first time near beer, this time rocket fuel

so i was in a bit of a hurry and bombarded with cooking, watching my daughter, and cleaning my equipment. i didn't really have too many chances to look at my recipe while i was brewing. i used whole hops leaf and it seemd to soak up the water a good bit more than the pellets i used last time. i scaled the recipe to a 4 gallon batch cuz i only had a 5 gallon carboy. i ended up with about 3 gallons of wort. i didn't get a chance to get a gravity reading because it was about 9:30 pm when i got the last drippings from my boil kettle. according to beersmith, i may be looking at round 1.09 8.8%
my last batch was round 2.5% but it tasted really good. i can live with 8% if its as good tasting as the last.
original recipe is irish ale... i think i ended up with a wee heavy
i'll get the hang of it sooner or later

You could have added back a gallon before fermentation began. It doesn't seem that you're concerned about it though. I'm sure it will turn out well. Watch those fermentation temps. It might ramp up a bit more than you expect.

FWIW, leaf hops do soak up a lot more wort than pellet... but that will not in any way affect your final gravity reading.

In Beer Smith this would be recorded as BK loss... and not affect anything except your final volume, not the OG. I guess, what makes you think that the OG was so high?

FWIW

just went for round three today with the same recipe. i think i may have pulled a good batch off. allthough now i'm warry of everything went too perfect this go round. i can't think of any hangups i had... lol.. it'll prolly be the worst batch

What was the OG on this one??

DOH!!! i knew i forgot something :-|
j/k it was 1.070
exact same recipe, just about a gallon more water. yeast reallly took off on this one. both of them are fermenting pretty vigorously.
http://s16.photobucket.com/albums/b45/granillanutz/?action=view&current=MVI_2924.flv