Month: January 2024

I did say the comics wouldn’t be interrupted in any way, right? Right…

So yeah, no comic uploads this week; between the increasing workload/frustrations at the day job and the debilitating heat, I have had zero energy to get anything done either at work or at home. The pages that were to go up this week have been scripted and pencilled out, but getting into the inking/colouring process has been tough; hopefully I’ll work myself up enough this weekend to push through it. 

I’ve been slipping a little in my journaling endeavours as well; I need to start doing it earlier in the evening, because I feel the need to fall asleep a lot sooner these days. I blame the extended work commute; spending that long on the roads both in the morning and the afternoon do not put me in the mood to do anything except pass out. I’m hoping to resolve this by finding a new job soon; I’ve been keeping an eye on job offers closer to home or remote working opportunities, but given my limited qualifications, I might as well fall back on the plan of writing a fantasy novel series and the hope of becoming the next Jim Butcher. The odds are about equal, I’d say.

Despite slipping on the creative side, I’m still holding strong on the physical stuff; I haven’t skipped a morning workout session yet (though I might leave off the additional yoga stretches if I’m strapped for time), and the meal preps have been working well. This week has been battered chicken and egg fried rice, supplemented by mini chicken pies; I did say last week that I had a hankering for chicken, after all. Not sure what I’ll have lined up for next week, I’ll make a decision on that after payday. The website from which I get my workout routines now has a sister site that does healthy recipes; they’re primarily vegan stuff, but even as an avowed carnivore, I still thought some of them looked good, so we’ll see what happens.

Still no luck in capturing the factory floor kitty (I’ve nicknamed her “Pandora,” since she’s a vicious lady that won’t stay in a box), not for lack of trying. I’ve given up on leaving food out to bait her, as it clearly wasn’t working before, and she’s been spotted roaming all over the building, not just the one storage room. I’m still keeping the cat carrier in my car, just in case we happen to opportunistically snatch her up, but Pandora’s been extra cautious ever since my first attempt at catching her; the scratches are healing nicely, thank you for asking.

Think that about covers everything for this week; fingers crossed for some comic pages come Monday.

Ciao for now.

So much for maintaining a buffer… I’m going to have to put some work in this weekend to build up again.

That being said, the comic uploads should not be interrupted in any major way; I already have next week’s pages plotted out, so if I get the inking done by the end of Saturday, I can at least have Monday’s page ready to go in time, and then build up from there. It’s not like the day job has been particularly gruelling this first month back; on the contrary, it’s been dead as a dead thing, but I’ve found myself being preoccupied with other stuff instead.

Chief among the preoccupations is the appearance of another stray cat on the factory floor. She (I think it’s a she, I didn’t get a thorough look) has taken to hiding in our Receiving storage room, as well as some extra-dimensional secret space that makes her impossible to find before 3pm most days. She’s somewhat skinny, but not 100% feral; I managed to get close enough to pet her the other day, which she accepted; she was less accepting of being picked up or held in place, which is why my right arm is a mass of scar tissue right now. Subsequent attempts to catch her have failed; I’ve brought in a carrier, some calming herbs and a bowl of food to try and tempt her out, but no luck yet. Unlike the situation with Sparrow, there is no debate in my mind about keeping this cat if we catch her: the answer is no; in our current space and financial state, a third cat is out of the question. 

That said, I still want to wrangle her up somehow so that I can get her to an Animal Anti-Cruelty League depot, where she can be looked after and hopefully adopted one day. The problem with this lies in the fact that anywhere that I could take a stray cat either doesn’t accept uninjured animals, doesn’t send out responders on the same day, or closes too late in the afternoon relative to when she shows up; it’s frankly ridiculous how hard it is to get a stray cat to a qualified safe house after 3pm. If I do manage to catch her later in the afternoon, I’d have to make a plan to house her for the night before taking her elsewhere the next day; I just want her to have a chance at a good life, like how I’ve been able to give a good life to my own cats. 

Being the obsessive, ADHD-coded worry-wart that I am, my concern for the cat has kept me from focusing on a lot of things this week; it’s a good thing I’ve been prepping and packing good lunches, or I might have resorted to buying stress-food from the petrol station again, which is on my list of resolutions to not do this year. I intend to keep my credit card free of frivolous charges, and my trash bin at work free of snack wrappers. With that in mind, the burrito-style beef wraps were a rousing success, and I have zero issues with eating them all week. The only complaint I can voice about them is that they’re very more-ish; I always want seconds after I finish one. Maybe next time I’ll make bigger wraps and pack them with more stuff, perhaps some rice like a proper burrito to make it more filling. Next week will likely be something different though; I’ve got a real hankering for some chicken again…

Not much else worth mentioning this week; anything I could properly angst over these days is still going directly into my journal so that I don’t have to inflict it upon the internet. Fingers crossed I get my buffer reestablished by Sunday’s end, and next week will start to introduce a new face or two to the Fifth Ace Showcase.

Ciao for now.

We’re almost two weeks into 2024, and I haven’t crashed and/or burned yet; I’ll take it as a good sign.

I’m happy to say that the Fifth Ace Showcase has returned and is trucking on well so far; I actually had enough of a buffer that I could schedule the uploads for the whole week, which is not something I could say since the beginning of the series. I don’t know if I’ll be able to maintain the buffer at such a rate forever, the day job kind of puts a crimp in the already-slow colouring process, but considering how much I’ve been able to get done so far, I’m feeling optimistic. Issue #0 will be running all through January and February; we’ve already seen some familiar faces, we’ll be seeing a few more, but by the end of next week there will be a slew of new characters being introduced. They may or may not feature in the next upcoming stories, but if I waited to introduce them naturally, it would take years, and I don’t want to wait that long before showing them off. I’d rather whet your appetites for the wider universe by showing you what may be on the horizon rather than just telling you about it.

