I have four more pages of comic book left to ink--and then once I'm done that, about eight to scan, lay out, and letter. It might just be possible to finish by the Expo, maaaybe. What a load off that would be.

Speaking of the Expo, they've updated the guest list again. Finally, finally my life's dream can be realized: I can know if Iain's claim to have dated Tricia Helfer when he lived in Fort McMurray is even remotely based in fact.

Last week most of my tux arrived. We'd determined that the coat I want is only available for rental at the actual, physical stores we visited--and it costs $550 to do so at Black & Lee. Pft--for that much money I want to own it, and, tragically, wear it to LARP games. So I ordered it from uniformalwearhouse.com and for $370 got the penguin suit and a top hat and shoes and disappointing spats. Unfortunately, though the paperwork agrees that I bought a 2XL hat, the hat itself is only a large, and therefore insufficient to cover my buffalo head. I called them to have them ship out a replacement, which is something I have plenty of experience at, at work. There's still plenty of time. Since I'm returning things anyway I'm exchanging the spats, which were apparently only appealing in theory, for a bow tie.

The Batman cufflinks Lisa bought me for Valentine's Day fit perfectly.

What there isn't plenty of time for is my ring, which also came the wrong size. All of my other rings (I wear three) are size 11, so I felt confident in telling Lisa that she should order this one in an 11 as well. Turns out these rings are "comfort fit," a term which here means "will likely fly right the hell off if you whip your hand around." I'm not sure what's comfortable about that.

On Saturday Dad and I visited my grandparents, where I did, as planned, demonstrate the unsafety of the stairs in their house by flinging myself up and down them. I also demonstrated the unsafety of household appliances by displaying the branding I had given myself last weekend, with the toaster oven. As Lisa predicted, that was simply taken to prove that I am a spaz, not that they might hurt themselves. But then we caught Grandma climbing onto 60-year-old half-broken wooden furniture to reach her wall safe, and oh, did that give me ammunition. Ammunition for hours.

And now it is bedtime, so I must chart exactly how much water my crotchety, diabetic cat has converted into pee today, and then go to bed.

There, I think I'm done now. I tried to make it brighter and airier than usual. Still a person dressed almost entirely in black, of course.



I'm very much enjoying Christmas break which I am now officially halfway through. I intended at the outset to get a lot of work done on Diaperman 13, to get it done by the Expo. I have inked two and a half pages of it so far, which isn't no progress, but I haven't made a lot of progress. I'm hoping to accomplish more next week.

Had a great Christmas: I got a suitcase from my sister, Tick Vs. Season Two and a future Batsignal from my parents, and $50 from my grandparents. Which I haven't done anything with. (Actually, come to think of it, my boss gave me $100 and I haven't done anything with that either.) Kyle gave me a gargoyle and Jason gave me a collectable card game he transparently hopes to be invited to. And Lisa gave me Doctor Who Season 3, a clockful of Batman for the bathroom, and some minty chocolates which are not for the bathroom.



And of course we bought each other a TV and HDPVR. As things have turned out, the TV is more for me and the PVR is more for her, as she loves being able to pick and choose things to record a week in advance, and she loves no longer having to remember when Ugly Betty is on.

Right now she's not watching it, though. Right now she's glued to the Pokemon Diamond game I bought her, which seems to have been popular.

And the season of giving continues: the BBC gave me a new Doctor Who Christmas Special (click the link to watch online, provided you live in the UK; if you don't, adjust your proxy settings accordingly). My orthodontist will be giving me lower braces next week. And, just now, I have given you all an image of a heavyset man in his jim-jams in flagrante delicto with a cardboard box.

No need to thank me.

I've really been neglecting Livejournal in favour of Facebook lately. Which is too bad: the greater speed of Facebook posting is both its advantage and its detriment.

After spending last weekend in Vancouver, I was hoping for a quiet weekend. Except the van's brakes needed fixing, so I got up early on Saturday to go get that accomplished. Then I caddied for Lisa as she photographed a wedding for friends of Scott and Sara.

Today we checked out an open house in our condo complex: a bunch of the condos are up for sale, but this one was a twin of ours, so we wanted to see what they'd done to it. It was like being in an alternate-universe version of our house, except with more tile. I liked how they'd put the TV at the far end of the living room, but there's no cable outlet there. And where would our dining room table go?

Then we went hiking up around the cliff overlooking our house. Well, we drove up there and then hiked around it. I finally got to use the 80-200 zoom lens I got for my film camera last year; they're cheaper now that film's apparently obsolete.




