The first drawn comic will be posted on 1/5/2009.

If you need to read something, you can read the photo archives or Two Girls and a Cat. I am soooo excited.

UPDATED: Fixed Two Girls and a Cat link.

This is a tale that can only happen in Seattle. Probably.

In the week leading up to Christmas, snow fell on the city. Every other day, a few new inches blanketed the city in a bright white coat.

We called it the Snowpocolypse. Or the Snowmagedon. Your choice. We had accumulated anywhere between 4″ and 12″ of snow. The city and its suburbs where brought to a stand still.

For those of you who live in parts of the country that never–or rarely see–snow, you can imagine what the situation may have been like. For those of you who live in parts of the country that regularly see snow you may be inclined to think that we Seattleites are “wimps,” keep in mind that we live in “hills.” When I say hills, I mean foothills to mountains. And when I say foothills, I’m talking hills that are bigger than mounds in other parts of the country that are called “mountains.” I won’t go into my Phoenix story here.

Getting back to the hills and their vertical rises, it means any amount of snow creates treacherous situations. One friend’s hill was shut down by a stuck FedEx truck. One friend’s hill was shut down by a stuck police car. The bus system only ran on routes that were flat. That is to say, very few busses ran.

Between the 18th and the 26th, I got to work only twice. I missed all of the holiday parties and family gatherings. I got so stir crazy, I attempted to shovel out our drive with an entrenching tool. 1 1/2 hours of back-breaking labor produced a clear spot 6 feet wide and 4 1/2 feet long. It wasn’t enough to facilitate escape that day. One day when we chose to sally forth, the trip nearly ended in divorce.

Don’t weep for me Argentina. Since traveling anywhere presented issues, we stayed at home and gamed. And worked on comics. And websites.

The rain came on the 28th and washed away the white stain from our city.

Since then, the world has edged back toward status quo. Rockin’ new years party, a post Christmas/Let me dumb Christmas left-overs on you/Gift exchange thing with the parents and my sister’s family, and counting the number of UPS trucks scurrying about trying to catch up all provide entertainment.

We had not forgotten the White Terror. We tried not to think about it, but our eyes could not but drift heavenward searching for the signs of its return. On the fourth, I headed out to a birthday party. As I headed into the city, the small white harbingers of doom started to drift down. By the time I got to the restaurant, a half inch had accumulated.

I stayed for a while, but then my fear of the Frozen Horror, drove me to get on the roads and return.

The four letter, non-explative s-word now creates panic in the eyes of Seattleites. We now talk about preparing for the next coming. In becoming prepared for that most horrible eventuality, we have now been gifted with marvelous technology. My parents gave me a snow shovel for Christmas.

I’m not super adventuresome when it comes to food, but I’ll try most foods once. Unless they contain mushrooms (allergic) or peanuts (hate with the passion of a thousand suns).

As mentioned in a previous post, I went to a birthday party. A friend held her birthday gathering at Quinn’s Pub. Take a moment and look at the menu.

I fell in love with the idea of the Wild Boar Sloppy Joe. I didn’t care how it tasted, I knew that’s what I was going to order then I got there. Upon arriving I nearly left due to the aforementioned snow. However, I decided to tough it out. I was glad I did.

We settled into our table and ordered appetizers–Pate and Escargot. The pate was good. Quite good. Very good. I’d never had escargot before, so I wanted to try it.

The thought of eating snails turns many people’s stomachs. However, there are some people who really, really like snails. I wanted to know. I had to know.

I popped one in my mouth.

The clouds parted, the angels started to sing, and the most beautiful flavor filled my mouth. It was butter, garlic and bacon in a perfectly balanced three-part harmony that lifted my very being toward eternal bliss.

Then I started to chew.

The clouds turned stormy, the singing turned to screaming, and I realized that I had something that was part semi-solidified rubber and part gelatinized mucus in my mouth. I quickly grabbed my water and washed it down. Fortunately, since it was still largely whole, went down easily.

I am torn about the experience. Escargot, at least as prepared by Quinn’s, has the most amazingly flavor (in the good sense) and surpasses anything else I have ever eaten. Yet, it is also the most disgusting thing I’ve had in my mouth. Ever.

I guess, in the end, I have to recommend the Wild Boar Sloppy Joe. It was very good, and didn’t remind me of slime.

We cursed and yowled at the snow demons. We cried to the rain spirits for their intercession. They answered in abundance. Roads that were once closed due to snow are now closed due to flooding. Escape from the city to the East and South is not possible.

