( Entertainments... ) The MJ thing, however, is not entertainment. Although, I do have a theory that the man we've been increasingly repulsed by for the past twenty years was actually a Captain EO animatronic who went haywire after the Pepsi commercial incident.

( Speculations... ) None of this has anything whatsoever to do with splitting beer atoms. Probably.

( Machinations... ) The prize demographic to aim for is the Cartoon Network viewership, because they're nerdier and because their age range extends all the way to the Adult Swim audience. Think about it.

Tags: film, outandabout, science, tech

Not much going on. Tank and her dog spent last weekend out at rustic Guemes Island, while I minded the monkey. I expected she would have a good time, but I was surprised to hear not a single complaint of RA pain, despite having hiked and gone sea kayaked every day. She claims it's the clean air, but expect that's only one reasons, perhaps not even a major one. I felt guilty -- still do -- that she had to return to the city life she dreads more with each passing day. Workin' on remedying that...

The new member on my team at work is moving to Bainbridge in a month, in his case mainly because Seattle School District were being such utter fuckwits about enrollment for his kid in the fall. Very interested in gleaning insights into island life from someone who actually commutes into my office and self-describes his family as "not island people". Meanwhile, I'm slated to check out the city of Snohomish tomorrow, though I'm not optimistic based on what I saw in nearby Monroe. There's also a nice little farm outside of North Bend, but it backs up to both I-90 and the south fork of the Snoqualmie River, either of which may offer a clue as to why its price has been slashed 40% since it was last purchased four years ago.

"I just re-read 1602, for proofreading purposes, this afternoon, in a small boat, drifting across a lake on a sunny day, and I found, to my relief, it as very much the kind of comic I had wanted to write: something for summer, to be read under a porch or in a treehouse; or up on a roof; or in a small field, a long time ago, beside the bulrush patch."
--Neil Gaiman, afterword to 1602

While Tank was gone, I stayed up way too late every night reading Marvel 1602. It was an okay read, but the art style, though well-suited to the swashbuckling time period, is not one for which I feel any great enthusiasm. Aside from being a typical Elseworlds story, the only points of note were: 1) Gaiman provided the writing after a five-year absence from comics; 2) a one-panel caricature of Bush and Rumsfeld discussing torture; and 3) at one point the fourth wall is broken and then promptly and inexplicably forgotten. Enh. I had more fun with M.O.D.O.K.'s 11, a super-villain team-up that is only vaguely evocative of Ocean's 11, with the main thread being a motley crew executing a heist and a subplot involving the group leader's former romantic interest. Hilarious though! And the art was much more to my liking, complemented by beautiful painted covers on the individual issues.

Having survived a weekend of single-parenting with aplomb, upon Tank's return I quickly fell into a torpor that has persisted for the entire week, squelching any intentions to go out and enjoy the glorious sunshine. Bother! Not really sure what's wrong, except that I may have come down with a bug, likely the same one that has kept Mini sniffling and/or coughing since last week. I really need it to go away in time for this weekend, dammit.

Not that I have any major plans, other than to participate in the massive zombie event in Fremont on Friday. My original plan had been for the whole family to join in, which would have been a hoot, but it's going to run way too long and late for either of the girls to handle. I had been lamenting to people this week that the event wasn't scheduled for the evening of the Fourth, because that would be frickin' cool to have the blanched masses illuminated by fire raining down from the sky. But then, as teenage delinquents were out tonight setting off firecrackers near my house, it occurred to me that zombies wielding explosive devices is actually a Very Bad Idea. Or comedy gold. Really, it could go either way.

Any other would-be walking-dead out there got yer ears on? Hell, is anyone still alive? No? Carry on as you were then.

Tags: comics, outandabout, roadtrip
Current Mood: exanimate
Current Music: Garbage - #1 Crush (Nellee Hooper remix)

( I said everybody MOOOOOVE! )

So difficult these days to get myself over the motivational threshold to post updates. It's not that I have nothing on which to ruminate, but... well, it's kinda representative of where I'm at socially of late. Sigh. Whatever.