I've been keeping up with the thirteenth issue of Diaperman -- gotta get printed before Expo -- and this week I've been working on a print of Catwoman fighting Black Cat since I want some stuff that will be popular with the foot traffic. Can not get Black Cat's face right, though.

Quite a long time ago, I mentioned an interest in getting Invisalign braces to my parents. When I was a kid an orthodontist had told them that my teeth--and my sister's--would align themselves as we got older, which they didn't. I didn't mean it as a criticism, it was simply something that was.

Shortly thereafter, my parents let us know that they would pay for Mandi and I to get our teeth straightened. Which was darn nice of them, I thought.

Mandi moved ahead on hers quite quickly. Last time we spoke, her Invisaligns had almost finished their work on her lower teeth, and created a space in her upper teeth. It's made a noticeable improvement already!

I didn't start the process nearly so quickly: what with house-buying and moving and whatnot, and also my propensity to drag my feet where talking to new people is involved, I didn't get things underway until after January.

Under the assumption that I'd have to get my wisdom teeth removed before doing any renovations in there, I made an appointment with Dr. Kroetsch, the oral surgeon my dentist had referred me to. Coincidentally, it's the same guy who did Lisa's teeth recently, which was nice because she'd liked him.

He said that three of my teeth had crowned, but my lower right tooth was completely sideways and impacted. It was up to me whether or not I wanted to be put down. (Out, I mean.) Lisa had gone with only the local, and said it was cheaper and not at all difficult. On the other hand, Chris, my dentist, recommended the general anaesthetic, because people are not meant to hold their jaws open as much as would be necessary, particularly not while other people are using saws on their faces.

I decided to go with the general, for reasons of chickenshittery. And so I made an appointment for May 3--today.

Once that was settled, I made an appointment with an orthodontist, Dr. Rix, who my dentist had also referred to me. I wanted to confirm that Invisaligns were an option in my case.

They're not. Dr. Rix took photos of each side of my head

and presented the results to me. My upper teeth are on a slant, which Invisalign cannot fix. It can make them straighter and slanted, but that's it.

So, it's normal braces for me. That's more or less fine. What was more less than more was that I might have to have a tooth removed--my lower jaw isn't on straight, meaning that I have too many teeth on my right side. That's probably what's caused the loud click that happens when I open my jaw all the way, which reminds people of a snake unhinging its jaw and is lots of fun at parties. Thus, that tooth will probably have to go, and then an "implant," which in non-orthopedic terms is a threaded metal spike, would be driven into my gum to keep my molars from shifting forward into the space. O joy.

Lisa recommended that I get a second opinion, so I went to get a consultation from a different orthodontist, Dr. Hoffman, who we found on the web. Their offices use Damon braces, which claim to take less time and require fewer extractions than normal braces. So I gave it a try.

His opinion was different, all right: removing that tooth won't straighten my jaw, as I had thought. Actually, removing that tooth would simply align my teeth to my misaligned jaw. I didn't like the sound of that.

The alternative to tooth-pulling, however, is jaw surgery: they'd saw through my lower jaw and reset it into its proper spot. Then my teeth would be aligned to where my jaw should be. No extraction necessary--only sawing my jaw off and screwing it back into place.

At this point, I felt like giving up on the whole damned thing. All I'd wanted was nice straight teeth by way of nice invisible braces, and now I'd have to get my face sawed off. I was disappointed!

Lisa said she'd support me in whichever I picked. My parents, a little spooked by either the quitting-altogether or the dangerous-surgery options, wanted to meet up to discuss things. Which we did, but by the time we saw them I'd decided to go ahead with the braces but not the face-sawing.

On Monday I had my second appointment with Dr. Rix, where they x-rayed my head a lot more (I'm too tall for the x-ray machine and had to sit on a chair) and filled my mouth with rubbery goo so that they can make a mold of my teeth.

And then, today I had my wisdom teeth taken out. I was nervous, since I've never been anaesthetized or had anything removed before. And the cold Kyle had managed to pass along to me at the Expo complicated things. I wasn't especially happy when they chose to insert the IV into my wrist, either. They stuck heart-monitor pads on me, and an oxygen-sensor to my right forefinger. I assumed they'd gas me, but actually they administered the sedative through the IV.

Dr. Kroetsch put a round rubber thing into the left side of my mouth and asked me to bite down. I remember the beep-beep of the heart monitor changing rhythm and merging with the whine of a saw, and I watched an X or H shape made out of an organic pinkness, flexing, with a red background. It was much like watching a Tool video. It went on for about a minute or so and then changed to two bright, vertical rectangles.