On the home front, we have more or less settled into our new residence quite well; all the essentials are in place, now it’s a matter of seeing how we can improve. A few natural decorations in the form of some pot plants wouldn’t go amiss out the front and back, maybe some astroturf, a few veggies and herbs growing out the back if we can manage it. The cats are getting acquainted with the area; Silver doesn’t go much further than the garden for fear of the sprinkler system, while Sparrow has already started taking his explorative expeditions beyond the perimeter fence. We were a little worried about him at first, and we still want to get a tracker tag for him just to be sure, but he went out early this morning and came back before I left for work, so he clearly knows where home base is. It’s just as well; if we tried to keep him exclusively inside for much longer he might have exploded; the little guy feels the need to roam down to his bones. Plus it means that even if I have to get up early to let him out, I can go back to bed and get an extra hour or two of sleep, which I’ve been needing for a while now.

Exercise is still being maintained; my routines would be the equivalent of a warm up to anyone else’s workout, but it’s not about bursting onto the scene and wearing out my body. So far, it’s something to get my heart rate up, and get me used to doing something in the morning; by the time the workouts start to ramp up, I’ll have gotten into the groove of being physically active before 6 a.m.; it’s all about routine building. I’m also going to be expanding my meal prep this weekend by finally making those homemade tortillas I was looking at last year; filling those with some ground beef mince, some black beans and a few onions and bell peppers… I’m making myself hungry just thinking about it, which is not hard to do, because most of my between-meal snacks have consisted of apples, lately; I need to crack out the popcorn again.

Other than that, life goes on. My fiance starts her new job next week; lucky her that she can roll out of bed and be right where she needs to be. I’m still hunting for a new job, fingers crossed that something comes along soon; in the meantime, I’ll just do what I can to keep us afloat. See you all back here next week, where I’ll hopefully have more stuff to talk about; journaling in the evenings has seriously cut down on how much I need to vent here.

Ciao for now.

Happy belated St. Patrick’s Days, or whatever that holiday that just passed was; my brain has been broiled inside my own skull for the past week, so I have no idea…

Unbearably hot weather aside, it’s been a productive first week of 2024 so far; I’m keeping up with a lot of my goals, making significant progress on others, and generally trying to do better in all things compared to last year. I did my traditional New Year’s tarot draw, and this year’s card is the King of Swords.

This card is all about intellectual clarity, decisiveness and discipline, taking the best route based on the most logical choices and holding true. In a year where I plan to better myself creatively, physically and mentally, nothing could be more significant for me right now. I’ve got a lot of things I want to accomplish this year, and shying away from them due to illogical reasons is not going to help. Though I maintain that almost melting from the heat is still a valid excuse for not getting as much stuff done as I want; I’m almost looking forward to going back to the day job next week just to hang out under the aircon.

On that note, I’ve been busy getting the first pages of Fifth Ace Showcase Issue #0 ready for upload; I’ve been putting last year’s practice to good use, rendering the illustrations in greyscale and then layering colour on top. By doing it this way, I can have a print-ready version of the page done at the same time as the digital version; if I ever get this stuff in print, greyscale is the cheaper option. The drawback is that this does take a lot longer to render than just straight colouring, especially since I’m still experimenting with the style; I didn’t get nearly as many pages done today as I would have hoped, and as I said before, the heat wasn’t helping. Despite it all, I’ll still have the first page ready for upload tomorrow, and I want to have the next three pages done before Monday; I want to get a buffer out ahead of time for a change, and this free week before I go back to work is prime real estate for building it up.

Over to the physical side of things, I have started my exercise routines for the year, and so far have no real complaints; my thighs aching is to be expected, I shouldn’t complain about that. The program I picked out is pretty simple, nothing too hectic for the first month or two, and it doesn’t wear me out first thing in the morning when I do it. In the moment when I work out, it doesn’t feel like I’m doing that much, but the fact that my thighs are aching means that something is happening. The routines will get more intense as the year goes on, but I’ll work my way up to that. Similarly, my meal prep is also going well; I currently have a freezer full of premade meals for the upcoming week. It’s mostly stuff like curries and pasta dishes, which are usually quite carb heavy, but they are also smaller portions than I usually eat; I don’t think I could ever cut carbs completely, so this is the compromise. I still feel the need to snack a lot, especially since my main meals are smaller, but once I’m out of the house again, there will be less temptation towards that.

Mentally speaking, I want to maintain a better attitude this year; I want to channel my negative emotions to productivity, and let my positive emotions colour the rest of my life. Hopefully this will result in more art and less angst in my online posting. To aid in this, I’ve started journaling again for the first time in years; it worked when I was still in therapy, so no reason it shouldn’t work now. I keep my journal next to my bed, and every night I fill a page with my thoughts on the day, some positive affirmations about what I’ve accomplished, and what I want to get done the next day; if I happen to have an inspired thought after I get into bed, it’s also on hand for me to jot it down as well. I started the journal a few days before the end of last year, just to see how it felt, and I think it’s already helping a lot; by getting the thoughts out of my head, I can see more plainly where I’m going, and get a better night’s sleep without them weighing on my mind.

So with all that, 2024 has begun on a good note, if not a terribly loud one. I’m going to keep building my momentum as the year goes on (fingers crossed), and will hopefully be all the better for it. Once I’m no longer feeling like a strip of crispy bacon, that is.

Ciao for now.