Putterer

I had a great weekend this past Saturday and Sunday. I spent most of the time in my basement, cleaning the garage, getting stuff ready to move into storage in preparation for selling our house, and puttering in my workshop. I had one bookshelf that was stacked with projects-to-be-done. It had been accumulating stuff for years. Well, a few things got thrown out, and a few little projects got finished. We now have a miniature copy of a spinning wheel that my grandfather made, and which was in pieces under layers of dust, sitting proudly in our front hall. An heirloom doll's bed that my mother and then my daughter played with is now fixed and ready to store under cover till we have a granddaughter someday.

Saturday night, I sat down to dinner with a grin, and realized I'd loved getting the chance to just putter all day. Fixing stuff, organizing, cleaning, replacing lights...this is stuff I love to do. I guess I knew I was a putterer, but I get to do it so seldom I forgot I was. Now I'll try to make time for it. I gave myself permission to go from project to project, so if I was planning to box up an object and then do something else, but noticed that object needed the paint touched up, I'd jump to painting the object, then box it up and go on to what I'd planned. Did everything I'd scheduled get done? No, but I didn't care. I got a lot of things accomplished. It feels good when we accomplish something.

In the next week, I'll be getting a trailer hitch on the VW Bug, buying a trailer, and moving stuff into storage...and we'll attend a family reunion on Saturday. A week from now, we'll have new happy memories and a lot of stuff out of our house. Ah, accomplishments. Puttering. Satisfaction.

Lucky day

Ever have a day where you run errands and it works out better than you expected? That happened this morning.

My first stop was Home Depot, where I returned a can of paint and some molding. I got a store credit for what I'd paid--but it still felt like a profit because I was suddenly $40 richer. On the way back to the car, I found a five dollar bill in the parking lot. No one around, so I pocketed it and drove to Staples, my next stop.

As I shopped for some paper, I found 100% recycled for less than the price I usually pay for 30% recycled. It's a lower-grade finish, but works fine for my purposes, and I can now add "Printed on 100% recycled paper" to my correspondence. I had a coupon, but it turned out I needed to spend $25 to save $5. I found a couple of folders I needed, a drawing template I'd forgotten I needed, and some hanging folders that will help me improve my filing system. I also answered an in-store survey about a new shredder they're thinking of carrying (which, by the way, was very nice: it'll take 100 sheets at a time, and will even shred paper clips and staples) and received a $10 coupon. So I left the store with $28 worth of stuff that I needed anyway, and only paid thirteen and change for it! With the fiver I found, I was almost twenty bucks ahead.

Sometimes small, unexpected victories are the sweetest.

Vacation

Just back from a week's vacation in Maine. Did all the usual stuff--read a couple of books, swam, visited with family, went shopping, watched the sun set--but with a stomach ache most of the week. Some days were awful---an actual ache that I always noticed, and nausea a few times; and one time I became very sad as I tried to nap up in my room and heard the extended family laughing and splashing down on the lake---but most days, it was just a low-grade ache that kept me subdued but not stopped. I like to have a drink or two on vacation, maybe more than usual, but there were only two glasses of wine for this guy the whole week because of the 'ache. And the whoopie pies that are famous in our family, which we buy daily from the bakery down the street...only a couple the whole week. Very little coffee, even though I love a good cup out on the deck overlooking a pristine scene. I would've liked to at least come home having lost a few pounds---I didn't eat much---but I only lost one.

Yet I still had a great time. Yes, I didn't swim much, and was a lot quieter than I usually am, but just being with all the brothers- and sisters-in-laws, and nieces and nephews, and folks-in-law, as well as my wife and kids and their significant others, is always a treat. You see, there were twenty-seven of us in one big house last week. We do this every year. And we enjoy each other's company the whole time---or close to it. If I was too weak to dive off the dock, there were kids who weren't, and I was glad to just be there with them. If I couldn't have a drink, I could visit with my sister-in-law who was a little loopy and a lot of fun. And if I was quietly reading a book, I could do that on the shore, in the shade, with an in-law or two doing the same in a chair beside me.

The one day I felt fine, I got a little more active, but was a little "iffy" by evening. But what if I'd been home working during my illness? Would it have been bearable? QlownTown might've missed a few days, because I wouldn't have been up to sitting up at the drawing table or computer for hours. So, while I wouldn't recommend being sick on vacation, there are worse things.

We started doing this big family-week-at-the-beach-or-lake about twenty years ago, but I was sick the first couple of years. Bronchitics one year; pneumonia the next. I began to think I'd never go on vacation with the family without being sick, but then I went all those years till now feeling fine. My plan is to never be sick again. The law of averages is in my favor.

I did accomplish some stuff: my nephew Jake showed me a book of cartoons from the Perry Bible Fellowship, a very offbeat strip. (Warning: a number of the cartoons are R-rated.) What I loved about the strips is that they almost always have an unexpected twist on what you expect. I choose not to go in an R-rated direction with QlownTown, but I hope I can back to more of the offbeat, Far Side type stuff I enjoy so much. I wrote down a few ideas, and will try to move some of the puns to a later date and incorporate these new ideas over the next few weeks. It re-energized me.

***

An order came in while I was away for a print of one of last week's cartoons. I went to get it ready to send to the printer, and realized that I hadn't thought about what size the new square panel would be when people bought prints. I decided to center it on an 11" x 14" page. I still haven't decided if I'll stick with the square format, or if I'll go back to the strip, or if I'll just do whatever I want each day. Consistency is a good thing, I guess, but why not just use the format that serves your purpose best each time?

I'm still working on a new project that would be very cool, but that's still a few months off. For now, though, QlownTown is exciting me again. I'm feeling upbeat. I'm even going to try a piece of the blueberry pie that I brought home from the bakery. It may rile my stomach, but I'm getting used to that now, anyway. Maybe it'll give the comic a slightly darker edge, although I'd prefer that if that's going to happen, it happens because I decide to---not because I'm in pain.

By the way: yes, I called the doctor's office. She said it's probably just a bug that's going around. It's been nine days, but I'll give it a few more and see if it goes away. (High co-pays are a good incentive not to overburden the doctor.)

Rope swing

I drew a cartoon earlier this week and was very pleased with myself when it was done. I liked the colors, the composition, the way I drew the characters. I liked that I'd changed my original concept of having the chicken say, "Of course I'm chicken" to a caption explaining the picture. I think that's a drier, more amusing way to do it. That way, the "narrator" is stating this as a logical reason, which I think is funnier than just having the character make a silly pun. (I was going to say "bad" pun, but puns aren't really bad--they're clever wordplay. Shakespeare and I don't have a lot in common, but we both have beards and love a good pun.)

I even traced a Shaker-style wooden box to get the even curve of the rope...I use a compass sometimes, but it's quicker and easier to trace an object when I want a smooth ink line. And I decided that Perry seemed like a good, unlikely name for a chicken. Finally, I liked that I put the chicken in a bathing suit and set things up as if he was just another one of the boys.


Sooo--it's all done, it gets uploaded, it's there in the queue--and then it arrives in my email several days later as the Daily Cartoon. And I see that the rope on the swing is so long, one would smash into the ground before reaching the water.


My first thought was to fix that--redraw that part of the cartoon so the rope is tauter. That would mean replacing some black lines and a few areas of color, all of which I'd do in the computer. But I liked every other element so much, I decided not to tamper with (near) perfection. Maybe I'll do a followup, where the taunting kid who's holding the tire tries to swing and hits the ground. He deserves it.