Comic goes like this:

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2

3

4

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18&19

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21

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24

Took almost exactly 21 hours to do. Some cut & paste, done largely because my hand was cramping badly enough I couldn’t draw anymore.

Working on the 24 hour comic. (http://web.helava.com/images/page1.jpg for the first page. Subsequent pages have increasing page numbers. Until I link ’em all nicely, just go through ’em that way.) and am about 14 hours in. Got 16 pages, which means I’m ahead of schedule, but radically slowing down due to tiredness.

oog.

Thanks to the efforts of a whole fistful of great friends, the ceiling in the downstairs bedroom (and one panel of one wall) got put up yesterday, as well as one side of one of the major support beams in the basement. Unfortunately, I picked a crazy-hot day to do the work, and ran out of power for the power tools (most of which were cordless), so we ended up not being able to really maximize the manpower. Still, if I’d had to do it by myself, or with just the GF, it’d have taken an ungodly long time to do. So, it’s great that it’s coming along as quickly as it is. Unfortunately, my best guess would be that we’d need at least three more of these full-bore days to actually get done with the place. That’s a lotta drywalling. Don’t know how keen the folks who helped out would be to do it again…

Still, nice that it’s coming along. Busy the next couple weeks. Got the 24-hour comic next week, then a wedding, then a trip to Montreal. So it’ll be almost a month before I can really crank anymore on the downstairs. Gotta start putting up drywall on my own during the week, I guess. Ah, well.

Still waiting for parts for the Mini. Man. Lots of things to do. So little time.

seppo

Had a blast in Vegas – it was great to see everyone, and the friend who coordinated the whole works did a stellar job. Absolutely stellar. Got the parts for the Mini yesterday, and installed the gas cap, rocker cover, and new air filter, all of which took about 15 minutes. Getting the carb needle in, and figuring out where to attach the bonnet straps will probably take a substantially longer time, and reattaching the exhaust pipe, which has lost a collar needed to keep the pipes together, will be a challenge, given how difficult it is to get that deep into the engine. Whee. Fun stuff, though. At least nothing’s *broken*.

Weekend should be entertaining. Housemate’s birthday this weekend, then Sunday, we drywall. Whee. Gotta run the cable wires again, and punch a hole in the floor to run a bundle of cat-5 through to the upstairs, but all in all, it’s pretty nearly ready to go, which is strange. Looking forward to it, though.

Good grief. Hectic next few weeks. Basically, got a bachelor party in Vegas this weekend, then next weekend, a drywallothon for the downstairs, then a wedding (I think that’s the weekend), then a camping trip, and whatever the hell else we end up doing.

There’s something wrong with the exhaust system on the Mini. How do I know? The front end of the exhaust pipe is dragging on the ground – not usually a good sign. Not sure what came loose, but something sure did. So, up onto the ramps it’ll go maybe Wednesday of next week, so I can see what the heck has come loose. Also got to get a new part machined for that broken shift linkage, but fortunately, Boss Tool, out in Tracy, CA does excellent work, and they’ve been great for stuff I’ve needed for work, and hopefully, they’ll be able to whip me up a nice stainless part to replace the cast aluminum piece that broke. Depends how big the sucker is, I suppose – but I’ll check that out Wednesday, too. Whew.

Oh – also have a 24 hour comic event coming up, where a bunch of folks and I are gonna blast out a comic in 24 hours. Got an idea for what I want to do, but actively working to not think about it, lest I ruin the premise of the whole 24 hour comic zeitgeist, or however you’d put it.

Yeah.

Went to a Mini “rally” last weekend, and was floored by the number of the Mini’s, and the fantastic old Minis that were there. Stunning stuff, and inspirational, in terms of me getting my little car fixed up nicely. Got some parts on order (soon) from England, and still searching for a reasonable deal on tires. We’ll see how that goes, I suppose.

We had a small scare when the brakes overheated, and we had to essentially go through a T-intersection blind at full speed in the wrong lane to avoid crashing. We survived. It was … scary.

Flew the kites I’ picked up a couple of weeks ago, and they’re crazy fun. The “SuperChute” is a small NASAWing, and pretty darned hard to launch – it’s really jittery – but once it’s up in the air, it’s fun to rocket around. The “ParaStunter” is a quad line, and really entertaining – you can do a lot of stuff with it. I see why it might be nicer to have a framed quad-line, since the PS can collapse in weird winds – it also doesn’t have crazy pull like I’d sorta hoped it might, but for its size, I guess that can be expected. We haven’t flown in really serious winds regardless, so whatever.

The house is pretty crowded. Was going to have a drywall-o-thon this weekend, but there are still details that need to be finished by the contractors, and the new housemate has a ridiculous amount of stuff downstairs – so that’ll need to get sorted out first. Pushed back two weeks. Will hopefully be able to slam out at least one of the rooms, complete, in a single day. We’ll see.

Right. That’s what I’ve been up to.

New Roommate Acquired. BBQ to follow, no doubt.

