Gah! An old fashion nightmare!

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My kitten is terrified of the sound my harmonica makes. She literally heads fr the hills if I blow notes or just sounds. LOL! The cat can run fast when she needs to.

Okay, since I sleep during the day I guess it would be a daymare. It doesn't help that the c5-a Galaxy Transports were flying overhead. They are stationed at the Air Force base nearby and are extremely loud. I had a dream and then a good ole fashion nightmare.So in this dream it started out a wee bit creepy. There was a large field dotted with some trees surrounded by thick woods. On one side was raised ground that was flattened out. It was for a railroad. There was one that stopped about halfway along the field.

This field was quite large as people on the far side were like one to two inches tall in the distance. It had roads going through the field and it would take a car doing 20 mph about 20 seconds, maybe more to cross it. The field also felt like a video game grid in that there was either nothing beyond the surrounding trees. Space simply didn’t exist outside of the field and the mountain surrounding it on two sides.

People I knew where in this dream and the field. I think it was my family but I can’t really recall. I know my cousin Sue was there and her husband later on. I was driving my car across the field if I remember correctly. The railroad tracks actually used steam engines so the time period sort of felt like the 1930’s or something. And it was me the whole dream not my free floating camera nor was it a lucid dream.The sun was going down and I headed to the small railroad bridge. Some of my family was there and a guy from work had an 18 wheeler he was driving stall out in the middle of the rails. I saw a car come around the far end of the railroad bed that didn't have any rails. I went to the corner and went around it. For whatever reason, I couldn't see past the corner. This is where the field and thin amount of trees that corralled the field just ended. There was no space as we know past them. But then my mind seems to add things past this area as I approach it. I think it was all woods. I get around the corner and there are a couple of houses there starting the edge of a town. I was standing above the houses in the dark. The best way I can describe it is essentially like an unfinished foundation for a house. You have the flat ground, then a concrete support wall around the basement. And then yet have the dug out part that would be the basement. The houses were in the basement part. Or I guess you could call it a square valley surrounded by mountains.

It was nighttime and one of the houses was totally unlit. They were newer houses of my era not set in the 1930’s or anything.I started to slowly head down to the houses and was getting close when a light came on or something. It was Jill, a co-worker of mine. She was dressed in sort of a silk red dress like one would wear to a cocktail party. It was tight around the torso and sleeveless but was a flowing or at least spacious skirt from the waist down. It ended around mid-calf. Actually, she looked quite gorgeous with her hair up.

So Jill has comes around the corner and discovered me in the yard of one of the houses. The first house is all dark but the second houses has lights on including a bedroom that has a red light on behind a shade. Jill mentions she got all dressed up including wearing heels despite all the grass, woods, and outdoors. I was upset or scared because of possibly being discovered. Jill also had a pair of small wings that she had under her arm that where sort of sky blue that she could put on. Somehow I knew she had known about this sort of hidden town and that she was visiting a young girl behind the shade with the red light. She was pretending to be a fairy godmother or something. And then another co-worker, Tony, arrived. I can't recall what else happened. I think I woke up. So that was the creepy part. The nightmare part was that I was back by the original train bridge but instead of field and woods, everything as like a closely packed toy store. The mountains were high walls marking the outside walls of the store and all the trees had become tightly packed aisles over flowing with toys. I was now a priest or something and there was the girl from The Exorcist there possessed by the devil. I knew I had to work on exorcising the devil out of her and it scared me because I was alone. I also didn’t know what to do. But I knew if I kept trying something would happen. The elderly priest from the movie, Father Maren, eventually showed up as I had started to try and exorcise the devil out of the girl. I was using a commanding loud voice invoking the name of Jesus Christ and God to try and exorcise the devil. This was really instense and scary for me. Really, it was all the tension and what could happen rather than actual pain or whatever. The girl could walk on walls and at one point her skin was all mold gray and yellow eyes. The scariest thing for me was when other people (store patrons?) started running away and the girl came out dressed in doll's clothes that was a life sized doll. She may have been the doll actually. Her eyes were all red and she had thick somewhat dried streams of blood down the center of her eyes. She spoke in a weird sort of little girl voice that sounded badly recorded. It was really, REALLY creepy and probably the scariest part of the dream.The priest and I, mainly me, kept trying to use the power of God to exorcise the Satan but it never worker. It even became Christmas Day at one point. We felt Satan would be kicked out that day at some point and then I woke up. I was rather tense and somewhat scared. I had a lot of trouble getting back to sleep. And I wasn't sure I wanted to because I often dream about the same things again as if I'm just continuing the dream.Brrrrr....! It's been a long time since I've been that rattled.This past weekend my friend Wendy and her family showed up for a visit. They were visiting family in the area and were able to take time to visit me. It helped that the place they stayed for the previous night was only 15 minutes away. It was the first time I had seen her in person in eight years. Yipes! EIGHT YEARS. I was stunned that it was that long. But since we e-mail each other regularly and are good friends it was like she had never moved. I think the only difference I could tell was that she had stopped coloring her hair. Wendy (hi, Wendy!) looked to me like she had just left. That’s not a bad feat after a period of eight years.

