Taking a few minutes to blog in an otherwise overly busy month. I’m not sure where to start. This year, I’m busy. I haven’t had time for a lot of things and sadly, new duties and responsibilities keep popping up and delaying the comic yet again.
I had planned on releasing the last two zero issues, oh, about three weeks ago. They’re pretty much done except for the word balloons and a couple of stray pages. They wrap up the prequel issues pretty nicely (if not randomly) and then set the stage for the Amazing Incredible continuity. I will have to make changes to the story for the rest of the issues that had already gone up (and pulled and gone back up and pulled and…), as I reletter them and release them, but for once, I have an established continuity to work with and a foundation for a story other than “uh, let’s write a random issue with no pay off.” Not saying I WON’T revert to that when I have to, but gosh darn it, I’m trying.
We’ve had a load of two cords of wood that I’ve already moved and stacked down the hill this year. Another load was delivered on Wednesday and this time I had him stack it in a way I liked. Rather than pushing it up against our bushes, where I’d have to climb under the bushes to get to half the pile, I had him dump it two or three feet out and crossways instead of longways. As he was dumping, I actually got to see how much two cords of wood is. I never had the concept down because it was all on top of itself. I was a little scared and a little impressed that I was able to process so much the last go round working an hour or two a day for a week. It’s getting colder now and the weather has been crappier (yesterday was solid rain so I worked out instead of doing the wood pile), so we’ll see if the motivation stays… especially when the third load comes in December.
The weather patterns have changed in the 16 or 17 years we’ve lived at this house. For every idiot who says that there’s no global warming or no global changes to our environment, well, I’ve been here long enough to know better. I can observe it. We used to get snow in October. We used to get solid movie style snow from November until March. Now we’re lucky to get any by December. The movie style snow usually holds off until the first week of January. I’ll tell you, it ruins the holidays when the only snow you see is the fake snow in all of the holiday movies. Seriously, be the time it feels “Christmassy,” Christmas is long over. That’s why I put the Christmas tree up in September. I figured if the holiday is ruined anyway, I may as well put the tree up and enjoy it as the first Christmas commercials hit the air.
I’m alone with my father until Monday. My mom is in Texas because I bought one of our old cars back from a friend who no longer needs it. Mom has family in Texas and is spending a couple of days with her sister while she gets the car checked out and, well, gets a break from my father. I couldn’t go because I couldn’t take that much time off of work, plus, I’ve vowed never to step foot in the state of Texas. There are a lot of reasons for that, most of which I’m not getting into now, but unless things change and change in a big way, I’ll never set foot in that state. Closed minded, I am, but after the past few months, I’m tired of being the one who waffles and gives. It’s time to stand up for something, even if it’s as insane as this.
We had been without a second car for about a year now. My status as a virtual shut-in was upgraded to real shut-in as I couldn’t schedule the car to do anything other than the occasional hair cut. Even then, with my schedule (working nights), it was hard to get up and get dad there and back without sacrificing sleep for the day on those rare days I could have the car. Now that we will have two again (she’s not back from Texas yet so anything can still happen), sadly, I’ve been down graded to virtual shut-in. I’ll have to get used to that.
I’m also starting an insane project. Dad’s been using up most of wifi bandwidth streaming movies I’ve recorded off the satellite dish from my computer to his computer downstairs. Oh, plus every episode of the TV show ‘Reba.’ These are monster sized files. Lately, he’s been in every drive on my machine that I use for the comic. It was my bad to put movies on that drive, but I never thought he’d have an interest in Sports related movies until my machine was running slowly as I opened files. You have to understand, with the dementia, he not just watches a movie, he repeats the same movie until my mom gets sick of it. He’ll watch movies like ‘the Benchwarmers’ 300 times if you let him, because he forgets he’s seen it. Seriously, I barely made it through that movie once, 299 more times would kill the rest of my lingering sanity. Some people say to switch to something like Netflix but a) Netflix doesn’t have a very good selection of streaming movies, and b) have you ever seen the hit you take on your internet when someone is streaming movies? We’re in the country, we have barely functioning DSL, that’s NOT an option. So I’ve been using a program called Handbrake to convert them down to smaller files and moving them to another machine. That way, at least, I can have some bandwidth and I won’t be sharing a machine with him when he really needs to see ‘The Mighty Ducks 2’ over and over again.
I guess I better start wrapping up. I’ll catch up with you again soonish. I hope you have a safe holiday season.
Jim