Whine and Cheese

It's been over a week since my last post. Nothing major has happened, a bunch of little things here and there that don't amount to much.

• I've been trying to run more and more outside when I can. I got a lot of miles in this week. Today, I ran one mile and then did ten runs up the gravel hill that goes to the track where I run. Lord, that was a chore. I am going to be sore tomorrow. Still, it's been fun trying to vary the different exercises I've been doing.



• A friend recommended "Agatha Raisin," a BBC detective show about a loud, PR person who moves to a small village and ends up solving various murders. I'm only two episodes in, but I'm enjoying it. However, it does remind me a tad of "Murder, She Wrote," in that it's a small village and how many murders can happen in such a small place. Cabot Cove, ME must have been one of the most dangerous places in the 1980s (yes, I know it's fake).



• I've already written Issue 29 of my comic, but I am so reluctant to start drawing it. I'm not sure why. I'm so wiped out after work mentally that the idea of drawing has lost its luster. Even just general drawing, random scribbles, haven't really been happening. The stresses of our current situation has something to do with it, I'm sure.



• I took today off. I just wanted ONE more day to sleep in. And then I was up at 6:30 AM. Ugh!

My day started off by Boo the Devil Kitteh sneezing in my face to wake me.

Let's hope it's not a portent of what's to come... cat boogers...

I really don't do the resolutions, because we all know that people break the large majority of them. Here's a few things I'll try:

• Exercise more, eat less, and lose weight. My weight is a roller coaster at times, but I need to get it under control.



• Read more books. I have a stack of books that I've purchased with the intent to read them. It's always easier to grab a comic book or draw or watch TV instead, so I may need to put some effort into this.



• Try to get back into a creative groove. I've been in a slump of late. I have a few moments of clarity, but otherwise it seems to be sputter out. Issue #26 of my comic is in progress, but it's not coming to me as easily as past issues and is making me think I wrote a crappy story. We shall see. I am also going to try to do the 365-drawing challenge again this year, just to see if it will fuel the fire a bit.



• Found money total this year was $5.18, which is the second highest in the ten years I've been tracking it.
  

Happy New Year everyone!

I had no plans this weekend. None.

Friday afternoon after work, I raked leaves for a couple of hours and found myself sore afterward. I was thinking of going to see the new "Suspiria" remake. It's only showing at the local arthouse theater and it was the "opening night," so I pushed it off to avoid crowds.

The next day, I went for a run at the gym and rushed to get home for a quick shower and change. I was going to go grab lunch and see a matinee of the movie. The more I read of the reviews and the length of the movie (almost 2.5 hours), the more I felt like not going. That length of time for a movie is a commitment. Plus, the reviews was comparing it to "Mother," a very artsy, out-there flick, which I had not heard good things about. So I begged off again, grabbing lunch and coming home to take a nap. I did watch "John Carpenter's Village of the Damned" on my DVR, which is something I've been meaning to see for years.

My goal for the most part was to spend a bit of time working on the next issue of my comic book, or doing some drawing, but the creative juices just don't seem to be flowing for me right now. I can doodle and whatever, but concentrating on a project or a potential project seems to be escaping me.

So the weekend is now done and I raked the yard and did laundry for the most part. Not what I'd call my most productive weekend.

I love the exhilaration of getting a comic book done, but when I post it and the comments and such have died down, I find myself feeling a bit odd and out-of-sorts. Another former LJ'er called it "post-artum depression," which is somewhat fitting, but it's not depression. It's that sudden feeling of having time to do things, when the work on the comic book used to fill that space. I'm antsy and not sure what to do with myself.

It's not that there isn't a list of things I should be doing, like cleaning house or yard work, but I'm not feeling that either.

I easily could start writing the next issue, but I like to give my brain a break from that. I worked from home today, which just gave me a strange case of cabin fever, as I've been cooped up in the house all day. I'm still feeling it.

The gym beckons. I need to do more there I think.

Okay, enough of this...

