Cartoon

Every once in a while I draw a cartoon in my journal. I havn't been doing it as often as I used to—there are only two in my whole current 600-page journal, and I'm 520 pages into it. But here's one I did a few days ago. Click on it to see it full-size.

-I'll explain a little bit first. These cartoons are based on a karacter I came up with when I was in, oh, fourth grade, called Chicklet. Probably a lot of his appeal to me then was that he's easy to draw. Over time, more karacters hav joined the strip, which is good, because it's tuf to carry out a strip with just one karacter. Each one represents someone I know. Aaron and Keith bothe hav one based on cartoons we used to draw in classes when we wer supposed to be doing other things that wer too boring. Keith's is a chameleon, a spin-off from his strip The Chameleon Brothers. Aaron's is an orb with eyes. The only one that makes an appearance in this strip, tho, is a snake that's supposed to represent Micah, for reasons I'v forgotten by now. He drew cartoons, but none of them wer snakes—I think I may hav asked him once what kynd of cartoon he'd like me to use to represent him, and he picked a snake. If I fynd some more good cartoons, I myte scan those in and post them here. One of the volumes of my journal is still in Iowa, but I have the other three big ones (plus the small, old one) here in Ohio.

This has been an uneventful week. I'v been reading, and (while the snow was around) sledding, and werking on my font, and stuff. I'm going back to Iowa this weekend. I'll hav lots of fun stuff to tauk about this semester. The latest news is that the assistant manager of Bob's is stepping down, and I myte take his place—I havn't decided yet, since I don't know all that it entails. I'll also, assuming this program is still underway, be volunteering to teach English to immigrants in ?Cedar Rapids, most of them Somali. And of course I'll be going to Costa Rica. I'm definitely excited about the near future. And the future after that, actually. I'm all sorts of excited.

asf.

(That's English for etc. and short for "and so forth")

I guess I'll just copy journal entries about Christmas. I'll try to condense a little, since there wer two.

Christmas Eve:

I was tired all day today. But I still enjoyed it, of course. Around 11w Mom & Dad and I drove up to Oxford with our presents, altho I forgot to bring one of Mom's. Dave's and Dan's clans can't be in Oxford tomorrow (other Christmases are afoot), so we basically did Christams today. Joe was there, so we all shot the breeze with him and ate crackers with salami and played the Christmas pool tourney. I finally had a decent showing in a tourney! I beat Dad and Grandpa to make it to the third tier of the bracket. But I ended up out against Joe, and I didn't fare well in the losers' bracked. I still got to play way more than I hav before. Dan ended up winning, coming from the losers' bracket. Cammy and Tracy wer around, Cammy hamming it up and being cute.

-At 5 we opened presents, because Dave's clan was going to be late, and Mom & Dad and I had to leave by 6 to make it to Micah's visiting hour.

• Dad got Mom a jogging suit.

• Grandma gave Mom the fried grasshoppers.

• Grandpa gave Dan a handheld variable-speed spindle sander—Dan's ben asking for it for five years, and it was the last obscure tool he needed, and now he won't know what to ask for.

• Tracy got me a calendar, and, more impressively, a great calligraphy set with several nibs and lots of ink. Yeah! Oh, and parchment paper.

• Dad got Grandpa some Glenlivet, but actually I don't think that's opened yet.

• Everyone got Cammy baby stuff. Mom sewed her several bibs and a blanket.

-And then, in a little of a hurry, we all got delicious food such as vegetarian lasagna, and said goodbyes until tomorrow, and took off to Talbert House. Now I won't know what the Sierras think of the journals I gave them!

-Talbert House was deserted. None of us could figure out why no one else—at all— was visiting these kids on Christmas Eve. Well, Micah came out. I had no idea what to expect from him, since Dad was there, the first time they've ben around each other for at least a month. Turns out, Micah has found something besides anger in him! Dad tells me they got him good and detoxed, finally, after a long time of his hed being full of kemicals, and now he's apparently pretty much back to his old self, as far as I can tell. Which is really just super. We tauked about terrible Talbert House food and moovies and books. Micah's also started reading. There's not much else to do in there, he reasons, besides clean his room. He says he has probably the cleanest room; all the other guys' rooms smell like "old dog biscuits". I offered to take him to see Avatar on one of his home passes before I leave, since he's ben wanting to see it and now he's level 1.4, which is one sublevel under 2.1, and level 2 means home passes each weekend. …

Christmas:

We all overslept until 10, which is when we wer supposed to be at Talbert House to pick up Micah. We got there a haf-hour late or so, and drove strayte to Oxford. On the way up we thaut of peeple who have unmistakable voices [list to follow at the bottom of this blog], like Morgan Freeman, Gilbert Gottfried, and Fran Drescher.

Got to Oxford, and it was nice. I can only imagine how nice it must'v ben for Micad. We had some leftovers for lunch and sat around tauking. Eventually, since everyone who was coming was alredy there (our family, Joe, and Grandma & Grandpa), we opened presents (again). I got mostely clothes, but also a pretty sweet wheeled suitcase from Grandma & Grandpa (Micah got one too), and a Subway gift card from Dave & Cº. Mom got me plad and a lether jacket. She loved both of her gifts from me the Snuggie and the bike, and she was particularly amazed by the bike. I wrapped it by drawing a picture of it on a tiny piece of cardboard with an asterisk that said "See back yard for details". Grandpa got Grandma a Snuggie too! And a dozen bottles of wine. Dad got tin snips and shirts, and that's about all I remember.

