"Weekend of The 4th."

And here we are beginning the second half of the year 2007. As usual, time has really slipped away and I know what everyone always told me when I was a kid, that "the older you get the quicker time goes!"

A lot has happened just since the first of the year with my family, with my father going into a nursing home and my father-in-law passing away. We're hoping for some better fortune in the second half of '07.

I'm off from work this weekend here before the 4th., and the work I'm trying to play catch up with really began on Friday night after I got off from work when I went by my mom's and fixed her outdoor swing and filled up a large gas container so I could mow her (and my own) yard.

So I got up about 8AM Saturday to begin the day and sat around the house trying just to wake up until around 9:30AM, watching an episode of the animated "Legion of Super-Heroes", which to my delight was a new episode (or, at least one I hadn't seen), then went down to the local flea market for a few minutes and walked around (didn't buy anything), stopped by and got gasoline for my next week's work travel and stopped by a yard sale on the way back home (didn't buy anything there, either).

Getting home I walked down the street to mom's, aired ("pumped") up a flat tire on her riding lawn mower and mowed as much of her yard as I could with that, then brought it back to my house to do the same.

Then, after eating a bite of lunch, got out the push mower and drug it back down mom's to do the trim work and used the weed-eater around her house, and drug the mower BACK to my house to finish up my own trim work to find that the mower had suddently died on me. The pulley was broken somehow (and this, being an OLD push mower, it'll be easier for me to either buy a new or good used one that to have it fixed). So I was going to look around for another mower, but got out the old thing and worked on it for 45 minutes and "lo n' behold" fixed it again, and finished the trim work on the yard.

Then, I worked more on finishing the back of the house where for the last month or so, a couple of hours after work each day (and for several hours any day I had off) I've been enclosing the old screened-in back room, which as I've stated before never became a sun room anyway due to all of my wife's craft "junk" and I got tired of the neighbors seeing all of the mess so I decided to cover it all up and make it attractive to the view.

Thus far, I've got ALL three sides of this room enclosed, and am currently working on the green trim to the back. The window on the rear has been framed and covered in lattise and everything's been painted. What I need to have the basics finished is the remaining green (against the white) trim and new wood at the bottom (and painting that), then painting the back concrete steps hunter green to match the trim.

Eventually I'm going to build an extended deck on the side where the back door is and have the steps come out from the side rather than the rear of the structure. These have always been narrow steps and difficult to get up and put things in the storage room there from the rear, and a deck would certainly make it much easier.

I also have this area where I used to have a work table at the back that's now barren earth which I want to cover "somehow". It's in the shade so I don't think anything would grow there (including grass), so I'm considering framing the area with bricks and filling it in with gravel and making a rock garden in that spot. I want the bricks to be special, however, and with them tearing down the old Owen's Hotel (which I've mentioned in previous posts) I thought it might be a good way to preserve a little bit of that history and use those bricks for the project. I've already gotten permission from the city to do so, and am just waiting for bricks to be available.

Yet another old historic structure was recently torn down; the old Town's Hotel that was on Main Street in in my home town. This was used as a hotel for years, then later as a bording house and finally just as a home, but recently the bank next to it bought the property and tore down the old structure just to make a parking lot. Quite an outrageous thing to do, I felt, as the building was structurally sound and looked really nice, and 'why" this bank needed yet another parking area is beyon me since they have a large lot in the back and even the city has a parking lot right next to them. But then, I discovered ong ago that no one IN this town really cares about their local heritage unless it has something to do with making money. Any hoo...they have loose bricks there now as well and I could incorporate those as well into my remodeling plans and preserve a little more history there, too.


In other things... I got in coverless copies of both the Brave and The Bold(DC) #34(1961: First Silver-Age App. of "Hawkman & Hawkgirl"), AND Rip Hunter...Time Master (DC) #1 (1961) (4th. app. "Rip Hunter" after his Showcase try-out issues) in the mail and was able to make some half-way decent color photocopies from scans of complete issues listed for sale on line. They'll make some decent filler "reading copies" now. I've discovered that if one decides to use someone's scans, it's always better to get larger ones and reduce them down that smaller ones and blow them up as enlargening the image loses a lot of detail. A silver-age comic's dimensions should be around 675x995 pixels, whereas a GOLDEN Age comic is more like 725x1005 pixel size. (Anything "modern" to me isn't worth making a cover for unless it's pretty darn rare...like maybe a Incredible Hulk 181, or somethin'...).

This makes two of the 4 different B&B "Hawkman" tryout issues before he appeared for a few issues in Mystery In Space, then finally his own title, my other app. being a B&B 36 (which is in pretty decent and complkete shape and was the image used on the DC Superhero U.S. Postage Stamp last year). That was certainly a wonderful time for DC Comics, from 1959 - 1963 or so, either inventing new characters from the Golden-Age counterparts or re-introducing the original GA ones. First we had "The Flash", "Green Lantern" and "The Justice League" (which was pretty much just a modern "Justice Society"), and "The Atom" and "Hawkman", and along the way both "Green Arrow" and "Aquaman" were given new origin tales, and then the GA characters like the original "Flash" and the "JSA" members were all brought back, even well up into the mid 1960's with characters such as "Dr. Fate" and "Hourman" getting Showcase issues. It was a great time to be alive and buying/reading comics as a kid, that's for sure!

Then, at the flea market this morning I picked up BOTH TPB volumes of Art Spiegleman's MAUS for a mere fifty cents each. Wasn't any way I was going to let those die the "flea market" death (and they'll be added to my personal collection even tho' I already have both volumes in hardcover).

And finally...over on my "Beatles & Bizarros" blog site (link to the right top column) I've added yet another 2 Beatles appearances in pre-1970 silver-age comics to the list (Thanks, Jerro!). This makes 92 different app.s, cameos and/or mentions of the Fab Four just in the silver-age issues/titles, and I'm sure that there are more (somewhere). Archie Comics definately has the most app.'s and mentions due to their titles being teen-oriented.

(And...I'm outta here.)