I’m going to Minnesota with Maria and her brother Michael! I’ll be back Monday! That’s four capital Ms in a row!
Actually I’ll be back Sunday, but I think you saw what I was trying to do there. Anacrusis will hopefully be updated as usual.
Category: People
New friends and old friends
I have had occasion in four separate instances, lately, to play with a new baby puppy. It’s a girl puppy, a Yorkie, who has recently taken up residence at Maria’s family’s house to keep her mom company. Her name is Sadie. She is very small and not at all yappy. We are napping buddies. How it works is this: I pick her up and put her in my lap, and then we both fall asleep almost instantly. This is basically the best of all possible worlds.
In the midst of the most recent puppy-time but one, I got an unexpected phone call from Jon, which at first I believed to be the unintelligible noise of somebody who has accidentally called you by not putting on his key lock. After a moment, though, I perceived it as actually a live bootleg from the BNL concert he and Amanda were attending at that very moment. It was the sound of our collective favorite band playing “Lilac Girl,” which they never play because nobody but us three and Canada knows it–it was on their first release, The Yellow Tape, and nothing else. So it’s a rarity and a great song, and I was really gratified that Mr. and Mrs. Brasfield thought to call and share it with me.
- Gave away what, 60 copies of HONOR? Something like that. Two of them I traded for other ashcans (Yeperynye and The Last Sane Cowgirl), which I totally count as sales. And every copy given away was to somebody whose work I (or Will or Stephen) really respect, which is a worthwhile transaction, in my opinion.
- Left my hat at Preview Night. Never got it back.
- Got to meet a lot of cool people from the online.
- Cool people I met from the online all had a curious need to run off to important, distant engagements within seconds of meeting me. Either I smell bad or I’m Creepy Interweb Fan, or (probably) both.
- Had a really good time with Monica, Will, Stephen and Maria. And Stephen’s lady Erin, at whose residence we crashed, is maybe the coolest person on the whole planet.
- Ran out of plane-ticket money and was unable to visit Leonard and Sumana. That was a pretty stupid mistake, and I feel really bad about it. Hopefully, a post-student-loan trip is in the works.
- Tycho and Gabe were the coolest, most professional people at the whole freaking Con.
- Speaking of Tycho and Gabe, I had one of the world’s most random encounters: passing by their booth, I recognized Paul Mattingly, a great guy who was in Richmond Children’s Theatre with me a billion years ago and who now works as a Klingon and Second City understudy (!) in Vegas. I literally hadn’t seen him in over a decade. He even has a site, The Famous Paul, though I understand that’s mostly a placeholder for the moment.
- Getting to California by train was interesting, right enough, and I’m glad we tried it. but the people who work for Amtrak seem unhappy and unhelpful and it’s very bumpy. I think I’ll pretty much be flying from here on out.
- I thought about taking a whole bunch of stuff to get signed, but eventually decided against it. I had a better idea. Thanks to the unlined pocket Moleskine my family got me for my birthday, I now possess what can only be referred to as
The Greatest SKETCHBOOK
Ever In The History Of Time
which basically means I win.
I managed to take a whole roll of film, which is good, considering I frequently manage to wish I had a camera while holding one. Probably more updates after I get that developed, but considering I still haven’t posted the pics from my San Francisco trip in February, one shouldn’t hold one’s breath.
I highly recommend the Brother HL-1435
There exist exactly 100 copies of HONOR, the first comic book anthology from The Fake Middle Names Collective. They are in a box. I helped make a comic book! Life goal #22 gets a BIG FAT CHECK!
We were supposed to print it this morning and leave by 1, and it’s been kind of a torture test on the printer and humans involved, but it’s done. And now Maria, Monica, Will and I roll for Alton, nine hours late but moving fast.
CALIFORNIA HO!
In two days we’ll be on our way to Alton, and thence to California; I’ll finally be meeting Stephen and Erin and Kris, and a great host of other humans, not to mention buying a great many new comics. And I’ll get to see Leonard and Sumana again! And it’ll be my first cross-country trip on a train! I EXPLODE WITH AWESOMENESS!
It’s strange to think that we’ve been planning this for almost an entire year; I was investigating possible trip companions and talking about prices with Stephen before the last Comic Con was over. My enthusiasm for the trip has yet to diminish even a whit, despite the fact that I’m desperately behind on… The Secret Project.
Which Will already talked about, so I guess I can too. He, Lisa, Stephen and I are putting together an ashcan comic to sell to or throw at Con attendees–something we’ve also been planning for a long time. It’s only natural that I’m not done yet, and will probably be up all night tonight finishing my section. We investigated printing prices (Kinko’s, et cetera), then ended up buying a totally sweet laser printer and an extra high-capacity cartridge for less than it would have cost to get it done at a shop. We’re going to bind it ourselves and sell it cheap, and I’ll probably put at least my section up on this “web site” once I get back and have time. I’m drawing my part based on Stephen’s script, which is a new and interesting experience for me, and I hope I get it right.
On Friday I left work early and went to the lab where Maria is working for the summer, in order to get my brain mapped. Brain mapping means they put a lot of very wet sponges all over your head with rubber bands, so they can go in the room behind you (with a one-way mirror window) and laugh at you until they pee themselves.
It’s a pretty neat process, if not very comfortable. They do some really interesting work there, although Maria apparently disagrees with me on that. I got to be one of the first participants in a new experiment one of Maria’s coworkers has designed. I can’t tell you what it was about, but I might be able to get a printout of my session; apparently my data was “very clean.” That’s nice to know. I should be out of Re-Education And Happiness Camp any day now!
Go, car. Go.
I wrote an ultrashort as per Leonard’s idea, and the next day I saw this story linked on Dave Barry’s blog.
The cars are waking up. I’d just walk everywhere, if I were you.
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Ever since the (pretty good) PC speakers which came with my computer started misbehaving to death about two and a half years ago, I’ve been dealing with a nonincreasingly satisfying series of compromises on audio: first, spotty PC speakers; then my dad’s old ancient RCA stereo receiver and its equally-ancient-but-durable monolith speakers; then some bookshelf speakers (kindly lent me by Maria) with the same receiver, which has now begun its own gentle decline into inevitable doom.
Today that same Maria finally compelled me to do what I’ve wanted to do forever, which is buy a freaking decent pair of PC speakers that will sound good and last. I picked them up at Circuit City and installed them just now; only 2.1, but they’re Altec Lansing and THX and I can probably add them into any surround system I eventually build.
Really, really nice speakers. Really, really nice to be able to hear both sides of music again.