I leave for the airport in 30 minutes; I decided sleep would not be a good idea after spending most of the night / early morning packing things to bring with me and cleaning my "room" (the basement at my parents' house). I hear it was about 75 degrees tonight in Denton; I'm excited about that after freezing my ass off today in Wisconsin.

It has come to my attention that some people think we're playing a show somewhere in Wisconsin on February 8th (I think the Logeman Center in Mequon). Unfortunately, that's not true. You should still head out to that show either way (and I'm sure everyone will -- us not playing won't ruin anyone's day); I just thought I should clear that up. If you see that we're playing any shows, you should probably not believe it.

Check out ADVANTAGE TO NO ONE for an interview I did with my friend Ron, mainly about our trip to Europe.

thats funny.. i have it on my computer and i have your ftp password so i can upload it tonight when i'm back from work and have time.

Just when I thought we were going to have to thump some skulls, Air Canada found our guitars and got them back to us primarily unharmed. They managed to break the handle off of my case, but that happens to lots of cases.

I'm going to put the Quicktime videos up really soon, but I realized that I don't have the "Mercurian Harmonium" video stored on my computer, nor does Jessica have it stored on hers. I'm hoping someone downloaded it and could get it to us somehow, via e-mail or whatever. Please e-mail me if you think you can help out.

I think I'm still on European time, because I feel like it's 4 am right now. I'm very tempted to go take a nap.

This is going to be a rather long-winded post, so please bear with me. I guess you could choose to simply not read it as well; the choice is yours entirely. I’m somewhat speechless now, sitting here thinking about how long ago we left for tour, wondering how it all went by so quickly. When we first set out and we were telling people that we were on tour for nearly five months, we all had fears in the back of our minds that something would prevent us from actually making it through it all. It could have been a number of things. Perhaps booking that many shows would have proven to be too difficult a task and a lot of it would have fallen through, but it didn’t. We also had fears that something would prevent us from going to Europe, but it didn’t. Instead, we had the best time of our lives and saw things we never ever dreamed we’d ever see. If you had asked me even just one year ago if I thought I’d ever have a reason to be in Slovenia or Croatia, I would have probably given you strange looks. I never really imagined being able to see Prague, but I did, and it was just as beautiful as I imagined (and then some).

We may not be the best at showing it, but the way everyone involved in our European tour made us feel about ourselves as people and as a band was truly breathtaking and more than we could have ever expected. We met some amazing people with whom we will hopefully never lose touch. It would be impossible for us to list everyone that helped us out because everyone we met helped us in some way, but we have to send a million and one thanks out to Ralf for booking the entire tour and keeping everything together so damn well, Steffen for letting us stay at his house so many times and for driving us to the airport, Martin and Andy for driving us around and being the two most amazing people we could ever have with us, Seb and Fafa for letting us crash their apartment for six days (including the three days the van was broken down) and for teaching us dirty French phrases, everyone in Kinjite and El Mariachi for being amazing people in amazing bands and for letting us play their shows when we had to cancel our shows in Sweden, Four Random Words for making our trip to England a great one, Crowpath for being super nice guys and teaching us dirty Swedish words… I could go on and on, but really I just want to express thanks to every single person that had any part in making the tour go so well.

No thanks to the people who seem to think we’re “rock stars” for not playing the show in London on the 13th. It’s a long boring story, but basically we were all set up to play and just as we were about to plug in our power converters (boxes that convert European 220 volt current to American 110 volt current), we realized that British plugs differ from plugs used by the rest of Europe. Due to the fact that we only had only about ten minutes of our set left anyway, as well as the fact that we couldn’t play without our pedals, we decided the most polite (not rock star) thing to do would be to quickly get our gear off of the stage so as not to screw over the band playing after us. The bar at which the show was taking place had a strict curfew, and most of the people were there to see the band playing after us anyway. We truly regret the fact that we weren’t able to play, and we’re sorry to the handful of people who came specifically to see us. Please rest assured that our reasons for not playing are based solely on judgments we made at the time pertaining to fairness between us and the other bands on the show and the impossibility of us playing our songs without certain effects pedals, NOT on our “rock star egos” or whatever bullshit words people want to throw around. Perhaps if we wanted to be rock stars, we would have played anyway, even though it would have been a sorry interpretation of what our songs are supposed to be, for the sole reason that we at least would have been paid then. We care too much about the music we make and I’m sorry if we’re cocky because we chose not to half-ass it, but I don’t regret the decision we made.

All that having been said, we’re going to be taking some time off from the band. We just spent nearly five months on tour and, prior to that, we spent five or six nights each week writing and rehearsing songs for the new record – as well as a bunch of weekend shows thrown in here and there. It seems like a good idea to take a little bit of time for our “real” lives (if such a thing even exists), since we just spent an entire year on the band. We’re going to head out on tour again in May, but until then, I’m afraid we won’t really be doing much besides work, school, and every day life type things. Spending time with friends, girlfriends and family that we have been neglecting.

I still feel as though I’m leaving a lot of things out, but there’s just so much to mention that it’s hard to sum it up. Basically, a simple “thank you” to everyone is in order. I probably could have summed it up that way, I suppose.

