i have a passion sweet lord

back again. a bit of an exhausting week. we did some housesitting and really didn't get very much sleep- especially the first night. jay and diana's cat terrorized us all night. surprisingly it didn't catch up to me until last night. i woke up at almost noon today- haven't done that in quite a while. i didn't go to sleep that late last night- almost 2am. i feel pretty good though. it seems to me that i got a lot of rest over the holiday and was able to get back on track. very nice.
i went over to will's last night and watched every episode of 'metalocalypse'- it was pretty fun. i really liked the show a lot. i didn't realise that it was by brendon small of 'home movies' fame. he did all of the music as well as four of the voices- quite impressive. funny stuff. i wanted to embed the dr. rockso video onto here, but embedding has been disabled. bummer. i think that means that it's being embedded too much. not that much of a surprise. when i was watching the video the first time it took me a few times to realise that he's skiing down a mountain of cocaine. wow. hysterical.
i'm listening to the spiritualized recording from the metro. i wish that it was better- but what can you do really. if i hadn't recorded over the original minidiscs i would attempt a remaster of it like i did with the my bloody valentine show. at least for my own edification.
there is a feeding frenzy on spacemen 3 vinyl going on at ebay right now. all of it closes on sunday. yipes. i already have to buy tickets for shows this weekend- neko case tickets go on sale tomorrow (at least the presale does) and brian jonestown massacre goes on sale on saturday. i've got to get tickets for both of them immediately because i'm worried they'll sell out quickly if i don't get on it. there are also a ton of shows coming to town in february that i'd like to go see- appleseed cast, alla, juana molina (that one's at the morse theater, which would be about a five minute ride from where we live) and then there's primal scream coming in march as well. eleni mandell plays at schuba's inbetween that and bjm. i think i'd like to finally go and see her play already- i've been meaning to for about 10 years now. i don't have any of her records, but have heard tons of her music and i really like it. i think now's the time too- i'm so into that female singer-songwriter thing right now. that's about my musical taste- female singer-songwriters with heartbreaking voices, sad bastard folky shit, psychedelic weirdness from any era, 60's music and then holly golightly (who covers just about all three of those umbrellas). we've missed holly golightly twice the last time she came through. i even missed deerhunter when they came through town last. kind of a shame because i suspect they might not bother to do as much touring for 'microcastle' as they did for 'cryptograms.' they came through chicago about three times in 2007. we were going out to a nice dinner with claire and her mom for stefanie's birthday and i didn't want to have to run off in a hurry from it. i also didn't have any money (as per usual). speaking of which i really need to get this survey filled out for this sleep study i want to try and do. this one is a bit less involved than the others i've applied for. kind of nice. it would pay about $150. not very much, but hey, money is money. i've got so much to do this year. it's a bit scary, really. i've heard that obama was planning on doing another economic stimulus thing. i haven't placed too much reliance on such a thing, and if it does happen i plan on using at least half of it to pay to my credit card balance. the same goes for if we get a refund (by some weird miracle). of course i'm still waiting on my w2s. i don't anticipate getting those much earlier than the last possible second, which is a bit annoying because we like to file really early so that we get our money back faster. we always have it routed to stefanie's bank account. this year we're probably going to file online too so hopefully that means it'll be that much faster. we like to file so early because then if we owe money we have some time to raise it (like we did last year).
i was looking at my earnings on my paycheck at my year-to-date from a paycheck in november and it was kind of sad. i hadn't even made more than $10000. wow. i am amazing. i always get a bit down on myself for never being able to follow through with all of my big plans but seeing that was pretty sobering- it suddenly became amazing that i was able to get that much done with that little. quite impressive. the only point at which i ended up having to break out the credit cards was during the tour and only towards the end of proceedings.
i am rambling. so what else is new?
