A Special Guest

(Unrelated picture: Steampunk Ethan, per his special request.)

It's the end of August. That means it's been a whole year since my husband left home to work overseas, and his contract is now officially complete. He's stateside again, finishing his outprocessing/debriefing crapola and will be home soon, soon as in maybe in a few hours, maybe tonight, maybe first thing in the morning, maybe maybe maybe. It sucks not knowing any more than that!

But we persevere, wielding our large cleaning brush and a vacuum-cleaner hose, washing the linens and sweeping the floors so it will look like we've been living in a clean, tidy house the entire time he's been gone. "Yes dear, that's right. I am supermom."

He won't believe it for a second.

What has he missed? Oktoberfest. Home-cooked meals (including lots of tofu and more pizza nights than I can remember). PMS (lucky him). An entire year of school, minus those two weeks in November when he was able to sneak away for just a little vacation and see us. Christmas in Oregon. Ethan's first DS. Mommy's malware incident. THE WORST SPIDER SEASON EVER. Those soba noodles that introduced tiny noodle-eating pests to the pantry and launched a spring-cleaning war.

He's missed poorly-sung karaoke, Super Dance-Moves Mondays, a dozen new CDs and the addition of a stereo to the living room. He's missed Ethan's Jet-Li obsession, his anime obsession, and most of all his obsession with subtitles on every show or movie EVER.

My hair has grown 10 inches longer in his absence. I hope he doesn't mind that I threw out let Ethan use up all the shampoo and bought bar soap instead.

He missed my affairs with LOTRO, doodling, hair care, D&D, Le Creuset, finding a houseplant I can't kill (go go kalanchoe) and real, honest-to-god snow that lasted a whole day.

I know he's missed us a lot. But I'm also pretty sure he wouldn't care if the house looked it'd hosted its own personal hurricane, so long as we're here.

But no. I am going to clean ALL the things!

Catch y'all on the flip side. I'll be sure to tell hubby that my invisible internet people are glad he's home.

Dysfunction, Dinner & Doodles [Lots of images!]

Today's been a very rainy, very slow and somewhat productive day. Usually Sundays just kinda tear by but this one was rather comfortable without feeling lazy.

I decide first of all to put on some music, then clean the living room. En route to the couch, I notice all the couch pillows are on the floor. It seems the Ethan-monster chucked them off so he could use the couch as a weekend bed. When I pick up his blanket I notice it smells rather funky and decide it should be washed.

On my way to the laundry (it's just a closet in the dining room space between the kitchen and living room), I find an exceptionally large spider has chosen to die in front of my washing machine.

By this time, the CD I picked is barely through the intro and I've already careened off-course into the completely wrong room. I'm supposed to clean the living room, not vacuum the laundry closet, but here I am with the Dirt Devil anyway, extra-long tube extended as far as it will go so that I can remain a safe 4 feet from the carcass (it makes audible rattling sounds and I can feel it clatter through my hand as it vanishes up the pipe, which is revolting).

Since I've already got the vacuum out, may as well tidy up the rest of the room. I go around every crack and crevice in the dining room, then the kitchen, using my vacuum rather than suffer the indignity of sweeping. Let's face it, sweeping sucks, and brooms are gross.

Holstering the tube, I see the toaster and a couple boxes of tea are taking up valuable real estate on my counter. I don't even eat that much toast, let alone drink tea. What am I, some kinda highfalutin' whatchamajig? Holy crap there is a lot of dead toast crumbs in this thing. Soon there's crumbs all over the counter, the sink, and the freshly-vacuumed floor, but the toaster looks pretty good huh? Aw yeah!

So I put the toaster in the cabinet and vacuum again. I want to relocate the tea, but where... oh, I'll put it up on the baker's rack! ...which is dirty, but whatever. I clean it off and decide that the tea doesn't look nice enough to go there, so instead I cram it all in a ziploc bag and open the corner cupboard to find...

Old medicine! Well THAT isn't worth a damn, is it? Expires March 2005? Oh no no no. All of that goes right into the trashcan, and I can finally put the bag of tea on my new clean shelf. Yay! But now I'm hungry. I should make dinner now, let's chop up some onions and some celery and some carrots and put them in a pot and play video games and draw a picture and wash my hands 16 times because I keep forgetting to do messy stuff all at once so I don't have to wash up after every single one.

