I totally want to have a discussion of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, but I don’t want to spoil it for anybody.

So I’m putting the rest of this post behind a cut tag. Continue reading Pirates with Spoilers →

Sandra and three of my kids returned home yesterday afternoon, and they brought with them Sandra’s sister Karen, her husband Sean, and their toddler. Today my mother- and father-in-law arrive, and we’ll officially have a full house (as defined by “all the beds are full, and people have started sleeping on the floors”).

I’ll be out all day though, so I’ll miss most of the merriment. I’ve got pencilling and inking to do, and lately that gets done best at The Dragon’s Keep. And then there’s Iron Kingdoms… so I’ll be out of the house all day, and by the time I get home, most of the beds that are destined to be full will already be filled. But I’ll be home on Friday, and I have no idea what the crowd has planned for that day.

I seem to have hit a dead patch. Journalling and blogging topics abound, lots of neat things are going on, and the more of them there are, the less desire I have to write about them.

This is probably why so much LJ out there is whiny and depressive. The people with the most time to write are, statistically speaking, the people with the least to write about, so they complain. (So instead of writing something meaningful, I’ll post something in which I take a stab at complaining about people who only post complaints? How’s THAT for lint-filled-navel-gazing?)

Today was a great day.

Yesterday was the first Independence Day I can remember in which the following things happened:

1) I did not muck about with a gas grill, nor did I cook meat. (I let my neighbor do it all, while I made flatbread.)
2) I did not buy fireworks. (I let my neighbors buy them).
3) I did not set anything on fire. (I let my neighbors do that, and I sat and watched.)

You may think that as record-setting activities go, NOT doing something hardly counts. I beg to differ. Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to just sit with my hands in my lap making small talk while other people light things on fire?

This was also the first Independence day since my engagement to Sandra 13 summers ago in which the two of us have not been together. I suppose I could pretend that I was eschewing flesh-grilling and firework-lighting because I was in mourning, but the fact of the matter is that it was probably the only opportunity I’ll ever have for this kind of an exercise in self-restraint.