State of the Lindsey.

I know that lately all my posts have been about a) bizarre micro-events or b) COMICS COMICS WOO!!! This is because the rest of my life has been in a state of vagueness: plans still in flux, nothing concluded or settled or accomplished. If it weren't for Three on the Third, my posting record of late would be very very sparse.

But things are starting to move toward resolution, and I'm feeling better about it all at the moment. So here is an update on the more prosaic aspects of my life:

1) My roommate moved out. It was an amicable parting, but it did leave me hunting frantically for someone trustworthy to live in my house and give me money before I leave town in June. This was more stressful than I expected. However, I am happy to report that I will soon be renting most of my house to Mr. and Mrs. Chainsaw. Yes: they are Webcomic Artists. They are moving to Portland from Georgia, partly because they want to go to my church. (This is significant to me. I quit my secure long-term job partly so I could go to my church. My church is pretty amazing.) Also, they have a Good Rental History. Cue giant sigh of relief.

2) I've been temping a couple days a week at a school for painters and drywall tapers. I'm assisting with clerical duties in the admin office. My supervisor is great, and the work isn't bad for temping: lots of data entry, filing, paper-shredding. Nothing all that exciting, but nothing painful either.

2.5) I am disappointed that I didn't earn more money during my time in Portland, though. I've got to get better at this.

3) However, I'm glad I'm not working full-time this month, because I've got a lot of preparations to make for my departure. This evening's project is Filing. I finally got a hanging folder insert for my cheap filing cabinet. This makes all the difference in the world. It is no longer a Huge Pain to file things; it's actually almost kind of fun. I am not going to admit to you how many years' worth of documents are now getting filed, shredded, or recycled, but I will have a lot more space in my room when I'm done.

4) And then I can pack up a lot of my stuff from downstairs and move it into my room.

5) Also: My yard is a jungle and it's eating my house. So I'm working on that.

6) Also: remember the heating duct project? Yeah, there's still that too.

7) So you could say I've got my work cut out for me.

8) However, because of the Chainsaws' arrival date, I will probably not leave right at the beginning of June, which was the original plan. Probably more like a week into June. I should probably get those tickets pretty soon, yeah?

9) Tickets... to Maui! I'm going to Maui! I'm going to work on a boat with my superhero cousins! I'm going to learn to clean fish and drive standard. For real! I feel like it's dead week right now, and I am all wrapped up in papers and tests and sort of can't believe it will ever end, but I have to keep reminding myself that just on the other side of the deadlines is Summer Vacation.

10) And now: back to Filing.

Everyone's a Comedian.

Last night I spent far too much of my dreaming time trying, and utterly failing, to tell a joke I'd made up. I would get it all set in my head and then look for opportunities to tell it, and then hesitate -- how did that go again? -- and miss my chance. Finally I cornered my mom and said, "What do you call a... uh... um, hang on...."

I never did make it all the way to the punch line, which was "A Göring boring Alice." I didn't even realize until I woke up that it's a riff on a family inside joke, so even if it were funny it would only work for a limited audience. But thanks to the tenacity of my brain in clinging to the punch line, I am now able to record this incident for posterity.

The Third Three on the Third!

So check it out! I actually got my comics done on the Third this time. For that, I win a special prize. The prize is not being expected to draw any comics today.

Here are the ones I drew yesterday:

#1 * #2 * #3

And here are everyone else's so far:

recoveringmale * evannichols * sanguinity * patchwork * alissa & upsidedown cat * ah * grrlpup

As usual, this post will be updated until everyone has posted their comics. So give 'em all a gander, and remember: everybody likes comments!

I think this might be my new favorite holiday.

This Post Is Pretty Much About Comics.

Hello! I hope your May Day was spring-y, or fair to laborers, or at least didn't involve any sinking vessels. Unless they were your enemy's.

Now that it's the First (and probably the Second by the time you read this), you know that the Third can't be far behind. And you know what we do on the Third, right?

We draw three comics. About things that happen to us, or things that we make happen, or things that we observe happening, on the Third.

Okay, then. As long as we have that straight. Fortuitously, this month the Third happens to fall on Free Comic Book Day. That should give you something to write about. On Free Comic Book Day, you can walk into any comic book store on Saturday and get a free comic book -- or, in many cases, multiple free comic books. (Note that it does not mean you can walk out with any comic book for free. There will be lots of free ones to choose from, though.) If you live anywhere near me, I highly recommend stopping by Guapo Comics and/or Cosmic Monkey. They both have a good representation of independent and non-superhero comics, and will not act surprised/confused when an ACTUAL GIRL walks in the door.