In case you are curious, here is a spreadsheet/calendar that shows where I am in my buffer: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p3jlgg0dMC8HN8CHLqPpAWw&output=html&gid=0&single=true

Helps keep me honest the more people that see it.

Yeah. I am.

I should preface this by saying–perhaps obviously–that I am a huge nerd. My parents are not nerds. My partner is also a nerd. When it comes to Christmas gifts (or Birthday gifts), they have no idea what she and I would like.

Except that they know we like food.

We got close to 10 pounds of meat for Christmas. In the package there was pork garlic sausage, smoked pork chops, rib eye, and some tender loin from Owens Meats in Cle Elum, Washington (they don’t have a website). We ate the pork chops last night. They were pretty good. I cooked them a little too long, but thus is life. The pork drippings went into the mashed potatoes.

What I really want to talk abut is the pork garlic sausage. Properly it is Grampa’s Garlic (if you ever happen to get to Owens’ and see it in their case).

On one of many camping trips as a child, we were headed through Cle Elum going to . . . someplace. Probably the Teanaway River, but I don’t remember. For reasons also unremembered, we stopped at this somewhat dingy looking place. Dingy on the outside. However, the entire town of Cle Elum looked dingy, so that wasn’t necessarily a strike against it.

My parents picked up a few things, including some of this sausage for breakfast the next morning. We cooked it up, and I remember Mom remarking on how little fat was coming out of the sausage. The smell that filled our small travel trailer was unlike any other breakfast smell we’d had.

There is a smell and taste that the typical American breakfast sausage has. It’s a bit peppery. It smells fatty. It is even a bit smoky. These aren’t bad things. I’m just trying to build a vocabulary. Jimmy Dean sausage is the archetype of those qualities.

Grampa’s didn’t follow that arc. In fact, the smell was so clean, that we were afraid it wouldn’t have much flavor.

We were wrong. The archetype can be over-powering. This was not. It was pork and garlic in harmony, and the garlic was the supporting note. Since we didn’t go through Cle Elum very often, we’d only get the sausage a couple times a year. It became a special treat.

I’ve loved it for many years. I’ve even tried grinding my own sausage to capture that essence. I was very excited to see two pounds of this sausage in the Christmas gift. I couldn’t wait to cook some up, so my partner could try it.

“Too garlicky,” she said. My heart broke. My soul wept.

Then I remembered that she has the palate of a pallet. So I just sat and watched her cover the sausage in ketchup.

My partner once told me this joke: What’s the difference between a fairy tale and a war story? A fairy tale begins with “Once upon a time” and a war story begins with “No sh*t. There I was.”

She and I are gamers. I’ve mentioned that before haven’t I? If I haven’t, then there it is. We’re gamers. “Date night” is us going home, cooking pizza, and then heading out to our Friendly Local Game Store and playing a game. Right now, we are on a Memoir ‘44 jag. We sit down and lock wits over the fields of battle.

She’s been kicking my ass.

Sometimes its luck. Between the dice and the cards, I can’t catch a break. Sometimes it’s superior tactics. From time to time, she’ll pull a maneuver that I didn’t see. Really, I think that she’s cursed me in this game. In no other game, can she continually give me such a drubbing. That’s not true. She turns me into a thick paste in Trivial Pursuit. She is a walking encyclopedia of trivia, so I don’t feel bad about losing.

As far as Memoir ‘44 goes, I’m a veteran of a thousand war games. I was playing Panzer Blitz in in my pre-teen years. I had a small collection of SPI and Avalon Hill classics. I was a war gamer before she even started playing D&D. I held my own in tournaments with people more than twice my age. I can’t win. Just can’t.

We took a break and played Monsterpocalypse–beat her. Went back to Memoir ‘44–lost.

We know the rules. We can crank out a game in an hour. In some ways, the best part of gaming out of the house is that we get to sell the game. People see us and ask questions. For what ever reason, seeing two women playing a wargame is interesting to other people. We also take time to explain that this game is historically based.

I know my history. YET I STILL LOSE.

Not that I’m bitter.

It’s time to switch up my tactics. Maybe I need to spike her pizza before we play.

Gah. I missed yesterday’s blog post. I’ve got a calendar that’s helping me keep up with my buffer of comics, but I don’t have something for my blog.

