JanerBlog

Take off, eh.

I'm leaving, on a jet plane, tomorrow at 10 am. I'll be offline for the entire week, as Layla and I have made a pact to look at neither television nor computer for the entire trip. So, if you email me or post a comment, I'm afraid it'll have to wait till I get back on 6/5.

We've got all of Alaska spread out before us, and the weather looks promising for the entire time.

It should be a total blast. An added bonus: Paul's going to pick me up from the airport and we're heading to the family cottage on Lake Michigan to round out the vacation and decompression.

Can't. Wait.

See y'all later; when I come back there'll be pictures.

With friends like these...

See, I always tell people how amazingly smart and witty and brilliant and selectively mad my friends are. I don't think the lay person ever really gets it, at least not unti I am able to post something like this:

Scary Mike Finally Records the Amazing True Story of the Hand of Saint Turing

If you're wondering? Mister NASDAQ is Virus. Oh, and Scary also forgot to mention that he had to shave his hairy, hairy arm to make that cast, and then freaked people out at Sidetrack the following Monday, yelling "DOG ARM! LOOK AT MY SHAVEN DOG ARM!"

Scary? I fucking love you. To pieces.

Hmm.

I've been trying to put my finger on why this picture of Thomas Dolby and Paul together bothers me:

Oh, yeah. It's because it makes Dolby look like Krank and/or Cyclops from The City of Lost Children, a deeply creepy movie to which I had a strong visceral reaction.

Motor City Wrapup

Over here.

Garden setbacks...

So I went out today to do the very last of the planting. I asked you to stop me. Did anyone? No? I thought not. I may be in need of a gardening intervention. (Jane? Honey? Put down the trowel. )

Seriously, though. I found something this afternoon that really bummed me out:

This spring, at the end of April and beginning of May, was crazy warm and beautiful, with lots and lots of sun. This means that the trees leafed out -- BAMF! -- way ahead of time. Now it's the end of May, and the stupid Basswood tree that sits on the corner of the lot is so dense that it's throwing shadow for three hours longer than it did last year. Let me restate that: The garden, which was in full sun by 1pm last year, now does not enter full sun until nearly 4pm. Pruning isn't an option, as the tree appears to have grown significantly during the last year, enough that we'd need someone with a cherrypicker to make a dent in the problem.

This means that, barring some sort of accident that makes the Basswood's leaves drop entirely off, the garden's probably going to be a total bust this year. All this work -- for probably just some stunted plants with very little fruit. One small ray of hope, pun intended: It looks like some sort of insect has been at the basswood's leaves. Maybe they'll thin out before the end of the summer. Is it inherently wrong for a gardener to wish parasites on a tree?

Before I left for a walk this afternoon, I put little tinfoil collars around the tomatoes, a trick I read about in several gardening books that supposedly gets more useable sunlight to the plants. When I returned an hour later, the bottom tier of each plant's branches had been scorched to death. Sigh. Can't win for losing, it seems.

At the moment I'm contemplating my options: moving the tomatoes and peppers to buckets, and replanting their squares with beans, which are more shade-tolerant. Not sure yet; I think I'll probably wait until I'm back from Alaska to see how the plants are faring, and move them then, if necessary.

Sigh.

My alternative for next year probably involves tearing out the existant bed and turning it into a second strawberry bed, and making a small raised bed along the side of the house where there is enough sun -- either that or getting a bunch more containers. I'm not as fond of containers as I am bedding, because round pots aren't as efficient with space. I'll have to do something, 'cause damned if I'm getting rid of all that dirt. I spent a lot of time on that dirt! It's really good dirt! (and stuff. grumble.)

Sigh again.

Good thing this is a hobby.

Stop me before I plant again

Just went out and planted the rest of the Hidatsa Shield Figure beans and half the Scarlet Runners along the fencerow. I am well aware of how fast and long pole beans grow, so the plan is to weave them back and forth along the fence. We shall see. The main goal is going to be keeping them trained so they don't reach out and try to strangulate the neighbor's lilies.

Mike and Dagny swear by the taste of Scarlet Runner beans; I can't wait to try them. THe beans themselves are a gorgeous mottled mix of black and lavender, and some are a full inch long. Big!

