5:00:08logiehello - I did log off earlier, it seems like I figured out how to get notify to load. Even though I installed stumpwm via apt-get, I still needed to go through the steps outlined on the homepage to install quicklisp and dbus. Once I did this, everything started to work.
13:37:00logiehello again - not sure if it's a problem with my version of stumpwm or notify, but whenever I send a message though notify-send I get a message saying "The function STUMPWM:TAKE is undefined" I see that function is indeed being called in notify.lisp
13:53:44Demosthenexlogie: i do notifications differently