Her son cut a loud fart that was a bit more than a fart. Wendy investigated by sniffing his butt. Eww! Gross! I was pretty shocked by that maneuver. A few minutes later as things were working out whether pooh was involved Wendy just grabbed the back of his shorts and took a look down the old back alley. I turned away at this point letting it be a somewhat private family matter that I didn’t need to see. David, her husband, was recruited to do the changing honors although I was handed the bag of gross to dispose of afterwards. Her son Gavin loved Weebee my kitten. It was kind of fun watching them play. He would chase Weebee behind the couch and then he would run away. Weebee would run back out and freeze and then run back behind the couch as soon as he chased her. I never got the feeling that Weebee was scared but more playing a game of cat and mouse pardon the pun. They did this like four or five times before they took it to the kitchen before things were broken up.

It was a very enjoyable time and I’m very happy they made both the effort and time to see me. Now it’ll probably be another 5 to 8 years before I see them in person again.

I have all the pages of the comic scanned and pieced together and cleaned up ready for grayscaling. I tried to do three pages a day which was a bit because I usually had to scan the pages in three pieces to get the whole page. I have an 8 ½ x 11 scanner and the pages have an image area of 10 inches by 15 inches. Then you have to line them up which isn’t always as easy as you would think. There was lots of the eraser tool being used and the move tool in addition to tweaking and extra ‘copy and paste’ to get things right.

I also somehow goofed in my head. I thought I only had 22 pages of art when I really had 23. Previously I thought I might have 2 pages of poems but 23 pages of art prevents that. But that’s okay in my eyes. Now I can start grayscaling. Sometimes its fun but sometimes it’s a lot of work to. It is more enjoyable that piecing scans together and cleaning them up though.

I noticed something at work today. Former crush has man hands. Well, they looked pretty manly to me. I was kind of turned off by them. Other than that, former crush is still extremely cute.

The other week I encountered a nutjob driver. He passed me on the right side of the road with on coming traffic in the other lane. While the road in question is rather wide with and emergency lane it was still unsettling to have someone pass you doing 50 mph or more at 10:45pm on the right hand side in the middle of darkness. I had thought those headlights in my mirror were getting really close!

So I was still fairly shocked at this when I could see us approaching the highway four way intersection coming up. I wondered if this guy was going to do what I suspected and he did. The light was clearly red for our lane. He drove into the left turn only lane and then turned right and entered the highway on ramp.

I do wonder about people that drive like this. Was he a doctor or have someone just admitted to a hospital in an emergency? Did he have a good reason for driving like this? Probably not. He was probably just and impatience asshole. My question for people that drive like this is what are you going to say to my family if you kill me? Sorry? I was in a hurry just ‘because’? And it’s people that drive like assholes that always seem to survive the crash and leave others injured or worse.

I had to laugh at my co-worker last night. He’s a big dude that thinks he’s hot shit. Usually he’s alright but he’s always got a counter story for everything anyone says. So he comes over to the area a bunch of us are working and he has his water bottle sort of on his right pocket vaguely near his groin. There are a couple of wet spots because of this on his pants. He also had the water bottle base against his leg so it stuck out like a certain male appendage when aroused. So another hot shit co-worker starts in on him on this and basically just made total fun of big ass hot shit. So big ass hot shit gets out-dueled in being made fun of and walks off. Later he comes back and brings the situation back up trying to make it sound like second hot shit was focused on big ass hot shit’s penis emotionally or something. But I guess big ass hot shit couldn’t fathom that he had been trumped in the making fun of department and started sounding like he was getting mad. I know he’d deny it but his tone and the fact that he came back over and reintroduced the conversion after it had been dropped for more than 5 to 10 minutes tells me otherwise.

