I'm already pretty bad at getting back to people quickly, but the last few weeks have been especially bad.  There's this project at work that's eaten up a lot of my time and sanity, and my car's kind of broken-down for the last week because I'm never home during daylight hours.  Then there were the four NIN shows the past week, which I attended without missing a day of work.  In the evenings, I've been fixing computers and websites, and little-by-little, the car.

Lucky for me my dad's out of the country and let me borrow his, otherwise things would be even more complicated. 

When I do have off, which is basically Saturday, I've got to take Mel to work, and I usually go see the plays she's in.

Hopefully people understand that even while I may be incommunicado, it's not because I want to ignore my friends.  I'm just crappy at juggling, and I pad my time in-between 'work' with the veg-out time I don't normally get. 

I never get to just sit and listen to music anymore.  I haven't had time to play music anymore. 

Secretly though, I blame the television.  Mel's much more into having a television on, and I tried quite successfully to kick myself of the habit years ago.  Now that it's on and we have cable, I get sucked in, and it's an awful, awful waste of mind for me.  I can't get anything done at all with the television on, which is why I've done away with it in the past.

I've also got to get back on track to getting MS Certified by the end of the year.  Fuck.  This last week was supposed to be a nice break, but a wave of stressful activity helped to neutralize the positive events that took place.

I wonder if things ever were really less busy, or if this is just a reaction to all the putting-off I might have done in years past.

P.S. -- I am not complaining about my awful, awful existence, I am explaining what I have been up to, which is exactly what I choose to and like to do. 

I'm doing everything I can not to rage about this.

A few months ago, it came to my attention that Guitar Center was having a real steal on Pacific drum kits.  I was using Jamie's brother-in-law's drums for Slow Andy, and they sucked real bad.  Brand was Sunbeam or something like that.  So I asked if I could tap into the Slow Andy pile of cash for a new kit.  I spent every last penny we had saved up from shows and shirt sales on a new kit and a new cymbal to go with it.

The space we practiced in up until Sunday was at Steve (the bassist)'s house.  The cats there like to shit all around the equipment, and Steve and Karen are slow to pick it up from week to week, so it was kind of smelly, but before Karen got engaged to Steve and kicked out all his friends,  Jamie's cat Gir used to pee on piles of cables, so it was kind of old hat.  Kind of.  In that now the room smells a hell of a lot worse.  More specifically, I noticed a few months ago that my drum kit smelled like cat pee.

Every time we packed up for a gig, my car would smell like cat pee too.  It was pretty awful.  I made a lot of noise about potty-training cats, picking up feces, that sort of thing, but it didn't really make a difference.  For months, the cats would shit in that room, who knew where they peed, and my car and drums would smell like cat pee.

Well, we were finally given the boot from Steve's place -- Karen's taken down all the posters and our band's fliers and painted it pink and purple and put two pianos in the room.  Good riddance, gaudy decor and cat urine.  Or so I thought.

I had an epiphany last week.  "What if," I thought, "the cats were crawling into the sound hole in my kick's front head and were peeing on the pillow?"  The thought stirred my bowels, and my brain panicked a little, so I avoided thinking about it.  However, when packing the equipment on Sunday to move, I thought I had better take a look.

The kit was sitting in my basement for a week and a half.  When I pulled the pillow out... it was soaked.  The screws holding the hardware in underneath had turned black and deteriorated.  The wood was stained.  I just bought this fucking kit.  Words cannot express my rage as I dangled that urine-soaked pillow over to the trash can and threw it out. 

On one hand, I'm to blame for not having thought of it sooner.  I put a pillow in there, I use black kick drum heads, the front one with a hole in it.  I use the drums, no one else.

But on the other hand, what the fuck drives a cat to crawl into a kick drum to pee?  How hard is it to fucking potty train cats?  You put them into the litterbox once, and they go there the rest of their life. 

So, I'm searching Google for remedies to cat pee on hardwood, and it's not looking very good.

Your stains might be so deep that you can't bleach them out.  You might try sanding them down first to remove the sealer; this should allow better penetration into the wood and increase the possiblity of cleaning.  It might also help to really saturate the wood to get down into the fibers.   Find a really bad place, hopefully in a closet or a corner and just experiment. See what you can do.