( Goings on... nothing earth-shattering, just long... )

Tags: books, comics, dayjob, film, fitness, music, outandabout, whining
Current Mood: uffish thought

( Try not to hate... )

Unrelated: Ignite tonight in its new Belltown location. I'm probably going; let me know if you are.

Tags: books, dayjob, emo, illness, obit
Current Location: big purple couch
Current Mood: blah
Current Music: INXS - Mediate

Despite weeks of anticipation and having gathered up a posse, my plan to attend Emerald City ComiCon on Sunday with the family this year fell through. I was fairly pissed about this for a number of reasons. Not the least of which was that Tank is always pushing and promising that I need to quit my day job to become a comic artist. This is not something one can do without having first made some of the necessary connections, however, a big contribution toward which is attending the convention. Oh well, maybe next year.

I'm glad that I had k_arjuna pick me up one of the limited-edition Monsters 'n Dames artbooks on Saturday, because that much was a treat. It also provided some inspiration: After complaining endlessly about the lack of one on the official schedule, I'm hoping to have my wits about me enough next year to organize a drawing event in connection with the convention -- possibly under the auspices of Dr. Sketchy, the San Diego chapter of which I know has previously gathered on the periphery of that city's con. Other non-appearances at the Seattle con: Seattle Public Library, which puts on its own series of comics-related events in January, and 826 Seattle, despite the NYC chapter having its home inside the Superhero Supply Store.

The day wasn't a total loss though: We spent the afternoon outside doing some badly overdue yardwork and helping Mini with her first attempt at her bicycle, both of which she was rather excited about. Can't argue with that as a good use of family time.

Tank has been obsessively searching online for two things: 1) A farm to move to and 2) a new dog. Both of these are a hard sell to me, but she's had more luck with the latter. Willow (our pit bull) was already showing some depression after Boone died. Then on top of general economic woes, Tank's main client shafted her earlier this year, so her business has been in a lull. A direct effect is that she put Willow's couple days a week at "doggy day care" on hiatus in order to cut expenses . Then to add insult to injury, Tank has had her usual repeated bouts of sickness this winter, which has been used as the justification for lack of dog-walking herself. (I'm not going to argue about the validity of that here.) End result is that Willow been spending way too much time inside, bored off her ass. I don't really want another dog, especially while I'm still in mourning, but don't want to see Willow miserable either.

The first crack in my armor appeared at an animal shelter event on Mercer Island a month or two ago, where there was the cutest australian shepherd female puppy. So! Cute! It's pretty clear that Willow wants a puppy to mother and this would have been a good choice. We were literally the last people in there before the SPS people packed up, and even though I was shocked that no one had snatched up this puppy, I decided to be prudent and sleep on it. A puppy is a lot of hassle, but mainly I was concerned that we would be leaving for Arizona in a few days and I didn't want a new puppy to have to be boarded for almost a week. By the next morning though, she was gone. Dammit! Weeks later, I'm still regretting that one.

The current candidate is Diego. (see pic) We're giving him a trial run for a week. Beautiful dog and certainly friendly enough. But he's hairy and big and -- this cuts both ways -- a bit too much like Boone in some respects. I recognize that he's a good catch and I'm trying to be open-minded, but my enthusiasm has yet to manifest. Marking our CD collection last night, moments after I restricted him to the back half of the house... yeah, that didn't win him any points either. My sense is that I'm just not ready yet.

I miss Boone terribly, that much should go without saying. But also it's clear now in retrospect that I inflicted some fairly severe trauma on myself as a result of trying to be so attentive at the end. I used to think I had a bleak outlook on the world, but after that experience, that mindset has been taken to a whole new level. Not so much sadness as a bitter resignation. Unfortunately, even though it probably would have done me good to say it openly, I had to redact the rest of this paragraph, because it's major-league socially unacceptable. And so it goes.