i have a recording session coming up soon- katelyn is coming by to do some more violin stuff. i can't get ahold of chris. that's kind of a bummer- i was going to try and do something kind of revolutionary- i was going to try to record them both at the same time and see how it worked so as to save myself some time during mixing and save myself from having to bounce tracks (which is going to be a necessity for some songs). i also have a theory that both players will play better when they are laying their parts down together. some of the stuff that is on tap to record is still in very early stages and if i can get it done in by using as few inputs as possible, then that will help me a lot as things progress. other than that we're kind of limited in what kind of stuff can be accomplished over the next four or five months. i'm at logger-heads with my equipment yet again. i'm going to try and buy some more mics again so as to record the drums a bit better. i'm getting to be quite the stickler for drum sounds. i don't know why this is- it's just something i've always felt was a weak point because they are the hardest thing to record well. my standards have also gotten frighteningly high in that department. i think we were listening to something that i used to think pretty highly of and the drums sounded kind of lame to me. that's been happening on a lot of records that i used to love. a good example of this is 'gish' by smashing pumpkins- man the drums sound totally crappy on that album. this is true of a lot of butch vig's records. steve albini does the best with drums. even a few things of his don't sound that dynamite to me if i'm in the right (or wrong as the case may be) mood. i guess i should relax a bit and not really worry about it so much (or spend so much time worrying about it). i just want to push things along and improve. i've really liked the drum sounds i've been beginning to get. i'm happy with the way that things are progressing in that department, but it's a long road of constant improvement. once i finished 'christmas song revisited' i was really unhappy with the drum sound we got. i listen to it now though and i really like it. a lot of it was that there's no really clear-cut way to record a snare drum being hit with a mallet very well. so that track has both stefanie and me playing drums. i doubled her part playing it the same way with a regular drum stick. it took some doing- that's something that's kind of hard to get down on tape- doubling a drum part. especially one that's so ridiculously stark.
i have been doing a middling job of detoxing off of sugar over the course of this month. i can't remember when i started but i believe it was right around new year's day. i've been trying to keep off of it for at least a month. i don't think i've been doing that great of a job. i've been ingesting things with some sugar. if it doesn't have very much sugar i go ahead and let it slide. joe's o's have 1g of sugar, for example. i figure that that's okay to let slide. i've accidentally been eating more than i'd like simply because sugar is in fucking everything. it's even in soy milk. grrrr. so i am now coming from the point where i just want to lay off of the sorts of items that are really heavy in refined sugars- i haven't touched a muffin, scone, cookie or sweet bread at work the entire time. i haven't bought a donut the entire time either. those were where i was getting most of my sugar intake as well. i've also started doing 100 crunches every day. so far i've lost about 10 pounds. i weighed myself at jay and diana's and i weighed about 210 pounds (that was with clothes on- my clothes account for another five pounds apparently). it seems to me that the lack of sugar would've made more of a massive difference if it were true that that is another factor in my weight gain. i think the main thing has been all of the bagel-eating that i have been doing working at a bagel shop. i didn't moderate when i started either- i'd have at least two a day when i first started. that's very bad. i think as long as i can do some physical activity to offset it i'm hoping that that will enable me to get back to a good weight- i think it would be a really great accomplishment if i got back down to 195 even. ideally i'd like to get down to 175 eventually because that's how much i weighed when i was living in portland and i felt very healthy during those years. we walked around a lot back then- we used to walk all the way downtown from our apartment on 23rd and hawthorne. often times we'd walk downtown all the way to powell's, go look around and then walk back home. i even had to walk home from union station one time when i got back from london because i had absolutely no money whatsoever for bus/cab fare. it was kind of a sad state of affairs to be in. i think i crossed the hawthorne bridge and got to about se 7th before stefanie caught up with me in the car. the honda civic. o how i miss thee lem. that car probably wouldn't have made it this far though thanks to the complete idiots who 'repaired' it at carstar after my only accident. every time i'd take the car in to get repaired for anything the mechanic would mention something about how it was put together very shoddily by someone in the past. i'd always just nod my head and sigh. that was a fantastic car until that happened and it was so fantastic to have a car that reliable and easy to drive. it got such amazing gas mileage too- it could get more than 40 mpg on the highway. i don't even want to think about how much cheaper that west coast tour would've been if we'd been able to do it with lem. i think that it's entirely possible that the money we earned in bozeman could've paid for all of our gas on that trip. it's even possible that we would've had money left over once we got back. but that's just how we do everything- by the skin of our teeth. it's what makes us who and what we are.