Just a few odds and ends of the weekend and such:

• I watched a documentary called "David Cassidy: The Last Session" this weekend. Now I was never a huge "Partridge Family" fan, but I would watch it on occasion and I thought the music was fun. After he died, I went to iTunes and bought several of his songs and found that he was actually a very good singer. The documentary showed that he was quite the pop star. It's strange to see it now as a 45-year-old man, because I don't seem him as these young girls saw him. I've heard from folks who were teenagers in the early 1970's that his level of fame was astounding at the time. What I learned from the documentary was that he really had no control over the show or the concerts, but was literally swept away with the huge wave of manufactured popularity. Things appeared to happen so fast that I doubt he had much of any chance (or overall desire) to say no to anything. The documentary goes into his last recording sessions before his death. His voice was clearly damaged by hard living and substance abuse, but it was still familiar. I did notice that the film didn't dive into his children, including his daughter actress Katie Cassidy, who he didn't raise and freely admits that he had little interaction with her.



• I did spend some time on Saturday drawing pages for Issue #25 of my comic. It's been very slow coming this round, but part of it has been work and family stuff that required my attention. I still have a few pages left to pencil and I hope the inking goes faster.



• Sunday I had a bit of scratchiness in my throat, like it was very dry, and I was afraid that I was getting strep. I have some work travel coming up and I didn't want to deal with being sick and traveling after my last trip having problems with my knee. I went to Urgent Care and the doctor said I don't have strep, but she thinks I have "thrush," a fungal infection usually seen in infants. They're culturing it to make sure, but I'm already on the meds as a precaution. It could be allergies acting up, but it's good to fix it now before the trip.

It's been a really busy few days, mostly good and a hint of bad.

• I took Friday off so I could jaunt down to Corbin to see my sister and my mom. Mom seems to have adjusted well to the nursing home. She has moments where she's not happy there, but others she where she's enjoying the company of the other ladies. My sister and I had a bitch-fest about my twin who hasn't visited Mom since Christmas. He lives in town, less than ten minutes from Mom, yet he does not want to visit. I'm not sure what his issues are, but I foresee me having it out with him soon over his behavior.



• Saturday was my drive home. It was relatively uneventful. I got back to spend a few hours cleaning the house in anticipation of the arrival of Steve (rootbeer1).



• Steve and I hung out for a few days, eating Skyline Chili multiple times and enjoying Graeter's Ice Cream. We did see "A Quiet Place" which was really good for a horror movie. We both agreed that sadly there was not enough shirtlessness on the part of bearded lead actor/director John Krasinski.



• I was back in the office today and swamped. In the middle of the day, my sister texted me that the nursing home had sent Mom to the hospital, thinking that she's had another stroke. She had stopped talking and responding to people. The doctors believe that she's had a "mini-stroke," but I asked my sis if she though Mom had contracted another UTI, which caused a lot of her issues last year. They sent her back to the nursing home, as the doctors said that there wasn't anything else they could do. However, they did find out... she has another UTI. Hopefully, they can treat it and Mom will get closer to normal.



• Tonight, I'm just exhausted, so it is just TV, watching the season finale of "Schitt's Creek" and reruns of "The Bionic Woman." I'm already looking forward to the weekend.



• Lastly, but not least, happy birthday hugs to the somewhat invisible xianjessen ;)

When I bought my house back in 2001, the previous owner was big on wallpaper. She had wallpapered the living room, hallway, bathroom, and at least one wall in every bedroom, one with a border. Before I'd moved into the house, I removed all the wallpaper in the house, except the living room and hallway. The wallpaper in the room wasn't floral or ugly, but was textured and had a non-descriptive pattern to it. I dreaded taking it down and the uniformity was not unappealing, so I kept it.

Move forward to now and Boo the Devil Cat has been enjoying actively scratching up the wallpaper. While I found it to be okay, it offends her decorative sensibilities. The good news is that the wallpaper seems to be easy to remove. So last night, I decided to test it out by removing a panel above the closet in the living room.


It took maybe 20 minutes to remove the panel. I still need to remove the glue residue. However, I found out something specific. One, the people who put the wallpaper up did it right. No super glue, or stupid stuff. It came down relatively clean and intact. Two, the original owner to the house, not the previous owner, must have put this stuff up. The wall beneath does not appear to have ever been painted. This wallpaper is almost 40 years old.

The latter bit surprised me a bit. The original owner was a single man and I'm betting it was put up by the builders, and the previous owner was a woman and she apparently didn't want to change it. I thought it was strange as her other wallpaper tastes were far different than this pattern.

The problem I'm feeling now is apprehension. With the panel gone, I'm feeling this urge to keep going and get it all down. I'm impatient and a bizarre sense of OCD is making this missing panel grate my nerves. I'm holding off because I need to have time to move the furniture, take down curtains, and remove electrical outlet plates to do it properly. And then comes the fun of picking colors to paint it. I'm not a wallpaper person. I swore I'd never put that $#!+ up after having so much trouble getting it down.

