Aaron Traffas Band at the Plum Thicket in Kiowa on October 25, 2008 - left to right: Chris Goering, Lucas Maddy, Mason Powell, Aaron Traffas

Hot from the oven, here are 9 tracks from a live recording made at the Plum Thicket in Kiowa, Kansas, on 25 October 2008. The Aaron Traffas Band was Aaron, Mason Powell, Chris Goering and Lucas Maddy. You can

hear Lucas singing his song, Bottles of Bud.

• Aaron Traffas Band - Republican - 25 October 2008
  
• Aaron Traffas Band - Mirror - 25 October 2008
  
• Aaron Traffas Band - Bottles of Bud - 25 October 2008
  
• Aaron Traffas - Singularity - 25 October 2008
  
• Aaron Traffas Band - Getting Over You Again - 25 October 2008
  
• Aaron Traffas Band - Archipelago - 25 October 2008
  
• Aaron Traffas Band - 24 Feet - 25 October 2008
  
• Aaron Traffas Band - 200 Miles Away - 25 October 2008
  
• Aaron Traffas Band - Red Dirt Farm - 25 October 2008

You can find more downloads on the downloads page.

Singularity, live, Last Chance Saloon, Manhattan, Kansas, 18 October 2008
Click here to view the embedded video.

Getting Over You Again, live, Last Chance Saloon, Manhattan, Kansas, 18 October 2008
Click here to view the embedded video.

Aaron Traffas, Lucas Maddy and Chris Goering

Thus ends the three-day weekend of relaxation. Today was the best day by far. Erica ate with us this morning and when I dropped her off she ended up with both of my cell phones. There is an unexplainable sense of peace that accompanies the knowledge that nobody can contact you.

It’s weird having Erica here and Megan gone. My sisters are quite similar and yet quite different. I’m excited to get to know her as I got to know Megan.

I’m watching Chelsea Lately with Lucas and Diane and plugging away at finishing the new shows section of the website. My mother was in town all day Saturday and never contacted me because she thought I was in Omaha because that’s what my website said. We had booked a show there and when I Twittered regarding its cancellation I never got around to updating the convoluted event calendar that was nailed on top of Wordpress. That’s all fixed now, as the new shows section now includes all shows, both upcoming and past - all the way back to the first launch of the site when Trevor Burgess and I were playing at Fats.

I’m typing away on my Apple slim aluminum keyboard. It’s the one I poured nearly a full cup of coffee into a couple weeks ago. I dried it, wet it, dried it again and when it wouldn’t work I’d left it for dead. A week passed and I tried it one more time and it’s been working well ever since. I guess I bought a pair to have a spare. With all the damn computers around here, I guess it will get plenty of use.

I’m selling my Cloudbook at Thursday’s auction. I couldn’t ever get the wireless to work as well as I wanted, though it seems I’m not the only one. The graphics always seemed weak, though VIA just released an open source driver for it.

I’m currently rocking the ASUS EeePC 900. It’s quite possibly the finest piece of equipment on which I’ve ever laid my hands. I turned it on long enough to hit restart on the Knoppix distribution of Linux so that I could install Ubuntu. I had good luck with Ubuntu-eee as opposed to Eee-Ubuntu. Everything worked pretty much right away. I had to load a different kernel to get the microphone working so I could play with Skype with Diane.

I got Diane an Acer Aspire One as an early birthday present. It’s slightly bigger than my Eee, but the difference in the keyboard size is pretty huge. It also runs Windows XP, which is pretty much a must for her iPod Touch. It was also crazy-cheap, weighing in at $349 at Best Buy.

It seems like John McCain’s Eskimo running mate’s daughter is knocked up. How fun.

Maddy here now…thinking that the goat bash and sixteen kegs of beer may have legitimate claim as a ton of beer…research to follow…

20 minutes later…

2560 lbs of beer. That’s assuming a 160 lbs keg..they range from 155 to 165, so light beer, which contains less alcohol, which weighs less than water, actually has more water..so light beer is heavier…who would have thought.