Sanity returned in stages. "That was like a video!" I thought. And then: "Oh, those are lights." A nurse-face-blur said something that had the word "Michael" in it. I realized I was in a different room than the one I'd started in. The rubber thing had changed to pillow things on both sides, but exploration of my gums felt pretty much the same as they always do--had they removed all four teeth? I didn't have any way to ask. The nurse-face-blur asked if I had double vision, which I indicated no, but as soon as I looked at things that were not the overhead lights, it was clear that the answer was very much yes. I looked around the recovery room. They wheeled in another patient and said "Hi, Rebecca" to her. Rebecca was still pretty out of it, and her mouth hung open. Was mine closed? I checked with my non-IV hand--yes, it was. I looked to see if the heart-monitor-sticky-pads were still on me and they weren't.

The nurse retrieved my boots from under my gurney and put them at my feet. "Here's the test: can you lace up your boots?" Indeed I could, even with the IV in. The nurse, apparently impressed, removed my IV and the oxygen sensor, which for some reason had been moved to my left forefinger. She invited me to get off the gurney and put on my coat, which proved more of a challenge than my boots had. She led me wobbily to the patients' exit, where Lisa was waiting with the van. They couldn't figure out who should let go of me to open the car door, but I surmounted that obstacle as well, double-vision or no.

I was surprised to note that it was 2 pm. My internal clock said 12:45.

I attempted to navigate home, which Lisa ignored, and I tried to help her with the window defroster, which neither of us was able to master. But now I'm home, on drugs, and minus four teeth, which nobody offered to let me keep.

Next step: third appointment with the orthodontist, where he presents me with my x-rays and the mold of my jaw, and I discover whether I'll be losing a fifth tooth or not.

Actually the next step is to be able to eat pizza again. Lisa bought pizza at Costco when she picked up my prescriptions. That would have been pretty cruel if it hadn't been for the prescription-getting, and the driving rain.

Lisa and I were watching a commercial for Abreva.

"Why are they called cold sores when they're on your face but herpes when it's on your genitalia?"

Because nobody wants to say 'face herpes'?

"But why do they call it genital herpes then? Why don't they use a cutesy name for that? Like... crotch blisters?"

Love bumps!

We rented some stuff this week. Man of the Year is not the movie it purports to be. Sure, the goofy-guy-runs-for-President footage from the trailer is in there, but the rest of the movie is about Jeff Goldblum trying to disappear Laura Linney. It's not a bad movie, but it's nothing like what the trailer says it is, and I hate that.

Idiocracy is exactly the movie it purports to be. I'd really like to get my parents to see it, but unfortunately there's too much swearing and fart jokes.

The animated Hellboy: Sword of Storms is better than the live-action movie.

The animated Superman: Brainiac Attacks contains Brainiac attacking. In fact, that's all it contains: wall-to-wall Brainiac attacking. Naturally Superman beats him into a melted motherboard and three of those little screws that hold your hard drive on, Brainiac gets rebuilt, Brainiac attacks, Superman beats him down, he gets rebuilt, etc. This would be merely tedious, if they hadn't recast the role of Lex Luthor--instead of the gravelly Clancy Brown, he's played by Powers Boothe.

I don't know who Powers Boothe is, but Lex squeals, mugs and giggles like pop culture has explained to me that Japanese teenagers do.



To be fair, the movie was not written or animated by Powers Boothe, so the level that Powers Boothe is responsible is unknown to me. But somebody is god-damned responsible, and I choose to believe that that someone is Duane Capizzi, the writer and executive producer. I don't really liiiiiiike like his The Batman, but I don't hate The Batman. I do hate this.

When I talk to Bruce Timm in April, I'm going to ask him WTF, sir. WTF.

And, speaking of the Calgary Comic Expo, Morena Baccarin and Christina Hendricks are now guests. Heard of Firefly? Then you should go.

Lisa: Lookit: http://www.bbcanada.com/adventurebb

Mike: Oh here we go.

Lisa: I like B&Bs. Also that B&B is cheaper than a hotel, I think.

Mike: Girls and B&Bs, I don't know. Gay men, too, apparently, Outlooks was always full of ads for em.

Lisa: Oh yeah, this one has a pride flag graphic on their site. It appeals to us! Fems, I mean.

Mike: Why?

Lisa: Um, well, it's more personal than a hotel. It's a home-baked meal compared to a pre-fab dinner from a store. And it's on your schedule. You get up, and they give you your breakfast.

Mike: Boys don't like that. We find the idea of staying in some stranger's house and making them launder our pit sweat off their sheets to be somewhat terrifying, like being watched pee. We like hotels because they're impersonal business transactions.

