Anyone that happens to be around the Hampton Roads area in VA in early November, NekoCon will be held at the Hampton Convention Center. I'll be attending, but just to hang around. Maybe ya might bump into me, probably at the drawing panel with Fred Perry *insert fanboy noise here*

I'll be taking some pictures as well and posting them up.

So we have a new District manager at work, and apparently he wants to write up everyone in the store that actually does do their job. Something seem wrong here?

Anyway, I'm still doing my best not to let work overwhelm me and still manage to get some comics out, at least more often than I have lately.

Yes, I finally managed to squeek out a new comic. If anyone notices, I'm still tweaking my style and character look. The hair doesn't look so flat anymore and I'm still working on proportions. The only problem with the hair now is that it takes longer to fill in the black, but i think it looks better at least.

To those who continue to come here for the comic, I thank you greatly.

Yes I'm still alive and around, no I haven't abandoned the comic. It kills me I haven't updated in a while and i still plan to, but let me give a bit of a reason for the lack of updates as is.

I've said before about my promotion, and things have settled down a bit as far as the stress. My problem now is that I work constantly. Every day I'm at work till 12 - 2 am and getting home after that doesn't leave me much energy to do anything. On top of that, getting only 1 day off a week (2 if I'm lucky) and that's needed to take care of things at home. I haven't mentioned before but I also help take care of my grandmother, so quite often a lot of my running around town for things is for her. Going to the store for her, taking care of bills, getting her medicine, things like that. Being the company I work for, schedules are done weekly and can change every week, so nothing's ever set in stone. Add onto that, that my store manager doesn't get the schedule up till the DAY BEFORE THE WEEK STARTS, I never know when I am or not working until the last minute, so I can never plan anything in advance. If I could do at least that much, then I could my life a little more organized.

Of course all this also keeps me from having anything resembling a social life. It doesn't help much that my closest friends live in other states (talking about you Red and Silver... I just noticed my best friends are colors...) I would pretty much kill to hang out with them for a while. I wish I could find a way to keep work from running my life as much as it does. We have 2 more people promoting to managers so maybe once they advance, I'll have a little more time, but that's a couple more months away at least.

On a good note though, my cousin is getting married. The wedding isn't until next year, but he asked me to be his best man and I couldn't say no. Him and I grew up like brothers.

I'm taking a little time off work next week to attempt to celebrate my birthday... oh yay, one more year older, time for drinks. Might have a little time in there for drawing as well. If I can manage it, I'll TRY to do a few pages so I can have some breathing room and still manage something resembling an update schedule. I promise nothing, but I'll try my best. Until then, please keep coming around, I can promise that something will appear here soon.

I hated having to take this long of a hiatus, but things in life were a little unavoidable. Anyone who reads the forums knows the ill things that befell me before, but that's mostly cleared up. The insurance company still hasn't decided who was at fault in my accident, so that hasn't been resolved yet. In the meantime though, I have a new car which is nice, also my first car with working AC which makes me a very happy man.

Besides that, I've also been promoted at work, which has given me many more hours of stress and very few days off for anything. Shortly after said promotion, my boss decided to go on vacation so I had to work every single day. That was not fun, especially since everyone under me decided to act up, pitch fits, or just not show up. We also had increased business that week so I was under a lot of pressure and stress so my first day off after that was spent either asleep or vegitating. Now things are smoothing out a bit hopefully so I'll have a little time to work on the comic once again. For now though updates are going to be a little sporadic or only on mondays.

So on with the comic goodness again and i hope you all enjoy.

Also don't be afraid to sign up in the forums and discuss whatever, or even email me with any comments or such. I like hearing from readers.

Soon I will be making my return.

As for the troubles I had, they ended not as good as I had hoped, but good none the less.

Except now my car has broken down. Such is life I suppose.

Anyway, sometimes soonish there will be something new up.

Go to the forums here. It will explain all.

Life can take some strange turns, and it especially likes keeping me from doing things I want to do. The past couple of weeks, I've been swamped at work, pulling extra hours because we recently lost a couple of drivers. One was fired for reasons I won't get into. The other quit because of some tragic events that happened around here. I don't know if it appeared in news nationwide, but there was a shooting at Hampton University. As far as i know, no one died, but two people were seriously hurt, one of them was a delivery driver. No not me, but the scary part for me was I was 100 feet away at the time with my own delivery when it happened. Can really shake up a person.

