Category: The Adventures Of Cynical Woman

Weekly webcomic about my life as a stay-at-home mom and erotica writer.

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ACW Episode ?? – Oh, the horror!!

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Personally, I think this is one of the best self portraits I've ever done.

I apologize for the lateness of this week's webcomic, and for the general lack of posts this week. Last weekend, I went camping with several volunteers for outdoor training with Girl Scouts. While participating in some adventure games, I hit an uneven patch of ground and my knee went “POP! POP!” And that was that. Yours truly went down like Moses in the fifth.

So this week, I'm hobbling around the house on crutches. I'm avoiding flights of stairs as much as I can, which means I'm not getting up to the office where my scanner is. So everything on the blog is going to be dne in the iPad for a while.

Anyway, about this week's webcomic. I love candy, especially chocolate. Especially peanut butter cups. In fact the only thing, I love more than peanut butter cups is very fancy dark chocolate. So every year at Halloween, the Hubster buys all this candy. And then he goes off trick-or-treating with the girls while I stay home with this big bowl of candy that I HAVE TO GIVE AWAY TO ANY YARD APE WHO SHOWS UP AT MY DOOR!!

So. Now I have a bum knee and no candy. Except for the stuff I managed to stash away before the trick-or-treaters showed up, and that stuff is all mine. Isn't that right, my precioussssssss…

Hopefully I'll be back to regular posting next week. Until I am, it's Personal Cartoon Drawing Month (better known as PerCaDraMo) again this month, which means I'm drawing cartoons every day, so those should show up here. Enjoy!

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ACW Episode 183 – Let me take you higher…

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The Adventures of Cynical Woman Web Comic!

Click on the thumbnail above to view the full-sized web-comicky goodness!

This is the perfect comic. I drew it exactly as I had imagined it. The colors came out brilliantly, IMHO. And the story is 100% completely true.

The second day of our last-minute vacation to the Shenadoah mountains, Hubster decided to take us all hiking. There was one trail, Bear Fence Ridge I think it was called, that included the words “rock scramble” in the description on the map. I was hoping for an alternate/indie music festival. Instead, what we got was miles of trail that meandered over stones taller than Hubster and I combined. I use the term “trail” loosely here. The actual footpath disappeared as soon as we hit the first giant pile of rocks. From then on, we had to scramble over the rocks (thus the term “rock scramble”) and follow hash marks of paint scattered here and there over the ridiculously increasingly dangerous landscape. And did I mention that somehow the kids ended up taking the lead? They ran right out in front of us the moment we hit the worst terrain and skipped their way up to heart-stopping heights to balance on the edges of cliffs that offered a breath-taking view of a sheer drop that went 50 or more feet straight DOWN.

Every time we reached the summit of one of these piles of mountainous stone, I kept thinking, “This is it! We can’t get any higher up! There’s no way the park rangers would make this path any worse! Not when they must know it could possibly get people killed!” But then we’d head for that next hash mark and sure enough, there was an even bigger pile of rock to climb.

When we reached the highest summit, Hubster and I stood there, staring down at the sheer drop only inches on either side of us. That was when he turned to me and confessed, “Ya know, I have a sleight fear of heights.” I swear I came so close to decking him. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that if I hit him, I’d probably knock him off the mountain, and then I’d have to go down the cliff face and retrieve his dead body myself. After more than an hour of rock scrambling, I was simply too tired to do that, so I waited until we got back to the car in a nice safe parking lot to hit him.

Today is the day Hurricane Sandy is supposed to do its worst damage to our area. Hopefully everyone out there stays nice and safe today. I plan to hunker down on the couch with my latest stash of yarn and work on more creepy craft projects. I think pretty soon I’m going to start posting pics of the weird dolls I’ve been making. I’ve been showing the works-in-progress on Twitter, and folks really seem to like them, so I may start blogging about crochet and spooky projects on a regular basis once I’ve got a few more pieces made up. So you have something to look forward to! Or run away from screaming! Depends on if you like crochet, I guess.

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ACW Episode 182 – Vacationing with the Hubster

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The Adventures of Cynical Woman!

Click on the thumbnail above to view the full-sized comic!

This is exactly what it’s like to go on vacation with Hubster. I have been married to this man for almost 20 years, and he has just about damn near killed me every one of those years by taking me on vacation. I remember our honeymoon. It was a death-march through Disney World. In Montreal, he walked us up and down the mountainside of the Mont Royal cemetery, looking for some mythical passageway to the park on the other side of the hill. He never found it, and when I slipped and fell in red clay mud and ruined my best linen skirt, trying to follow him down a steep path, I nearly killed him and left him there among the crypts. And then there was the time he nearly killed my aging mother by walking her to death in the Virginia Zoo.

Anyway. A week and a half ago, the kids had a four-day holiday from school, so at the last minute, Hubster planned a trip to the Shenandoah Mountains. He and I both went to college at Virginia Tech, so we love it up there. The kids had never been, and we hadn’t had a vacation in the last couple years, so I thought, why not? It was only four days, and surely the kids would slow him down…

We headed to the Shenandoah National Park on Thursday and spent the night at the Big Meadows Lodge. Beautiful place, absolutely gorgeous. The main lodge has a large sitting room with lots of comfy chairs and couches, a roaring fire place, and a big picture window view of the mountains. While Hubster played checkers with the kids, I sat on one of the comfy couches and crocheted contentedly.