And while I'm going on about comics, ohmygosh Stumptown!!!!!! If you were designing an event specifically to make Lindsey happy, it just might involve a whole lot of quirky, non-mainstream comic artists under one roof, all eager to talk about and show you their work and give you free samples. I met a bunch of cool people, listened to some fun speakers/interviews, and came home with a giant bag of loot. Most of the loot (business cards, postcards, and minicomics) points toward a body of web-based work as well. So I have a ton of fun things to look at, if I can find the time.

What I would really like to do is highlight some of my favorite finds in some upcoming blog posts. However, the arrival of May also means I have a month left before leaving for Hawaii, and holy cow do I have a lot to get done in that time. So no guarantees.

All I can guarantee is that Saturday is the Third, and therefore a very good day to draw comics.

DJ Fred Plays the Hits!

Never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down.... I was well into the grocery store by the time I realized why that song sounded so familiar. Yes, I got rickrolled... by Fred Meyer. I burst out laughing, then looked around to see if anyone else got it. One lady gave me a "please don't pull out a gun" smile, and it occurred to me that maybe most people don't spend as much time on the internet as I do.

By the time I reached the cereal aisle, Billy Joel was pounding out "Piano Man", and I spotted a man singing along to the little boy in his shopping cart. "What is that song?" asked the kid. "That is a very great piece of music," said the man as I walked past. Awww.

Mr. Sparrow vs. the Evil Doppelgangers!

The latest in an ongoing series of Fun Tricks Nature Plays on Lindsey:

A couple of days ago, I noticed a lot of bird crap on the driver's side door of my car, small deposits localized right behind the mirror and smeared around on it. As I was in a hurry to get somewhere, I didn't think much about this odd configuration beyond "Gross, I'd better clean that soon."

While it was being sunny out this weekend, I noticed a sparrow with pretty markings darting around the front yard. It perched on my car's side mirror, so I could see it well from the kitchen. I admired it for a moment before it clicked: that feathered freak has been picking fights with himself in my mirrors.

"Hey, buzz off!" I hollered (or words to that effect), banging on the window. The bird removed himself to the opposite mirror, the one that was heavily smeared with tiny diagonal poop-streaks. (I never realized sparrow combat involved so much excrement.) He did not leave until I tied grocery bags over both mirrors.

The bags have been an effective deterrent, but they also keep all the crap from getting washed off by rain, which I was sort of hoping would save me the chore. Ah, well, I've cleaned up worse. Here's hoping that without mirror-foes to battle, Mr. Sparrow will get himself a girlfriend (or at least some real live opponents) and leave my car alone.

Throwing Things Out, Driving Around, and Talking About Sailing.

I never posted a Discardia wrap-up, did I? The end of it got upstaged by Earn-money-a. Due to diverse work schedules, hhw and I didn't make it to the Hazardous Waste facility (though we still intend to go). And I bought something on the last day of the holiday, which is the day you're supposed to not "buy anything or bring anything into your home and enjoy the fact that you have enough." I bought some fish and chips and a milkshake, because in the rush to get from work to a show (which I was too early for), I forgot all about Discardia. I'm not sorry though. They were tasty.

I'm not sure how summer Discardia will work for me. Maybe by the time I've been in Hawaii for a few weeks I'll have accumulated some stuff to discard? Maybe I'll clean up my hard drive. Or maybe I'll have to actually examine "ideas and habits [I] no longer need." That sounds almost painful.

In the spirit of Discardia, and also Obtainia or perhaps just Rearrangia (Q: Am I taking this wordplay too far? A: YES), there is a Stuff Swap going on in Portland this Saturday the 19th. It's basically a free garage sale: bring your old stuff and/or take home new stuff without ever getting out your wallet. I heard these have been pretty cool in the past; this will be my first time to actually attend and not just drop stuff off beforehand. E-mail me if you're interested and I'll give you the details.

* * *

I had a fun weekend driving around in Washington. Oregon is the landscape of my heart, but Washington is my favorite place for a road trip. Crossing the Columbia, heading north with the windows down and adventure ahead, is greatly giddifying. Doubly so when the weather suddenly turns fabulous.

I went to Gig Harbor for Truck's hitchin' (daah hah), which was pretty good times, as weddings go. And I crashed at Piri's place for a couple nights, so we had a little time to catch up on our respective plans and (mis)adventures and creative projects, and even planned to revive one of the latter for collaboration (woo exciting!).

And both times I passed the Aberdeen exit, I got that little tug that said "turn off!" Even though the tall ships are still in California and everyone in the Seaport office was home for the weekend, even though Aberdeen is a really wretched town and Westport doesn't have a lot going for it, still I knew the sun and the wind and the water were doing amazing things out there, and I really really wanted to be part of it.

