Boring because of being boring.

I have always been a huge fan of the band Tool. However, the typical Tool fan is generally perceived as an intentional misfit (as opposed to a genuinely unusual or unique person) and as someone who feigns depression and darkness and the like (my own occasional depressions are in fact not voluntary, to be sure, and I'd trade them for sunshine if I could). As such, I am usually not gigantically vocal about my appreciation of and affection for the very few albums that Tool has actually given us over the years and for the band itself. Anyway, I decided to check out the Tool site today to see if there was any news about a new album, the last one being released in May 2001, just before I graduated from college. The site has not been updated in some time, because there is not much going with Tool these days, they say. This is my very round-about way of explaining my web-absence lately. Not much interesting has been going on. We bought a front cover for the car and had splash-guards installed, since the amount of gravel and stones on the roads around here is nauseating. The cover ("bra") itself caused a small and very easy to repair chip in a joint where the fender and bumper meet, but the weather is too cold this week to apply the little dab of paint and have it actually dry properly. I'm kind of excited about being able to fix something on the car myself, after we had to pay the dealership to install the splash-guards. I did put on the bra on myself, which was not easy for someone as out of shape and technically-challenged as myself. I bought a pack of Uni-Ball Vision Exact pens on sale and three packs of some sweet and delicious Faber-Castell Grip 2001 pencils on sale at OfficeMax for a mere $0.70 -- a steal for such precisely engineered German pencils, which usually run for a buck each in the States. I watched Pulp Fiction for the first time in at least five or six years, and it was good to remember what I loved about that film in the first place. What that was exactly escapes me now. I have been drinking entirely too much coffee and have not been to bed before 3:00 a.m. in a few days. That's good. I'm also getting work done, as a result of drinking all that coffee. My current favorite morning drug is Sumatra. Darkly earthly to wake me up from not enough sleep. Lovely. Etc. Etc. Etc. Told you life has been boring lately. But with three sets of house-guests coming in the next few weeks, tons of work to get done, and tons of good non-school books to read, I have a feeling that things will get interesting this week. And that posting will become more frequent again. I leave you with some nice pencil links, via Faber-Castell: the history of the pencil and famous Faber-Castell pencil users. I hope the links work.