The reason I call big ass hot shit big ass hot shit is because he’s 30 but talks like he’s experienced just about everything in life. He’s been this and that, worked here and there, had this girl and that girl, knows someone that has done this or that. What I’m getting from all this is that he lives at home, can’t hold a job very long, and is somewhat immature about a lot of things. I could be being too harsh though. Like I said, he’s not a bad guy overall, just kind of a hot shit know-it-all.

Former crush has missed back to back Fridays or at least left early last Friday. It’ll be interesting to see if she makes it 3 for 3. It might be a legit thing though because we have inventory tonight which can be dreadfully boring.

I’m also expecting another round of lay-off’s at our plant. Right now, our room called “Custom’ has only 7 out of 12 machines running. It could probably be dropped down easily to 5 or 6 machines. A bunch of us, sometimes 6 at a time, are doing various tasks like packing and cleaning. It seems things have really slowed down. Where we were doing orders the night before they were due we are now doing orders that aren’t due until 6 to 8 days down the road. There are also rumors of lay-off’s occurring. It’s going to happen because it does every year. It could happen a lot earlier this year though. I may or may not get caught in the lay-off. It all depends how they choose if it does occur. Should it be strictly by senority rules across all shifts I could be in trouble. If it is like a couple of people per shift I should be fine as I’m in the middle for company time on my shift. I would think it would happen pretty quick though like maybe as soon as next week. A couple of weeks off in the middle of summer could be pretty awesome though. J

I blew $40 the other day. It was the week I get to keep a chunk of my paycheck instead of paying bills so I bought a bunch of things called Heroclix. The new set just came out and I went early to the comic shop to buy them and help the guys ‘pull books’ which is filling customer orders. I like the new additions where a lot of times I don’t. I didn’t get the figure I wanted the most but I should be able to trade for it. But now it’s back to three weeks of paychecks paying my monthly bills. Sigh.

I’ve risen from 10 out of 10 to 8 out of 10 in my fantasy baseball league. That happened in one week. Right ow I’m playing my buddy who’s both the league commissioner and in first place. He’s ahead of my but like 60 categories wins which is a whole helluva lot. I am currently winning 10 – 2 out of 14 categories and we are tied in 2. I hope to really put the boots to him but all the categories are really close so I could just as easily be 2-10-2 after Sunday. That would suck. I lost a bunch of categories last Sunday to fall from roughly 10-4 to a 7-6-1 ‘win’. But a win is a win.

Okay, this blog is HUGE. I’m done.

Holy shit!!!!

With my mom getting out of the hospital today I figured it's time to get myself a physical because I haven't had one for awhile. So I call the place where my family doctor practices who is the same doctor that is taking care of my mom. They tell they are booked for physicals until March. That's March of NEXT YEAR!!!!!! Even then they amended it to mid or late April.

God damn!

I guess I better look into getting another doctor if I want a physical.

Where to start?

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Where to start?

Friday was a day of worry and tension. My mom was admitted to a hospital. I was pissed at myself and some at my brother that lives with me. I was pissed with myself because I skipped a phone as I lay in bed not wanting to answer the phone. The answering machine got it but the sound is turned down so I couldn’t here what was said. It was one of my brothers telling me mom had been admitted. I got pissed at the brother that lived with me because he didn’t bother waking me up thinking I was asleep to tell me she had been admitted. WTF?!?!?

My mom was admitted for an infection on a cut that was oozing puss or some sort of discharge colored with pink, i.e. blood. She was immediately put on anti-biotics or was suppose to be. They could find her vein to get the I.V. to stay in. It took the hospital over 3 or 4 hours to finally get it in.

So my brother that didn’t bother to wake me calls the house to explain what is going on. So I get all my mom’s room and hospital info. I had just come out of the shower and still clad in a towel during this call. I dressed and headed out to see her. Unfortunately, I was rather flustered and my brain decided to tell to go to the wrong hospital. I got 1 minute from that hospital when I realized I had the wrong one. Of course, the traffic couldn’t move fast enough for me and everybody seemed to be doing the speed limit or less as I backtracked to the correct hospital.

