Jeez, it says it's been five months since my last post here - not that there hasn't been Events in my life, but I doubt they would be of much interest here. I had a trip to California to visit family there and had the opportunity (probably never to be repeated) to walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, but I had to pass due to my clumsily having the day before fallen down and literally crippled my @$$. Pulled an important muscle right next to my right hip joint anyhow; it seems to be pretty much cleared up but I was sure I had broken it like someone's ol' granny; in any case I consider it a shot over my bow, a warning of things to come. But who needs to read about this? I'm tired of the subject and have been for a good many years.

On a more cheerful note: back in the early-mid 1990s I was somewhat involved in the self-pub movement, putting together a number of zines of varied artistic quality, which I mainly used a ballast in my snailmail correspondence for the amusement of their recipients. I still have a good number of copies, which I may yet use as auxiliary material for Rowrbrazzle; some of the more interesting items I may scan and post here. We'll see...

Under such circumstances a good fan is a must-have thing, being less expensive to run than AC. So a couple of months ago I got a big floor fan (on a pole) and set it up. Imagine my displeasure when I found that despite its size it seemed to be unable to move air very well. It took quite a while before the cause became apparent - the blades of the fan were almost vertical, with almost no pitch at all. Almost as futile as having Spongebob Squarepants stand by doing his karate waving, worse because Spongebob could always go in the kitchen in between times and make some sammidges anyhow. I'll probably wind up having to do some surgery on the fan blades, with a hacksaw and a hot air paint stripper; making sure the result won't be unbalanced will be tricky but doable.

Such is life in metropolitan Lake Flaccid, Texas, where the men are dull, the women are murderous and the children are all sub-par.

Summer came in some time ago, and I'm sitting here sweating like cheese with a large floor fan feebly puffing air at me from across the room. I can't really afford to run the AC very much: last month I did so for some 4 hours one day and my electric bill jumped up $20 which can't be right. I have one of those new "Smart Meters," which may be a factor. The coming year is supposedly not going to be as bad as last year, but I dread it nevertheless.

I don't think I've ever had one like this before. I'm in no hurry for another.

The scene: some kind of animated cartoon, a Robert Crumb style marginal urban neighborhood with cracked sidewalks and battered storefronts. I don't recall any cars, mobile ones anyhow. Characters, myself (a skunk) and a raccoon, both drawn in a style combining Walt Kelly's Pogo and Over the Hedges - somehow I could see myself and be myself at the same time, which can be a neat trick sometimes. Our mission: to confront The Man about some human devlopment that was screwing up our home turf.

We found The Man (as the raccoon seemed to think he was), an elderly Hispanic gentleman in a rundown barbershop that he owned and ran; he didn't seem to be surprised at having two animals wander in the front door and start talking to him. Actually it was the raccoon's idea, I was too sceptical about anything useful coming from our trip. Why was I there? Maybe he felt he needed some backup in case things went wrong, in which case I doubt I would have been very helpful. I was ill, dizzy, my coordination was off and I had some difficulty keeping up with the raccoon, and when we arrived I was unable to follow the conversation to any extent.

As I thought, nada. We started back to a place that was almost certainly no longer there, and the raccoon seemed to be reconciled to this. He began talking about how we would all go to "some better place, just around the corner," and presently we came to a turn in the street where he told me to hop off the curb, we were on our way.

Looking down I saw it was a steep cliff of maybe 100 or even 1000 feet, and the people were like ants running about down below. He told me again to hop off, and for some obscure reason I did so, expecting a long whistling drop ending in a dull thud - and doing a bellyflop from three inches into the dirt while ants like people scurried around me.

Seeing my bewildered expression (so far as skunks have expressions), the raccoon asked me if I was all right. I replied after a moment, "No, not all right at all..."

And at this point I woke up, not drifting awake as I usually do but with jerk, around 5 AM. Needless to say I got little sleep after this (I wound up sitting up reading the new issue of WIRED). All in all a disconcerting nocturnal adventure, the origins of which remains mostly unknown. I still have a slight headache, too.

