When is a Vacation not a Vacation
1. When your entire office knows they can email and call you on your cell phone.
2. When you blackberry is sitting next to you on the coffee shop table.
4. When you have a to do list that includes mostly client projects.
5. When you're pretty sure you're not going to get to do any writing, except when you're waiting for Outlook to download the giant client report file so that you can start on the giant report you need to write for the client so she doesn't get asked by her boss what we're doing for all of the money they're spending and she'll have to say she doesn't know which is silly because she knows exactly what we've been doing on pretty much a day-to-day basis but even so I've procrastinated on this report so much that I shouldn't have to be doing it on vacation and yet here I am at a coffee house all ready to write my latest story and instead I'm waiting to work on this report and sometimes I think I just need to leave the country. Heh.
Talk to y'all later...
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Friday, August 18, 2006
My First Illustrated Comic
I've been trying my hand at comic script writing over at a great forum for budding comic creators called PencilJack. After posting a number of scripts, a terrific illustrator in the UK looking to build his portfolio emailed me to see if he could do a script of mine. I'm ashamed to say that I presented him with a rather odd one... It serves as a vast exaggeration of what I thought was a funny situation and, perhaps, a side of me that just wants to crawl into a corner by himself...although Mrs. Chronic finds it a tad too close to the bone, you might say...
Anyway, click here to check it out at my story blog, and let me know what you think.
Anyway, click here to check it out at my story blog, and let me know what you think.
Monday, August 07, 2006
Home Improvement
As I aimed the garden hose at my burning face and squeezed the trigger, I found myself musing on how, when I die, the coroner might find himself marking the story of my body's life by the scars left from home improvement projects.
Yesterday, the project was refinishing the wooden front porch -- about a 12'x4' space. The project began with a belt sander, a frisky little device that bucked like a puppy on a leash, ready to take off if I didn't maintain a firm grip. Two days, seven sandpaper belts and one wide, red scrape down the inside of my left wrist later, I had a mostly sanded deck, with large areas of paint left around the edges.
Next, the Internet said to "strip" the deck, so I went out and got me some deck stripper, giggled some, wistfully fantasized about deck strippers, put on a baseball cap, latex gloves and safety goggles and went to work rolling the pungent liquid onto the deck. At some point, I decided switch from roller to stiff-bristled brush, so I lifted the safety goggles, unscrewed the roller from the pole and in doing so, spattered deck stripper on my face.
I felt what I imagine a vampire feels when splashed with holy water -- "It burns! It burns!" Thus the firing of the garden hose at my face.
Later, after a cleansing shower, I took inventory. There's the purple bruise on my toe and still-not-yet-healed scrape across my shin from dropping a large wood frame during the construction of the kids' bunk bed -- a project that involved much swearing and use of Resolve to dissolve the blood on the carpet. There are the host of little cuts on my hands and wrists, the most fresh from rolling two rocks from the woods to the garden -- the rocks must have weighed 200 pounds each.
Then there's the thin scar on my forehead, obtained 17 years ago, during a stop to see a friend in Cleveland on my way to Minnesota. My allergies were horrible that trip, the floor of my little maroon Ford Escort was covered in Kleenex, and my sneezing fits were increasingly violent. So I'm with my friend Naomi digging through the Escort for a package of Sudafed, when I feel another sneeze come on. So I stand up and sneeze hard, slamming my head into the corner of the open car door. It sounded like I'd been shot. Blood streaming through my fingers, I turn to Naomi and say, "Why did you hit me?"... Which strikes her as the funniest thing she's heard in the longest time and she laughs and laughs while I grab at wads of dried Kleenex to stop the bleeding. I saw her a couple years ago at the wedding of a mutual friend, and she still could hardly speak she was laughing so hard. Meanwhile, you can still see the scar, faintly, over my right eyebrow.
Okay, that had nothing to do with home improvement. Except to say that, in general, it's best for all concerned that I continue to hire experts for most projects and save my frequent flier miles for long summer trips.
Yesterday, the project was refinishing the wooden front porch -- about a 12'x4' space. The project began with a belt sander, a frisky little device that bucked like a puppy on a leash, ready to take off if I didn't maintain a firm grip. Two days, seven sandpaper belts and one wide, red scrape down the inside of my left wrist later, I had a mostly sanded deck, with large areas of paint left around the edges.
Next, the Internet said to "strip" the deck, so I went out and got me some deck stripper, giggled some, wistfully fantasized about deck strippers, put on a baseball cap, latex gloves and safety goggles and went to work rolling the pungent liquid onto the deck. At some point, I decided switch from roller to stiff-bristled brush, so I lifted the safety goggles, unscrewed the roller from the pole and in doing so, spattered deck stripper on my face.
I felt what I imagine a vampire feels when splashed with holy water -- "It burns! It burns!" Thus the firing of the garden hose at my face.
Later, after a cleansing shower, I took inventory. There's the purple bruise on my toe and still-not-yet-healed scrape across my shin from dropping a large wood frame during the construction of the kids' bunk bed -- a project that involved much swearing and use of Resolve to dissolve the blood on the carpet. There are the host of little cuts on my hands and wrists, the most fresh from rolling two rocks from the woods to the garden -- the rocks must have weighed 200 pounds each.
Then there's the thin scar on my forehead, obtained 17 years ago, during a stop to see a friend in Cleveland on my way to Minnesota. My allergies were horrible that trip, the floor of my little maroon Ford Escort was covered in Kleenex, and my sneezing fits were increasingly violent. So I'm with my friend Naomi digging through the Escort for a package of Sudafed, when I feel another sneeze come on. So I stand up and sneeze hard, slamming my head into the corner of the open car door. It sounded like I'd been shot. Blood streaming through my fingers, I turn to Naomi and say, "Why did you hit me?"... Which strikes her as the funniest thing she's heard in the longest time and she laughs and laughs while I grab at wads of dried Kleenex to stop the bleeding. I saw her a couple years ago at the wedding of a mutual friend, and she still could hardly speak she was laughing so hard. Meanwhile, you can still see the scar, faintly, over my right eyebrow.
Okay, that had nothing to do with home improvement. Except to say that, in general, it's best for all concerned that I continue to hire experts for most projects and save my frequent flier miles for long summer trips.
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