Squweeeeeeeeeeeee, I finally went out and bought a tablet! I got a Wacom Bamboo Fun small tablet and it's wonderful. I'm still getting used to it, but, wow, it feels so much easier than using a mouse. I did a very very rough sketch of one of my older pen characters, Suihou. I hope to draw a lot more using the tablet, and hopefully get a lil better at it too. Hehee, no more scanning from paper, and now I can even do shading the brush strokes, oooooh, it's awesome, just awesome.

BTW -- I had some issues using it initially in GIMP, if you are also having issues, http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496958 is the place to go for the solution.