"Post No. 679"

I swear I saw Wooly Mammoths walking around outside. Well...okay, maybe I didn't, but I'm really tired on this frigid weather here in South-Central, Kentucky which has been going on for the past week, and the worst may be yet to come with a snow storm scheduled to move into this area Thursday night adding to our misery. Perhaps it's not as bad as it is in New England and other areas North, but these people expect it to be bad like that every winter. Here we usually have a kinder season with slight amounts of snow, but every 20 years or so we go through this cycle which brings the ice and snow.

Last January we had this terrible ice storm that knocked out power for some residents of the state for more than a month, bringing down power lines and trees and in general disrupting the entire state to the point that it was declared an emmergency situation. The snow itself held off for the better part then, but I expect another falling of the white crap similiar to the one we had in the early 1980's when blizzard-like conditions pretty much kept everyone inside for over a week.

Sorry I haven't been around posting in a while now (over a month) but I got an unexpected "Christmas present" on Christmas Eve; a computer virus that's infected my whole pc. It was obviously from someone that I trusted and opened up an attachment on a email from him. The guy may not have even known it was infected, but it's a trogan and one that is trying to steal my passwords, so until I can get that system cleaned out and my XP reloaded, I'll have to blog from my mom's pc.

Christmas went okay this year. My wife and I went down to mom's and made a Christmas dinner for her and my cousin and aunt and we had a good Christmas gathering with family. Debbie made me a "throw" this year that had illustrations of the Beatles from their 1960's cartoon show, which is pretty neat. ("Bobcat" gave me a new pair of house slippers.) A late "present" of sorts was from my good old friend Steve who brought me a set of the original 1986-87 DC Comics Watchmen series, as well as a hardcover reprint of the 1950's St. John Tor comics, both of which I quite enjoyed. It was nice to re-read those issues of Tor which reprinted the first issue of 1,000,000 B.C. as well as the two 3-D issues that were produced. At one time or another I've had a couple of these, plus the DC reprint set produced in the 1970's. Joe Kubert, like Steve Ditko, had a great influence on my own artwork, and at times I find their very early artwork hard to distinguish from each other (although both artists styles changed later on to be quite unique, with Kubert in his more sketchy style, and Ditko using the more fluid, round-body building techniques).

Steve, when he visted, offered to give me a ride to the comic book shop which was still having their 25% off sale on all store stock, but I sadly declined this time due to lack of funds and when I don't have any extra cash, I sort of find going to such a sale as a mute point. This past year has hit me so hard financially that I rarely have extra cash for anything save the bills, groceries and gas these days, and my "Christmas bonus" this time was more like a "Christmas insult" with it being about half of what I got in 2008, that I just put it all in the bank just to live on.

And...that's it at the moment. Please excuse any typoes as I'm doing this pretty fast. Just wanted to touch base with everyone and wish a Happy New Year to all, and I'll try to post a little more often in 2010.