So it was gratifying to get back to my speedy internet connection and read a post from former crewmate Annie about realizing how much sailing lingo you've learned. I only know maybe half of the terms on her list, which is appropriate because she is at least twice the sailor I am. But I definitely know what a vang is (and that there are four of them on the Chieftain, two of which need to be moved from pinrail to kevel before setting the mains'l, and by the way they go three times round the kevel before the locking hitch, or they're impossible to undo if there's any wind to speak of). The article she references articulates something about the language of sailing I think I've tried to say before, but not nearly as eloquently:

But there’s no glazing over [the vocabulary] when you begin sailing, as I did under tutelage for the first time a few weeks ago. You find yourself at sea, awash in the natural world, and yet at the same time you find yourself immured in a vigilant kind of properness, a clear sense of how things should be. It’s not just a matter of proper names. It’s a matter of proper actions and responses, without which there is a world of trouble. There is something deeply ethical about it, as there always is in the command of language.

This was one of the things I found deeply comforting about sailing, even while being utterly confused by it: that there is a unique way of talking about things, and a particular way of doing things, both of which have been derived from centuries of trial and error. Taken out of context these seem odd, even nonsensical, but in a world where creatures of earth move across the water using wood, metal, and air, they make sense. I mean, literally, they make sense, taking something ridiculously complicated and improbable and distilling it into something anyone can quickly learn to contribute to and even understand. The way we've shaped this technology is amazing, but no more so than the way it has shaped us.

Life After The Third.

So on the Fourth I worked all day, and then met up with Alissa (check out her new 3/3rd and Trip To Japan comics) to see an art opening at Grasshut Gallery. Then we had some tea and one of those conversations that only starts winding down when you look at the clock and wonder how it could possibly be that late.

And on the Fifth I worked nine hours, and went to see Upsidedown Cat (check out her Trip To France comics) opening for Lake, which was so fun it made me grin from ear to ear. Ear to ear, I tell you! But I went home before Lake even started, although I like Lake, because of the Sleepy.

And on the Sixth I worked ten hours, and went to the home of Bee and Spider's parents (Mr. and Mrs. Bug) for dinner. Mr. Bug grilled chicken and Mrs. Bug tested several new recipes on us. I was alternately giggly/chatty and dazed, due to the Sleepy.

And on the Seventh I rested. Sort of. There were an awful lot of interruptions from taking my car to the shop, picking it up again, running errands, the phone ringing a bazillion times, etc. And I drew two comics, but had to quit because my eyes and hands were not working quite right, thanks to the Sleepy.

And on the Eighth I drew the last comic and uploaded all three and blogged about why I hadn't done that earlier.

first comic * second comic * third comic

But wait, don't go away yet! I have to tell you about this crazy temp job I did for nineteen hours this weekend! I worked for an auction house that specializes in stamps.

All these collectors and dealers wanted to look at the merchandise before the auction on Sunday, so for all of Saturday and half of Sunday I pulled boxes and albums and envelopes full of stamps (and postcards and old letters and coins) for these people to look at, and then put them back again. There were a bunch of us doing this all at once, inside a corral of tables at which the collectors were sitting, and it was pretty fast-paced and a lot more fun than I have yet figured out how to describe. Maybe it was like waiting tables, but with fewer things to remember and heavier things to carry. I don't know. I've never actually waited tables. Honestly, it would appeal to me a lot more if there were fewer things to remember and heavier things to carry.

Part of why it was so fun was that I am fascinated by little subcultures like this. What kind of people collect and sell stamps? What kind of people sail tall ships? What kind of people work in tattoo parlors? I might not want to spend all my time with stamp collectors (no offense to any closet philatelists!), but observing them for a weekend is terribly entertaining.

(If you're wondering, the answer to the first question above is introverted conservative wealthy white dudes over 50. Although I'm told the hobby is also popular in Japan.)

The auction took place on Sunday afternoon. The auctioneer didn't do the old-time patter style of auction-speak, but he still moved through the lots at quite a rate (which was a good thing, because it still took over four hours). This was intense because I was asked to represent a phone bidder in California. That meant I had to call this person at various points during the auction and slow down the bidding while I checked to see if each price increase was acceptable. And if I messed up, that would obviously be a pretty bad thing.

But I didn't mess up. Whew! In fact I helped the dude in California spend quite a bit of money. He was not the biggest spender there, but to give you an idea of the kind of cash being dropped, one of the more valuable stamps went for $1400.

