Things have been going well enough, if not particularly exciting. But then, I guess that's nothing to complain about.

I think I've ingested enough cake to last me for a while...

Jenny had her Crafty Club Friday evening, and since Sunday was her birthday, one of the people brought a cake, which she had leftovers to take home. Then on Saturday we went over to Tigger and Lincoln's for a barbeque and birthday celebration for Jenny & I and Lincoln's daughter Elizabeth. There was more cake there, and since Elizabeth was turning 15, the house was quite a madhouse of sugar-crazed teenagers. But the food was good and it was still a lot of fun, even while dodging crazy kids.

Sunday we headed over to CdA and Jenny's mom had made a cake for us as well. They also surprised us with presents and took us out for Mexican for dinner. All in all, a good (and fattening) weekend!

Weather's been pretty nice (in our opinion) the past couple of days, which means grey, cool and wet. We even got quite the show the other night from the lightning storm that rolled in. Hopefully we won't have as dry of summer as last year - no need for more wildfires.

Went to the Spokane Comic-Con on Saturday, which was an awesome show and a whole lot of fun. We had planned on getting there when the doors opened, but got off to a slow start and ended up there around Noon, staying till the end.

I'm definately going to have a table there next year, and plan to have at least one of my comics started with some related material to sell. Jenny and I are talking about sharing a table, so she can show off her art as well. Figure that prints of her paintings would sell, and her jewelry should also go over well.

After the Con, we went out to dinner with some friends who were at the show and met a bunch of other cool artist/comic folks as well. All in all, it was a fun day!

I've got a bunch of different projects (mostly art but also writing & other things) to work on right now, so I should have no problem keeping myself busy. Just have to get moving and deal with this heat sapping my energy... I thought I was ready for summer, but I guess not.

Anyone who might be in the area this Saturday (May 30) should be sure to check out the 3rd annual Spokane Comic-Con, being held at the Spokane Falls Community College from 10-5.

Jenny normally works on Saturdays, but was able to get the day off, so we plan on spending the whole day there just hanging out and being geeks (next year I hope to have a table there myself...). Several of my friends will be there, however, so be sure to swing by their tables and check out their work. You can find a lot of them on deviantArt:

Ben Hansen

Jesse Acosta

Lars Brown

Levi Skeen

Matt Nelson

More information about the convention can be found here: Spokane Comic-Con 

Also this weekend (Friday through Sunday) is Spokane Art-Fest, the annual arts and music fair, sponsored by Spokane's Museum of Arts & Culture. You can find out more about it here: Spokane Art-Fest

And finally, Jenny also has her Crafty Club meeting on Friday, which she organizes through the library (where she works). Needless to say, we plan on being pretty busy this weekend, but it should be a lot of fun!

I haven't blogged (or even Twittered) in a while, so just wanted to start remedying that:

Jenny and I have both been sick off and on the past few days - sinus stuff and head aches, but thankfully no real flu. I also did something to my back last week which I'm still slowly working out. Probably wouldn't have seemed as bad if I hadn't got sick at the same time.

It seems Summer has arrived. It's been blue skies and sunny, and in the 70s the past few days. Still pleasant and not horribly hot yet. Just a matter of time, though...

I might have some temp work lined up at Borders next month. They're apparently doing a big re-organization of the store and will need some people to do overnight work for a while, moving stuff around, which would be perfect. I'd love to get back on with them, if even part-time, but they haven't had any regular hours to spare. I'm friends with the store manager, though, so if something opens up I'm sure I'll hear about it (which is how the temp job came up).

In the meantime, I've been trying to throw myself into art and also starting to write again. I want to get my superhero comic back on track soon, so I can start it up as a web-comic. I'm also working on a second, completely separate, project which I'm hoping to do something similar with.

We're still way behind on TV shows from this season, with the last few episodes of a few of our favorite shows still taped and waiting to be watched. We have been watching a lot more movies than normal, as Jenny's dad has been taking us out to see some of the big summer blockbusters he also wants to see. Besides Wolverine and Star Trek, we saw Angels & Demons last wednesday and are looking forward to the new Terminator movie this week. I wasn't really impressed by The Da Vinci Code, and mainly just wanted to see Angels & Demons for all the art and architecture that's shown, but I actually enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. It was incredibly rediculous, but entertaining.

Also, both of our birthdays are coming up relatively soon, although we don't really have any plans or ideas for what to do. Probably nothing too exciting, due to lack of money, but I'm sure there will be cake involved. :)

Here's my entry for the current contest running over at Project: Rooftop. This one was to design a new costume for Wolverine, to go along with the release of his recent movie. 

I tried to make a somewhat "realistic" outfit for him, inspired somewhat by the X-Men movie costumes and those designed by Frank Quitely during his and Grant Morrison's run on the New X-Men comic.

This was actually the second design I came up with. My first attempt can be seen over at my deviantArt page: Discarded Wolverine Design

Speaking of Wolverine, I did see his new movie last week and it was... OK. Not great, but still entertaining. Some good action scenes, with a couple of CGI bits that could have been improved. But I did like it more than the last X-Men movie, so I guess that's something.

We also saw the new Star Trek, and it was excellent! JJ Abrams did a great job of re-starting the series for a new generation, while not erasing or stepping on any of the stories that came before. Well worth seeing in the theatre - I hope the inevitable sequels will be just as good.

