Haunted Raffle Over!

The Haunted Sketchbook Raffle has ended!

I spent today moving. Drove up to St. Paul and packed what little remained of my stuff and the bathroom/kitchen supplies that hadn't been grabbed before. I even grabbed the thirteen dollar parmesan cheese Seebs loves to occasionally place spaghetti noodles beneath. It was one of the few foods from the fridge that could be saved.

We kind of abandoned everything in there during the move and the smell gives this fact away. There is a half-full gallon jug of milk that probably won't slosh if you shake it (even more terrifying: it might taste okay due to the power of the atom).

My favorite tupperware container was full of sliced cabbage that stank up the entire neighborhood when I dumped it out. I found the word CROATOAN carved into some suspiciously furry rotisserie chicken just before I shut the door and began crying hysterically on the kitchen floor. Adventures!

When I got back home, I stuck my hand down the side of the easy chair in the living room to see if my iPod had slipped into it... and pulled out my missing camera! The crazy thing is, I had checked there quite early in the search and found nothing. All the files are intact and everything still works. I had to break the news to the formerly missing camera that, in my grief, I had found another to love. She took it pretty well for a piece of sensitive photography equipment that's just spent four weeks lodged under somebody's ass.

The other night I walked to the gym, hooked my dog to the front door, and worked out to my little heart's content with no one around to bother me. It was a long long walk along a busy highway, but this was pretty late at night.

I got the Captain a Gentle Leader headcollar with the last of my money. He hates it like the fires of hades, but I've never had more compliant and docile behavior out of a dog.

Within five minutes of leaving the house with the Captain in his headcollar, he was my bitch. This after three months of yanking his leash and darting into traffic and generally ignoring my every attempt to make him walk nice. I tried everything--treats, reinforcement with praise, commands, tugs on the leash, getting a different leash with variable lengths.

I did the thing where you stop every time the dog tries to pull (to remove the reward and teach him that pulling is pointless). No dice. I would refuse to move until he stopped acting out, and move on only to have it happen again five seconds later, then again and again and again for the next thirty minutes.

I even put a choke chain on him. That sort of slowed him down a bit and stopped him dashing into the street, but he was still borking my wrists up by yanking on them every time we left the house. If he saw a squirrel or a bird, forget the chain, it'd be a nonstop tug of war the entire way home because he was set on going back.

The worst part was stubbornly walking along with the leash at a set length while he dangled at my side. Was the leash too short? No, he just preferred to choke himself every two seconds rather than walk with me. Now, I'm all for a battle of the wills (because I always win those), but I know futility when I see it. So, the headcollar. At 25 bucks it was kind of a pricey experiment, but I was pretty much out of options and I'd read great stuff about the results. And oh my fucking god, it worked like a charm.

When he's not attempting to slide across the countryside on his face to get the damn thing off, he is walking calmly by my side with a loose leash. He still hasn't accepted this new restraint on his lifestyle, so left to his own devices he tends to paw at it frantically and then slump to the floor in a fog of ennui so complete he may die at any moment. But I just laugh. Oh, how I laugh.

Best of all, he's mellower. He barely notices the cars and trucks that used to send him bolting. My wrists feel amazing because all it takes is one short, mild pull and the little furry son of a bitch is doing EXACTLY what he's supposed to do, and that boils down to good times for him, because dogs LIVE to please their pack leaders and he's getting the idea that his current behavior is precisely what I want out of him.

I'm the one with the thumbs, baby. Do not fuck with me.

Got 1x New House!

Back online at the new place! I fucking love it here.

Inked most of a page of Kagerou today and my carpal didn't flare up at all. This is the best they've been in weeks, so I'm taking advantage of my good fortune before I help finish moving the rest of the boxes and fuck my wrists up all over again.

However: my knee went boom just as my fingers stopped going numb, so now I'm having to stay off it as much as possible. This is a problem since I live on the second floor of the new house, so going up and down stairs is a real adventure.

One benefit of having to sit on my ass all day while the knee mends: time for art! I think I'll be able to post an update and start the Sketchbook Raffle this Saturday.

At this moment, the Captain has taken his evening whiz, so I'm going to go flop down on the futon mattress I'm using for a bed and pass out. Bliss!

Welcome to the Aspie Tech Graveyard

During the move, Seebs dragged his dead electronics up from the basement for a computer parts disposal service to come and cart away. Here's what the pile looked like:



You can't really see the size of the dining room in this pic, but take my word that it was completely filled up. The pile got bigger after I took this pic, to a final height of maybe three or four feet in places.