I know, huh?

Three on the Third: This Time, We Really Mean It.

So I have bad news and good news.

The bad news is that I don't have any comics to post yet. I scripted them all, but now (for the second time today!) I am choosing sleep over drawing. I don't feel entirely comfortable doing the drawing on the wrong day, but I told other people it was fine to do the same thing last month, so this is me pretending I don't care: "I don't care!"

The good news is that other people are way better at managing their time than I am. Check out these INCREDIBLY AWESOME comics, everybody! And watch this space for updates as more appear online.

greenmouse * S. * evannichols * recoveringmale * sanguinity * grrlpup * ah * alissa * lindsey * upsidedown cat

Also, new rule: tell me if you don't want a link to your comics made public. Otherwise, consider yourself advertised. You are all so very worthy of advertising.

A Thing, Plus Some Other Things.

This is when I remind you that Three on the Third is coming around again! If you didn't know (gasp!) or forgot (gasp!), Three on the Third is when you draw three comics about your life on the third day of the month. It is not very hard and it is a lot of fun. April 3rd will be the second Three on the Third; you can see the comics from the first one here. Note that artistic ability is not a requirement. Do it! Do it.

I keep meaning to blog about things besides that thing, and now that I am finally blogging I have no excuse not to. So here are some other things:

Dryer report: I took it to the repair shop and they said, "There's nothing wrong with it! Check your exterior vent." So I replaced my ancient exterior vent, which was exasperating because I am not very good at that kind of thing. But after all that, my dryer still smells like burning. I don't know what's up with that, but it makes me nervous.

Discardia report: I have already discarded a substantial list of things, if not a particularly impressive volume of things. Perhaps my most impressive feat was to pass off an old computer, a hefty bag of peripherals, and two large boxes of software to my parents. They did the same to me several years ago ("Here, you have a house now, want these?"), so I am just returning the favor ("Here, you added on to your house, want these back?"). We all want this stuff (mostly old favorite games) to remain within reach; we just don't know where to put it all. Well, no tagbacks, Parents!

This week, I will clean out the fridge the night before trash day, and hhw and I will venture to a Hazardous Waste Disposal Facility to get rid of old batteries and fluorescent bulbs and maybe a little asbestos. Saturday the 5th is the last day of Discardia. The idea is not to buy or bring anything into your home on that day. I'm curious to see how that will go. Should I put a "no thank you" sign over my mail slot?

Job report (current): My part-time work for my jewelry-making cousin continues to buy the groceries, but hasn't made much of a dent in the bills. However, continued persistence with an unresponsive temp agency has finally landed me a few days of clerical work. I am fervently hoping this marks the end of the long dry spell of underemployment.

Job report (future): Summer plans are finally looking definite enough to blog about: I have two cousins (other side of the family) who run a fishing charter on Maui, and they're hiring me on as crew June through August. It's not sailing, but it's fun work for good money, and I'm extremely excited about it. In case you're wondering if this job will be anything like my last boat job, the answer is no, they are pretty much opposite in every way.

And in case you're wondering if all six of my first cousins are outrageously talented, attractive, generous, intelligent, fun, and useful to know, the answer is yes. (As my sister once said: "I hope we're not a disappointment to them.")

The Other Holiday Season.

Man, the holidays, they can really wear you out.

March 14: Pi Day
I ate a pear-almond tart, because I didn't want that ate-a-whole-pie feeling.
March 15: The Ides
I bewared to the best of my ability. Did not get assassinated.
March 16: "The Controversial Latvian Legion Day" (Wikipedia)
I observed a hiatus from celebrating.
March 17: St. Patrick's Day
I avoided going downtown.
March 18: Flag Day (Aruba)
I did my taxes.
March 19: Discardia begins
I sent a book away in the mail, and made plans for the further disposal of unwanted items.

A word or two about Discardia: It is a festival of casting aside. It is a quarterly sloughing off of the unnecessary. It is such a very good idea. If you have too much stuff, I encourage you to celebrate Discardia with me. This season it is two and a half weeks long! Just think how much stuff you can get rid of in two and a half weeks.

If you do not have too much stuff, do you want some of mine?

Three on the Third Roundup!

Hey, how was your March 3rd? Mine was pretty terrible, but I got some good comics out of it. No suffering is wasted if it's transmogrified into ART, right?

Page 1 (#1, #2) * Page 2 (more #2) * Page 3 (still more #2) * Page 4 (end of #2, #3)

Riiiight. Anyway, I am thrilled by how many other people participated in The Inaugural Three on the Third Challenge by making three journal comics on the third day of the (third!) month. The other entries I've seen so far are fantastic! I will update this post with links as more appear online.

