Sometimes I feel guilty when I schedule stuff like this. And then I remember that as much as I love my family, the salary Novell is paying me is sufficient that they DO deserve some serious claims on my time… especially when something important comes up.

My travel schedule just picked up an extra week of bookings — two trips in one week. That means that between September 10th and September 29th, I’ll be at home for roughly (tapping on calculator while looking at calendar) four days. Give or take a few hours.

Yuck.

THIS is why I hammer on the buffer the way I do. This is also why RIGHT NOW I’m booking two days of vacation immediately following the last trip, and why I’ll be pressing to get an additional three the week following. Sure, the salary means they get to drag me all over the planet, but I also accumulate 9 hours of vacation time every pay period, and that means my family gets to drag me back.

–Howard

p.s. I’ll post details later, but right now it looks like I may have free cycles in NYC on the evening of the 21st of September, and maybe in the afternoon and evening in Montreal on the 22nd.

I’m sure I didn’t INVENT this, but this is definitely the first time I’ve done it.

A caricature is a representation in which the subject’s distinctive features or peculiarities are deliberately exaggerated to produce a comic or grotesque effect.

Typcially you see it as a real person reduced to something more detailed and exaggerated than a comic-strip character, but certainly less realistic than a photo.

A reverse caricature, per my own definition, is when you take a cartoon character, assume you know what the REAL person from which those features were oversimplified looks like, and strike some middle ground.

Like this:

My Grandmother came to town about a week ago, and is headed back to DC first thing tomorrow. She looks a lot better (a LOT better) than she did when I saw her in July, and I’m super-glad she got to come out here. She got to get piled on by great-grandkids, plied with food she can no longer really digest, and kept up late by enthusiastic nieces and nephews of three generations.

She was in town for her sister’s 90th birthday, and and accompanying reunion. It was heartwarming to see everybody (or at least a sizeable fraction of “everybody”) together for the assorted events.

This afternoon Grandma came over to our place, went to church with us (so that she could sleep through my Sunday School lesson), and joined us for dinner before heading up to SLC. I’m a little sad because I know she’s got a very limited amount of time left here on Planet Earth*, and I may not have a chance to get back to see her before she’s gone for good. But this was a good time, and we got lots of pictures, so I’m chalking the melancholy up to “things I can’t change” and just focusing on the happiness we’ve shared in the last few days.

–Howard
*Note: If you don’t believe in an afterlife, feel free to believe that my Grandma is a space alien and the mothership will be coming to take her away, thus preserving the truth in my comment about “Planet Earth.”

I’ve just about had it. I can forgive the fact that the stories are wandering around like abandoned children. I can even forgive the disjointed (if well drawn) filler that is “Meanwhile in the Dimension of Pain.” It’s this dearth of regular updates that is doing me in. I’m a creature of habit, and Pete USED to be able to keep my attention by posting something new every day. Lately, though, I have no motivation to click in. Today I clicked in, and was rewarded with filler of Kiki acting like a pirate and telling me to check back “Tamarrrr.”

Hey, Pete: remember back when you did a webcomic every day? Remember how you kept up on it, in spite of the other stuff that was happening? What was that, 1999? At any rate, it was back when I loved your work. Figure out how to get back to that point, and maybe I’ll see you there.

*sigh*

–Howard