When I got to her room my sister, niece, her boyfriend and my live-in brother were all there. My dad and another brother had already gone home. My mom sorta kicked them out because they were driving her nuts with their worry. My mom actually looked more healthy in the hospital bed than the last time I had seen her which was 5 days earlier. She was sick with the flu or something and never got off the couch despite me being there 3 or 4 hours.

I stayed for about an hour and was allowed to stay a little past visiting hours because I had gotten there late. When I left, I found I was locked in! The lobby had all its lights shut off and the entrance was all locked up so I couldn’t get out! I started wandering around the hospital wings and shortly found a nurse or someone to let me out a side door.

That night at work I was fairly miserable as I was concerned with worry. My mom maybe needed surgery and had gone for a CAT scan after I had left. They may have done an MRI too but I can’t recall. I wasn’t sure of what exactly the problem was with her which added to my worry.

In the morning at home I got a call from my dad. He told me my mom was doing well with the anti-biotics and that surgery was not necessary. She sounded pretty good that night when I called. I had gotten up real late so I didn’t visit her. Talk about feeling guilty! But we did talk on the phone for close to an hour.

So mom is in the hospital for the weekend but the prognosis seems pretty good and the feeling is that she should probably get out Monday. We’ll have to see whether that comes true but today I was VERY happy with the news dad had given me.

On the way to work I finally heard the artist of an old song I’ve been wanting to get. His name is Billy Swan. I had been mis-identifying him as Jerry Lee Lewis. The song is something like I Can Help or Let Me Help. It sounds like it from the fifties. Now I should finally be able to go find it and add it to my music collection.

My baseball team is beating up on my buddy. Things are close but I’m winning 10-3 out of 14 categories. Since I’m in last place I really need to pound on people to get back into the race.

I also got some bad news at work. The crush seems to be avoiding me like the plague. A lot of it is my fault and some of it is because of ignorance on my part. The crush doesn’t like being called a kid and finds it really creepy to be called a little girl. I have a confidant that tells me this. We have sworn to secrecy to one another not to mention what we discuss to the crush or others because we both think it would really hurt the crush. I made a big mistake the other day and showed really poor judgment. I had some Pez candies and as crush went by I said ‘Candy Little Girl?’. It’s a reference to Chester the Molester which is an older cartoon from Hustler or Playboy. But crush walks so fast she just went ‘What?” with sort of a fearful look and kept walking before I could say anything else. So it’s gotten to me that that really creeped her out. I feel really bad about it and figured it would lead to trouble almost as soon as I couldn’t say I was joking. When I had tried to offered the same candy later (crush has taken lollipops from me in the past) that night more normally, she just kept walking saying ‘no thanks’.

So before I knew the little girl stuff really bothers her, I was talking with my friend giving her a hassle about the white coat she was wearing. She and the crush were painting the floor of the shop and my friend had on sort of a doctor’s coat made of really cheap fibers. It’s like a paper coat. Crush looked really good tonight. She must’ve been on a date because she wore tight fitting clothes and came in at 3am and not 11pm which is the start of the shift. So I know things are weird between me and crush and I don’t want to upset her so I don’t really saying anything to her. I talk to my friend by saying ‘I’d like an Italian Ice, please.’ I then tell her that her coat reminds me of a Ding Dong Ice Cream truck. She’s using a tongue stick (the kind that doctors use to check your throat) to stir paint and tells me to lick that. She I get a little pervy and flick my tongue out like I’m licking it. Crush saw this even though it wasn’t meant for her and speaks up saying ‘I bet I can do that better than you’. I mention off-hand that we would need a contest and I miss what crush says but it’s something about being woman with sexual needs. I reference my comic by saying something like she isn’t a little girl in a school outfit. I can’t recall what exactly I said but there was sexual suggestion in it because that was what the whole conversation had been. I guess she got really creeped out by the little girl comment and said ‘that creeps me out’ and meant it. I then said, ‘okay, you’re a kid then’, or something to that effect. At this time I did know she didn’t like being called a kid but didn’t know she didn’t like being called a little girl. I hadn’t meant anything by the little girl stuff but I was annoyed she called me out on sexual skills. That’s why I called her a kid. But I guess she was quite bugged out by the little girl stuff. I talked with my friend a wee bit more and crush said nothing else concentrating on painting the floor. I didn’t realize her uncomfortable feelings. I then went back to my machine.