Not really, it would have to be about 15-20 degrees hotter than it has been this past week or so, but still. The big tree in front still has some leaves from last year, though they seem to be catching on to the idea that they have pretty much overstayed their visit and have to go away now. Meanwhile new green leaves have sprouted all over so vehemently that as usual many fall off the branches. A couple of days ago I went out with a shovel and removed three trash trees that had annoyingly established themselves in the bed around the big tree, an operation that proved to be less difficult than I had thought. This leaves a number of infant pecans and red oaks, the produce of skwerlian agriculture, which I hope to transplant to less crowded areas.

Autumn is coming on pretty well, the leaves are changing and falling off and the local skwerls have started building their winter nests out on the ends of tree branches. Heavy rains, such as we could have seriously used earlier in the year, have drenched everything outside, meking the great indoors look greater.

Well, here I am attempting to upload some stuff and it looks like nothin' doin' at present. This hasn't been a problem before now - getting past the second page of the Submissions process - and it's two bad: two pieces for the Gallery and 11 random sketchbook pages for Scraps. Ah, well...

Seasons Greetings and all that, and hopes that the upcoming new election year won't be such a mudslide as it looks to be.

The month started out with an Arctic blast that had me wrapped in an electric blanket turned way up; now the temperature has risen to the 70s F, which is also unpleasant. Meanwhile, I've posted a number of items here that have been sitting around for some time, or just recently finished ovre the past couple of days; one thing to note is that unlike previous posts, these images are appearing here just as the scanner made them, with no fiddling with resolution or cleaning up the dodgy bits. The computer I usually use for such purposes is currently just (as I write this) finishing a day-long techincal process that may or may not prove to be useful in the near future when I rearrange my computers at the start of the new year. Luckily the images are nearly all pencil drawings, which seems to be more forgiving of such shananigans. Ah, well... on to the Year of Doom, 2012!

Ordinarily I only drop by here on Wednesdays but as I expect to be otheriwse occupied this week I'm throwing some stuff in my Scraps section ahead of time.

Weather keeps cycling from cold to muggy, though little rain is happening; the city is already in the process of taking down hundred of dead trees in its parks, as if we need this additional expense. I'm crossing my fingers for the trees here in my yard, especially the big Ash in front - I recently found an extensive rotten section that I cleared out and filled with roofing tar.

and it's been comparatively cool for a change for the past month. As the past winter included ice storms it will be interesting to see what comes down this time.

The time since my last post here has been filled with random activity but little in the way of useful action -job-hunting can be so distracting. Towards the end I started doing more drawing, the one uploaded now being something I've had stuck on the back burner for several _years, amazingly enough. Much of the rest is just me getting my drawing hand back in shape yet again after yet another dry spell, along with items for the next issue of Rowrbrazzle.

After August, more of the same record-breaking temperatures, and we're aflame with over 60 wildfires in various areas. We don't ordinarily get much cool weather until November and not always then, but who knows what this coming winter will do.

For once we've been wanting hurricanes and tropical storms to blow through here, but no dice. Everyone else gets floods, those greedy... Anyhow the hurricane season is waning and now it looks like despite popular request our drought is going to be held over into next year.

But enough. Three bunny girl sketches and an experiment in glass etching that kinda sorta didn't quite turn out as I hoped. Better luck next time, or the time after.

and a full moon overhead.

Back during the late 1980s, I attended an all-day course on metal work - soldering and welding - being given by a professional ornamental metalworker (he specialized in gates) as arranged by Leisure Learning Unlimited; his workplace was in a rather marginal part of town - as I approached the place I happened to observe a row of somnolant winos laid out on a stretch of sidewalk before an abandoned shop like so many dead, hardly something I was prepared to witness so early in the morning. The course was interesting, but this isn't about metal.

Across the access way from the studio, some workmen were busy clearing out what proved to be a now-defunct music studio, tossing equipment into a large dumpster brought there for that purpose. I was appalled at the sight and would have helped myself to some of it , only I had no idea at the time what would be useful and how to use any of it. Gone! to the dump, something no longer legal now - this sort of stuff has to be taken to a recycling site instead.

I did, in spite of myself, manage to rescue a few music tape cartridges from the holocaust, and have them still. One, marked "Belize Music," was a recording of drums and singing at some unknown location in Belize, the former colony of British Honduras that was settled mainly by Africans.