For quite a while now really, Sheba has been pulling tufts of fur out her back and leaving them on the carpet. Her skin looks fine, and she mostly does it when we're not home, so I pretty much assumed it was anxiety, since she's not the sanest of cats to begin with.

But she turned ten years old this year, so it was about time we hied us over to the vet, as she was long overdue for a checkup. This involved Dire Warnings To The Cat for the week prior, which of course she ignored, being as she is foremost a cat, and also does not understand English.

Unlike most cats, Sheba is very well-trained. She is very careful not to misbehave: she won't jump onto food preparation surfaces--and in fact recently we dropped some salmon on the floor and she wouldn't even come into the kitchen when we were there, because she knows she's not allowed to be underfoot during food-time. She bolts out of the basement if I go down there while she's using her litter.

This isn't because she's especially eager to please. It's because she fears reprisal.

I have sat on her for as much as half an hour at a time. Also I randomly chase her around. Try it--it keeps them humble.

Which means, in order to stuff her into her carry-bag, I can't LOOK like I'm about to stuff her into her carry-bag. I don't know, fly casual! Naturally our first attempt didn't work, which aroused her suspicions, and we ended up just putting the bag on its end and dumping her into it.

She yowled in the car, briefly, as cats are wont to do in variable gravity areas. But she calmed down, probably soothed by our speaking conversationally. Then she was fine. And she was fine in the cat clinic's waiting room. But as soon as we went into the little examining room, kitty Jekyll turned into kitty Hyde. She growled and snarled and refused to be dumped out of her kitty bag and in general raised a ruckus.

The vet released Sheba on the floor, in the corner, and tossed a towel over her, muffling her slightly.

"She's, um, feisty. I think we're going to have to sedate her," the vet said.

"Yeah, the most you can usually do is listen to her heart and check her teeth," I said.

So we left her at the clinic and they gave her a roofie-colada. Apparently not enough to defeist her: when we picked her up, she was pretty happy to see us, and I unzipped the top of her bag to pet her. "She wouldn't let us do that," the orderly said wistfully. She and the vet both had quilt-patterns of scratch marks on their hands, most of which were too old to have been Sheba-inflicted.

Her x-ray showed a possible slipped disk in her spine, which she might be chewing on. But no mites or lesions. She recommended that we dribble omega-3 fatty acid onto her food, which we've been doing, and buy her Prescription brand wet food. "Won't soft food rot her teeth?" I asked. Well, maybe, she admitted.

The clinic is pretty good with the intertron nowadays. The doctor sent me a followup e-mail:

How did Sheba do after her visit on Saturday? Any problems? How are things going with the fatty acids?

Her bloodwork looks good (normal thyroid, kidney, liver, white and red blood cell count etc etc). Her skin scraping was negative for mites. On xrays, the radiologist felt that at most there was only a subtle narrowing of the vetebral disc space in the lower neck. So...nothing concrete to go on. I would monitor her behavior closely and write down when the hair pulling seems to occur, and where the tufts are coming from. It might be worth a trial with an medication called elavil which can help with chronic pain as well as act as an antihistamine to reduce itchiness.

Translation: "Your cat's probably nuts."

That's possibly why mint chapstick makes her scrunch up her face.

	My sweetie bought me an advent calendar--with Lego in it! I had no idea these things existed!
	Today's Lego was a construction worker. He's sneering to teach children that tradespeople are malicious and gleeful, and should be avoided. Go to a real college, kids!

Between moving and van-buying, this has been the busiest month that there has ever been. There've been lots of blogworthy adventures (the line of credit! Anus the dog! Subway product testing! Crazy newfie mover!) but no time for actual making of the blog. So you will never know!

It looks like we'll have to buy a house sooner than expected. Currently the rent on our apartment is $849 a month, but yesterday Kyle let me know that our suites are currently renting for $1249. And that's now. What will it be like in October, when our lease is up?

It doesn't make sense to pay $1300 in rent. And if we did that, we certainly wouldn't be able to save for a downpayment. Or anything else.

The first step is to see a mortgage broker and find out what's available to us, and what we could find in that range. It seems stupid to buy when prices are so high, but I don't think they're going down anytime soon. Plateau maybe.

( In better news, my replacement computer arrived this week. )

Submitted for your attention: The Calgary Comic Book Expo.

I know I'm going, because Lisa bought tickets to it before I even knew of its existence. She knows Alberto Ruiz, y'see. I countered that I used to game with Jim Zubkavich, and the contest of wills began. This morning she let me know that she invited a Edmonton friend who draws for Teletoon--though since he's not a Guest we're still tied.

So mark your calendars for May 7th, Calgary-types. It beats the hell out of Con-Version! Of course, so does a lightly-drenched yak.