Later, out of sight from crush, confidant tells me I can’t call crush little girl and the like because she got really creeped out. This is also when I was informed of the bad showing on my part about the ‘candy little girl’ comment. I felt and feel really bad about the ‘candy little girl’ comment. The second ‘little girl’ comment I don’t really feel bad about. This is more because of the history of conversations crush and I have. They have been sexually suggestive a lot. Some of her stuff has even somewhat offended me. Once incident that really threw me was when she was asking at lunch at a table full of like five other people whether I liked to ride the cucumber or something. With stuff like that, it’s really hard to sudden understand that ‘that creeps me’ was meant in all seriousness in the middle of a conversation. I readily admit at being sometimes totally blinds towards reading signs and stuff. On the other hand, when for well over two months conversation with the crush have tons of suggestive statements from both parties, it clouds what it meant as serious and what is just goofing around. I tried to explain that to confidant but I’m not sure I explained it well. I did mention that maybe the best course of action for me to talk is just not talk with crush. She’s not really much of a crush anymore anyways. I still like her and all but I don’t want to creep her out or offend her any further. I am considering a blind apology for Monday though. This would be to get crush to admit to me what offends so that I don’t do it again. On a side note, confidant did miss that crush had stated that crush had more tongue skills than me. I told confidant that she has selective hearing. LOL!

So I’m really happy about my mom. I’m also pretty sorry about saying inappropriate things to crush.

I’ve forgotten anything else I may have wanted to write at this time. LOL!

Work things

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Work. Huh. Monday started off with a total sucklessness. I got a bit better but it did suck for the first hour or so.

Yesterday was actually kind of fun. I was in a good mood and things ran somewhat well. Or maybe I just didn’t care. I was cracking jokes most of the night and having a good time. I was trying to make people laugh with two things. My first was to say that I’ve introduced ground iron to my diet. I elaborated that food goes right to my ass meaning as in weight gain. Thus, by eating ground iron, I would have buns of steel! The second thing I was saying was that I was very mean to my kitten while being lazy at the same time. I told them I dropped a deuce in the cat box because it was closer than the bathroom. I also said how my kitten was trying to bury the turd for an hour.

I’m done to one page left with an option to add another on the comic. I’ve now got the last page half penciled.

I added a small avatar to some of the comic forums I post in. I found a picture of some cool spiked heeled boots with thick straps. And since I go by the handle Dungeonmaster Jim…

Things have cooled off a lot with the crush. I still like her and all but it seems the return likablility just isn’t there. We don’t talk all that much. She may be mad with me actually. We had agreed to eat breakfast at a local shop but she asked to delay a day. Then, with about an hour to go the next day she asked to delay it by several hours as a mutual co-worker was suppose to go to her place to give her free cable stuff. At first I said ‘sure’ but then went back to her and said I’m canceling. She wasn’t going to call me with a new time because she’s never called me once despite saying she would. So pretty much, we’ve said ‘hi’ to one another and some very minor conversation in the meantime but the magic seems rather gone. I’m glad my instincts were right – she’s always had a lot of red flags. Still, the whole situation is disappointing.

as usual, weekend news

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A fast weekend. Saturday was an extra day at work. I spent most of the week painting the job place because the CEO came in from California today. While the extra money helps, and it is union dues week, it makes for a tiring week.

So Sunday I got up around 4pm, showered and headed to the parentals to do a lot of clothes washing. I got home about 9pm. I watched the Red Sox lose and inked some pages and got a pizza with my brother.

So I’m down to one page left to pencil and ink. I also have one panel left to ink on another. I have an option of an additional page of art or a second page of poems. I’ll make that determination later.

