G L I S S

I made this flyer for the band Gliss. I first heard of them when they were touring with Billy Corgan a couple of years ago, and more recently when they did an excellent cover of Smashing Pumpkins "Rhinoceros". Myspace and Spin magazine got together with several bands and put out covers of several SP songs. They were all HORRID, except Matt Walker's band Most Dangerous Race who did Signal to Noise (a pumpkins song most people haven't even heard, as it was written for the new album, but not included in the final product), and Ben Kweller who did "Today". I was hoping to enjoy The Bravery's cover of "Rocket", since I like The Bravery a lot, and I LOVE Rocket. But no. Their cover was not that good, sadly. Anyway, Gliss definitely did the best cover; the only one I will continue to listen to in the future.
It was fun making this little flyer, and I may end up doing some further work for Gliss soon. This is the reason I got into this stuff, so that I could have some sort of involvement with the bands that i dig. My own music career didn't exactly work out, but I get just as much satisfaction from working with the visual aspect of the music world (and I'm better at it!)

another headache

I must've had a billion headaches in my lifetime. Since I was as young as 10, I've been getting migraines that just knock me right out. Sometimes I'll have them in clusters of 3 or 4 a week. I used to have them so bad, the only thing I could do was lie in a quiet, dark room until I could finally fall asleep (no easy task with that pain), and hope that when I woke, it would be better. Sometimes it was, other times not. Since Riley was born, 7 years ago, the severity of the headaches has subsided. For the most part, I can stand to be awake, watching tv, working, or whatever. But they're still there, and it's not fun. Lately the problem hasn't been migraines; it's sinus headaches. Still, it's miserable, and it eats up large chunks of my time when I could be feeling fine. Wouldn't that be nice? No panic attacks, no headaches, no stomach aches. It would indeed be nice.

So now another is beginning to take hold, just at the front of my forehead, right above the eyes. The pain is mild, barely there. If I take a few ibuprofen now, and go to bed, I might just be okay. Of course, I HATE going to bed on a Sunday night. It's like I'm giving in, saying "okay, the weekend is OVER!". Defeat. I really hate going to work. I know, it's life, no way around it. But that doesn't make me feel any better. It's depressing. I need a therapist or something.

bayou

Car Wash

Fresh Oil

weekend update

This weekend has been good to me. I started early Saturday morning, waking Randall to go excercise with me. We could both use a lot more of that. Especially me; I'm extraordinarily out of shape. He reluctantly agreed and dragged himself out of bed to join me in biking. Actually, he ran, I biked. It was pretty good until about 30 minutes in. We hit some treacherous hills, and my legs turned to jelly. I got off and walked the bike for a while, and eventually Randall took it to ride. As we're going up one of the steepest hills in the neighborhood, my calves started to cramp. It was excruciating. We finally made it home, hot, sweaty, exhausted. Took a cool bath and felt much better. Even now though, my calves are killing me!

Later in the afternoon, I spent a couple of hours watching a live stream of a Smashing Pumpkins concert. Hooked the ol' laptop up to the stereo, grabbed a box of Honeycombs, and settled in to have my mind blown. I was amazed by how great the band still sounds, and the new songs are even better than I expected them to be. Billy's voice was strong and much better than I've heard in a long time. I recorded the stream, and if you're interested, you can download it here. I can't wait till they finally make their way here, so I can see them for the first time in ten years! I'm as excited about them now as I was then. Being able to watch them live in my bedroom was quite an experience. I do love technology.

The rest of the weekend was spent watching several episodes of 21 Jump St. with Randall and working on my new website. It's been pretty relaxing, one of the better weekends I've had in a while. They're always over way too soon, though. One more month, and I'm finally up for some vacation time at work! I'm as excited for those five days off as I am for that Smashing Pumpkins show. (well, almost).

new site design; new blog

After a year of having the same design on my portfolio website, I thought it was time for a change. This time around, I've decided to add a personal blog to the site. I already have an mp3 blog, but of course I can't really use that space for talking about stuff that's going on with my work, family, and social life. The other day I discovered an excellent blog written by a guy with panic disorder; I thought about how much I'd like to have a blog where I can talk about my own struggles with this. What better place than here? So you're likely to find just about anything here. I'm going to try not to hold back or censor myself here. And for now...that's all.