London Drugs dropped their price on the Master Replica lightsabers to $99. I tried, but I'm not made of stone.

And I just happen to have a nerdy outfit to go with it.

Of course, I see that they have this one now. Jerks.

( More Pictures )In other nerd news, I bought Lisa these. Drawn as she is to bead stores, she foolishly promised to game if I bought her pretty shiny dice; she didn't think I'd actually do it. She was mistaken.

( Old People )

( Gift Budget )

( Xpox )

I spent New Year's Eve the same way I did last year: playing poker at Kyle's house. This year Lisa did not win, and though there are amusing photos with funny hats, Justin and James have not yet managed to get their shit together to send them to me.

In the meantime, you can see the teddy-bear picnic Kyle and I turned Jason's painstakingly-drawn evil D&D temple into. And the gay chorus line his attacking force became. While Shonna rode me like a hairy pony. Jason keeps threatening to kill our party with asteroid strikes, but we're wearing him down.

My New Year's resolution is to buy myself a black 30GB iPod with my Alberta dividend cheque. I've held out this long since they announced black ones, but there's only so much I can withstand.

As I was going downstairs to retrieve my clothes from the dryer, there was a knock at the front door. It turned out to be our resident manager, JP.

"I've got to ask you to remove that from the hall," he said apologetically, indicating Lisa's GO AWAY welcome mat. "The regulations say that it's a fire hazard."

A fire hazard? I didn't follow him. "Don't worry, we won't put Christmas lights on it," I said, referring to a previous Boardwalk notice advising us that we're not allowed to have live Christmas trees. "That makes no sense," I told him.

"You could trip as you're coming out of the apartment," he explained, "and smash your head on the door on the other side of the hall."

"And catch on fire?" I frowned.

JP followed me downstairs, chatting about his D&D character. I owe James dearly for that, and the other D&D conversations I've had to be part of, since he's the one who observed the gaming potential of our ceiling fan in front of our downstairs fan. (And then Jason told him what game.)

James claims that it was payback for sizing up his basement rafters' ability to support a sex swing in front of Vicki's brother. Apparently we gave him the wiggins. Naturally I stand by my assessment that Vicki is tiny and would therefore whip around like a tetherball. Forewarned is forearmed.

We moved the mat from the hallway where we never tripped on it at all, to inside the front entryway where I trip on it all the time. I would probably trip on it slightly less often if I hadn't damaged my right leg somehow from driving to Cockring, Alberta on Saturday. I'm not sure how driving could mess up the muscles in my hip, but messed up they are, and I'm as proud as a thirty-two-year-old can be to be walking with a cane.

Some people spell the name of the town "Cochrane," but I'm not sure why.

The kitchen is mostly unpacked. The dining room is still a mess of boxes, the fish are still in their pink My Little Pony bucket, and the plants are still in a box, mostly because I can't set up my IVAR shelves until they're painted, which should hopefully happen by the end of today. We're heading out to IKEA to buy a dresser and probably a second ILEN and a footstool.

Our upstairs neighbour is a jerk. For the first three nights we were here, he blasted Punjabi music from 9 pm - 11 pm, so loud we could hear it clearly through the ceiling. While it's true that this building isn't as well insulated (and is probably not concrete) like my last one, when we went upstairs on the third night to tell him to turn it the fuck down, it was even louder up there.

"Oh, I was just getting ready to go out," he told us, which apparently means that his hearing had failed.

Last night the music was loud again, from 7:30 on. This time it was being performed live--he was having a band practice with his friends. "Oh, we're just having a little party," he said at 10:10 when we went upstairs. "Good. Quiet time now!" Lisa told him.

Starting a Noise War with my stereo system would only make the people below us pay, and they have done nothing wrong. We'll mention it to the resident manager.

And now, to glorious IKEA! IKEA makes it all better. And we can actually get things home from IKEA now, because in exchange for doing some gofering at work (since we ran out of employees who can drive) I get to drive the company van around the rest of the time. Free van!

I'm taking my iBook in while we're out, which wasn't the catastrophe it could have been, since DiskWarrior resurrected it enough for me to copy all my stuff onto the G4, which is up, running, and sharing a monitor and mouse with Lisa's PC. (So dirty. So very dirty.) The drive still has 170 bad blocks, though, which means new drive! And new battery while I'm at it.

I still can't find my hat. But Lisa showed me this, which is a shining beacon of hope.

Who wants to adopt a hamster?

( The Home )

( Widgetry )

( Candadey )

( Photomagraphs )

What I'd like is a digital SLR camera--but I'd also like a van.