A little over halfway through reading Alice W. Flaherty's The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain. This book is made of pure awesome. It's everything I had vainly hoped for from Writing Addiction. Among other notches on her belt, the author gently but firmly puts in its place the pseudo-scientific hand-waving professed in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which had always bugged me. Highly recommended for anyone with more than half a brain.

Tags: books, comics, obit, pets, writing
Current Location: big purple couch
Current Mood: enh

Is it Spring yet? At least the trees and birds say yes. I finally got sick of waiting for the chill to lift and started working out in the office gym. As expected, it seemed to improve my mood considerably. It was also necessary because I signed up to run the St. Patrick's Day Dash. With the benefit of only a single day of outdoor running under my belt (but a fair amount of time on the treadmill, which I loathe) I woke that morning to find a mix of snow and rain falling. Ignoring Tank's suggestion to just stay home (bah, that's the opposite of helping!) I trudged out there, as did a very displeased josienutter, with whom I ran the first bit of the race. Once we got going, the precipitation didn't bother me so much, except for my thumbs which were frozen solid. But after a mile or so, that had subsided and I actually started having fun and had a decent run. So, small sense of accomplishment from that. The week following, I proceeded to avoid all exercise, beyond walking up the hill to my car. Heh.

Over the weekend and the first part of this week, we made another pilgrimage down to Arizona for to visit the in-laws at their winter home. Overall the trip went better than I had expected, though it was definitely a day longer than I would have liked. Our hotel's wifi was overloaded until late every evening, thanks to the minor league ballplayers there on spring training. On my first day, I decided to go on walkabout in the mid-day sun, intending to make my way to the dry riverbed a few miles off. Unfortunately, this was a bit too ambitious and I had to stop just shy of my goal in order to rejoin the group. Worse, I got cocky and burned the crap out of my shoulders, which I ended up immensely regretting the rest of the trip -- not the least because I could have avoided it easily by simply draping my shirt. We made a couple excursions to the private swimming pool, but Mini was restricted to the lame non-swimmers pool due to the futtydutty rules. We would have been better served going to the pool at the nearby YMCA, which had a fully covered pool with all the trimmings, including a spiral slide. Mostly though, we spent entirely too much time cooped up at the in-laws' small-ish house, which likely had a hand in the clingy behavior that Mini increasingly demonstrated. On our last full day, the girls went to the zoo and aquarium. Who the hell puts an aquarium in the middle of a desert? Sheesh. Meanwhile, I went out to White Tank Mountain Park and made a rushed "hike" (more of a walk, really) to the dry waterfall, presently evidenced only by two tiny pools of greenish water and the echoing buzz of mosquitos above. I tried -- and quickly gave up -- getting the in-laws' dog to go with me. That delay prevented me from having much time to check out the marked petroglyphs along the path, or from doing very much clambering up the craggy hillside to search for more. And of course, I had no camera with me. Le sigh. Anyway, it was nice to get some sun, but I'm glad to be back where there's far more green than yellow.

During the trip, I finished reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. Tank insists that all the books I read are dreary, so I pulled out this one to prove her wrong. Ironically, it wasn't a particularly uplifting read: The true "ecstatic experience", as the author refers to it, is a rare experience in the modern world, where propaganda and advertising have subsumed and repurposed it to their own ends. I was annoyed by what was left missing. Burning Man? I'm personally not a fan of the event, but it is certainly pertinent, yet received only a single mention, two pages from the end. Mirror neurons? Again, only a single mention, which also represented the sole mention of neuroscience. Swarm behavior? Nope. The endless parade of historical anecdotes was interesting, but jumped around too much and ultimately didn't hold together very well. (heh, there's a joke hidden in that last remark) Another area where better editing would have helped was the author's tendency to repeat certain statements almost verbatim several pages later. Oh well. Onward to The Midnight Disease.

Tags: books, fitness, roadtrip
Current Mood: my head hurts

Christmas Day. The snow keeps trying to fall, but unlike its other assays during the past week, today it is not sticking, even though it is coming quite heavily at times. The temperature has edged above freezing for the past couple days and the rain yesterday put a big dent in the eight or nine inches of accumulation. As much of a pain as the impassable roads have been, it is still beautiful to watch the flurries float down, sometimes hard and fast, sometimes slow and gentle.