My comic is a long arc. The humor isn’t topical. I can work ahead as much as I like. However, I feel that my blog post should encompass my current feelings, thoughts, and thoughtful feelings. Also: what I’ve eaten recently.

I attend a book group that discusses classics. January’s book we read John Wesley Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. This book is part anthropological survey, part geological exploration, and part adventure yarn. Powell and his expedition where the first people to navigate the entire course of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

Yes, there have been people in the area for hundreds of years prior to Powell. Yes, they had explored the canyon pretty well. So how can we be sure they didn’t do it first? Well, the locals weren’t stupid enough to try. They could see that it would be a foolhardy venture.

Powell knew enough to see that there was a blank spot on the map and that, by God, blank spots on maps are not to be tolerated. I’m not trying to denigrate Powell’s bravery. He lost an arm in the Civil War. He was a fit man, as he frequently climbed rocks to gather samples. He knew how to mount a field expedition. He knew nothing abouts boats, boating, and rivers. Or botany.

Between the rapids and eating random things in the desert, he was down three men by the end of the expedition. The amazing thing is that those three men walk away from the expedition of the own free will. The expedition didn’t kill them. (Although they were killed by either some Indians or some Mormons, but that is a tale in and of itself.)

We had a rousing conversation about the beauty of the canyon, and the idiocy of the Powell expedition. There seems to be a certain class of human (males of European decent) that seem to think running off into the middle of nowhere and nearly getting themselves killed.

I also drank a Starbucks salted caramel signature hot chocolate.

We’ve been on a game buying moratorium since November. We set up a strict rule against buying new games–both video and tabletop–until March. In the rule there was a specific exception for specific titles (Fables II, Left 4 Dead). The rule also has a neat loophole in that we can buy a supplement or expansion or booster for a game we already own. This rule has slowed the amount of money we spend on games.

We should set up a more robust version of the rule. Something along the lines of “can only spend X dollars on games a month.” That should slow us down even more.

No, actually it wouldn’t. We are weak people when it comes to games. We would break the spending limit rule just like we broke the “no new games rule.”

Yes. We broke it this last weekend. We purchased War of the Ring by Fantasy Flight. This is the most complicated game I’ve purchased in a long time. It has the ability to simulate a bunch of things out of the books and then not follow the books.

She played as the Free Peoples on Friday night. It wasn’t a full game, as we had to set up, read the rules, and Ernie’s closes at 11 PM. In those few turns, the war was not going well for the Free Peoples. Rohan had been completely rolled up, and the Ring Bearer couldn’t step foot out of Rivendel. I tried to smooth her ruffled feathers with some soothing words about getting lucky rolls.

I played the Free People on Saturday. We didn’t complete that game either. I lost Gondor on turn five or six. Although I did get the ring bearer a bit further. I started doing the math, and it would have been nearly impossible for me to win the game. She would have had to both roll badly and draw low value chits. I got testy. I hate unbalanced games. Her response was, “See! I told you it’s broken.”

We were beginning to regret the purchase. It seemed as though the Free Peoples could not win. A public argument was a-brewin’. As I sometimes do in those situations, I headed for the bathroom.

While I was “away”, a kibitzer kindly pointed out that we were missing something. The Free Peoples don’t have to spend points to move to war. They will go to war simply by getting attacked.

Great. Wonderful. We invested hours into a game we didn’t understand. Having said all that, go buy it. It’s a Lord of the Rings nerd’s dream come true in a war game. Especially if you draw the Ent’s event card. Squeeee!

I swear my brain hates me. Before I get to that story, let me talk about my cat.

Our cat is a hunter. From a deep sleep, she can be roused to sproingy action just by dragging something in her vicinity. Her pupils go from thin vertical slits to round, black pools of action. There are also times when we haven’t been “entertaining” with her feathers on a string, she gets really, really, big round eyes for no reason. Generally, this means she is about to go crazy.

I went to the eye doctor today, and my eyes were dilated as part of the examination. The color in my eyes was absorbed by the black singularity of my pupils. I even tried to take a picture of my eye. I felt so crazy. I felt like my cat.

I worked in one office for 17 years, and it’s about thirteen miles from my home. My company out-grew our facilities and moved they department I work to a facility about three miles from home back in June. Everyday, I’ve been going to the new facility.

Except today.

The day, I needed to get into the office as early as possible, my brain sabotaged me. It drove me all the way to the old office. By the time, I drove back to the new office, I was merely on time.

Then I got to be a cat.

Good going brain. Good going.