The webmaster at Kaijuphile.com forwarded me a nice complimentary letter this morning. Ted A. Bohus, writer/producer/owner of the The Deadly Spawn saw my fan art. And liked it. Would I tell you that the writer of a movie I liked hated the fan art I did for said movie. Probably.

The monster in Deadly Spawn was designed by Tim Hildebrandt, one of the Brothers Hildebrandt, twin artists who gained their fame doing Lord of the Rings calendars back in the 70s. I’ve always been impressed by the critter. It looks like nothing else in the movies.

Got the specifics that the Editor wants for Worlds of Cthulhu. Looks like my biggest RPG illustration assignment yet. And the deadline is the end of the month. There’s a slightly earlier deadline for the Strange Eggs story. That one’s got a Lovecraftian riff. So I’ve got lots of tentacles and indescribable horrors to draw. Warms my heart.

Friday we’re seeing the new Star Wars. A friend has tickets already otherwise it would probably be a month before we got around to it.

Godzilla is coming to Seattle for the Seattle International Film Festival. Yay! Nizzibet was asking me what I wanted to do for my birthday. Why, watch Godzilla: Final Wars on the big screen of course. If she didn’t actually groan it was because she was practicing self control.

Now I’ve got illustrations to do for Worlds of Cthulhu #3. Still getting details on what and how many. Between that and the Strange Eggs work I’m having to push all my other projects back a bit. Those two have more specific deadlines than anything else I’m doing. As we move in to summer and closer to the time Nizzibet and I move I see myself getting busier and busier.

Saturday I spent sometime helping the Bombshell move some furniture. She found a buyer for her condo and now she’s moving her stuff to storage spaces until she moves in with her sister in Portland. Then Nizzibet and I went to the Soon-To-Be-Canadians for a while, drank wine and listened to the conversations swirling around us.

We finished the night at home watching Merchant of Venice and the first episode of Space 1999. I’ve no love of Shakespeare and this sumptuous production of Merchant didn’t change that. Too serious for some of the silliness that occurs.

Space 1999? Hmm. Between the first episode and the two (A Matter of Life and Death and Black Sun) we saw on Sunday night I’m afraid that the show benefitted from It’s-the-only-science-fiction-on status when I was a kid. I last saw these episodes when I was eleven in 1975. Star Wars was still two years away. The original Star Trek was in reruns. Space 1999 had much better special effects. But … The characters spend a lot of time looking serious and discussing the ramifications of pseudoscientific nonsense. I’m pretty sure I thought their science was crap when I was eleven. On an episode by episode basis anyway. For some reason I was never bothered by the moon’s ability to find a new solar system every week. I thought that traveling among the stars on a rogue moon was a great idea.

I’ll be checking in on Nizzibet shortly to see if she’s ready to go have coffee. I’m nursing one of her Diet Dr. Pepper’s right now to get my caffeine level up to a tolerable level. I don’t really like diet anything but, unless I feel like making coffee right now myself, it’s the most convenient source of caffeine.

Paliki has been in and out. We don’t see her much these days. She meows to come in first thing in the morning when she hears us moving about. She eats and then meows to go back out. That performance gets repeated in the evenings. Sometimes then she’ll spend an hour on the front porch meowing about something. The front door is often open while she does this. Why doesn’t she come in? I’ve asked her this many times and I’ve yet to get an answer that makes sense. During the day she seems to sleep in the tall grass outside our bedroom window.

I would be announcing that I’ve posted an entry for the Glass Cat but Keenspace seems to be down and I can’t update the pages. I’m not even sure that the pages properly uploaded.

In other news, I just agreed to illustrate a short story for the next Strange Eggs anthology. Steve Ahlquist is writing.

The Hammerheads entry should have the image working today. I’ve also added an entry for Cap’n Bill. That one has link for Trot but it doesn’t go anywhere yet. The illustration for the Trot entry needs to be inked, shaded and photoshopped.

No drive to do anything last night. Got home. Made Nizzibet the avocado and turkey sandwich that I’d promised and heated up leftovers for myself. We traded news about our days and then, because I wasn’t in to doing anything productive and she didn’t have the energy, we watched The Magnificent Seven. Yul Brunner’s character is a Cajun. Apparently that’s a handy excuse when actor’s have odd accents and their character is still supposed to be “American”. A little silly given how many immigrants were running around the Wild West at the time. Silly also considering how many of those Mexican peasants in the movie didn’t have Mexican accents. Fun movie.

I’ve updated the Oz Squad Who’s Who page to include bios of the Sawhorse, the Gump and a couple of Hammerheads.

I’d say Happy Birthday to Gregg Victor too but I couldn’t find an image to link to.

Still sick but now it’s the sort of sick I can effectively ignore until it goes away.

Saturday –
Nizzibet and I went for coffee. It’s a Saturday morning ritual. We either go out to breakfast or go to coffee. It all depends on our finances and what else we’ve got going.

Nizz had a business meeting. While she was gone I moved the weight bench and weight set upstairs. I could have disassembled the thing but I wanted to see if I could get the bench upstairs without doing that as a challenge to my ingenuity and a generally machoness. It’s now sitting in JayDogg’s old room.

Did some scanning. Did some inking. Nizz got back and we went to JayDogg and TwoM’s. LittleM had a play date next door so we didn’t see here for a while. When she got back she wasn’t interested in hanging out with the adults. She’d had kids to hang with and we definitely rated second best. After awhile she got bored and decided we were okay. While Nizz and TwoM watched Elf I spent some time throwing and spinning Little M all over her room. She’s fairly light. The biggest thing to pay attention to is how long she is. I had avoid thumping her into things. When I finally wore out we settled down to a game of Dinosaur Checkers.

All was interrupted by dinner. Lasagne. Yum.

I’d probably feel worse but, instead of getting upset about it and therefore cranky, I’ve pretty much rolled with it. That means not trying to do things that I’m going to screw up or get too frustrated about. It also means I’m not getting as much done as I’d like. That is annoying. I never include a “getting sick” contingency in my plans.