
A trip to the other Best Buy in town and with the help of that awesome employee discount yielded these two:

A Behringer XENYX 802 Mixer, and a Behringer UFO202 USB Interface. It took some time to dial everything in just right, given the mic's proximity issues, but damn its a hell of an improvement over the USB mic I have been using. The UFO202 even came with a FREE copy of Audacity, how swell of them. The Xenyx came with their energyXT software which looks like it would be useful to someone who knew what the hell they were doing.

We also bought ourselves a new laptop, lady Haze's is a cheapie and is falling apart already and she needs one for school. Plus I needed one that could handle photoshop, audio/video editing, and of course, shortscallllin. DAMN working at Best Buy is going to break me! We decided since december is my 3 paycheck month that we would do an early christmas present between us and picked up an Asus U52. i5 processor, 4G ram, 640GB HD. My only grip is that the graphics card is a shared 1gb but no biggie. Ideally I would want a backlit keyboard and a blue-ray drive, and maybe an LED screen but no big deal.
Its a bit late for some sounds but tomorrow should be good. I'll get my man cave/beat lab cleaned out and set everything up accordingly.
edit/also. I'd like to try out my Behringer DI I brodeal'd here a while back. Its a damn good bass EQ pedal to run in front of an amp but I haven't tried to actually DI it yet.