Mutant Clovers

We went to Bell's last night to purchase nice dark beers for my Alaskan hosts, and Paul and I ate dinner in the Biergarten. While we were eating, I found eight four-leaf clovers in the grass.

I gave them to the waitstaff, and the baristas at Water Street.

Eight Days.

Saddest. News. Ever.

Tom and Lily broke up.

Tom Beland and Lily Garcia are two of the sweetest, kindest, lovingest people I've met in my time as a comics creator. I can only imagine the pressures they must have been under to make this kind of decision. My heart goes out to both of them, as well as kudos for handling the situation with such public grace. It's my fervent wish that they can always remain close, as two such extraordinary people should.

Love to them both.

And no, the series isn't over. There's much more to tell, and knowing Tom, subsequent issues will be as exemplary as they always have.

Done!

I finished planting the garden tonight:

• moved carrots, even though they'll probably die anyway


• planted beans... seven different kinds: Dragon Tongue, Edamame, Hidatsa Shield Figure, Yin Yang, Jacob's Cattle, Blue Lake Pole, Black Turtle


• replanted more beets and radishes hoping for a second try
  

I got an extra couple bags of soil that I hope to use in some tubs. Part of me wants to try a "three sisters" tub with a couple corn plants, some scarlet runners and a pumpkin. I have one tub big enough, but I'm not sure I have the sunlight necessary to pull it off. I do have a couple window boxes that I want to fill with Nora's extra greens, and maybe try a small bush watermelon in a tub, but those projects may have to wait until after I get back.

Yes, I know I sound obsessive about my garden. But let's remember, here: I work from home. I make my comics from home. I was born and raised on a 300-acre farm. I need an excuse to get the hell out of the house and dig in the dirt, and trust me, planting seeds is cheap therapy.

And good eats, too.

Gardening at lunch

I'm leaving for Alaska in ten days. TEN DAYS. So, I need to plan out what I'm going to do with my garden. The typical "plant-after" date for Michigan gardeners is May 20th; this is the average date of the last frost. I checked the local and national weather sites, and found that the forecast over the next few days will be highs in the 60's and lows in the mid-40's. We'll be getting a lot of rain, but no real chance of frost. I'm willing to take a chance on the weathermen being right, and so, on my lunch today, I went ahead and planted the seedlings I started in March.

Six tomato seedlings, one currant tomato in a hanging basket, eight basils, seven peppers and an eggplant went into the ground. The cherry tomato is vigorous and difficult to kill, the currant tomatoes should be fine, and the full-size tomatoes are all short-season cold-tolerant plants like Stupice, Silvery Fir and Early Red Chief, so they should all be okay. The basils are easy to replace if they die, so I didn't worry about them. But the peppers and eggplant all got little 2-liter cloches put over them, just to be safe.

No, I didnt bother hardening them off. I kept them in an unheated room, and they'd been exposed to sunlight daily. I'm willing to baby the peppers a little, because they're all rare seedlings, but the others? Tough love, babies.

I also yanked up all the beets and radishes. No, none of them had matured enough, even though I planted them on April 3rd, and their packages said they were 30-day crops. They must not've gotten enough sun, or water, or something, but they were so tiny and worthless that I'm having a beet-microgreen salad right now. I've done another planting of radishes, carrots and beets in the herb wheel, and they're looking good so far, so I hope to have more root veg, eventually.

Tonight I'll plant the beans and yank up all the spring planted carrots. The peas, obviously, will stay put. They're loving the gloomy wet weather, and are about 8" high.

ANS: All we need is U.

For all my buddies, past and present, at UUNET/ANS/MCI/Worldcom/VerisoNOC/Hell:
Here is something that will make you laugh, tee hee.

Farewell, MCI

and then:

Farewell, MCI: An Epilogue

Tee, I say. Hee.

*snif*

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/5/14/94712/3128

I <3 you, Spike.

Spike is one of the people I met last fall on my Chicago trip. I thought she was awesome the instant I met her, but I wasn't aware of the depths of her awesomeness until I started reading her old blog entries. Sweet merciful crap, behold her awesome.

Beancar

As of this morning, Silverbean is now officially back on B99. She already smells like french fries. This makes me happy, as I wasn't expecting to find anything higher than B20 until after Memorial Day.

YAY

You must all see this.