Options might be to try to stain the floor a really dark color, but that might not work either as you may still have dark spots.  You might consider having an engineered hardwood installed over it.

Basically it looks like my options are a) Sand, wood-bleach, and refinish, or b) there is no b, the brand new drum shell is fucking ruined.  It's not even like I paid for it myself, I spent all the band's money on this kit. 

I guess it's time to put that 6th grade wood shop class know-how to work, before it gets cold outside.  Fucking hell.  

Oh, you can look at the damage now:
http://www.theninhotline.net/argh.jpg  

"Thank you for your recently placed CD duplication order with DiskFaktory.  There is an issue regarding the audio of your order that needs your attention. Your order has been placed on hold for the following reason:

Major Burn Errors
Needs Better CD-R Media"

That's just wonderful.  Played fine before I sent it to them.  I have to go and buy a new spindle of fancy CD-Rs and burn a better copy this time around, I suppose. I burned the dang thing at 1x speed too, hoping to eliminate as many problems as I could.

To those who had questions before about the TFA CD release, it's going to be available on CDbaby, online at places like iTunes, and in Baltimore you'll be able to pick it up at any Record and Tape Traders.  There are 100 physical CDs being made in this run.  If they all sell, I'll make more.  Thanks for the interest!

I finally collected on my judgement against Kelli Harman.  I have already earmarked a portion of that money for what it was originally intended -- creating 100 Tears for Agnes CDs, to be sold online via CDbaby and in the greater Baltimore area at Record & Tape Traders locations.  And probably on iTunes and the like, as well.

It's about fucking time.     

I don't really listen to metal, but for some reason I like to check out Blabbermouth.net for music news, pretty much on a daily basis. Lately, clicking on a news story brings up an interstitial ad, and going to the front page brings up one of those full page [iframe] jobbies with some awful flash ad for ringtones on it. Using Firefox and Adblock, this isn't so disasterous, but for the first few times I had to deal with it, it really pissed me off. Also, it appears that Google's spam filters have finally learned German. Somehow I found myself on Wonkette, that political blog that got so much press in recent years. I took a look at their ad rates. They get less traffic than The NIN Hotline, and charge $500 a week for a 468x80 banner ad. Jesus christ! People have told me, for about six years now, that I should have ads on my site. Honestly, seeing numbers like that makes it sound initially appealing. If I landed regular advertising at that rate from one customer a month, that would be an additional $26,000 income. Fuck me! But then, I think people frequent the site I run not only because we pretend we run a tight ship, but because we're not showing them shit they don't want to see. The NIN Hotline is word-of-mouth in action. (And also, generous linkage from nin.com) Last month, we got 7,620,984 hits from about 200,000 'sites' (unique IPs, whatever they may really represent.) I only take up 1/3 of the page above-the-fold for navigation and masthead. The site loads quickly, and shows you exactly what you came to see on the front page, and there is so much more useless NIN information than you'll ever need to see residing in the sites listed in the navigation, it's really nuts. If we put ads up, it would mar the slowly-more-uniform look of the site with something designed by someone outside the staff, pushing something that they have to pay money to get people interested in. And then what of the all-volunteer staff... should they become contracted workers? How would their pay get divvied out? Would I get in trouble for having 700 articles reprinted online without permission in our archive, since I'd be making money off them? Of course, the downside to popularity is the cost of running a service. The site only costs me about $600 a year, between hosting and domain name costs. But that's usually offset when I do an NPR style fund drive. Everything evens out. Whatever.

I just spent the last hour and a half cleaing my eight year old, black IBM Trackpoint Keyboard. I got this thing for $5 at a computer sale once, and picked a second one up for $15 at a later sale a couple of years ago. Not having to move my fingerts off the keyboard to use the mouse owns in so many ways. The thing is built like a fucking tank, and sells regularly on eBay for no less than $45 (+$15 shipping). I keep the second one around for parts in case anything breaks on this one. I also have font catalogs. FONT CATALOGS. Time to go eat some curry.