Anyway, it’s pretty late. It seems especially late to me, because it’s actually 7 am to me. I woke up at 9 am in Germany, after having only slept for 3 hours. Goodnight.

I really don't have time to post in detail right now, but I wanted to say that we're home, safe and sound. We had the time of our lives on this tour, and I am definitely going to go into much further detail when I get the chance. However, there's someone I haven't talked to in almost a month, and that begs my attention much more than anything else at the moment.

I can say this, though: Air Canada lost mine and Jim's guitars today, and we're hoping they show up on another plane. If not, I don't know what we're going to do.

quietus was the pick of the week on the webzine "delusions of adequacy". go here to read about it!

Well, the last european show is happening right now. I am sure the guys had the time of their lives, but back in the states, we sure miss them and can't wait for their arrival home! We hope you boys brought us lots of presents... Have a safe flight back!

Good luck tonight bros! John and I were gonna fly out for this show but me=no passport. see you next week!

Greetings from Germany. Two days ago, in Prague, Nick sliced his finger open while opening a bottle two minutes prior to playing a show. Luckily there was a hospital within walking distance, so by the time I has finished cleaning up the trail of blood in the venue and the pool of blood in the bathroom, he had returned with a massive bandage on his left index finger. He surprised us all by walking back into the backstage area and asking if we were ready to play, which we did immediately. Anyway, sounds like the clothes are done drying, so it's off to the next show. 9 days and 9 shows to go. It's going to be good to be home, but difficult to leave all of the friends that we've made here.

Day two in Eastern Europe and no border hassles so far (knock on wood). We haven't seen much of Croatia, but Zagreb is a very beautiful city. The venue is awesome, too. They made up printed booklets (similar to a cd booklet) with information on all of the shows. There is a page for our show, complete with a picture of Nick doing a death-chop. This is also the second venue in a row with a computer lab.

Both things I wrote about in the last post ended up being true! Two people drove all the way from Italy to see us in play, and we were filmed for national television. We're going to be able to get a copy of whatever they air, which is awesome. We won't be able to understand what they're saying, so they could very well do a segment called "shitty bands from America" for all we know. We didn't get interviewed, however, which is probably in everyone's best interest. We did, however, have to play two extra songs and still hear about how short we played. In America, if you play more than 30 minutes, people will call you a rockstar. Here, if you play less than an hour, people get angry. Strange.

I must be off; I think it's time to eat.

Oh yeah: word has it that the national television station in Slovenia is coming to the show tonight and that they will possibly be interviewing us. Scary. Word ALSO has it that two people drove all the way here from Italy just to see us play. Nervous? I suppose so!

We're currently at the show in Slovenia. It was difficult to find, but we're here now, and that's all that matters. We had some awesome food, and now we're basically waiting for the show to start. Our fears about crossing the border seem to have been pointless, because we were basically waved right in. We'll keep our fingers crossed and hope that we have the same luck over the next few days. I think we all had weird ideas about what Eastern Europe would be like. It's a lot more like western Europe than I imagined. The scenery is a bit more rustic and picturesque, I suppose, but the people here seem exactly the same as everywhere else. By that, of course, I mean that they are awesome, as usual.

We had to say goodbye to our drive Andy yesterday, which was sad, but we are back with our last driver Martin, who is also an amazing guy. We also got Justin back yesterday, so things are going well. We have 7 people crammed into our small van, but it's cold enough that it just makes for a more comfortable ride, temperature-wise.

I'm excited about the fact that I get to go home in about two weeks, but really only for one reason. Other than that, I'm going to miss being in Europe and being on tour. I am not looking forward to having to get another job! Oh well, you have to make sacrifices in life, and that's just part of it, I guess.

i´d just like to say that everything is still going really well over here, most of the shows have been a ton of fun, and the food is still awesome. the only not awesome thing is that we just have one more day with our driver andy (a.k.a. the dude jr.) before we have martin (a.k.a. the dude) so we are all going to be kinda sad that andy is leaving but, at least we are getting some one equally as awesome to replace him. i wish we could have both... they are two of the greatest guys ever.
we head off for eastern europe in a couple days so we are kinda scared about that... well, at least i am. we are actally going to have to go through border checks and stuff like that because most of the countries over there are not in the EU... hopefully we will not have too much trouble. we barely have any merch left so at least it will not be hard to hide it all. plus from what i can gather they don´t really even like to look in the vans... they are more concerned with what you may or may not have concealed in your rectum... yikes.
oh we pick up an extra roadie too... andrew, he is a super awesome guy as well. we met him when we played with his band, kill devil hills, in up state NY this fall. his parents live over here now and he just happens to be here visiting them for a while. he and his friend brooksie (who had to fly home this morning) came to the show last night and we all had a really good time and as it turns out andrew doesn´t really have any thing he has to do in the next few weeks so he is going to come a long for a bit.
we even get justin back tomorrow too... things are turning up fofo. hehe. oh yeah, justin was in rome with his sister for a week... i don´t know if we said anything about that. hmm any way we are very excited to have him back.
well, i should shut up now.. we´d all like to wish brooksie a nice flight by the way.

the € kinda sucks... word