The Sitayana by Nina Paley. Watch and be amazed. Via Spike's journal.

Virus, this so completely needs to get to der Bruddaman.

That's My Husband!

So Paul's getting interviewed all over creation. See, his Moped Army book is garnering all sorts of awards and the local media is just now catching on to his awesomeness. So far today: three radio interviews and two print interviews.

Now you can all say you knew him when, and that you knew he rocked before anyone else did. Keep an eye on the Sizerblog for updates, links and MP3s.

Oh, and also? If you've always wanted a complete run of Little White Mouse, may I suggest that you go forth and ask your Local Comics Store to order you one? The initial Direct Market sales were a little less than spectacular, and we can't have that, can we? All the information your LCS will need to order the book from Diamond is at the link.

Thanks! Every sale helps. Don't wait for the next convention to pick it up!

Sigh.

Brother's having two more things cut off of him. Prayers and good thoughts appreciated.

Dreamblog

Been having some very involved, weird dreams lately, and have decided to start blogging them, at least the less-embarrassing ones.

Last night was a long-awaited return to flight dreams. My flight dreams are always the same: I can fly if I try *really, really hard*. Sometimes I run really fast and brace my arms, and there's a moment where I just take off and glide up into the air, like a kite on a strong breeze. In other dreams, I've leapt off a building tp glide away, or sometimes I'm floating and pulling myself over the scenery below, as though I were floating on my stomach in shallow water at the lake, and guiding myself along with my fingertips. The common thread between my flying dreams is that there's always some point in which I forget how to fly, or lose my concentration and have to start over from the ground.

This dream was different, in that I had a special necklace that I could use to make myself fly. A secretive group of people wanted the necklace (though I don't think I stole it) and so I was wearing it looped around my left wrist to camoflauge it, and was wearing a bunch of other junk necklaces so that if I got caught, they'd take those instead. Which happened, and I gave this one creepy secret-agenty guy all my necklaces, kept my "bracelet" and flew away with him and his cronies in hot persuit.

Upon closer scrutiny, the necklace, which had originally appeared to be made of oblong, facet-cut silver metal beads, turned out to be tiny little mechanical insectoid constructs all on a wire. They pulled open, transformer-like, and showed tiny eyes and legs and heads separate from their thoraxes. I think at this point I assumed that the necklace was of alien manufacture, and that's why I could use it to make me fly.

I'm taking echinacea to help stave off the creeping evil that Paul brought back from NYC, which means I'll probably have another vivid, weird dream tonight.

As a discussion point, though I've asked this before over on the Tart Boards: I'm always curious as to how people fly in their dreams. It seems that everyone has a distinct way that they fly, and it tells something about their personalities. How do you fly?

ZeFrank: The Show

Blame Jim Ottaviani.

Memo to God

M E M O R A N D U M

To the Supreme Deity:

Today was the third funeral I've attended in thirty days.

If there's any way to forestall the deaths of people I know for a few weeks, that'd be awesome.

Thanks,

Janer

cc: fate
karma

jei/JEI

MakeWork

So Paul was out of town all last week. In his absence, i did a ton of work: Cleaned house, went to the opening day of Farmer's Market, scheduled some more home repair, painted the front porch and did a ton of work on the book.

I was also going to try low-carbing it again, in hopes of surprising Paul with a few pounds gone. Instead, he walked all over Manhattan and dropped at least five pounds, and guess who found them?

Tableau: An AIM Conversation

jane: Oh, hey, I have to tell you this.
tish: m?
jane: I was eating b'day dinner w/ my mom and we were discussing the new diet she has to follow, and she said "My biggest problem is portion control."
tish: yep
jane: and I said, "Don't you wish you could just call Portion Control, the way you call Animal Control?
tish: Help! There's 10 servings of spaghetti on my plate!
jane: "And the guys would show up in the uniforms with the little noose on the stick and haul you off the brownies?"
tish: LOL
jane: then thoughts of me struggling in a big cone-shaped collar, trying to drop forkfuls of spaghetti in
tish: Nooooooo! Noooo! One more brownie!

Post Birthday Thank Yous!

Hey, everybody. Thank you so much to all the non-family members who gave me a call yesterday on my birthday. I was having kind of a lonely day, and it was really, really sweet to hear from so many of you who remembered, and thought to ring me up. Y'all are the absolute bestest.

