February:

Ah February. The month of buying. Bought a new old iPod. Bought a snowblower after clearing a driveway took 2.5 hours, with another huge snowstorm looming that night. Tough. I didn't care how much it cost, I was pretty much stuck on wanting to get one.

March seems a little more interesting so far. Went down to Northwest Arkansas (and the home of Wal-Mart) for 5 days (even though we drove through a blizzard on the way down). It's amazing seeing different economies, different climates, different soil. It's all different even though we try to make it all the same.

Saw Brighten at the New Loft in Madison last Friday (first time I've been there since it relocated years ago). Brandy and I saw Brighten with Eisley and Fair out in San Francisco, and they were pretty cool. I don't normally obsess about their type of music (kind of pop-punk oriented), but their songs are pretty amazing to me, and I am obsessing about them a bit. The songs seem to kind of fit the mood that I'm in, which is kind of this melancholic positiveness. The lyrics to their song "More Vacations" are really a perfect example of melancholic positiveness. "...We're taking pictures so we don't forget names or faces and medications... Don't trust anyone anymore." Probably one of the best two minute songs I've heard. Anyway, going to the Loft was weird. Brandy and I fit right in with the parents watching their kids, hanging out towards the back, just kind of taking it all in. It seems like not so long ago that I was going there with my friends, and I was young just like they were. Amazingly, that's the most packed I've seen a club in Madison for a long time. It was great to get part of the new Brighten album too, since it doesn't seem like it's going to get released thanks to Victory Records' (blast from the past record label seems more like big business now than a record label) lawsuit to the label they were going to be on, which has since folded I believe. Brighten sounded pretty good, though the sound was a lot less great than in San Francisco. Lots of standing waves and general muck and mud.

In more music stuffs, I just found out that Ken Andrews is going to be playing a lot of Failure songs on his upcoming tour. He said like a 1/3 of the songs will be Failure songs, from all their records, and like a 1/3 to 1/2 will be new stuff, and the remaining being his other stuff (Year of the Rabbit, ON). This is probably the closest to a Failure reunion as it's going to get. Too bad I'm not going to be able to go to any of the shows in the area at the end of March. Just too much going on in that time frame... a lot more important things...