There’s little to complain about when considering how 2008 closed out.
On New Year’s Eve, Erin and I were fortunate enough to have Grandma in town to stand guard over children which freed the two of us to perhaps taste a bit of freedom for a night. While the idea of going to an actual party seemed somehow unrealistic, fanciful notions of an evening spent whooping it up by attending the cinema and perhaps partaking of a feast and several large glasses of beer floated through our heads in the days leading up to the end of the year.
Really, I just wanted to finally go out for dinner and see a movie for the first time since our anniversary in mid-September. But, as seems to be the case more often than not, frivolity was soon yoked with the need for efficiency and a responsible usage of time: it became necessary to spend some of our precious hours of unfetteredness in order go to Target and/or Home Depot and/or Menards to look over and probably buy some boring old storage bins and utility shelves for the basement.
I really don’t have much of a reason to complain about buying the boring stuff. While Erin’s been slowly eaten away inside by the sorry state of our basement and the possessions and materials stored therein. But I stood to benefit just as much as Erin.
See, for the last few months, I’ve been sharing my office with Torbin and his crib. A less than ideal situation with a net result of me not really being able to do any work before he wakes up, typically about 8 or 9, nor after the youngster went to bed, lately around 7 or 8pm. Which is great from a getting to bed early standpoint, but not so much for a blog writing and comics drawing perspective.
The plan was for me to move my office into the basement, a move to be made possible by packing all the loosely stacked stuff that organically accumulated in the fairly large space down there into soon-to-be-purchased bins and putting it onto soon-to-be-purchased shelves. I was looking forward to the new space, but not the work needed to actually move into it.
So it was with a somewhat heavy hearts that, after putting kids to bed, we bid good evening to my mother and stepped out into the cold night. We drove South to the magical land of Eagan, where all roads of my life seem to lead, intending to have 2008’s benedictory meal at Doolittles and then begin our search for the best deal on household storage items.
A digression in honor of a chicken sandwich
I now want to take a moment tell you about the best damn chicken sandwich on the planet. Doolittles is a local chain of restaurants that takes great pride in the big rotating skewers full of roasting chickens that you see upon entering the establishment. They also have the best chicken breast sandwich that you’ll ever have. First they take a giant knife and they just whack off a chunk of the breast meat, throw it between a bun with some chipotle mayo and some cheese and they put it in front of you. Simple as that. I daydream about this sandwich. And this is where, despite the 30 minute wait in their lobby, I wanted to spend the last free moments of 2008: chewing on one of these sandwiches.
(They also have awesome key lime pie.)
Full bellies and warm feet; no bins or shelves
By the time we were seated, had our beers, savored our sandwiches, were pissed about the fact that the key lime pie was “seasonal” and therefore unavailable, settled for the vanilla ice cream and giant brownie, and got our check it was 9:45pm.
Most of the stores we were going to go to close at 10, so we said, “Screw it”. And went home. I was in bed at 10:30.
It was an anticlimactic but comfortable way to end the year, and I wouldn’t have done it any different. Unless there was something I wanted to see playing in the movie theater.
We did the shopping the next morning, and I spent the entire next day carrying crap from upstairs to downstairs (with the help of my parents and Erin).
Threat of even less work being done in the coming week or more
Sadly, I’m not finished setting up my new office due to power supply issues. My two surge protectors were discovered to be disfigured by heat. So I’m going to have to do a little rewiring in the basement with the help of my dad. But even that can’t be done until I get the new surge protectors I ordered from Amazon.
The impact of this may be that, in the short-term, I may miss a week or two of comics. I have 3 episodes still in my buffer, but have none currently in progress. Once I get my main computer up and running, I’ll have more time in the evenings in which to draw, but it takes more than a couple of weeks, typically, to complete a sequence, so I’ll likely miss deadlines in a few weeks based on a problem suffered today.
Not happy about it, but that’s the way things go. I am happy that I’ll be able to get a little more time to work now, though. It’ll be worth the pain.
2009 also begins without our refrigerator
I picked up a message from last week from Warners Stellian letting us know that they just received word that the parts they had ordered will be arriving on January 5th.
So it’s been more than a month with the loaner fridge. Glad we have it, but I’d like the one I bought back, please.