MWAH!

Gardening question.

A neighborhood cat keeps shitting in my raised vegetable bed. I can't blame him, it's beautifully level and groomed. However, toxoplasmosis is really not on the menu. Anybody got suggestions? Fencing really isn't an option.

Smarter people than me weigh in

Heidi MacDonald gives her take on the Taki Soma case. Reading this makes me very glad I pulled my earlier post. Go, Heidi.

Catcalls.

There's a block I avoid. It's on the same street where I live, only one block down. When I'm out walking, I usually choose routes that circumnavigate it. Today, I was enjoying a beautiful sunny spring day after three consecutive days of rain, forgot to go around, and got a reminder of why I avoid it.

"HEY GIRL! HEY GIRL!"

"OWH! OUUUWH!"

"HEY! HEY!"

Yes, I get catcalled a block from my house. This week's participants are renters in side-by-side houses. One's a skeevy-looking old white guy, the other's a young, good-looking black guy. They hang out on their respective front porches and yell at me when I walk by.

I ignored them, but part of me wished for a shoulder-mounted potato cannon and a reason to claim impaired judgement.

I'm not crazy! The WSJ says so!

Check out the content of this Wall Street Journal review of the new Toyota Yaris:

While Washington was doing backflips about rising gas prices last week, I spent a few days gaining perspective about the fuel-economy debate by driving around in a car sent from an alternative universe.

The car is the new Toyota Yaris, a tiny hatchback with a 106-horsepower, 1.5-liter four-cylinder engine, a five-speed manual transmission, a minimum of power features and an EPA mileage rating of 34 mpg city, 40 mpg highway. The price tag for the model I drove was $12,720.

For Americans, the world the Yaris calls home is an alien one indeed. It's the world of Europe, where gasoline costs $4 or $5 or more per gallon, and where government policy increasingly is tilted toward minimizing carbon-dioxide emissions, the better to delay the day when some adventurer can water-ski from Prudhoe Bay to Murmansk.

...

Forget all the talk about ethanol, hybrid gas-electric vehicles and fuel-cell powered "hydrogen" cars. What stands between the U.S. economy and a significant reduction in gasoline consumption isn't some Manhattan Project leap of technology. It's a more-challenging effort to recalibrate culture.

Ten pounds of awesome in a five-pound sack

Haley's "Inner Goth" has red skunkyroots.

More on Taki Soma

I had a long diatribe written.

And then I talked to some other people.

And I also read this and this and this.

And now I'm retracting my diatribe until I know more.

ooOOOooo.

The advance copies of Paul's new LWM Omnibus just arrived. They are so gorgeous that part of me wants to lay them all on the living room rug and roll around on them. SELF PUBLISHING RULES.

Get your MoJo risin'

From an awesome article from Mother Jones about a super-organic farmer:

ON MY LAST DAY ON THE FARM, a soft June Friday afternoon, Joel and I sat talking at a picnic table behind the house while a steady stream of customers dropped by to pick up their chickens. I asked him if he believed the industrial food chain would ever be overturned by an informal, improvised movement made up of farmer’s markets, box schemes, metropolitan buying clubs, Slow Foodies, and artisanal meat-processing plants. Even if you count the Organic Supermarket, the entire market for all alternative foods remains but a flea on the colossus of the industrial food economy, with its numberless fast-food outlets and supermarkets backed by infinite horizons of corn and soybeans.

“We don’t have to beat them,” Joel patiently explained. “I’m not even sure we should try. We don’t need a law against McDonald’s or a law against slaughterhouse abuse—we ask for too much salvation by legislation. All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse.

“And make no mistake: it’s happening. The mainstream is splitting into smaller and smaller groups of like-minded people. It’s a little like Luther nailing his 95 theses up at Wittenberg. Back then it was the printing press that allowed the Protestants to break off and form their own communities; now it’s the Internet, splintering us into tribes that want to go their own way.”

Gazette!

Here's a link to my article in the Kalamazoo Gazette. It's by the same guy that did my interview in the Ypsi Courier, only with a few things changed. There's a nice photo in the print version, but I forgot to pick myself up a copy because I'm a giant bonehead. If there are any local Kalamazerds around, could someone grab me one?

Such a doofus.