Anyway: Life Like Luster, the new album, got its first press today, thanks to our local alt-weekly paper, The Stranger.

Read the review.

Full disclosure: we paid for this review, by winning an auction for charity that The Stranger runs every year over the holidays called "Strangercrombie." The auction was for "an enthusiastic review of the CD of your choice" which means they kinda, by definition, had to pretend they like it. Keep this in mind when reading. I'm cool with the review regardless. Thanks, Eric Grandy.

I won't even get into all the bogus spammer accounts I have to delete from the .Forum every day.

Here is a preview.

You NEVER get to see a debate like this on the news. Just another reason why I don't need cable, but I'd be lost without an internet connection.

Been laid low by some sort of Sickness over the last few days. In response I stepped up my Alias marathon and actually finished the entire series yesterday morning. Overall grade for all five seasons: big, big thumbs-up. For me the show really breaks down to the story of Jennifer Garner's Sydney Bristow and Victor Garber's Jack Bristow - and the payoff of their steadily growing relationship is huge and heartbreaking at the end. That was a great show (if largely completely preposterous) and I'm glad I took the time to finally get through it.

I'm really sad right now that there's no more episodes to watch. That's the mark of a great show for me, that I go through a period of mourning when it's over. Shows that have hit me that way in the last few years: Freaks And Geeks, Buffy, Six Feet Under, Angel, and now Alias. I know I'll feel the same about Deadwood and probably LOST when those shows end, but for now there's many more episodes to look forward to.

Watching TV on DVD is the way to do it, no question. I have no regrets from my decision last year to disconnect my cable, even with the magic of Tivo.

I guess I'd better be a good boy and take advantage of today's snow day to get my Q406 tax information together. The one benefit of having to do my taxes every quarter is that it makes doing my personal taxes very easy to do.

Never easy to write those checks, though.

With the light now visible at the end of the tunnel for this particular project, I'm starting to have nights during the week where I don't actually have anything planned, and where I can just sit at home and... well, do whatever I want to do. A lot of times that's sit and think about what I want to do, when I'm not catching up on my backlog of DVD's to watch (I'm about halfway through the run of Alias seasons now, and having a great time of it).

We'll finish the album in the next couple of months, and then a good amount of my resources will be devoted to trying to promote it as best I can. I'm hoping to try and book a string of east coast dates in the fall as part of that effort. I don't know yet if that will actually happen or not. There's a lot of variables to pull together for that, but I'm committed to try.

And then... what? And then and then and then. Many possibilities. Some easier than others. Some more paradigm-shifting than others. Some more fear-inducing than others. The smart play is often the one that scares me the most. I've been feeling antsy for a while, feeling the wanderlust. I've got that "My situation is great, but..." feeling. Had it for a while now. I need to find a way to scratch that particular itch. Doing so might require me to bust out of what has become a lushly padded Comfort Zone.

That's always hard.

So, one thing at a time. Take care of the project at hand.

This could be an interesting year.

Part of that stretch of time was spent on a whirlwind tour of east coast family-folk. Great to see everybody, even if my time was short. I belly-ached a lot about the trip, and all the flying hassles and et cetera, but in the end I'm very glad I went. I had a great time.

I did make noises about not wanting to travel next year, though. We'll see what happens. A lot changes in a year's time.

Let's see, did I mention the Strangercrombie auction I won on this .Blog? I think I maybe wrote about it over on MySpace, but I lose track of what I post where anymore.

Anyway, the local alternative weekly paper in town here, The Stranger does a holiday auction for charity every year. Some of the items they auction off are real estate in their paper itself - and I won an auction for "an enthusiastic review of the CD of your choice."

Well, so of course, I'm making them review the new Half Zaftig disc, duh.

Of course, it isn't finished yet, but that don't matta. It's almost finished. Finished enough for a pre-determined enthusiastic review, anyway.

So last night and tonight Darin and I are cranking through all 14 tracks we're working on and making rough "Strangercrombie" mixes of all of them. It's fun hearing the thing start to come together, it really is. We'll be having band pow-wows soon to hammer out the final song list and running order of the album in the next couple of weeks, as well.

I'll be sure to mention here when the Stranger review is online.

Looking forward to 2007. Looking forward to finally finishing this album after two years of hard work on it. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts about it when you finally get to hear it.