10 minutes later…

Aaron now. We just had a discussion about beer, its alcohol and sugar and what makes light beer light. We decided we don’t know, but that 16 kegs is a metric-fuck-ton of beer

Lucas: So we agreed to jointly blow it out our ass.

Aaron: My foot is asleep

Lucas:and my beer is warm.

For more YouTube goodness, view this gem. Rob told me about it the other day. It’s for all you asshole racists out there. This shows how smart you sound.

Facebook has been experimenting with different kinds of advertising techniques with varying degrees of success and to various amounts of fanfare, ridicule and outright protest from its users. The most ire earned so far has been related to ways they’ve tracked users and based the ads delivered on the data from such tracking. I don’t really mind companies watching what I do, as I gave up on the concept of Internet privacy many years ago. I figure that if someone cares enough about what I’m doing to record it and use the data, I feel just a little bit more important and my head gets a little bit bigger.

I logged in at the suggestion of an email sent by someone at Facebook to tell me that somebody I couldn’t remember added me as his or her friend. Facebook has a view that lists the recent activities of each of your friends, and I often find myself reviewing it since it’s really the only way I can find out anything about my friends with actually talking to them directly. Removing the requirement of human interaction is one of the most staggering modern conveniences.

In any case, I’ve noticed recently that the second or third entry is usually an advertisement. I usually skip right over it, but this time it caught my eye. There, listed right along with friends adding applications and joining groups, was the news that the Counting Crows not only had a new album, but that it was already in stores.

While most of my music purchases are now from Amazon and it’s one-click access to its DRM-free selection, there are some purchases that I want to be able to display prominantly at the top of the cardboard box of CDs that I keep in my tool shed. Reminding myself that I needed to eat an extra helping of cranberries as punishment for not paying closer attention to my favorite band, I quickly left my office and left to find a copy.

After striking out at WalMart among its selection of about 12 artists, I found my prize at Hastings. I was profoundly disappointed at the lack of a jewel case, but that disappointment quickly faded as I inserted into the CD player in my truck the tracks to which I will be listening exclusively for the next six months.

We had one hell of a show last night at O’Brien’s Pit Stop in Norton, Kansas. Our good friend Rex Striggow, previously of the Mad Cows and the Blaine Younger Band and now from the relatively newly-formed Carbon Cowboys, joined Lucas, Dave and me for the show by rocking the green bass. The crowd was fantastic, making us play 45 minutes longer than we planned and yelling “one more song” very loudly in unison about thrice after we finally quit.

I’m sitting at Maddy’s house in Norton. We’re making calls to everyone in the area who might have some alcohol to put in Lucas’s brother’s new racing go-kart. Two fat, grown musicians trying to get a tiny go-kart with a small engine running on gasoline is probably a sight to see, especially when they realize after it’s finally running that the engine is tuned for pure alcohol instead of the gasoline. I don’t know if we’ll get the alcohol in time before we have to head south for Hays, but I’ll grab some pictures if we do.

Friday night, February 22, we’ll be at the newly remodeled Plum Thicket in Kiowa, Kansas.

Saturday night, February 23, we’ll be at Professor’s Steak House in Hays, Kansas.

More shows to keep in your calendar:

Saturday, March 29
Full band show
Private party
McPherson, Kansas

Saturday, April 19
Aaron Traffas with Lucas Maddy
Bobby T’s Sports Bar and Grill
Manhattan, Kansas

Saturday, April 26
Goat Bash 2008
Goat House
Manhattan, Kansas

Sunday, April 27
Country Kansas Singer Songwriter Showcase
Aaron Traffas, Lucas Maddy, Blaine Younger, Russell Lovenstein, Ryan Tittsworth
Bobby T’s Bar and Grill
Manhattan, Kansas

That’s it for now. Fly on.