Then after all this, I end up pretty sick and not able to do much of anything. Being a still fairly young adult, and the news of the swine flu spreading, my family is of course scared I might have it. I don't know if I'm quite that sick, but the coughing, chest pains, and headaches combined with the fact I'm having constant allergy attacks (I have a very extreme case of hay fever... extreme enough there's a tiny chance it could kill me if I don't take medicine) I've been very miserable for a few days. It's kinda hard to hold a pen in this condition, as as much as I really want to draw, I haven't been able to. Soon hopefully I'll be feeling a lot better and can get back to the comic, but for now, just bare with me a little longer, I'll have something up soon.

The new comic will be up later today... right now I need sleep.

If you notice something different with the comic today, it's because I decided to try out Adobe Illustrator and see how it goes.

Honestly, I'm not to happy about how things turned out. There just some things I can't do in Illustrator that I could do in Photoshop. Perhaps with time and some experimentation, I'll learn how to utilize both to make something real good, but for now, I think I might end up sticking with Photoshop until I learn some more about Illustrator.

I didn't plan on missing a couple of updates last week, but sometimes life gets ya like that. Nothing bad or anything, just random circumstances, most of them having to do with my computer.

As I've posted recently, I had to get a new computer cause the motherboard on my old one was pretty much on it's last breath, random lock ups, shutdowns, and anything else to annoy me. Once I got the new one, things were great, everything working the way it's supposed to.

Now for the longest time, I've been using Windows XP. It and I have a bit of an understanding with each other. Other than the occasional stubborness, it's been good to me. After getting my new motherboard, Red explained to me that XP couldn't utilize all the hardware since it's only a 32 bit OS, and I needed a 64 bit OS such as Vista. When Vista first came out, I always said I'd stick with my familiar friend XP, especially after all the problem i heard about with Vista. Now most of those problems have been ironed out, and Red swore that Vista was very stable now and a good system to use and I would really have to have it to get everything I could from my new comp, and was kind enough to get me a copy of Vista Business. So I went and started up the install with a little bit of eagerness to see what might be different, only to learn one very sad truth...

unlike XP, Vista hates my guts.

And I'm not talking wedgie or random yo momma joke hate, i mean the kick you while your down, steal your wallet and your girlfriend and laugh the whole time kinda hate. After a struggle to get it to see my cd drive, I had a mostly painless install, until the update. No matter what I did, every fix I looked up, everything I tweaked to try and make things better, the updater would always crash while trying to update. What really irked me was that the solution center would say I'd need to increase stability by updating. EH? Eventually it would crash so much that all the files would become corrupt and I'd have to start a fresh install. On the third install, I tweaked, I fixed, sweat and bled to get things going, and after a 2 hour install and 4 hours of updating slowly, file by file, I finally managed to get everything up to snuff with only 2 updater crashes. Even after getting everything running mostly smoothly, I still have random things stop working, most of them I don't even know what they are, but apparently they continue to work even after I get the message that they aren't working. I'm not exactly sure how that is, but other than the error messages I get once in a while, everything is running without any problems really, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Of course after all this, I still had to reinstall all my programs and I decided to take my time a little on this as I was a bit sick and tired of the whole mess for a while. But now here I am, back again and trying to get back into the groove. With luck, the comic will continue on without any major hitches for a while so everyone can enjoy the reading goodness.

And for now, Vista and I will just continue to give each other dirty looks until one blinks...

I finally got my new comp, slapped everything together and it works beautifully. I'm still installing things I need and getting things up and running on it, plus enjoying a little time of having it not crash on me every few minutes. My good friend Chris Smith at Gibberish was kind enough to send me a guest comic. Heh heh, makes me laugh.



I also did a guest comic for him a little while back that he's posted now, so go check it out.

Well the bad news is that I'll be taking the week off from the comic because my computer is slowly creeping to it's death. Random powerdowns are NOT a good sign of a computer's health, and having experienced this once before, I can already guess how it's going to play out. The good news though is that I already put in an order for a new motherboard which should be here around wednesday. I'll need time to make sure to gather any info I need off this comp while it lives to be able to transfer it to the new comp once I have that up and running. After that I shouldn't have anymore worries about crashes, lockups and powerdowns.

Though I'm betting Red's gonna try dragging me back into World of Warcraft.

It's official, I REALLY need a new computer. While working on the comic last night, it decided to shut down on me twice. Not lock up, not crash, just turn off. I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty knowledgable when it comes to computer, and I know that's a VERY bad thing. I knew I needed a new comp for a while now, ever since I had a store put in a new motherboard and had constant locking up problems after that, but now things are getting worse and i need to do something about it now. So I'm shopping around, hoping to find a good deal really soon, since I missed out on that last deal I found. Once I find exactly what I need (and can afford) there may be a short absence while I get things up and running again on a machine I won't kick out the door first chance I get.

Most people expect April Fools comics on April Fools Day, but guess what? APRIL FOOLS! You get a regular comic instead! Haha! How's that for a joke?