better than nothing

I was just online looking for multitrack recording programs and found 2. between them, I could see a program that I would like and use. alone, they are (like the title here) better than nothing. kristal is very hard to use, but has a level checking meter without recording. audacity is easy to use, but has no such meter. maybe it does and I will find it later. anyway, neither of them compare to a real tascam portastudio 414mkII, but it's better to be able to record something than nothing.
I got real pipe tobacco the other night. it smells funky and tastes like it smells, but it burns a lot longer than what I was using. this type is called "westminster" and I got it at the dewey ave. smoke shop. when I walked in, I was greeted by a display of bongs and glass bowls that would make logan cream his pants. the whole store was so full of stuff, it was like a "where's waldo" picture. i could have spent hours just looking at every item in there without knowing what half of it was. the guys there were cool and let me smell a few different blends from their wall of square glass jars. I admired the pipes under the glass counter because it was FULL of pipes I had only seen on the internet. I know where I'm going when I get some money! fancy pipe and special tobacco sounds pretty cool. I think I'll get a sweeter one because what I picked by smell is kind of dank. it smells like some of the tents that I would walk by at the famous hershey flea market with my dad. we would walk by and there would be this smell eminating from some of the vendors' stalls. this odor would creep up your nostrils and not want to leave. turns out, it was pipe smoke!
while I'm on that tangent, I remember some of the people there smelling like beer too. it was like a grab bag of odors to walk through that place. there were like 5 feilds of vendors and who knows how many old cars. my dad would talk to everyone he met for the longest time. I would get so effing bored standing around that place, but there were other times when it was interesting to see all of the different people and things there. he would never let me buy anything over $5 without walking all day first. something that we had seen in the morning that was uber-ultra-cool like a custom made full suspension bicycle or a hot rc car would be gone by the time we got back to it in the late afternoon. I should have looked at this experience as a thing to be sampled and left where it lay. I would have enjoyed it lots more that way.
I remember waking up SO EFFING EARLY to hit the road in an effort to get there before noon. we always stopped at this restaurant on the side of a mountain for breakfast. it was called "the turkey ranch" and they had those brain teaser puzzles with pegs in a board on the tables. the first few times we went, we borrowed his friend's van to sleep in and listened to classical music during the drive because that's all his friend kept in there.
the flea market area was mostly grass and it was famous for rain. I remember the brown field (they labeled fields by color) really seeming like hershey was a great place to hold this event. catch the dook reference?
well, that's about enough of my trip down memory lane. I'm posting the first picture I found that seemed like it was of this place, so you can see how big it was. when I went there, I was about 10 years old, so it seemed even bigger to me. and more boring...