Ashley * Sanguinity * Upsidedown Cat * Alissa * Patchwork * Grrlpup

You guys! You are so cool.

Leap Day is a Day for Leaping!

Happy Leap Day, everybody! Remember to leap today. At least once. C'mon, it won't hurt... I didn't say you had to leap off of anything.

This is the last day of February, which means that the Three on the Third challenge begins in only three days. To participate in Three on the Third, all you have to do is draw three journal comics on the third day of the month. Not every month, unless you want to; just a month. They don't have to be well-drawn. They don't have to be funny. I'm not going to fact-check them to see if they're even true. They just have to be pictures and words about your life, as written and drawn/rendered by you. Making comics about other people who are part of your life is also okay, of course. And while the idea is to record what happens on that day, you can fudge on that too and no one will think less of you.

So, not very hard, right? You should give it a try. And yeah, you could put it off to do another month, but then you'd miss the auspiciousness of trying Three on the Third in the third month. Oooo....

Now that you've decided to participate (yay!), please keep in mind that it will be a lot harder if you try to do all the comics at once. So avoid putting them all off until the end of the day if you can possibly help it. Maybe try doing a morning comic, an afternoon comic, and an evening comic. That's what my plan is, anyway. Sharing your work online is appreciated, but optional; if you do, let me know if you want the URL to your comics included in future Three on the Third compendia or not.

In other news, the wire mesh on the heating vents is keeping the mice out quite effectively. Also, it turns out that a former roommate's husband works at a DIY ducting company, which is going to be extremely helpful when I venture into the Uncharted Realms beneath my house. I suspect he could probably even loan me a d20 if I needed it (which I, um, don't).

In This Case, My Enemy is a Varmint.

When I was a little kid, my favorite animal was the mouse. I identified with their shy and secret ways. Their tiny pink hands and soft furry bodies were the embodiment of Cute. I had a stack of children's fiction about mice, and a sizeable collection of mouse toys and figurines. I even had a file of cute mouse pictures that my mom and I had cut out of magazines and greeting cards.

I remember an exhibit at the Honolulu Zoo that made a big impression on me: it was a glass-walled mouse burrow, and you could see them running from chamber to chamber, this one full of food, that one full of sleepy mouse babies. I could have watched it all day. My parents' house, still fairly new at the time, was free of any kind of pest, so I didn't have a lot of contact with real-life mice.

All of which makes the following so excruciatingly ironic:

I was at least never going to resort to sticky mousetraps. A traditional snap-trap does the job quickly, and is also so incredibly cheap that there's no shame in throwing it away after one use. But when, night after night, you put out the snap-traps and find them unsprung but licked clean the next morning... well, you might start to wonder who's baiting whom. And when you find poop in your dish cupboard, you might even take it as a declaration of war.

Believe me, if negotiation was an option, I'd negotiate. But my enemy is a varmint, and a varmint will never quit. Ever. So I've spent a lot of time in the last several days studying their ways, thinking about their habits, trying to figure out what they can and can't, will and won't do. For example, they tend not to crawl up flat vertical surfaces, but they will readily climb any sort of cord or string. They got to the dish cupboard by way of a long phone cord, which I now realize was like a little mouse-sized ladder with a sign saying "Fun Times This Way!"

But much of mouse behavior remains a mystery to me. I mean, what's the deal with my roommate/renter's room? There's no food in there, but for some reason it's their favorite hangout. We were both horrified to discover the quantities of mouse poop between her bed and the wall. (Bad, bad landlady!) She has been surprisingly stoic about all of this, but she's sleeping on the spare mattress in my room (on the second floor, where there's still no sign of mice) until I can assure her that she will have no more rodent visitors.

And yes, I am now using sticky traps, which are awful and inhumane and leave you to finish the job yourself, and I will spare you the details of that horror. But until the problem of mouse access has been resolved, they seem to be my best option. Live traps are impractical; wild mammals can find their way home over ridiculously long distances, and I'm not driving across town every day to release the night's catch in someone else's yard. Poison's no good; then you've got tiny corpses all over, and you have to go find them to get rid of the smell.

I'm kind of surprised at the number of people who have suggested (or even offered) a cat as a solution. While I like most cats, they bring their own complications, and I have several very good reasons for not wanting to live with one. The bottom line, though, is that a cat is not a solution to the mouse problem, any more than traps are. It is a mouse mitigating device, an abatement factor, if you will. Even if the cat kills all the mice on my entire property, there will always be more mice. The world has an effectively infinite supply of mice. Cats are, in fact, probably the reason that this house is still so mouse-permeable: they've dealt with the symptoms and allowed their owners to ignore the root of the problem.