After about ten years, I finally got around to making a digital copy on my computer, burning the resulting two tracks (one for each side of the tape) to CD, and there it rested until the other day when, having set up a computer with Ubuntu Studio, I was looking for a project to practice with.

Copying the two tracks onto my computer, I fired up Audacity and proceeded to use copy/paste to separate out the different parts - there were finally 17 in all, not all of which involved drums. Further experiments showed that Amplify and Normalize had good results and the rest was routine. I have not reburned it to CD yet, but that is to be this project's fate.

I thought of sending a copy to the Belize consulate here but it seems there isn't one. Ah, well...

Yeah, it's hot and not just around here, polars are sweatin'. Drought has been a serious problem here for some months as well. Ah, well, summer time.

There's an entire branch of my artstuff that hasn't appeared here, mostly Rowrbrazzle material and material of a related nature, and I was vaguely thinking of posting it on (that other board of two letters, one an A), but I find it to be less than friendly in many ways, not the least being the tangled spagetti coding of their pages. I'm even more tempted to post it here instead. Well, we'll see.

This year's ApolloCon was interesting, I even saw some art, quite a lot actually, by veteran furry artist Bridget Wilde, though it was more oriented toward elfs and such as would be expected.

After a long dry spell I finally started scanning some stuff I've had sitting around here and posted them. At one point I found I had two with the title of Bunigirl 7 and wound up discovering how to change titles. Ya learn something new every day. Meanwhile I still have several more images waiting to be posted here, not bunigirls, so I'll save them for another occasion.

Why bunigirls? (scratches head)

Things settling down here, but now I'm looking for a job like a few million others. Ah, well....

After the heavy ice and freezes of the recent winter, spring has sprung with a vengeance. The fig trees are in full fig, the big ash tree has sprouted new leaves so vehemently that it's like autumn, except the leaves are green. The foxtail ferns and mother-in-law's tongue, after being killed off, have started growing back, great banks of cleavers are swarming over everything as they do every year and the canna lillies have returned to their advance out of the flower bed and into the yard. The red oaks, after a brief dalience with leafing, suddenly erupted with pollen, more than any previous year I recall, and my pet cactus, the Spirit of San Saba, is starting to sprout yet another head to go with the four already present. This burgeoning growth even extended to the rain gutters, filled with several years of composting leaves; as a result, yours truly this past week found himself perched upon a wobbly ladder dredging great handfuls of dirt out onto the yard below, as well as upon himself. With daily highs in the 80s, I'd say that winter is past and possibly spring will soon join it among the Accomplished Things of the Past as the new summer arrives with a furnace blast.

I finally bestirred myself to post something here - Pony Surfing, starring Sandy Cheeks and Applejack - and hope to start posting other things, even though whatever else I have available at present consists mainly of bunnygirl noodz for some obscure reason. Meanwhile, the weather is starting to ramp up into the high 70s and low 80s, in preparation for the big numbers of summer, and spring cleaning continues apace.

So now it's March 2011. Numerous reasons, many of them fairly common if I can judge from having heard them in the past from other people: the death of an Elderly Parent, followed by economic uncertainty, personal illness, and the possibility that I'm going to be homeless sometime during the course of the upcoming year, with no real income and a steadily shrinking savings - all useless to complain of, as I'm sure most of the folks most likely to read this are already in the same or similarly leaky boats. Needless to say, ART has been sitting on the back burners for some time, and only recently have I started drawing again, some of which may eventually show up here. Ah, well...

Having some of our usual roller-coaster weather - days when it's hot enough to need the AC, followed by days of the Big Chill, and then back again. The same old.

Looking at the front page here, I notice that my newest post and my latest favorite both feature a certain nifty murine character. Looks like I should have done more work on my piece, but there it is.

Cooler weather is coming on, to my surprise, and the skwerls are out in force to an extant I've not seen in a while - one front yard near here that I drove past today had three of them busily excavating in full view of each other. Either we have a surplus of skwerls or they're figuring on some harsh weather this coming winter. We shall see.