It was the last peaceful moment I had all weekend.

Before dawn the next morning, Hubster got us all up so we could hike to one of the local viewing spots and see the sun rise. The kids started complaining right off the bat, but I knew it was way too early for that yet. This was only the first of many hikes Hubster had planned for the day. When we made it to our destination and the sun came up, the kids suddenly got all ecstatic!  “WOOHOO! WE HIKED ALL THE WAY OUT HERE BEFORE THE SUN CAME UP!! IT’S SO BEE-YOO-TEE-FUL OUT HERE!! NOW CAN WE GET BREAKFAST?!”

So we hiked back to the lodge, had breakfast, packed up the car, and checked out before heading out on our next hike. Which was considerably longer and tougher than the first one. And the hikes only got longer and tougher from there.

Long story short, the kids discovered that day what I had known for two decades. Given the chance, their father will walk until every member of the family falls to the ground dead. And then he’ll keep walking, not realizing he’s left us all behind. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love us. I know he does. But the man has to walk. And since I married him, I have to walk to. Until death do us part.

‘Nuff said.

I’ll try to post pics from the trip later on in the week. As exhausting as this trip was, it was beautiful.

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Adventures of Cynical Woman – post mini-vacation

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A good cartoonist would have a backlog of comics available when they go out of town. A good cartoonist would plan for surprise mini-vacations. A good cartoonist would have figured out how to draw without getting carsick while riding on the Skyline Drive.

I am not a good cartoonist.

I'll have a comic posted about the aforementioned surprise mini-vacation next week. For now, this will have to do.

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ACW Episode 180 – It’s the most exercise I’ve had all week

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Click on the thumbnail to view the full-sized webcomic!

Click on the thumbnail to view the full-size webcomic!

Con crud is the ultimate suck. I spent all last week on the couch, struggle to get through email (most of it for Girl Scouts!) and do what little work I could, including this week’s webcomic. I like that I can do web comics on the iPad when I need to, and in fact I will be doing a new project entirely on the iPad, but for “The Adventures of Cynical Woman,” I prefer good ol’ fashioned paper and pen, with good ol’ fashioned coloring and lettering done in Photoshop.

For those of you who didn’t know (because I was so sick I never got around to posting it) I was at Interventioncon two weekends ago. Interventioncon was a blast! It’s the first time I’ve run a table at a con as a webcomic artist rather than as a fiction writer/podcaster, and I have to say, the results were nice. Mich and I were able to sell quite a few items that weekend. Not enough to cover the cost of the hotel room, but far more than what I usually sell when I’m working as a writer/podcaster. Makes me glad I’m switching over to doing more comics and less fiction. I’m still writing, of course, but that writing is all being done for the webcomic, which is good because I like writing for comics. But now I can also do things like sketch cards and amigurumi and felties and prints and creepy greeting cards and I can group all that stuff together and sell it! Yay for selling stuff!

So anyway, great weekend sandwiched between two weeks of sick. I’m writing this post on Friday, you should be reading it on Monday. Hopefully by now I can finally breathe again and I am back at the gym. If not, I will spend yet another day on the couch. Yay. Fun. Ick.

Con crud sucks.

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ACW Episode??? – I’m so tired after InterventionCon

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I spent all weekend at InterventionCon and I'm dead tired. I tried to get this done at the con and on the ride home, but Mich and I were so busy at our vendor table this weekend and the ride home was kind of bumpy so…

I promise, I will color this later on and repost. But for now, it's late and I'm going to bed.

PS – InterventionCon was FANTABULOUS!!!

 

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ACW 178 – Can’t… take… the strain…

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Webcomic

Click on the thumbnail above to view the full-sized webcomic!

I seriously though this was going to happen last week at TRX class. That is one intense exercise class, and both Mich and I are amazed that we’ve been getting up before 5AM to make it there twice a week. We’ve also been getting up at around the same time to get to the pool three times a week, so that means every Monday through Friday, we are up before the butt-crack of dawn. We are so tired. But dang, we are lookin’ good!

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ACW Episode 177 – BAM!

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Cynical Woman Webcomic

Click on the thumbnail above to view the full-sized image.

Oh holy cow. It’s amazing the difference one little pill can make. As of writing this, I’ve been on a generic brand of Paxil for over a week now, and even the kids can tell the difference. I’m no longer constantly worrying about things, I’m getting stuff done, I’m not brain dead come suppertime anymore, and I’m actually enjoying things that used to drive me up the wall. I can’t recall the last time I felt like this. It’s amazing.

There have been a couple days when the medication hasn’t worked, or it’s suddenly stopped working, and then suddenly I feel abysmal and over-anxious again. But overall, things have been good.

The diagnosis has changed, however. It’s no longer menopause, but polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS for short). When the nurse called and told me that, I immediately looked it up, and boy, is that a fun medical issue. Complications from PCOS include endometrial hyper-plasia (which I already know I have), heart disease, and insulin resistance or Type 2 Diabetes.  There’s a chance I may also have some thyroid problems, so the doc is running a couple more tests. I go back in a few days to get all the results and discuss treatments.

But right now, things are fine. Work is getting done. I’m having fun with the kids, and I’ve stopped cleaning the house like a harpy on speed. In other words, I can now handle life without the stress killing my brain. We’ll see what happens next week. Until then, have fun!