They replaced our hot water heater yesterday, even though we got a new one last March and it worked fine. But that must not have been recorded, and the powers-that-be had already decided we were up for a new one. I tried to dissuade them, to save everyone the hassle, but they went ahead anyway.

On the brightside, it didn't take them near as long to replace it this time (last one they were here nearly all day for some reason). Maybe this guy just knew what he was doing. He said that the old one was going to Habitat for Humanity, so at least it's hopefully going to someone who needs it.

However... there were two guys who showed up first to drain the old one, and Jenny said she heard one of them complaining that he hated working when people were actually home. So they hooked up the hose to the old heater, ran the hose down the stairs outside, and left it to drain while they went to eat lunch. Oh, and the front door was propped open by the hose!

So our thought was - would they have done the same if we hadn't been home? Just left our front door open and walked away? I doubt they would've hung out and waited for it to drain. Thankfully a different guy came back to do the actual work, who seemed a lot nicer and way more competent.

Also, my wisdom tooth above the one I had removed has been hurting really bad over the past week or so, and needs to come out. My appointment's on Friday. Yay.

So as I'd mentioned (more than once), myself and a few other local artists were hanging out at local comic book store Merlyns today, drawing sketches for kids as part of Free Comic Book Day. Though we'd initially intended "kids" to refer to those 10 or younger, we drew pics for basically anyone who asked, which also included quite a few parents and other adults....

And it was a success! A lot more people showed up than I think any of us imagined, and we did a whole lot of drawing. I lost track of time, but I'd say there was an hour or more where we were basically swamped by kids asking for pics. Crazy but very cool.

We were expecting kids to want drawings of superheroes, but it turned out that Star Wars was the all-around favorite, with the video game Halo also making a surprisingly strong showing. I drew at least 7 Star Wars pics myself (that I can remember), and 2 Master Chiefs (from Halo). We did have several superheroes, with some other random requests mixed in as well.

I do have to say though, my absolute favorite request turned out to be the last drawing I did. After a lot of Clone Troopers and Jedi, I really wasn't expecting any surprises. But then a young lad came up with his mom and said he wanted a drawing of Fin Fang Foom! He knew who he was (I'm still not sure how), and I had to oblige such an awesome and unique request. It took me some searching to find a reference pic, but it really made my day. It was also the only one I did in color, and I really wish I'd got a photo of it....

In addition to us, there were a few people there in Star Wars costumes so people could get pictures taken with them (and which might have subconsciously influenced the requested subject choices somewhat...). They were also making the rounds to the different comic stores around the area over the course of the day.

There are 2 major comic stores in town, Merlyns and The Comic Book Shop, the latter actually having 3 different location. In addition, there's another shop, Lightning Comics, just across the border in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. All of the shops participated in FCBD, as did the CdA libraries, and in addition Lightning Comics scored a coup by having writer Chris Claremont in the store signing comics!

John, the owner of Merlyns, seemed pleased with how we did, and was talking about having the group come in more often for similar events. We were able to spread the word about the local artist group and 24 Hour Comic Book Day, and hopefully helped to inspire some kids to keep or start drawing. All in all, it was a heck of a lot of fun!

In addition to myself, the following artists participated. We've all got pages on deviantArt, so take a minute and click on over to check out samples of their work!

Jesse Acosta

Lars Brown

Levi Skeen

Matt Nelson

Mike Lail

A few miscellaneous things that I haven't really blogged/twittered about. Just trying to catch up....

Our local bank is Washington Mutual, which is of course now becoming Chase. Not particularly pleased about that, but we don't do much banking anyway, so it's probably nothing to worry about. I am glad that Jenny and I both hung on to our credit union accounts in Alaska when we moved...

I'd mentioned the wasps coming back - I did get the maintenance people over here to spray bug killer and knock down their hives, and it seemed to have done the job. There's still a few around, but they're not swarming directly outside our windows anymore. It got really bad last year, with wasps regularly getting into the house, even after we got the new windows installed.

Avista is our local electric utility provider, and they've already been catching a lot of flack recently for raising their already high rates in the face of the current economic conditions. We normally pay our bill on-line, but when we logged on last week we found they'd switched to a new 3rd party company to handle their billing transactions. With this comes the new requirement that we give them our bank account information - even though we're paying with a credit card. We said no, and sent them a check. Just rediculous...

We hadn't been watching Chuck, although we had caught bits and pieces of it (since it's on right before Heroes). Jenny decided to start watching it on-line, since about half the series is available, and now we're both huge fans. The show's hilarious, with a lot of geeky in-jokes, and has got some awesome guest stars. Luckily we got caught up in time for tonight's episode, which is the season finale. Unfortunately, it's not certain whether it'll be around next year. Just our luck that we'd get hooked on a show right before it get's cancelled... :)

Also, the AFL tournament I was participating in is over, with Gene Kelly being the champion this time around. For his final entry, instead of just an illustration or comic page, Gene actually made a 2 person flash video game pitting his character against his opponent's! It's really impressive, and can be seen here: AFL 3 - Final Battle

I drew up this pic of his character Rocket, as a congratulations for his well deserved win:

Edit - You should've been able to click on the picture and get a ginormous version of it, but MySpace is apparently being stupid and thinks that linking to pictures on Blogger will lead to viruses and spam. So now it goes to the pic on our Flickr page.