Author: Karel Kerezman

  • 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.

  • Quacked Panes Launch Day

    Oh, hey. It’s the first of June, isn’t it?

    I guess I should officially launch the webcomic, then, shouldn’t I?

    Go forth! Enjoy!

  • Busy Vacation

    Day Two of Three:

    • Picked up a cheap memory stick reader so I don’t have to keep using my laptop as an intermediary to get files from the camera to my main workstation.
    • Completed my “trial balloon” entry for Quacked Panes, then discovered how badly I’d misunderstood the setup of Inkblot & Webcomic. Remedied those misunderstandings and successfully posted the “zeroth” comic, mainly so I could make sure that the layout basically works, and all that jazz.
    • Cleaned the downstairs toilet in anticipation of guests on Saturday.
    • Photographed, wrote, assembled, exported, uploaded and scheduled the first official QP comic. (You can see it Monday, folks.)
    • Realized how hot it is in my room (I blame my lack of awareness on the excitement from the creative process), looked at the weather reports, wiped the sweat from my brow and decided to just give up and put the A/C unit into the window. Three years of practice made this the easiest setup so far… which means I probably overlooked something. If there’s a loud crash in the middle of the night, we’ll know.

    It’s coming up on 4:30pm. I think I’m going to take part of the rest of the day to just goof off, then try cranking out one more comic tonight. Tomorrow I want to get at least two more done; that’ll bring me up to two weeks’ worth of content. I’m going for a Monday/Thursday release schedule, and while I’m still fine-tuning the process I want to make sure I’m working a bit ahead.

    I went through a bit of an anxious stretch this morning, hitting the “I can’t do this I’m not good enough I’ll run out of material in no time I suck everything sucks why do I do this to myself” wall. Luckily, knuckling down (after a brief pep-talk and some good advice from the lovely Kylanath) and forcing myself to finish the “trial balloon” comic seems to have worked out the worst of those preflight jitters. I even managed something of a punch line in a comic that wasn’t originally meant to have one. This afternoon’s efforts made me even happier, so right now? I’m feeling good.

    And cooler, now that the A/C is running. Ahhhhhhh…