It's a new year, innit?

Well, the holidays came and went and still the site isn't up. I decided to hold off on ordering the calendars, because how many would I be likely to sell without a comic strip to relate them to? And now that it's January, I may not be able to sell many because everyone's bought their calendars! We'll see how that goes in the first few weeks the site is up.

All I can do now is draw cartoons and wait for other people to get their part together so the site can be launched. If it isn't online this month, it will have been a year that I've been at it with no site to show for it.

On another front, I've been sketching house plans. One set will ultimately be for our house when we move in the next year or so. Others will be for sale at the website. Yes, I'll eventually be offering house plans! I used to be a contractor and restorer and won an award for a house I built in Maine. While house designer and cartoonist may not seem to go together, both involve fitting elements into a space so they look good and serve a function. And they're two things I love.

I went to the car show in Boston last month. I was especially taken with the Nissan Cube, which looks like, basically, a Cube. Some might find it ugly. It's definitely funny looking, but very practical. It seems a logical followup to my Beetle, which is really a cartoon on wheels. My wife, however, has informed me that it's her turn to choose our next car, so what I think may not matter much anyway. There are no immediate plans to buy a new car anyway, so who knows what will be available when we buy? She likes the Honda Accord, natural gas engine version. You install your own pumping station in your garage: no stops at the gas station! This appeals to me too: natural gas is domestic, oil is mostly foreign. One more way to work towards energy independence. If anyone out there has one of these Accords, let me know. We already have a Prius, and a friend suggested we get a license plate that says SMUG. But I'm afraid some bitter Hummer driver would ram us the next time gas goes up--and it will go up.