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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Life

  • Motive A Shun

    Do you remember what it was like when you were excited by something?

    I wish I could, lately. It seems like everything I try to do either blows up in my face or sputters to a halt. The anime forum? It’s limping along, with maybe five or six posters (counting myself) contributing during any given month. The webcomic? About 30 visitors every Monday and Thursday, sometimes one or two will comment, and now that I’ve run out my backlog of story and joke ideas it’s going to be a challenge, indeed, to keep it rolling. Writing? Hah. (Double hah, even.) Journalling? Yeah, you can see how many times I’ve posted in the last few months, eh? Music? I don’t have the budget to seek out new material anymore. Movies? I rarely set foot in a theater, and it’s not like I can afford DVDs very often either. Photography? Other than the comic, not so much.

    I don’t know if I’m just getting old (which is silly, I’m not even 40 yet) or if life plus work equals being too worn out to do or care much. I’m not happy, though. But what can I do about it? Solutions all require time and energy that I lack.

    I’m tired of being tired.

  • Who needs sleep?

    So, how does my body follow up a night in which I start with insomnia, and end with an anxiety attack?

    By starting with insomnia and ending with a giant-spider invasion nightmare.

    Maybe eight hours of sleep between the two nights, and one of those was a Saturday night so in theory I should’ve been able to get as much sleep as I needed to, right? I anticipate a fun-filled day of yawning and nodding off…

  • Comfort Snack Dinner

    I could have fried up a burger or two. I could’ve boiled some ramen noodles. I could’ve heated up a can of something in the microwave. Instead, I decided to indulge yet another of my little quirky, guilty pleasures: Peanut butter and crackers.

    There’s a procedure to it, of course.

    1. Gather ingredients: Less than half of a sleeve of saltines, jar of peanut butter.
    2. Gather implements: Small plate, butter knife.
    3. Arrange crackers on plate either in a gracefully-knocked-over stack or (my personal favorite) in two-cracker stacks.
    4. Get the right amount of peanut butter onto the knife. Enough for the crackers to stick together, not so much that you get peanut butter squirting out of the crackers’ holes to make a big mess. If you do it right, you get just a bit of peanut butter through the holes for an amusing visual effect.
    5. Use the dab of peanut butter on the knife to pick up the top cracker from one of the stacked pairs, then you get to hold the cracker in your fingers while you swirl and spread the peanut butter around like a normal person.
    6. Pick up the other cracker of the pair and make a sandwich.
    7. Munch.
    8. Return to step 1 until out of crackers.

    Today wasn’t a bad day, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a comfort food night anyway. Right?

  • Shiny Distraction

    I’m feeling rather “blah” lately, especially today what with the phone bill showing up and stressors being piled on at work. I haven’t had much to say about much of anything this past couple of weeks, not even about the wedding I took pictures of eight days ago.

    So, here, look at what the Spud gave me, bought with his ticket winnings at the nickel arcade:

    Nice, isn’t it? It’s actually a piggy ducky bank, I just didn’t take the picture from an angle which shows off the coin slot.

  • Up To Speed

    Funny title considering how slow I’m feeling today…

    So. Working backward… slept like crap last night (thank you neighbors, local musicians, assorted animals, and a splitting headache), had my brand-new character pretty much die in Sunday night’s D&D session, hung out with the soon-to-be-newlyweds, got my head shorn (a bit closer than usual, whoops), spent a fair chunk of the weekend with the wonderful Kylanath, spend part of Saturday with my most excellent rugrats, went on a lovely date with Lil’ on Friday night, had the kind of work week that leaves you emotionally drained and mentally blunted, and Monday night I cranked out the comic you’ll see on Thursday.

    Tonight, I have to go to bed early instead of doing comic work, so I’ll be doing that tomorrow night instead, because I’m way way way too tired (been walking into things all day, for instance) to manage a camera, never mind aseembling images in Fireworks… and I get to get up early tomorrow and take the train in, so there’s that as well.

    So. Now you’re up to speed… and I’m down to full stop.

  • Of Telephones And Traffic

    So, to catch up a bit…

    After a bit of public-transit unpleasantness my daughter dealt with the previous weekend on her way to visit, I decided to see about getting a second line on my mobile phone plan so she’d have a way to call if she needs to change course along the way, or get a ride, or what-have-you. (Her brother, apparently, has a phone of his own now.) So. We went to the Verizon store at Lloyd Center on Saturday. At first it looked like I was going to have to walk away from the deal, but the saleslady found a way to make the plan palatable: dropping the “PDA” level of service. Since I almost never used the PDA features of my Windows Mobile device… no great loss. Now we both have LG Voyager phones (thanks to a buy-one-get-one offer), and I’m rather surprised by how much I like it. (One downside? The “shift” keys, yes there are two, are in weird places. Oh well.)

    In other news, Quacked Panes is off to a decent start. I’m still three comics ahead in the pipeline, and thanks to getting pimped by Cleolinda Jones over the weekend, I saw some significant traffic for a couple of days. Since I also picked up a tripod (finally!) on Saturday, this evening marked my first webcomic shoot that didn’t require a half-dozen attempts per frame to get a non-blurry image.

    Unfortunately I managed to slice a small cut in my foot while I was setting up (something sharp tracked in by my shoes, I figure) so that delayed things just a bit. Ow.

    Other than that, I’m just kind of hanging in there, hoping nothing else in life goes horribly pear-shaped in the near future. Life is… mostly good, actually.

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