They never found Jimmy Hoffa, and I think I might know why.

Packing Up My Mother

I'm in kind of a morbid mood.

Today I packed up my Mom and all the little trinkets on the shelf--the lock of hair I sheared off after the funeral, the crystals she gave me, the little fossil one of Seebs' forum friends sent with their best wishes when she was sick, that sort of thing. This was the hardest part of moving for me, and I was seriously dreading it. Finally I decided this was stupid, and I should pack the hardest stuff first and ignore my conscience's wailing that I should have saved it for last out of respect for the dead.

I don't like to spend too long looking at the box because it still freaks me out to think that there's nothing left of the woman who created me except a box of gray dust that can be packed in a box and put out of sight like some meaningless souvenir. I also worry that when I pick up the box I might think something unworthy, but that's probably an OCD thing.

After I finished wrapping the little Buddhas and crystals, I folded her old monogrammed washcloth around the music box and packed it up along with the photographs and seeds and notes I found lying around her room after she died. So that's done with.

While I was doing all this, I found her box of Tarot cards and shuffled through them to see if she'd added any scraps of paper with sayings written on them (something she really loved doing in life, which made the mundane cleaning portion of dealing with her death a lot easier and harder on my spirit at the same time).

There weren't any notes that I could see, but the Five of Pentacles had been torn right down the middle. Rah said it was a negative card, so I looked it up and found out it signifies ill health, rejection and poverty--the three hardships that defined her life.

I didn't find the other half of the card anywhere in the box. I hope she fucking burned it.

On the bright side, now that I've dealt with Mom, it's out of the way and the rest of the packing should be bland and simple.

To combat my dust allergies, I've moved the air purifier into my room. The difference in air quality is substantial. Just to see what would happen, I sprayed some cinnamon air freshener near the machine. Ten seconds later, the scent was completely gone. I then realized that I haven't even smelled cigarette smoke from Jesse's level of the house since Seebs bought the machine. It's amazing what this thing can do--it even emits white noise, which I find comforting.

Ashes to ashes, allergens to allergens... Story of my life.

A Litany of Woe and Lame

Alex the Parrot Died.

Man, that SUCKS. He was awesome.

Yesterday was a fount of hilarity and strange. I was still up at 8 AM, so Jesse and I took Captain Obvious to the park and did some basic training (getting him to come when Jesse called, getting him to follow commands when distracted by small children, that sort of thing).

It was ungodly cold out, so we came home to put him in the bathroom and get some breakfast. He saw Mai-Mai (who never comes downstairs and is therefore still new to him) and bolted after her when I wasn't ready for it, jerking my arm hard all the way up to the shoulder. It was like getting struck by lightning.

The whole rest of the day that arm felt weird, and today my fingers are tingling a little bit. So we locked him up and drove off to the dread Perkins. We got all the way to the Rice Library when Jesse pushed the clutch in and it went "CLONK."

I got out and pushed the station wagon the rest of the way to the intersection, then up the street to the library entrance. By the time we got to the top of the little hill, my calf muscles had knotted and cramped up. I was shoving the car with all my might to keep it from rolling back down and bowling me over.

I ended up gasping for breath by the end of it, but we got the car parked safely. We hiked the rest of the way to Perkins, had some food and warmed up, then Jesse called Seebs at work for further instructions. Meanwhile, I was suffering from an asthma attack because I hadn't brought my inhaler and had been breathing very cold air through the mouth while I pushed the car. I'm still spitting up crap a day later!

We hiked back to the library to wait for the tow truck, and I got another sunburn all over my face. It was so bright outside I also got eyestrain from squinting. Then Jesse left with the tow truck to meet Seebs at the repair shop, and I gave myself a carpal-tunnel flare-up on the right side by leaning on that hand while I sorted through the library's parking lot gravel, collecting fossils and neat little crystals and stuff.

Seebs showed up at about 2 pm and brought me home. The repair cost for the clutch was lower than we feared, which is good. This is the same car whose clutch went out on us at Animazement 2004, which was a much costlier and more severe repair job.

Then I started packing up some books in the living room and gave myself an allergic spaz attack that left me wheezing with bloodshot eyes and a runny nose.

Conclusion: Look up 'epic fail' in any dictionary and you'll see a picture of me being shot in the face with lasers. I'm just THAT unlucky.

On the excellently bright side: We close on the new house tomorrow and begin moving in earnest right after that. Once we're settled in, I'll get to work on these Kagerou pages I've been pencilling even though I'm supposed to officially be taking a break.