Some recent dreams I’ve had:

I was walking in the woods with one of my supervisors, some dude and a lady. We were some sort of business people checking the landscape that was very nice. It was kind of hilly and there was a small river/wide stream that had a small road bridge over it. For some reason I was bare foot. We walked up a smooth hill that was covered in a sheet of ice. My old supervisor slid all the way back down the hill like an out of control skier finally roping himself around a tree. The lady had on high heel boots under her gray pants and made it all the way up! Yet then she had to replace them with steel toe safety boots because we were in a facility at the top. And I was still bare foot in there.In another dream a small group of us were playing Dungeons and Dragons. We were presented with a situation where we either could parlay or attack. My character attacked and was killed. My brother decided to dungeon master a D&D campaign. I opened a large trunk to dig out my stuff. Some of it was outdated old stuff but some was newer. It was suggested I make an archer type guy but I wanted another brawler, melee swords guy. I went to the kitchen very late at night and the kitchen was FULL of food. I'm talking like over-flowing as if someone had just gone shopping and the place was filled for a year. The fridge was pretty full also.So those were my dreams from Monday morning.The other day I had one where I was walking around my old junior high school in just my underwear! The other night I was a congress man along with a couple of my co-workers. It was in sort of an auditorium room from my old high school. We voted to allow a new drug company to sell across state lines. I voted 'yes' to that. I voted 'no' on the bill to force people to mow their lawns. I then wish I had said 'yes' because it forced towns to mow highways and malls to mow their lawns and created jobs doing so.
I hit a new high in Wii bowling yesterday. It was a score of 233. I think I had 9 strikes including three straight to end the game. And I think I had four straight to start the game.

My clothes washer drainage issues may be over. Some work was one by the brother that lives with me. We need to test what he did to see if it works. If it doesn’t, it may be a big problem.

Started working on some new Minutemen stuff. I don’t know if it’ll ever see print but it is fun to create and design characters. It is probably my favorite thing to do.

New review for the comic!

http://www.comicbloc.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=991&Itemid=57

Sweet! Thanks Joshua!

And my friend Jason Embury has become a bit of a big wig with Big City Comics. Go Jason!

A good day for comic book news.

again, the past weekend

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Another decent weekend overall.

The bad was that I cancelled on WW Philly. My friends gave me some static on it but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

I have a situation were my washing machine drain is backed up pretty badly. Since I’m totally ignorant on plumbing it has me kind of worried. It’s a really weird set up that may be fixed cheaply or it could be expensive. It’s added to my worry about Philly in case it is expensive to fix. Remedies from my friends ranged from possible expensive fixes like a new dry well to the ridiculous – just hook a hose up and have it drain into your backyard. Yeah, that last one was a serious suggestion.

My dad’s birthday was Sunday. A bunch of us were at the homestead for good chow and cheer. I was surprised that half sheet cake was $25.00! At least I got it $12.00 after a ‘gold coin’. My local supermarket has a random thing where you press a button to win coins that give you savings. Recently I’ve won 2 reds, 1 blue and 1 gold. Nobody wins gold because that the big winner. My parents have been shopping there for years and have never won a gold coin. I also bought a small ice cream cake for the party. It went over well. It only had the diameter of about a grown man’s spread hand. That cost $10.00. I got it for $5 using my red coin.

I’m painting the floors at work part of this week in prep for a company bigwig coming next week. It’s not a bad gig overall. To listen to my co-worker though you think he was assigned to murder people instead of painting. Even when the supervisor said he wouldn’t put the guy on the same detail tonight the guy kept going on and on. He just wouldn’t let it go even though the situation was solved. The same guy’s pretty weird. He’s a bit of a dick actually. He was hired as a packer. That’s all he wants to do or he bitches – badly! I almost told him ‘why would an employer want to keep you? You have totally limited skills.’ But I let it go. The guy’s stuck in his ways. He told me how his old supervisor at his old job treated him like shit until my now co-worker quit. That took 7 years. But it sounded more like my current co-worker was a bit of a deadbeat than a beneficial employee.

I’ve gotten some more inking done on the comic. It’s coming along slowly but surely. For me, the front cover is usually the hardest. Sometimes but not often I get a really clear image of what I want. That’s not the case this time. It’ll be the last thing I draw I suspect.

I’ve been on the internet too much lately. It comes and goes in spurts. Lately I’ve been hitting comic book forums talking about New Excalibur by Marvel Comics. I want to like the title so much but it’s not happening. Now my all-time favorite writer is leaving the title. Unfortunately, I haven’t enjoyed his writing for some time which really gets me down. I like a number of his newer concepts but his execution of those concepts leaves me wanting. Maybe I’ve just gotten use to all his tricks and he has nothing new to say to me. In any case, it’s a total downer.