Hey, I’m tabling for myself and Trees & Hills and Offshore Comix at SPX this weekend! Come see me if you’re around Bethesda, won’t you?

My next scheduled appearance after that is at MICE in Boston Sep. 25.

I’ve been wanting to establish a routine of doing comics in the morning, but have been getting up too late. I also want to do at least a half-page of finished comics every weekday, and decided I would get serious about it this month, then didn’t.  That’s probably because I was so busy procrastinating 2 different strips plus editing duties on TIME (the about-to-be-released Trees & Hills anthology). Anyway, although the goal is to work everyday, in the last day or three I’ve drawn 9.5 pages, which numerically is like I did double my daily half-page this month, and then some. And now I hurt. Little to no sleep + lotsa drawing = ouch.

I aim to get in the groove after SPX.  Look out!

Apparently the local wildlife can sense that this house is about to be uninhabited and are eager to take over, because we have been discovering increasingly larger critters in here. The carpenter ants are long-time residents, but lately we’ve had more & weirder bugs, culminating in the earwig I found under my pillow. (note: earwigs do not belong under my pillow!) Then we discovered a bold little mouse living in our kitchen. Most recently, my housemate found a snake in her wall (it had gotten stuck to some plastic covering a hole). If only we could direct the snake to the mouse! Anyway, it’s a good thing we’re leaving soon, because clearly this process will end in coyote, bear, and moose roaming the house.

Today I noticed a spider drop down from my desk to the floor. Fine enough, but then a little later I suddenly noticed it on my keyboard, which I was using. I don’t know how it got there without me seeing it, but when I tried to shoo it off, it crawled under the keys! That’s a bad place for spiders! They could easily be killed by my typing, which night also break my keyboard, making all of us unhappy. I switched to the keyboard on my computer (I normally use an external one at home), and eventually the spider came out and I shooed it onto the floor.

It’s time once more for my family to convince me to stay on planet Earth another year with a bribe of cake and song.

Recently I’ve had a couple of nights where I returned home after dark to find no one else home, all the lights off, and fireflies blinking around in the darkness, and stood around for a while just enjoying it.

This past Saturday night, I stamped the covers of 165 copies of Play. Sunday I glued game booklets into 120 of them.