So, this week, I was supposed to do more drywall, but it was sort of stalled by the rather sudden appearance of a new roommate. To make some room for this hoser, we had to switch rooms a lot. The computers are now in the dining room, we are now in the computer room, and the new roomie’s in our old bedroom. Which means, unfortunately, that now the house is packed. Basically, what we need to do is finish the downstairs, then either the GF & I will move down there, or we’ll rent it out, and live like kings! Kings in a very cramped upstairs. Still, not too bad, all things considered, and it’s likely that the roomies’ situations are largely temporary, so it’s not likely to be crowded for tremendously long, though I wouldn’t particularly mind either way.

Got a pair of kites, after going to the kite festival last week. I ended up with a frameless quad-line stunt kite, the ParaStunter 1.4, and I got the GF a “SuperChute,” which turns out to be a small NASA Wing (dual line), which is kinda cool. Curious to see what sort of pull the PS has in reasonable wind. I’d hoped to get out and fly it during the week, but it looks like that’ll have to wait either ’till tomorrow night, or the weekend.

Replaced the spark plugs & wires on the Mini last weekend, and I’ve gotta change the engine & dashpot oil soon – maybe this weekend (though I sorta doubt it). The scooter also needs new oil soon. Man, though, the Mini’s engine compartment is *cramped*. I’m gonna have the A/C unit professionally removed – I’ve already got a taker, provided it doesn’t cost a ridiculous amount to have the unit removed, so that should be worthwhile – I just don’t need it out here, and I’d rather have the engine open, to be perfectly honest. Oh, gotta measure the carb opening for a new air filter (straight from England, no less (www.planetmini.com) this weekend.

In terms of the whole exercise thing, it’s really about time I made some sort of logical plan. It’ll probably go something like Monday: 20 minutes on the elliptical, Tuesday: Swimming in the morning, Wednesday: 30 minutes DDR Workout Mode, Thursday: Swimming in the morning, Friday: 20 minutes on the elliptical, Saturday: Swimming or misc. I want to get some sort of weight center/resistance dealie, like a Crossbow/Bowflex, but frankly, we don’t have the space for it. Now that we’ve got another renter, I’ve actually got enough $$ to potentially spare for it, but there’s nowhere to put it. 😛

Ah, well. we’ll see – once we figure out where to put the new roomie’s computer, maybe we’ll know where to slap this sucker, too.

Pirates of the Carribean is the best movie this summer, bar none. I loved the Matrix, and I liked the Hulk, and there were any number of other decent movies out this summer. The Matrix, when paired with Reloaded, may be a more interesting movie, but PotC will have been way more entertaining. Johnny Depp deserves an Oscar for his performance as Jack Sparrow. No one else would have pulled it off the way he did, and he takes the movie from a really entertaining summer blockbuster to something great. Even at over 2 1/2 hours, the movie never felt long at all, and every minute of it is worth seeing.

Spent Wednesday drywalling the downstairs, and after a few mishaps, managed to figure out how to properly use the hole cutter. Whee! Things just come together slowly. What can you do? Also starting to try to actively get more exercise during the week, rather than just swimming on every or every other weekend. Tuesday mornings, I go for a swim with my old housemate, and recently, been doing pushups, and using our elliptical machine. I can get only about 10 minutes on the elliptical before my knee starts feeling funny, but that’s 5 minutes better than a month ago, so I suppose it’s an improvement. Knee also feels a lot better when swimming these days.

Debating getting some sort of home gym. With new tires for the Mini necessary soon, and a part on the Mini needing to be replaces (the shift linkage that broke a while back), spending a couple hundred might not be the smartest thing to do. But we’ll see, I suppose. There’s a lot of exercise I can do without weights, so I should be doing that, first. Which, I suppose, I am.

…and it looks like the onboard video card is butt, so there’ll be another card in the works. Looks like a PCI ATI Radeon 9200, if anything, which sorta sucks, but isn’t too bad – the question is 128mb memory, or 64? I’m leaning towards 128, since the cost difference isn’t too much ($20). Still, sucks. Total cost ends up being on the order of $350 + $40 (512 additional mb RAM) + $100 = $490. More or less what I’d figured on, but bleah.

Well, c’est la vie. Plus Mini tires = ~$1K this month on random relatively unexpected expenses. At least the drywall’s all paid up. 🙂

Ergh. Just spent $350 on a new computer – had to get something, because my old machine, though it tried to serve me faithfully, was constantly plagued by hardware problems, crashes, etc., that no amount of technical troubleshooting ever was able to fix. A constant crash problem with the only two PC games I’m even remotely interested in using in any way, shape or form (primarily Neverwinter Nights), made me finally give up on trying to fix this, since I spent most of yesterday rebooting over and over and over again, than doing the productive stuff I’d hoped to do.

So, out $350. Now I’ve gotta get tires for the Mini. Whee.

Otherwise, things are pretty good. Gonna start drywalling in earnest downstairs this week, since the electrical systems passed inspections with no problems at all. Also read The Da Vinci Code, and Angels & Demons, both Robert Langdon books, by Dan Brown, and the new Harry Potter book, all three of which were excellent.

Right. So, hopefully, we’ll be crash-free, shortly. Hopefully.