AFTER dinner and all of that stuff is done, I finally remember that I was going to do laundry but it's getting kinda late so I should probably wash some clothes for Ethan to wear to school tomorrow instead before I wash his icky old blanket and he should really take a shower pretty soon before it's bedtime and he has to stay up late just so he can hose off the skunkiness of a weekend before I send him back to his teacher and that's what it's like to have ADD the end.

Here's some pictures!

This is my brother's girlfriend. She is pretty awesome. She also looks exactly like this IRL.

A friend requested a doodle for his real self, so I made this. I like how it looks in black & white. :)

Been working on some Libby and Fenniel cartoons so I can try my hand at making a comic. I think they look pretty adorable, if I do say so myself. Fenn is channeling his inner Peanut in this one, I think.

My mom FINALLY decided to start a recipe blog (I made her this doodle to put on it), and I'm very proud of how many posts she's made. She ain't no slacker!

I finally figured out how to use layers in Gimp, so I was able to color something without it being like torture. Yay!

Keltyr is evil. I don't know what else to say. Viva la turtleneck of doom!

A watersprite.

Here is a sketch I made for Ghaar. He ended up with Mel Gibson hair, eww! I don't know if I like how the coloring came out, but I do love the guild symbol on his tabard. You can see it whole here.

One Breakfast, Hold the Brains [PG-Profanity & Contemplated Violence]

"One McMuffin, with egg and cheese, and no meat."

That's what I order for breakfast. No hash browns, no frippity-frack coffee-flavored sugar milk product.

Just an Egg McMuffin.

With egg and cheese.

No meat.

On repeating this six times at the drive-through, she still doesn't have it right. Every time I say the magic words "no meat" it filters through her own questionable brainmeats as unidentifiable gibberish.

Am I speaking english?

What do you mean, no meat? I don't understand. Why would anyone ask that. Can you use those words together in a sentence like that?

"So you want a egg McMuffin, with no cheese?"

"I want cheese. I don't want meat."

"So a McMuffin with no cheese, drive around."

At this point I give up and continue to the window.

"You had the McMuffin with no cheese right?"

"No."

"Oh, you got the McGriddle with a McCafe?" [**Author's Note. Every time I see or hear the word 'McCafe' I have a miniature aneurysm complete with mouth-foam. Hate the name, hate the ads, hate the pronunciation, hate the drink. It is nasty.**]

"No. I had a McMuffin, and I wanted it with egg. And cheese. With no meat on it."

The blank stare and silence that meet my slow, carefully enunciated words last longer than I would like, but believe me when I say it does not surprise me. Not in the least. I repeat myself.

"I. DON'T. WANT. MEAT. ON. IT."

"Ohhhh, I got that wrong! Hold on."

She tears up to the front, shouting "that's wrong, don't put meat on it!" and returns after a few seconds to stick her head out the window, speaking to me as though I were a small child with a lobotomy.

"Now, we gonna do it this way this time, without the meat? But we don't do that. We gonna do it this way this once, but we ain't gonna do that next time okay? We can't do that. That ain't a thing we do."

By all outward appearances, I am a calm and reasonable person. In my mind, however, I am yanking her out of the window by her hair and screaming "IT IS AN EGG A SLICE OF CHEESE AND AN ENGLISH MUFFIN. THIS IS NOT FUCKING ROCKET SCIENCE. GIVE ME A SANDWICH WITHOUT THE PORK OR I WILL SHANK YOU."

Rather than risk prison time, I pull forward again. Deep breath.

It's fine. Just get the sandwich and go. It's not like I'll be coming back anyway. Hell, I was just told, more or less, never to come back, which is fine by me. I go to McDonald's all of twice a year. No need to rock the boat! No big deal. It's fine.

At the second window, a dead-eyed blonde shoves a paper bag into my hand and I exit the parking lot talking to myself, my voice growing progressively louder and more shrill as I pull out onto the road and dig for my food.

"You're doing me a favor? By omitting a slice of ham? Egg. Cheese. Bread. What the hell is wrong with asking for no meat? Why you gotta look at me like I got three heads? I am not an alien! I just want a meatless sandwich! What the hell is wrong with people?!"

There is no cheese on my McMuffin.

I swerve into oncoming traffic.

[Yes, that's my illustration up there. The meat looks weird, doesn't it?]