Roughly a century ago, there lived in Vermont a photographer named Wilson A. Bentley, though probably more people know him as "the Snowflake Man", owing to his lifetime passion for that particular subject. We have the lovely children's book about him among our collection. Until his work, it was not truly understood that each snowflake is indeed special and unique.

( Reflections on Boone... )

Wilson Bentley was born in February and died on December 23. The same as Boone. And that dog surely did love the snow.

Tags: dayjob, emo, family, obit, pets
Current Location: downstairs
Current Mood: sad
Current Music: Neko Case - I Wish I Was The Moon

Mr. Boone, February 1995 - December 23, 2008



To say the past two weeks have been difficult would be an understatement. Our last good time together was a walk in the snow on Saturday night -- around the block, at his insistence. He went into decline once again the next day and never recovered. We had planned to put him to sleep at the vet this afternoon -- the soonest possible, given the holidays. But ever the impatient one, he went out on his own at home a half hour beforehand, with Tank and I beside to him. I choked out a lullaby to him. I felt his last breath; I felt the last beat of his heart. The knowledge that his suffering is finally at an end allows me some sporadic moments of serenity. But mostly, and probably for a while to come, I am utterly and completely devastated.

We miss you so much, boy...

Tags: family, obit, pets
Current Mood: sad

And I'm back! Well, I was never really "gone" in the senses of being either physically dislocated or emotionally submerged. Same as last year, I put the journal on hold for the whole of November -- as well as most book reading, exercise and socializing -- and instead focused most of my leisure time into NaNoWriMo. I didn't come close to the project goal of fifty-thousand words, of course, but I was ignoring that in favor a more realistic personal goal. Ten thousand words, yay! Which is two or three times more than last year. More satisfying was the linearity of my progress chart and the relative success of several of the changes I made toward how I approached the project. A positive indicator is that at the end of the month, I was more energized than at the start. Rarely did I get stuck and never for very long; the limiting factors were really time and my slow typing. The only change I'll make next year is to cut out time spent on social network sites, which everyone recognizes as a time suck. News feeds will stay though, since I leveraged them extensively for inspiration. Using a feed reader has streamlined that fairly well anyway, so it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

I don't think anything significant occurred since last post. The election win and the economy tanking, of course, but those were both well underway a month ago. I'm almost done fighting off the same cold that has hit everyone, while Tank and Mini are both still at a stalemate against it. This month is brimming over with opportunities to get out and about, which sucks because this is a hard time of year to find sitters and I've already used up both of the offers I was holding in reserve. We had a bad scare of the weekend with our old dog, Mr. Boone, where he could barely walk and wouldn't eat. The vet thinks it was probably a bad arthritis flare-up. After upping his pain meds, he seems mostly back to normal, but still not eating very much. He's been with us almost the entire time that we've been together and for as long as I have lived in Seattle. His vision, hearing and mobility have all been ebbing for the past year, but I wasn't prepared for such a precipitous decline though. However it eventually happens, it's going to be really hard when he does go, but I'm trying not to let my thoughts go down that road yet.

Much to my disappointment, we're not heading down to Nawlins over the holidays, as originally planned and after multiple deferments. The economy is just way to scary right now, and I'm not keen to drop a couple thousand dollars on travel that might be needed to pay the bills, should things get ugly in the extreme. Fortunately, my employer is still well in the black and has substantial cash reserves, so my job is not in imminent danger. Nevertheless, we're surrounded by an ocean of red and pink, so prudence wins out.

You should absolutely go to Hugo House one evening during the next couple weekends and see Island of Misfits. There was less puppet action than I had hoped for, but it's still hilarious, especially if you're familiar with the classic Rankin production Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Since we're in town over X-mas, we're using the occasion to do a viewing of Rudolph for Tess, whom we dragged along on opening weekend of the play.

Tags: illness, nanowrimo, outandabout, pets, writing
Current Location: Uptown