In the course of our bank’s investigation of the money stolen from my account they discovered that Nizzibet and JayDogg’s business account got ripped for a couple of thousand dollars at the same time mine got hit. I don’t know how the villains did it. I don’t have access to that account. Our bank is doing a changeover in credit card companies so we suspect that someone stole the new credit cards out of the mail somehow. There are a lot of holes in that theory but it’s the only one we’ve got at the moment.

Via the Blog of Oz I’ve just been reminded that May 15th is L. Frank Baum’s birthday. His 150th birthday. That gives me a goal to shoot for for finishing the first issue of Oz Squad. Thirty pages in a little over five months. Doable.

Did a quick clean-up of my links. Every one over there now either leads to a site or page of my work or the work/writings/whatever of someone I know (and would be happy to hang out with). Eventually I’d like to put together some pages of great webcomics or smart political sites or cultural commentary by entertaining writers. But the goal for the next few months is to simplify. This is as good a place to start as any.

Nine hundred seventy-four dollar, fifty-four cents. That’s how much an enterprising thief somewhere in the Philipines managed to such out of my bank account in the last two days. Not somewhere in the Philipines – out of ATMs addressed as Tierra Nueva Muntinlupa and Alfaro, Makati City. Merry Christmas twerp.

That ATM card has been cancelled. I’m grumpy.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. I do make plans for how I want to do things differently at this time of year but that’s more because I’m no longer planning for Christmas than because I’m making some sort of annual transformation. I figure life is a process of constant change, some purposeful, some by forced necessity, most gradual.

So what am I concentrating on? Mostly returning my attention to projects in progress.

There’s organizing and reducing our possessions. As I believe I’ve mentioned before, the next time we move I’d like it be with just the things we need and want rather than with everything we hadn’t decided to get rid of yet. So that’s clothes, books, videos (surprisingly, we only own DVDs that we intend to watch again), art supplies and general stuff. We have a lot of general stuff.

There’s Oz Squad. I haven’t been doing all those monster illustrations JUST for the fun of it. I’ve been sharpening my Photoshop coloring skills. This time last year I’d have thought that a color Oz Squad was a bad idea. I’d have said that coloring took me too long and that my color skills were too poor to make the job look good anyway. Coloring all those monsters has given me the practice I’ve needed to be confident that I can do Oz Squad pages almost as quickly in color as in black and white. And I’ve spent enough time thinking about color that I can balance it on a page so that it looks good.

Jason Levine, formerly of Comicraft, has signed on as letterer for the project. He’s been patiently reminding me of his interest for the last … year. Got to admire that. Jason, got any websites you’d like to me link to?

There’s Finnegan’s Brink, the graphic novel that Nizzibet is writing, I’m illustrating and she’s coloring. We’re digging the pages out of boxes this weekend and getting back to work on those.

There’s walking. I haven’t done enough of that lately. It’s really more a mental health issue than a physical one. I like to walk. Walking both calms and energizes me. I get some of my best thinking done when I’m walking. If I don’t walk around my life mainly consists of sitting around in boxes – the apartment, the car, the office. Nizzibet’s gotten healthy enough again to walk with me so it’s an activity we can add to our date day.

There’s other stuff. Updating my various webpages. Looking for property to own. Seeing a dentist. One thing at a time.

A writer who’s name I’ve forgotten once recommended that you should begin your story as late as possible. The sooner you get to your meaningful action the better.

I think I would have preferred it if Peter Jackson’s King Kong had hit the theatres with a leaner 2 1/2 version and then followed up with the expected four hour extended version on DVD. Once the gang gets to the island the story is pretty lively. Before that … There are characters that I’d have been happy to have learned more about – later. At the theatre spending time with those characters just slows the story down. Ultimately the important human characters are Denham, Darrow and Discoll. Everyone else is just Kong/dinosaur fodder. I loved the movie. I can tell because different scenes keep replaying in my memory. I keep seeing Kong’s scarred face. I’ll be happy to watch that four hour extended version. I think I’d have preferred to wait for the extra material.

Wednesday Nizzibet spent the day with a friend preparing pans of baklava and spanakopita that she and I delivered to friends that night. Usually to friends that we knew were going to be busy (or had kids, or had been sick) and unlikely to have time for cooking.

Last night we got together with Evil Genius (Race Car Version) at his sister L’s in Newcastle. Their father died last week and the memorial was yesterday. So dinner was leftovers of the food from the memorial. Much wine was consumed and there was much signing of Irish folk tunes. Delightful. We’re going back again tonight. There’s still food to be eaten and once Evil Genius and his wife and his kids and his other sister and her husband go home there’s only L and one daughter to eat it. We have to help out.

Christmas Eve we’ll be spending a couple of hours with the friend that partnered with Nizz on the cooking Wednesday. She’s married with four insane children. They’re the best kind of insane kids because they have no fear of strangers. I can pick ’em up and toss ’em around.

Later in the evening we’ll go to JayDogg and TwoM’s for dinner and an exchange of gifts.

And Christmas?

Christmas we’ll go to church for service. It’s only an hour in honor of the holiday. Thank heavens.

Then it’s home. We’ll open whatever presents we’ve given each other (and she’ll probably out do me, she usually does). We’ll toss a fake log on our fire and watch movies on the TV. And nap.

Monday I don’t have to go to work. So more naps. Maybe some house cleaning. We’ll see.

I’ve been addicted to caffeine for a couple of decades now. Every so often I purposely stop drinking caffeinated beverages to give my body a chance to detox. That might last a week. Maybe a couple of months. Sooner or later I get started again.

Usually the process is kind of painful. Aside for the lovely withdrawal headaches I also go through mood swings and experience random unpleasant body aches. I’m sure withdrawing from other, more powerful drugs is much more uncomfortable but that’s outside my experience.

This last week my body seems to have decided it wasn’t going to wait for me to decide on a time for detoxing. I just suddenly stopped enjoying my morning caffeine. I wasn’t that I felt jittery or anxious – that happens occasionally and I’m fine with that. No, my body felt sick. Like I had a flu but without the coughing and sneezing and sore throat. The first couple of days I figured that I did just have a cold. I took aspirin and cold medicine and didn’t think about it.

After those first two days I noticed that I felt worse after drinking caffeine. And I still didn’t have any other flu symptoms. So I’ve drastically reduced my caffeine intake. I got the expected withdrawal headaches but no mood swings and the aches and pains got less the less the caffeine I’d had.

I haven’t completely quit. But now, instead of a couple of cups of coffee in the first half hour of being awake I’ll have a couple of swallows after being awake for three hours. Odd.

Nice to know that my body is still smarter than I am.

I’ve created a Frappr map. Be so kind as to locate yourself. Muchos gracias.