Hello World! Hello hello! Thank your gods it’s another day above ground!

Unless you’re a troglophile. In which case, go deeper!

These Days …

More overtime at USPS.

A couple of veteran carriers retired last week and we’re trying to cover. One of those carriers was an overtime king, regularly casing and carrying multiple routes in addition to his own. He’d put in 35 years and had over 3000 hours of accumulated sick days.

Today will be the last day for three of our sorting clerks. They’ve made “career” and are being sent to the plant. So tomorrow we’ll be running behind getting parcels and magazines and mail distributed. Management asked for volunteers from the carriers to come in early to help out and I was tempted to volunteer. I keep thinking that I’m not really that injured. That my knee is more functional than it is. It can do all things the other knee can. For a while. A few hours of standing and walking and it reminds me that it is, in fact, weaker than the other knee.

I do my best to help out. I volunteer to carry off other routes. Before the injury I always volunteered for walking routes. I like walking. Now I have to restrict myself to carrying off mounted routes – the ones where you drive along filling mailboxes from the window of your truck. Even then I’m trying to keep my work hours as close to eight as possible. I’m not going to put in 35 years but I’d like to make it to a designated retirement age.

Mugshots

This week’s process GIF features a lovely lady. If you like blizzards and ice.

This design is available –
On a mug in my Zazzle store
On schtuff in my Redbubble store

Tintin in the Land of Disillusion and Aching Bones

I discovered Tintin when I was a kid. I don’t remember how old I was. I’m sure I’d been reading American comics (especially Spider-Man) for awhile. My family was visiting a friend of my mother’s and the woman had copies of The Shooting Star and (I think) both parts of Tintin’s adventure to the Moon.

I  recently found a site that has a treasure trove of Tintin covers – the originals, parodies, homages and take offs. The site is running a cover contest. A few years ago I did a watercolor painting of a middle-aged and weary Tintin. I combined that painting with some stolen Tintin cover dress to produce the image below.

After I submitted, I got this response from Swapmeet Dave –
“I put together the Tintin pages some time ago and got a good response then, but in each of the years since, I get just one or two submissions or comments. But then, just last week, I got 3 new pastiches and now yours! I’ll get them on the site the next time I update it. As a deaf 83-year-old geezer, I just don’t have the energy that I used to.”

That was back in August. Dave hasn’t added my submission yet but I don’t mind. I only hope I’ve got it together enough to think about running a website when I’m 83.

Mighty Nizz

The first page of the first Mighty Nizz story is live!

I installed the Toocheke webcomics plug-in at the Mighty Nizz site. Once I figured out that it didn’t want to play with the WordPress theme that was already there I installed the Toocheke theme. Now it looks very different from this site. I’d like having a standard appearance across my mob of sites but I’ll take functionality over conformity. Some of that functionality (the navigation buttons for instance) won’t be apparent until multiple pages of the story have been posted. I’m still playing around with the layout and organization. If you have any problems or suggestions, don’t hesitate to let me know.

Below is a scan of the physical art of the first page.

The final colored page is here.

May your Friday be a good one and your Saturday be even better!

See you in seven!