The root of the problem, of course, is that mice can get inside at all. I live in a modern house. I do not have a thatched roof or log walls. Therefore, the number of entry points into my house is finite. And while sealing up the outside of my house may not be possible without re-siding, the number of entry points to the interior of my house is actually quite limited. When these are effectively sealed, then the mouse problem will be solved.

Mice can theoretically pass into the interior of my house through: a) that hole in the laundry room drywall where the fusebox used to be; b) gaps in the construction of the closets; c) possibly the dryer vent; d) heating vents. All of these entry points can be mouseproofed. Unfortunately, last night I observed a mouse using option (d), which is by far the most daunting to fix. I am seriously daunted every time I think about it.

My heating ducts run through a crawlspace below the house which teems with rodent and arachnid life, and which for some reason is partly covered with that really jaggedy porous red lava rock that you see in cheap landscaping. I look at it and my knees twitch reflexively. I can't even see half of the crawlspace from my small cellar area because of how the ducts are placed; who knows what marvels await me in that sunless realm. The ducts themselves are sloppily installed and draped half-heartedly with random scraps of insulation, which is surely the ancestral home of generations of rodents. Oh, and did I mention the asbestos? Thanks, Previous Residents.

But the ducts have to be sealed. Even if I could keep the mice from entering the part of the house I live in through the vents, the ducts would still be supplied daily with mouse poop and pee, which is subsequently atomized and blown through the house by my fancy high-efficiency furnace. That's not okay. Besides, I dropped a large chunk of cash on that furnace several years ago, and here I am wasting it on a duct system that's full of holes and barely insulated. Once I set things to rights down there, I expect that the savings on my heating bill next winter will more than pay for my time, not to mention the money I'll save on medical bills by not getting a hantavirus.

Some of my readers are now asking, "Surely you're not going to take this project on yourself, Lindsey?" But here's the thing: even if I had money to throw at it, I wouldn't trust any contractor I could afford to do it right. And here's the other thing: this is not a job for a Big Strong Man(tm). This is a job for a person who is good at getting into very small places, and I happen to be a lot better at that than the average adult.

But it will be a convoluted, multi-day project, and I am not embarking on it today, or even this week. I am preparing a list of supplies and safety equipment that I'll need. I am collecting information on duct repair (which is surprisingly hard to come by; the internet mostly wants me to call a Qualified Professional). I am sketching diagrams and thinking through strategies, and I am soliciting advice. And in the meantime I'm covering my heating vents with wire mesh, so my roommate can sleep in her own bed again.

I really hope it works.

Be Mine, Internet!

I recently finished my latest submission to the CD Mix Swap, aka "The Mixchange," which is run by Ashley and which continues to be Awesome. I think it's up to like four swaps a year now? Crazy. Anyway, I always want to use the phrase "best mix yet" in describing whatever I've just finished, but really I should be more specific with my superlatives. In this case I could maybe use ones like "most unmitigatedly cheerful," "sappiest," "farthest out of character." It is a Valentine's Day mix. Not the romantic smoldery kind, but the incredulously giddy kind.

Thanks to the magic of The Internet, I can share it with all of you without burning a disc, slapping a label on it and standing in line for ages at the post office. Sure, I did all of that for my fellow swap participants, but are you sending me a mix CD? No? Well, you can just download it then.

BE MY VALENTINE please please please
1. Hello Saferide - The Quiz
2. Amit - You and Me and Love
3. Fruit Bats - When You Love Somebody
4. Herman Düne - I Wish That I Could See You Soon
5. The Weepies - Gotta Have You
6. The Silent Years - Someone to Keep Us Warm
7. Solomon Burke - Home in Your Heart
8. The Moldy Peaches - Anyone Else But You
9. Half-handed Cloud - To Love Like the Father & Son Love Each Other
10. Harvey Danger - Happiness Writes White
11. The Robot Ate Me - Apricot Tea
12. The Constantines - Soon Enough
13. Crooked Fingers - Call to Love
14. Luke Hawley - Not Me Babe
15. Victoria Williams - Love
16. Irma Thomas - Ruler of My Heart
17. Kite Flying Society - If I Could Split
18. North Atlantic Explorers - I Will Not Leave You Alone
19. Looper - Impossible Things
20. The Boy Least Likely To - Be Gentle With Me
21. José González - Heartbeats
22. Noah and the Whale - Five Years' Time
23. Daniel Johnston & Yo La Tengo - Speeding Motorcycle

PARENTS! This mix has no obscenity or profanity at all, although it does have a guy yelling "dang" really loud. Given the theme, it even has surprisingly few references to gettin' it on. However, if you would prefer the little ears around you to be sheltered from any incidental mention of the following issues, simply avoid the corresponding track numbers: sleeping/lying/sharing a bed with someone else (1, 5, 13, 17), drug/alcohol abuse (17, 22), automobile theft as courtship (18), being super excited about God (9), not really caring at all about God (10), poop jokes (8). I think most of this mix is music that kids would like a lot. They seem to know a thing or two about giddy incredulity.

