes of the new stuff that we just did with katelyn and the cd-burner had gone on the fritz at that point. it's purely a recording function mishap- it sounds fine going into there, but once it's recorded it sounds weird. it also did something really odd while it was dubbing something for stefanie- it jumped over a portion of the surface of the disc somehow while it was burning. ironically the music on the disc came out nicely. i'd be more worried about it, but i think that this is not the first time it's acted weird. one time it was doing similar things and all i did was get into the habit of turning it off in between uses (which hadn't happened for a really long time) so i think it's possible that it'll function perfectly well. i hope so anyway because i'm going to go home and do some mixdowns to the dat recorder and then mix those things down to cd. i also have a new song to demo today.
we watched 'the dark knight' last night and it was fucking awesome! loved it! i liked it a lot more than the original tim burton 'batman.' i've never seen 'batman begins' so i can't really say for sure but i'd certainly be willing to bet that 'the dark knight' is the best of the batman movies. it's about as realistic as a superhero movie could possibly ever be. what helps is that the characters aren't endowed with unexplained super powers. i'd completely forgotten that two-face was in the movie. naturally when harvey dent turned up i figured he'd be made into two-face in order to sow the seeds for a sequel.
yup, heath ledger was awesome as the joker. i'd even say that he did a better job than jack nicholson did. he was definitely a lot scarier. i was a bit skeptical when i heard it was him playing the joker, but i will eat those words.
one of my favourite moments was when they did that whole lower wacker chase sequence and they did that part where batman rushes towards him on that bat-motorcycle thing or whatever. the semi had turned over and we rewound and paused because saw an address on one of the buildings and it very prominently displayed '29 south lasalle' which is where smart resources' offices are- kind of cool. we both thought it was really cool that they pretty much seemed to have filmed the entire movie in chicago. my sister was walking around one night after work (she used to finish up there around 7 at night) and she worked on lasalle and evidently was walking around somewhere where she wasn't supposed to be and they were filming and some people walked up to her and told her that she wasn't supposed to be there because they were filming a movie and she said 'what movie?' and they told her some ridiculous decoy title and she just said 'yeah, right' and walked off. it wasn't exactly a secret when they were filming the movie what they were filming. my first day at smart resources there were trailers lined up clark street in front of some federal building. it was pretty sweet. so it was really nice to finally get to see it.
i can't believe that it's now less than two weeks until christmas. i have a feeling the next two weeks will go by like lightning and then the visit will feel like it was two days long.
i've got a nice early start going here, so hopefully that will mean that i will get some things done. we have two parties to go to tomorrow- both with some fairly precarious train rides. one is going to sam and ben's who live out near permanent records (well somewhat). the other is the aforementioned bird machine holiday party which is out in skokie. we are going to be taking the yellow line for the first time ever. i am fairly certain that that one will be a bit shorter.
i think i shall get going now and get my day started.