Letters to Holly

Monday, August 11

This Thing On?

Thought I'd crank this up again to catch you up in the easiest way.

We seem to still recover from the trip. Our sleep cycles are all askew. The boy cannot sleep before 11 pm, making him a rascal for three hours after bath time. Your Sister and I both slept in late over the weekend, which is something we haven't done in months.

I was able to get up fairly early otherwise to run at the school. I thought I would have an easier run on the flat terrain, but I can go faster with a longer stride. I'm really running now, not an uphill shuffle, and I can see some results already. I definitely lost weight during the vacation, and I attribute that to lots of fruit and deputy carrying. I haven't gotten over the pineapple, and I bought two of them in the last week for breakfast and homemade pizza.

The deputy has taken to lying as all kids do, and we're trying to break him of that by taking away toys. It's a phase hopefully. He and his mom got a planet model set for his birthday, and they spent the weekend painting the Styrofoam balls. He likes astronomy, and I link that to the Star Wars planet names.

I'm working on a new draft of my next comic project, something unrelated to the Focus stories. This will be my fourth pass at it, and I hope to have a thick trade's worth of issues ready by March and the Seattle convention. I don't know when I'll get the final word about being approved.

We are three weeks away from DragonCon, and we have almost finished my costume. We have maybe two hours' worth of work on it, and I'll use my lunch break today to look for the proper belt style. I think I'll need to make it with curtain rope and clasps. I bought the shoes last week at the mall. I also discovered no sports store carries my brand of running shoe anymore. I thought about getting running shorts, but they're $30 on clearance. Yeesh.

I was interviewed for a local arts podcast over the weekend, and I'll post a link when I see it. It was about an hour, and it was in Asheville. That gave me a great excuse to stop by Five Guys for supper on the way home.I can't eat from there every week, but God knows I want to.

And I got a call Saturday from my bank saying someone in NJ was trying to use my debit card number. The transaction was denied, and my card was spiked. I am sans card for a week, which is not happy time making.

My Mom was horrified that the deputy ate octopus. She also asked if anywhere in Hawaii sells hamburgers. I told her, by and large, the islands have everything we have and a little extra. She seemed OK with that.

Picture of the Day

The convention is getting closer. My beard is on borrowed time.