I'm seriously contemplating hiring a professional painter to do this. I have the name of a guy who apparently does good work. I just need to determine what would be a good week to do this as my travel schedule for work is starting to heat up.

Sigh...

I've not been a drawing kind of mood of late. Former LJ'er "prisoncitybear" coined the lack of desire to do artistic things after getting a project done as "post-artum depression." It's funny in a way. I'm not depressed, but just a lack of desire. I did do some designs for Christmas cards and I will have to work on a retirement cartoon in the next couple of works.

On the flip side of it, I've been trying to work out on a schedule again. Holidays are rough on the waistline. And I ate quite a bit during the holiday, especially when I'm helping with the cooking. My running speed is terrible, but I'm working on it.

I usually print one hard copy of my comic book for the "file," so I can put next to the original artwork. I was three issues behind, but I had Issues #21 and #22 printed today at Kinko's. It's nice to see them in print. Now I just need to assemble them into the sleeves.

The week is about mid-way done. I'm looking forward to the weekend already.

After work on Friday, I hurried to the nearest movie theater to catch a 3D matinee of "Wonder Woman". The character was one of the few highlights of "Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice," so I was eagerly looking forward to seeing her solo movie.

I was surprised that the theater was so sparsely attended, even for a matinee, as it was just me and two other folks. I have to remember that I get off work earlier than most.

The movie was FANTASTIC! Any concerns I had about Gal Gadot getting the role of Diana were quickly dismissed. The story was great, the characters were entertaining, the setting was amazing, etc. The setting of the movie is WWI (hardly a spoiler), which is a bit outside of canon as Wonder Woman started in WWII, but it's forgivable. I loved the action. When Diana whips out her glowing lasso and it flies around the screen, I was almost giddy as it brings a character I adore to life for me.

I will watch it again in the theater, very soon, I think.

Saturday was a relatively dull day. The appliance repairman was supposed to show up early Saturday afternoon, only to show up at 6 PM that night. It does irritate me that I was left to linger about the house waiting for this guy to show, but the time wasn't wasted. I inked a lot of comic book pages that day. And the washer is fixed and fully operational again.

Now it's Sunday night and work will come early again tomorrow. Ugh.

First, big thanks to all the birthday wishes! I really appreciate them! :)

I spent a large chuck of the last couple of days being somewhat lazy, napping and the like. The temps have fallen into the single digits and it's not much fun going outside. However, a few things did get me out of the house.

• Friday afternoon, I went out to see a matinee of "Passengers", the sci-fi thriller about two people who wake up on a long-distance startship to colonize a new world. They wake up about 90 years early, while everyone else is still in hibernation, with no way to undo it. While the movie has a fairly low rating on Rotten Tomatoes (around 31% as of this post), I actually enjoyed it. There were some seriously big plot holes, the sight of Chris Pratt's backside was worthwhile.



• I got home from the movies to find that my garage door wouldn't open. This happens quite a bit when it gets really cold. The metal contracts and provides some resistance that makes the door halt. This was different. So, I went inside through the front door and into the garage to find the track had come loose from the wall and blocked the door from rising. It was too late to go to Home Depot, so the Bearmobile had to sit outside in the freezing cold for the night.



• Last night, I hunkered down and watched the Blu-Ray of "The House That Screamed", a 1969 Spanish horror movie staring German actress Lilli Palmer. The movie was in English and definitely had that late 60's Hammer-esque feel to it. It's set at a girls boarding school around 1900, where the headmistress runs a strict place, flogging girls when they are overly defiant. The headmistress has a gestapo-like "head girl" platoon who also do some questionable activities, with a distinct Lesbian vibe. Amidst all of this, girls who try to run away from the school are killed by an unknown assailant. Certainly, an odd movie of sorts.



• This morning I got up early, without showering, to head over to Home Depot. I bought the necessary screws and support joints, checked out some very handsome bearded fellers roaming the aisles, and left to grab lunch. After I got home, I had the garage door fixed in about 30 minutes, which felt pretty good. A lot of it is common sense really, when it comes to fixing things, but I won't deny that it makes me nervous for some reason.



• I was tempted to hit another movie, but decided to just grab a nap instead. It's cold outside.