fluffyandbear.com

So.

I just finished putting my son to bed by reading him a small excerpt from Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. You go to Hell for that sort of thing, don’t you?

O_o

Sometimes it’s good to take a look back and take measure of where one’s been and how one has grown.  I don’t have a lot of old artwork scanned, but what I do have is certainly a bit…  different.

Geez, it may not show up as well since this is an elderly scan by a bad office scanner, but I’m not sure I could squeeze much more hatching and cross-hatching in this pic!  Maybe it’s the conflicting light sources or whatever the heck I was thinking.

It’s eerie to think this picture is almost 10 years old.  I’m not sure if I should dig some more old artwork or “accidentally” dispose of it.

Yesterday was a big day.

The wife and I took Little Dude to get his pre-kindergarten eye exam.  Shocking beyond belief is that the progeny of two extremely near-sighted people has almost perfect vision.  Not so shocking was that Little Dude messed with the heads of everyone trying to evaluate his vision by deliberately misnaming the images he was supposed to identify.  And then giggling about it.

Afterward, it was my priviledge to drop the wee man off at my mom’s where he would spend the next couple days.  Presumably the last trip he gets to take for a long while once school starts.  He was delighted to see Grandma Cindy.  Just as I was about to leave, however, I discovered a rather large tick hidden in his hair.

No, not this:

The other kind.  Needless to say, a great deal of sturm und drang went into removing the thing… and a small piece of Little Dude’s scalp with it, it had attached itself so tightly.  The boy came through the ordeal like a champ and hopefully my paranoid perusal of the CDC’s Lyme disease pages will be for nothing.

Of course the boy was completely unphased by the whole thing such that when I loudly proclaimed I’d earned a hug for “removing a parasite from your head” he allowed me to give him a hug… and then tried to place the bite mark in my face.

Ugh.

I’ve spent the past week breaking down and completely reorganizing my art room as well enduring Little Dude’s first days as a Kindergartener.  So the strip will most likely be up tomorrow with a couple of blogs over the weekend.

Patience!

I’ve been meaning to write about Little Dude’s entrance onto the Kindergarten scene.  Meaning to but not quite since I’ve also been waiting for him to adopt this big change into his routine set.  While the first week (last Wednesday through Friday) weren’t bad, this week has proven more…  difficult.

It takes my son (and really most kids) about two weeks to accept a new routine.  It was the same with swimming lessons this summer.  It was the same last year with Early Start pre-school.  And I’m sure it’ll take another week or so to adjust to new teachers, a new room, new classmates, and an all-day-no-breaks schedule.  So far, though, I’d have to say Thursday morning broke the record for worst response to a school day EVER.

The great thing about Little Dude is that generally after 5 - 10 minutes of purging his system, he’s good for the rest of the day.  At least that’s what all the teachers keep telling us.  I’m quite willing to concede that they’re all colluding to keep us from realizing the full extent of what a Holy Terror our child can be.

But it’s too late…  too, too late…  ;_;

It’s been a while since I’ve entered something.  I really need to learn that blogging is about just throwing something up here regularly.  ^_^;  In that vein, here’s a glimpse into my sketchbook!

As you can see I did a couple portrait sketches of McKinley and then…  kind made a Ghost Rider a homeroom teacher.  You know.  Just to see what he looked like.  “Mr. Murder - Algebra Teacher” probably won’t make it into this series, though I could see some retooling shaping him up to fit in nicely with my Evil Acedemy idea.

Mweh heh heh.

The Wife’s relatively new (purchased in January) has apparently had a stroke and now the part of its harddrive where the “Program Files” directory used to be isn’t.  Ugh.  Thankfully I have an external harddrive to back everything up to (seriously, something like 30GB of music and writing) before attempting anything truly invasive.

Sadly, it looks like the ol’ disk check ain’t a rockin’ so after I wake up and fetch Little Dude, I’ll most likely be speaking with your friends and mine at Dell Tech Support.  I’m sure they’ve missed me.

So.  My coworker and friend of a number of years is sitting across for me during my shift tonight.  He’s a great guy, funny and a little goofy.  He is also the kind of guy who has several anecdotes that end “…but they couldn’t arrest me because I have crazy papers.”

Yeah.

He just started meowing.  Help.

Yeah, last Thursday (Oct 9th for the calendar impaired) I hit the big Three-Oh.

I honestly didn’t think much of it.  It was my second day off from work, so I was up for the whole day.  It was pretty run-of-the-mill for the most part.  The Wife and I hit ol’ Red Lobster for a change of pace and for cheesy biscuits.  I heartily endorse cheesy biscuits, if you were wondering.

Aside from that, I got an uber-sweet copy of Who Can Save Us Now? as well as a few other things of my own choosing.  The complete Zot! by Scott McCloud and Ender’s Shadow from Orson Scott Card.  Perhaps the things I’m most looking forward to, though, are the two books by Pierre Alary.  Those suckers had to be ordered from Amazon.ca and will hopefully be here by Thanksgiving.  Oh well, I got them for something like 25% of the asking price from one of the more prominent online artbook stores so I can wait a while.

A long while.

Also, I decided to begin my vacation a couple days early, so I’ve been off since Saturday afternoon and have the rest of the week to which to look forward.

An hour into the event known to the universe only as “24 Hour Comicbook Day.”  I’ve gotten about 4 pages pencilled.  Right now I’m just playing catch-up on all of the strips I wanted to get done this week.  I wanted to build up a backstock of comics so that I’d be able to focus on the upcoming NaNoWriMo event without scrambling to get a semi-weekly comic strip up as well.  I’ve still got a number left that I’ve laid out but haven’t drawn or inked yet.  Hopefully I can bust through these and finish up this little story arc with enough time to work on a short (4 - 6 page) original graphic story today.

Gambatte!