I can't even slack off properly :)

I AM HENRY ROLLINS

I WIN, MOTHERFUCKERS: 105.76 MILES!


Reached my goal today while helping the roomies load and unload a moving van full of 90-something boxes (which felt like they were full of rocks, but it was really just the house library) into the Northfield place. We're renting a basement room to move our stuff into while the current owners are in the process of moving out.

Unloading involved some crazy stairs. I spent a lot of the unloading process in the van, lifting 40 pound boxes and carrying them over to the edge of the van to stack up for people to carry to the edge of the stairs for whoever was down there to carry down to the storage room.

I spent some time being the one who runs up and down the stairs, which was probably the most tiring part. I also transported two full-size bookshelves on my back from the van to the storage area, which was awkward but not too taxing.

When I got home, I used an activity-to-mileage conversion chart to total up all the various types of work, and found I'd done about 7.6 miles of activity, most of it heavy lifting, stairs and just plain walking.

Working out and lifting free weights have significantly improved my stamina. I survived hauling the boxes (minus one minor dehydration/carbohydrate crashing incident) with no muscles torn, and in truth feel kind of energized and mellow. I would get worn out, rest a little, and then go back for more without feeling like I was going to die.


I did 100 miles in 64 days and it was kind of easy. I'll need to step up my game a notch for the next goal, starting tomorrow.

My Spanish Pipe Dream

She was a level-headed dancer on the road to alcohol
And I was just a soldier on my way to Montreal
Well she pressed her chest against me
About the time the jukebox broke
Yeah, she gave me a peck on the back of the neck
And these are the words she spoke:

"Blow up your T.V.
Throw away your paper
Go to the country
Build you a home
Plant a little garden
Eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own"

Well, I sat there at the table and I acted real naive
For I knew that topless lady had something up her sleeve
Well, she danced around the bar room and she did the hoochy-coo
Yeah she sang her song all night long, tellin' me what to do

"Blow up your T.V.
Throw away your paper
Go to the country
Build you a home
Plant a little garden
Eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own"

Well, I was young and hungry and about to leave that place
When just as I was leavin', well, she looked me in the face
I said "You must know the answer."
She said, "No but I'll give it a try."

And to this very day we've been livin' our way
And here is the reason why:

We blew up our T.V.
Threw away our paper
Went to the country
Built us a home
Had a lot of children,
Fed 'em on peaches
They all found Jesus on their own.

-John Prine

I think the fact I've had this song in my head for the past three days is probably related to the Studio preparing to move out of the city next month. If all goes well, we'll be taking up residence in a big house with an enormous yard in a quiet neighborhood that smells like warm toasted cereal when the wind is right and everythign is in walking distance.

Anyway. John Prine is awesome, but this song strikes a kind of strange contrast when played while I read ghost stories and look at photos of Chernobyl the way I've been doing all morning instead of working on the damn comic.

I've been having a really hard time keeping my attention on my work lately. All I want to do is veg out and read travel blogs, walk my dog, and cook. I've lost track of time and bedtime rolls around before I know it. I'm like, "Sweet norns! I've frittered the whole day away!" Over and over again.

It's most likely just the usual end-of-summer burnout. I want to be out there digging up rocks, not in here sitting at my computer. It's not as bad as con burnout, at least. There were only two conventions this summer. Still, I've been going full tilt on the comic to make up for my lack of productivity outside the home, and this has been having an effect.

In particular, I'm concerned by how easily I've been blowing deadlines on updates that have been subsidized by donations (making timely updates not just polite, but VITAL).

The blown deadlines also set up a nasty cycle. If I finish the comic late, I don't get any days off that week. So I don't get to rest, can't work with full speed or skill, and tend to zone out. The delays might have been excusable the first time around, but it sets off this nasty chain reaction. I've been thinking about scheduling a few short breaks throughout the year in the future, just to keep me fresh. Lord knows I'd enjoy having some time off right about now.

Sure, I'd just spend it working on the comic, but at least I'd be pulling 20-hour shifts for reasons other than "because it's got to be up by tonight and I'm already late enough as it is."

In domestic news, my dog is lying in his little kennel with his head sadly slumped over one paw, occasionally sighing or groaning a little. He's bummed because there are three delicious dog treats on the floor and I've instructed him to leave them alone.

The Captain is amazingly clever for a dog. He picked up the basics of the "Leave It" command after the second session. If he continues to progress at this pace, he'll be ready to meet (and IGNORE) the cats in no time. I am very anxious to get him and the cats integrated and the whole rivalry over with as soon as feasible.