I'm back (kind of)

My trusty Excel calculation (=weeknum(today(),1))) informs me that the 44th week of the year is coming to an end quickly, and I have a lot of catching up to do if I'm going to meet my goal of writing one blog post a week this year. So then, a quick update of what I've been up to while I haven't been blogging.

Basically, I've been fucking busy. My last post was at the start of October, and since then I've:

• celebrated Jess's birthday (which was a bonanza)
• celebrated Erin's birthday
• played a gig with Tortured
• driven down to Canberra and back twice
• started doing some research assistant work for Jess' mum
• finished a book and started two more and 
• started jamming with Namazu - a new Newcastle band with a bunch of cool guys, including Ian and Scott from my Exploding Clover days (You can check out some of their stuff here.)

All while also working full-time - it's been absolutely hectic. In fact, this weekend is going to be my first that is reasonably clear in all that time, and it's only because I'm planning on celebrating my birthday. I'm heading out to Potters Brewery in the Hunter Valley for lunch and tomorrow I'll be going out to Springloaded in Gateshead - a room full of trampolines - to throw dodgeballs at my closest friends. Followed by a barbecue.

On the subject of birthdays, Jess's birthday went very well this year - we had dinner and cheesecake with her family one night, we went out for dinner at Fortunate Son the next (awesome restaurant on Beaumont Street, by the by), and we had a barbecue with our friends the day after. And she seems to have really enjoyed her gifts, most of which I coordinated.

Last weekend, Tortured played a gig at The Basement in Canberra with Claret Ash, Psychrist and Cruciform. It was a pretty bad-ass show; all the bands were goddamn heavy, and I think we devastated even though we haven't had as much jam time since I moved to Newcastle. We even had our former bandmate Bobby from Wretch join us on stage, so meaty dual guitars topped off our sound for the night. Once again, I've got to give kudos to Aaron from Claret Ash for letting me use his kit; travelling light between Newcastle and Canberra is a huge bonus for me.

In other news, I saw that today was supposed to mark the beginning of National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo if you insist. I was considering taking part, however, with how little time I have at the moment, I feel I would be crushed by the weight of the 1,700 or so words that I would need to write everyday to complete the challenge. Next year, mayhap.