Alright, we've finally got all the parts here (I think). The LM386s I had to order from Amazon have finally arrived. Then again, I did choose free 2-day Prime shipping, so it wasn't that long of a wait. I haven't had much time to do much with them, but I decided to use a leftover 8 ohm speaker I pulled out of somewhere to breadboard a test amplifier.

There's not much to it-just a hacked-up audio cable, the 9v battery, an LM386, 2 capacitors, a resistor, and the speaker. It's almost identical to the TI reference schematic, but with a 10 uF capacitor replacing the 250 uF DC blocking capacitor, the 0.05 uF capacitor replaced with a 0.1 uF capacitor, and no input potentiometer. Surprisingly, it sounds much better when the speaker is placed upside-down on top of a hollow spool of wire (or two). I found the best setup, however, was using an empty soda can-I think the air chamber it forms just allows the sound to resonate a bit better. It's a bit sensitive to me jiggling the input wires, but otherwise, it's quite a neat little amp. Good enough for me!