I'm about to start cleaning up the house. There's still a good bit of stuff sitting around from the great chaos of a few weeks ago. Hell, there's enough sitting around that you can't tell that we ever cleaned up at all. So today my main goal is to get things sorted out, put what needs to go up in the attack, and generally make it so that we can move around in here.

We took Mama shopping yesterday. She had some things that she needed to do. So we went to Eastridge Mall in Gastonia. Gods, off all the places to go during the week of Christmas! After Mara and I had bought some things we left Mama there and went over to run a few errands of our own. We went to Circuit City to pick up Mama's hard drive (more about that later), but couldn't get it because someone (me) forgot to print out the confirmation number. But we went to OfficeMax and got her a fresh copy of Windows XP (more about that later). Mara picked up some stuff from Michael's next door and we went back for Mama. Mama did her shopping and we kind of waited. I was supposed to get my hair cut at the mall, but the lady who cuts our hair wasn't in. After the mall ordeal, we wound up at Jackson's Cafeteria. I didn't want to go out to eat because I wasn't feeling good, but felt better once I'd eaten.

All in all, I really enjoyed being out with Mama a bit before Christmas. But the one thing that struck me last night was how miserable people seem to be everywhere we went. I had to wonder why that was.

As for Mama's computer and us putting in Windows XP and a new hard drive, we're of the opinion that her computer has a virus. We ran several virus scans. The first detected 4 viruses before the program crashed and the second didn't detect anything. Hmmmm. Just to be on the safe side we decided to remove the hard drive altogether and just start from scratch. So that's why we're getting a new hard and OS for Mama's computer.

I played around with Dawg's bass amp (a Behringer Bass V-amp) last night. I *ahem* wanted to make sure *ahem* that everything was working correctly. Okay, so I have to admit that this has me a little excited about getting my own. Mama's getting me
one of these and a guitar V-amp. Man, my Alembic sounded fucking good. And this on a pair of $10 Behringer headphones. If the guitar V-amp sounds as good I may not ever buy other amps to record with.

Speaking of this kind of stuff, I dropped off Dawg's bass and my Ibanez Destroyer at Cleveland Music here in Kings Mountain. I've been wanting to take the bass to Andy at Sam Ash in Charlotte for ages, but just never seemed to get off of my ass. Well, I was going to take it over yesterday when we went out, but found out that Andy had taken the week off. So, since the bass is something of a Christmas present for Dawg, I took it to Cleveland Music. And since I'm getting a guitar V-amp for Christmas, I took the Destroyer as well. I don't know what to expect from these guys, but I figure this is a good chance to find out, huh?