-So then we went back to sitting around and tauking. Actually, I went downstairs, and played pool with Joe. I even beat him once! We tauked, and then Dad came down and he joined in. I played Dad and beat him twice out of thrice. A little erlier, Grandma, Joe, Micah, and I sat at the table and tauked about prison and legal stuff. Joe told some pretty nasty stories from when he was "in the pokey" (as he always said it) in 1991–92. Some crazy stuff. I think it made Micah feel better about being in "prison lite" and more dedicated to never having to do real prison time like Joe's.

-Until dinner, Joe, Dad, Grandma, Mom, and I played Scrabble (with Joe and Grandma on a team). Then we ate prime rib, and told what we wer thankful for. Dad said he was thankful to hav Micah within hugging range more often it the near future, which was nice. It's ben a great Christmas, I'd say.

-We sat around once more, this time digesting, finishing Scrabble (I won), and waiting for Mom's birthday cake. Not long after that, we had to get going to get Micah back at 8; on the way back, I let Micah browse my iTunes and we lissened to lots of System of a Down.

I think that's all for journal entries that I'm going to copy. I've hung out with frends a bit since then, and red lots of books. I'v also ben writing my own book, which is something I mentioned a couple months ago. I had to stop partway thru November, but now I'm back at it. I won't have it done within the space of a month, I don't believe, but I'll hav an appreciable amount done by the time college rolls around again. It's alredy 49 pages long, and it'll be longer soon. The with-frends stuff I'v done is playing pool and other fun things. For example, Keith and I went to Marshmallow Lake, which he says looks way weirder when it's not covered in snow. It's not actually a lake. Rather, it's apparently some kind of squishy, white clay, and when you stand on it, it bounces up and down, as if you wer standing on a marshmallow. I couldn't tell Keith anything new about it, since it was covered in snow and mostely frozen, but I did detect a bit of bounce underfoot while I stood on it. He says it's downhill from a water treatment plant, which could explain it.

-Yesterday I did my latest snow sculpture.

And now I'm going to put some more pictures up. I just dumped a bunch of them off my camera.

These four are from something my frend Ben and I did in the theater. We suspended a bucket from the rafters.

We did it by going on the catwauk. We used some other rope to slide it so that no one could reach it from either part of the catwauk,
and hung it too hye for anyone to reach,
or to jump to.

These are from something I did with some other frends, whose names I won't mention. We clymed a bilding on campus. Using a grappling hook.
These are the two frends in question.

And this is the bilding. We clymed up it in stages, mooving up each giant stair-step in turn. They're each about ten feet hye.
Then we took pictures of the view.


And had fun with long exposures in the dark nyte. ("hi"!)

Some train pictures. This one is a goste.
This one is two hours erly, because this was the day of the Iowa-wide 16-inch blizzard, and Union Pacific wanted to miss that if they could. The result was a rare daytime winter train thru college.
I thaut this was a pritty trippy effect. I got it unintentionally by following the train's motion with my camera.
This isn't a train, but rather a bowl of delicious egg drop soup I made for myself.

2 cans of chicken broth (or was it one?)

3 eggs, beaten

2 green onions

ginger

other spices to taste

Put the broth in a saucepan and turn the heat on hye. Slice up the onions and put those in, and also add some ginger. Pepper is good too. Once the broth is just about boiling—very hot—stir it around so it's swirling in a circle. Before it stops mooving, dribble the eggs into it. They'll congeal in the heat and form noodles. Then you eat it, and it's delicious.

Christmas pictures. I hav more on Facebook, so here are a cupple key photos, featuring first the undeniable star of the show, Cammy.

And also a rare syting of the Oregonian Joseph outside its natural habitat. Plus a little winey on the bubbly.

Here's my snake's injury, for those of you who heard he got injured. It looks bad, but it was way worse. All the area of pink skin you see was an open wound. Now it's pretty much all sealed up, and we'll both just hav to wait until he sheds a few more times and the scales cover the area again. He can move his tail now, which he couldn't do directly after he got the injury (I think he burned himself on something), altho he's not very flexible in the area of his body where the sore is. Hedward of the pink skin is a scab that hasn't fallen off.
I just thaut this was precious.

And lastly, that list of peeple with unmistakable voices.

William Elliott Whitmore (singer who comes to the college)

Ralph Stanley (bluegrass singer)

Tay Zonday

Jane Kaczmarek (Malcolm's mom, Malcolm in the Middle)

Richard Nixon

Roseanne Barr

John Goodman

Morgan Freeman

Weird Al Yankovic

Gilbert Gottfried (Zazu)

Fran Drescher

Mitch Hedberg (late comedian)

Michael Clark Duncan (John Coffey, The Green Mile)

Johnny Cash

Jenna Elfman (Dharma)

Ellen DeGeneres

Barry White

Redd Foxx

Louis Armstrong

Jim Gaffigan (comedian)

Fred Rogers

George W. Bush

Dolly Parton

Michael Jackson

Elizabeth Devlin (singer, came to the college once)

Judge Judy

Stephen Hawking (I choose not to view this as cheating)

Craig Ferguson (Mr. Wick, The Drew Carey Show)

John Madden

Robin Williams

Michael J. Fox

Phil Hartman

Paul Harvey

That's all. You can stop reading now, finally.