Oh look, it’s a bit of English FAIL on the way to work this morning! This, near the Washington County Fairgrounds…
In other news, my new phone’s camera seems not to suck nearly as much as the xv6800’s… nice, eh?

Here’s a taste of how my mind works:
There’s a cardboard sign bent partway around a streetsign-pole at the end of our street. It’s for a garage sale, but the way it’s bent it reads “RAGE ALE” from most legible angles. What’s also odd is that there’s another sign at the corner of the block on the way to work, similarly bent, also thus advertising a RAGE ALE.
So. As I leave home, I pass the first sign at the end of the block. As I approach work, I pass the other sign at the start of the block. This is a strange sort of symmetry in my morning.
The world is weird. And this is the sort of thing which my old superstitious mind would interpret as a Sign Of Some Portent. Now I just think it’s silly… and wonder if anyone’s trademarked the name Rage Ale, because c’mon, we all know somebody who’d drink that.
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.
Today wasn’t a bad day, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a comfort food night anyway. Right?
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.
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.
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.