"Post No. 709"

This is the first year I've started having some decent luck with growing tomatos. We picked one ripe tomato last night and had it with our meal (Ummm-Ummm, Good!) and I picked another one today. The two plants I set early ("Early Girls") are 4 foot tall and really producing, and the eight others ("Jet Stars") are over a foot tall butr they'll be late bloomers, planted a few weeks later than the first group. Hopefully we'll have tomatos all Summer from these unless the blight gets them.

Was going to Elizabethtown today to stop by Peddler's Mall and a few other places and had my alarm set for 5:30 AM (they're an hour ahead of us) so we could get up there early and back before it got too hot, but as luck has it I had another one of those fitful nights where I didn't get to sleep until at least 2:AM. I fell back to sleep and didn't wake up until 10 o'clock.

So instead my wife and I walked down to mom's to visit a while with my Aunt Shirley who was down from Martinsville, Indiana. Stayed a couple of hours then back home where I'm contemplating going back down later on and trimming scrubs.

In other things....

I won 24 different issues of the 1988 DC series Checkmate recently so when those get in I figure I'll only need #'s 19, 21-24 (or, five issues total) having the full set of 33 issues of that title. Shouldn't be a hard one to finally complete, (although I've said the same about the 1980's Captain Atom series which I need the same number of issues now for a good four years).

I did pick up a half dozen or so misc. "modern" type comics the other day at the local book store which included a couple of those JLA Annuals Giffen wrote back in the '80's (fun stuff), and a Peter Parker Spider-man v2 #42 which had mentions of The Beatles and Yoko Ono (added to the listing over on the "Beatles & Bizarros" blog).

Read through those issues of Rocky Hartberg's Cole Black comics (published by Boardman Books) and enjoyed same. I got issues 6, 9 & 10, none of which I'd read before and it was great to read this series again after not seeing any around for 20 years or so. "Cole Black" was one of those alternate titles caught up in the great "comic book implosion" back around '88 and that's a shame as it was one of the titles that truely was worth buying and reading. I was also sent gratis a copy of The Art of Denis McLaughlin which reprints UK sci-fi hero stories from the 1950's. Excellant stuff there! All well-worth the recommendation to read.