Category: Cartoon

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Woo hoo! Purple hair! Boooooo, bad knees!

For the record, I changed my hair color again. I dyed it mostly purple with orangy-pink bangs, at the request of Princess’ Brownie troop.  Actually, they wanted purple only, but I had to have a second color in there.  And I’ve still got some streaks of blue as well, so it’s looking pretty funky.

As for the knees, I’ve injured both knees seriously enough that I’ve had trouble getting up and down the steps at times. I’ve definitely got arthritis, a fact which drives my dad crazy.

“Helen, you’re not old enough to have arthritis!”

“Uh, Dad? I’m almost 43.”

“Gack! Don’t tell me that! If you’re 43, then I’m…”

“Older than dirt?”

“Helen, you never were a loving child…”

So anyway, yeah, cool hair but lousy knees and an occasional twinge in my back. But I’m still rockin’ it baby! I just have to rock it in a rocking chair some days.

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I drew this cartoon on Friday, and wrote the blog post on the same day. Saturday around 9AM, I and two other troop moms were supposed to have picked up over 1900 boxes of cookies and brought them back to my house, where I was then expected to sign out about 1500 of those boxes to the rest of the troop to fulfill their orders. If you did not hear any blood-curdling screams this weekend, it all probably went okay. But I guarantee by this point I have eaten at least two full boxes of thin mints. Cookie season is stressful, folks.

Anyhoo, I’m still experimenting with offline blogging software. Zoundry Raven up and died on me after years of faithful service, and there isn’t a new version as far as I can tell, so this week I’m testing out BlogJet. We’ll see how it goes. I could always try MS Word, but I really prefer software dedicated to blogging, especially software that will let me grab my recent posts so I can see what got posted when. That’s kind of handy when you do a week’s worth of posts at once, and when you post things well in advance.  But if anybody knows of a good blogging software app I can try, something that will let me assemble my posts on my desktop and upload them to the web, drop me a note. I’d appreciate it!

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Hopefully, this post comes through okay. When I sat down to write it, my offline blogging software, Zoundry Raven, just sort of decided to quit on me and wouldn’t restart for anything. Of course, Zoundry hasn’t updated this software in a few years, so I guess it was just a matter of time. Let me know if the post comes out weird though.

Anyway, about this week’s comic. Every time I go to a con, I get asked the same question. Mike Pederson, who runs Ravencon (no relation to Zoundry Raven!), always asks about the Hubster and the kids, and wants to know when I’m going to bring them to a convention. The answer is NEVER. We tried, when Pixie was a year old, to take the whole family to a few conventions, and it was a disaster. The kids couldn’t sleep in the hotel room, which meant the adults couldn’t sleep either. In fact, at one con, Pixie got up at 2AM (she was sleeping in a trundle bed on the floor), picked up the phone, and ordered room service. That ended family convention attendance right there.

The fact is, I go to cons to work. Yes, I go to see people and have fun, too, but the main point of my being at a con is to work. I have a table to man all weekend long, and books and zines to sell. Plus because I write erotica, most of the panels I do tend to be held around 11PM or later, which makes staying in a hotel room with two children a problem. They’d wake up every time I walked into the room, if they weren’t already being kept awake by the room party down the hall.

And on top of it all, Hubster just isn’t interested in schlepping two kids around a con all weekend. I mean really, it’s a pain to travel with kids under normal circumstances, even when you go some place where you know the kids will have plenty to do. But at a science fiction convention? I don’t care how family friendly a con says it is, it cannot entertain my two little monsters all weekend long. They get bored, they get hungry, and then they go feral and that’s it for the Hubster.

So no family at cons. But I’m there, and isn’t that what matters?

Next convention I’m attending is Farpoint, February 17-19, in Maryland. Be there, or be… absent? I dunno. Just show up and buy issue two of Mustachequerade, okay?!

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Yes, this actually happened. Our hotel room at Marscon was interesting. In addition to being directly across from the never-ending room party from hell (on Saturday night, it shut down at 5AM), we also had a little problem with the coffee maker. It would only intermittently heat the water. Now, I brought instant coffee with me, so when the water came out cold Saturday morning, I cursed my fate that most hotels don’t have microwaves in the rooms anymore. And I probably did that cursing while standing in front of the microwave that I was somehow blind to all weekend long. All I can say is, I was very, very, very tired. And really, it’s so frikkin’ rare these days for me to get a hotel room that actually has a microwave in it!

And did I mention that the shower handle had a habit of turning itself so that the water kept getting hotter while I showered? I nearly boiled myself like a lobster. Oy!

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I was sooooooooo tired before, during and after Marscon. I was up late Thursday night getting ready, then up late Friday and Saturday night doing panels, and then there was this damned room party right across from our room that kept spilling out into the hall. You know a party is a real classy event when the people have moved to the hallway because they’re waiting for someone to clean up the puke in the room.

Anyway, mid-way through Saturday, while Mich and I were sitting at my table in the artist/author alley, she reached over and tweaked one of my horns, then declared, “They’re soft!” It all seemed so… weirdly sexual, like I had somehow forgotten to take my “Viagra for Devil Horns” and been caught wanting in the hardness department. So I filed the idea away for later to make into a cartoon.

Speaking of tired, did you notice the very obvious mistake in the cartoon above? I drew this right after getting back from Marscon, thus my “boo-boo.”