I was in a grocery store yesterday and found that they already of EGG NOG in the dairy section. O LAWD @_@

Not that I've been idle but most of what I've been doing has nothing to do with whatever winds up here. I haven't done much drawing and much of that isn't good enough to show up here.

The other day, after a long interval, I made another attempt at home-made bread. I did wind up with two small loaves that seem to be OK but they were afflicted by a curse of sorts that the kitchen of this house seems to have, namely while I keep having to throw out quantities of moldy food (potatoes, onions etc), bread yeast just won't rise! Maybe I should go back to using a bread machine, as I used to do way back when.

After waiting for Rowrbrazzle #106 to come out (and some folks to get their copies), I'm posting the color versions here even though it mainly concerns the misadventures of a character, a long-time member of my imaginary world, who hasn't been posted here before.

Meanwhile I have been doing some work on another item, on a very different location - a 1996 Apple All In One running OS X 10.2.3 and Adobe PhotoShop Elements 2 - upgraded with a 500Mhz processor and maxed out memory, it runs pretty well, especially as the story mentioned above was done on a 350Mhz, 256Mb memory Windows 98SE AT box...

(pause while my readers swoon with horror at such retro grandeur)

... and Corel PhotoPaint 8!

Ahem. All my other computers are some recent version of *nix, all with much faster processors, so I'm not really backward, merely an impoverished creature of habit.

Anyhow, some time back I had another 98 box that I had the PSE2 and a Wacom tablet attached to but it went tits up and I was never able to get the tablet to work until I plugged it into the AIO abovementioned just now. I spent this afternoon reacquainting myself with this ancient Apple and finding that it wasn't so hard to work with after all. In due time the results may be posted here. We'll see.

Wow, I managed to slide right through June and most of July without posting anything in my journals. Not for much lack of things going on, but perhaps a lack of things other FA inmates might find interesting. Let's see ... I just got my sewing machine back from the repair shop, and hope to be able to start fixing some of the torn-up clothes I have stacked up here - damages from day-to-day living, not from anything exciting, sorry. I'm still stuck in dialup and it looks like I will continue there for the immediate future; also, my ISP accidentally forgot to renew something or other, rsulting in a loss of access to the Usenet servers - I can get at the newsgroups via Google but it ain't the same - for some used to the stark ASCII of classic Usenet, Google's bloated html that takes forever to load is irritating beyond words. Shucks, I guess I'm too Old Skool for this new world order...

(background music: "Alegria: Cirque de Soleil", by Rene Dupere) (sorry, no diacritical marks on this machine >_*)

Almost slid all the way through May, but I'm still here.

After a cool spring we're heading into a hot summer, and the news tonight was anything but encouraging about the impending hurricane season - we're looking at some heavy action this time around. I'm hoping the weather service is wrong, but we shall see.

For some reason, my pet cactus, the Spirit of San Saba, has sprouted an enormous purple flower! It only did this once before, one Christmas back during the mid '90s, so who knows what this portends. I took numerous photos, but it's a film camera with a new roll, so it may be a while before I get to post photos in the scraps section. Assuming any of the photos come out OK, which I won't know until long after the flower is gone. Digital cams do have their pluses after all.

Another month, and to show I've not been idle I'm posting three images from a newly started sketchbook. They all seem to be bunnygirls for some reason.

A while ago it occurred to me that all these folks had Favorited this or that of the various items I've dumped here, but I haven't done as much for them. Such being the case, I have decided to start my own Favorites by going down the list in my Bookmarks (FA dept).

Not much else - computer problems threw a monkey wrench into my usual process of scanning my hand-drawn scribbles and tinkering with them - the scanner seems to be OK now, but it's being done with Xsane on a Linux box, so Heads Up.

...towards the end of January? About time, maybe. The weather here in the Third Coast continues to be confused - after a deeply chilling winter than we've had since '96/97, the temperature suddenly rose to the upper 70s.

Posted today is a homage to Sandy Cheeks of the Spongebob Squarepants show that I just threw together - the rodeo is comin' up pretty fast and the idea for this image came pretty easily. But does anyone know what part of Texas she supposedly comes from? Maybe Scurry County? (Is there a Scurry County? The atlas says yes, just north of Sweetwater, Texas.).