For those of you who like video with your audio, here are all the ones I could find that weren't horribly filmed live performances:
1. The Quiz
4. I Wish That I Could See You Soon
6. Someone to Keep Us Warm
20. Be Gentle With Me
21. Heartbeats (that one commercial)
22. Five Years' Time

So there you go. All audio tracks are downloadable for one week. Feed them to your MP3 player, burn them to a shiny disc, ignore them. Just have a happy freakin' Valentine's Day, all right?

Left Brain/Right Brain.

So, about this job: I have a cousin here in town who makes gorgeous glass earrings for gauged ears. The demand for her products is growing so quickly that she has been too busy filling orders to set up the business end of things properly. That's where I come in: I research everything that's involved in setting up a small business, and then help her make it all happen. I'm a left brain for hire. What I love about this (besides getting to work with my cousin, who's really cool) is that I'm essentially getting paid to learn -- and to learn stuff that could be useful in any number of other situations.

It's very part-time, though, so I'm still in search of something that will put some life back into my sickly bank account.

Thanks for all the great feedback on my Hourly Comics. I love journal comics, and I really needed a kick in the pants like that (i.e, an artificially constructed challenge) to actually make some of my own. It was a little too much of a pants-kick to want to do that every day, or even more than once a year really. But I have been thinking about ways to incorporate comic-making into my schedule on a basis that is both more regular and doable, more of a nudge in the ankle than a kick in the pants.

The ankle-nudge I've settled on... well, I'm calling it Three on the Third. On the third day of each month, I'll make three journal comics about my day. That's it. That's the whole challenge. I think I can manage this no matter what kind of work I'm doing. I think you can manage it too, so you should definitely think about it.

Hourly Comics.

So the idea behind Hourly Comic Day is that once every hour, you write a journal comic. Journal comics chronicle your life pretty much as it happens.

It turns out that this is hard. It helps to be unemployed (like me) or work at home (like many comic artists). I bet it also helps to have comic artist skillz, not only because the outcome would be prettier, but (more important) it would be less time-consuming. Like, you'd have already figured out how to draw yourself quickly and consistently, so your hair length wouldn't change in every frame?

Anyway, my results are below. If you have trouble reading them, your browser is probably automatically resizing the image. Tell it not to.

Page 1 * Page 2 * Page 3 * Page 4 * Page 5 * Page 6 * Page 7 * Page 8 * Page 9

Or if you want to see them all on one screen, here is my post on the Hourly Comic Day forum. There are tons more hourly comics there to look at, mostly by people who have a better grasp of basic concepts like legibility and white space than I do.

NOTE: The times written in the comic are the time the drawing was made, not the time the event occurred.

Getting Somewhere, and Four Weeks of Photos.

You know that feeling you get when it seems like nothing is going on, and then suddenly everything happens? Like... it's like you're pedaling an exercise bike, spinning your wheels getting nowhere, and you space out for a little bit and then realize (much to your confusion) that you're rolling down the road with the wind in your face?

This week I had that feeling again. I was starting to get frustrated with how The Great Job Hunt has not yet resulted in lucrative employment, and frustrated with the inertia that results from really, really enjoying not having a job. And then BAM! something amazing popped up when I least expected it. It isn't definite, so I don't want to describe it yet, and it isn't full-time, so it doesn't resolve the whole income issue. And it won't be simple or straightforward, and it's a tiny bit risky... but today I realized that those are things I especially like about it.

So now I'm gripping the handlebars for dear life, but also grinning a huge wide bug-catching grin: wheeeee!

* * *

The photo-a-day project isn't even a month old yet, but it has already been my most successful collaboration with Ashley since People In My Neighborhood (link to the original by Baldwin and Gregory; our version isn't online, but it was kinda like that, only better).

Years of crappy cameras, together with the irritations of paying someone else to develop my film, made me a reluctant photographer. But I love to look at good photography, and I always sorta wanted to learn how to use a camera well, or at least not so clumsily.

