Usually when we leave for a vacation we take care to clean the kitchen.

This time around it just got too hectic. We did decide to NOT leave the A/C running, though. I’m sure that saved us a few bucks. Of course, our return would have been infinitely more pleasant had we NOT left two packages of fresh, farm-raised catfish in a shopping bag on the counter.

This afternoon at 4:00pm we returned to a house that was eighty-nine degrees farenheit, and that smelled like sphincter.

Specifically, the sphincter it smelled like belongs to a man who has been dead for three days, and whose last four meals were fish-head soup, orange roughy, baked scrod, and a nice anchovy-and-limberger pizza.

So… stop on by my house this evening. We’d love to have you. After all, every molecule of putrescine that you inhale is one more I don’t have to breathe. Oh, yes, I WILL use my friends as air filters…

“What’s that?” you say. Schlock Mercenary is only starting year eight!

True. But today Sandra and I celebrate the fourteenth anniversary of our wedding, and kick off year fifteen.

Sandra dealt out enough mushy stuff for both of us, so I’m just going to link to her post. She said it better than I can.

When I started this comic project in March of 2000 (three full months before posting anything online) we had been married for about seven years and seven months.

With Schlock now two months into year eight, I think that sometime soon we will have spent half of our married life as the proud parents of a comic-strip universe. Oh, how the time flies.

(Note: we are also the proud parents of four actual CHILDREN. I spent a good chunk of this afternoon snuggling them on the couch while watching an Animaniacs DVD.)

Here’s to another fifteen years. Or fifteen million.

All,

I’m interested in getting some good Taiko drum music for my iPod. I could Google, yes, but I figure you folks might have some recommendations off the tops of your heads.

Thanks!

Some of the “upgrades” to the coloring of Schlock Mercenary have sent me out for lunch while my PC grinds (and grinds, and grinds.)

Earlier this week I decided that the problem had to be solved, and since CPU utilization was never more than 30% during the grinding, I figured more RAM would help.

I figured correctly. WOW.

I went from 1GB to 4GB (of which my 32-bit Windows XP is only recognizing 3.25GB) and the only operations I have to wait for now are opening files and saving lots of changes (like the addition of several colored layers).

As soon as my Serial ATA interface cable arrives, I’ll be adding a second drive to this machine, and telling Photoshop that if it ever DOES need to page to disk, it should use the second drive instead of the one Windows is using. That way when I do grind, I can grind in parallel.

In related news, who wants to buy four 256Mb DDR2-400 DIMMs? If these chips could talk, they’d tell you about all kinds of Schlock I’ve forced them to remember at one time or another.