I'm kind of a penny-pincher (when I'm not buying food), so when I got a low-end digital camera last year, that was a big deal for me. I was glad to have it to capture my sailing adventure, but I didn't want a fancy gadget like that to start collecting dust when I got back home. I didn't want to take it for granted. I wanted to learn how to use it better, and I figured the only practical way to do that was to use it more.

So now I'm taking more photos. Lots more photos. Since I got back from New Mexico, I've taken an average of 24 photos a day. And in doing so, I'm learning what my camera is good at and not-so-good at, gradually getting a grasp on what makes a shot work, learning to trust my gut and to take chances. I'm also learning how much I still have to learn.

Even better than learning to use my camera, though, has been learning to use my eyes: to see the world in a new way, to notice things I wouldn't have, to pay attention. Light means so much more to me now. And I realize almost daily now how amazing my eyes are, all the things they can deal with (low light, motion, obstructions, depth of field) without any conscious input on my part.

I'm also learning that if you go out looking for an interesting photo, sometimes interesting things happen to you. Yesterday I met Mr. Beet of Beet's Auto Body, which is kind of a landmark around here. On MLK Day a bricklayer told me the wall he was building was the last of 25 years' worth of projects in Portland. I thought for a few thrilling moments that I might get to meet a resident of The Scary House... but it was only a neighbor. Pointing a camera at stuff, I've learned, makes people want to talk to you. Sometimes all they want to say is "Can I help you?" which is of course code for "What do you think you're doing pointing your camera at my car/house/merchandise?" But even one question and one answer is still dialogue, and more than I usually share with strangers.

* * *

Friday is Hourly Comic Day. I've always been more than a little intimidated by 24 Hour Comic Day, but this I think I can maybe handle, if I'm not working (and possibly even if I am). Join me?

The Mystery Solved.

The mystery bone introduced in this post has been identified by an anonymous commenter as the pelvic bone of an ostrich. All the images of skeletal ostriches I could find seem to confirm this. I compared it with an emu, and it's definitely a better match for the ostrich.

The complete, unbroken bone is actually even more fantastical than what we saw:
Check out that crazy curly bit on the lower left: it actually connects in the middle, just like your pelvis. But different. (Image from this site, where you can buy an ostrich pelvis of your very own.)

There used to be ostrich farms in the area our Mystery Bone was discovered, so this find isn't as bizarre as it may seem.

Nice work, Anonymous (you know who you are).

Progress Report: A Report on Progress.

Look, I changed my header! The image width still isn't right, and I may not ultimately use that image at all, and I'm still missing one of those whaddyacallems, uh, titles? But it's progress, and I'm into celebrating progress these days.

I've made a lot of progress lately, actually. I've kept up with the daily photo challenge. I found an alarm clock that I actually don't hate. I rebuilt my resume from the ground up. I installed my Shiny New Printer (thanks, Santa!) so I could print it. I am currently in the process of applying to: a bakery, a company that does something-or-other with music licensing, and a sailmaker's loft (yes, there's one in Portland!). I have a list of about 10 other jobs I still want to apply to before I start calling temp agencies. But since I already have plans to go away for the summer, temp is probably where I'll end up.

I also got rid of a lot of stuff: I recycled an old phone and printer. I found new homes for bags and bags of clothing. I whittled the feeds in my reader down to a mere 1740 unviewed posts. I dumped a lot of MP3s that I never liked anyway. (Don't worry, I still have 2283 of them!)

Now the excess stuff in my room is mostly down to Projects, about which Decisions must be made. For example:

Q: Here is a computer I built in 1998. It has a 3.5" floppy drive and a keyboard that doesn't really work anymore. It also houses some really important files. What should I do with it?
A: Obtain hardware that will allow you to eat its brains. By which I mean pull the hard drive, suck out the good stuff, and erase the rest. Then, because you love it, set it free. Let it lope unfettered on the technological veldt. That's what FreeGeek is for.

Q: What shall I do about all these papers that need to be filed, but the mere thought of filing them is incredibly painful?
A: Get yourself a decent filing cabinet, for crying out loud: one that opens and closes easily and doesn't leave your files all bendy. Look into the hanging folder thing, which is Probably Worth It.

Q: Here is a paper model of a castle which I almost finished circa 1990, but then got frustrated with and abandoned. And yet somehow it has followed me ever since, without getting crushed. What should I do with it?
A: Dust it off and inspect it. Discover that it is Awesome. Consider how your dexterity and problem-solving skills have evolved in the past umpteen years, and set it aside for completion (for reals this time).

And so on. It's amazing how much easier it is to figure this stuff out than it was seven months ago. Hooray for progress!