Well, look who decided to stop by..! A fragment of the past.

March 15, 2014

Wow.
I'm really pretty bad at maintaining these blogs...

But, I'm always optimistic that I'll finally get my shit together with these things. Or I'm living in denial.

Anyway, here it is St. Patrick's Day weekend (Mar. 17 is the holiday), and just three days ago, we had about a foot of snow drop on us through the day. I don't know if we still have significant snowfall left in there rest of our Winter (according to the calendar), but counting today, there's only 5 days left of it: the first day of Spring is Thursday, March 20. We'll see what happens.
And we'll see if we get  snow when it becomes Spring.
Cripes, it's been a pretty brutal winter this 2013-2014 season.
Well, let me amend that. For the first time in about three or four years, we've had a pretty consistent, snowy winter, which sounds strange since I live in the Western New York (WNY) area, it's most famous city being Buffalo. There are areas to the south of Buffalo that are traditionally known as the snow belt regions because they pick up snow off the Great Lakes. We live north of Buffalo, and in past years, we may have a couple times during the season where we have some significant snowfall but mostly, we've been dodging the bullet in terms of constantly shoveling. Which is good, because I drive an itty bitty Chevy Aveo. I like the car (my wife HATES it, in terms of driving it or being a passenger in it. I think she can live with looking at it.) but come the snow, it's really just a toy car and I can easily get stuck if there's any real accumulation of snow. So, I've been lucky these past few years.
But this season, with the so-called Polar Vortex, etc., we've had more traditional snowfalls, and the guys at my work who live in areas like Orchard Park, Springville, Collins, boy, they've done their share of shoveling over multiple days.

So, this past Wednesday (3/12), we were having predictions for a terrible storm coming through through the night before. As it turns out, my wife didn't have to go to work, so I was able to go to work in the "Supercar," her Subaru Outback. And at work, we wound up just tearing through all our printing jobs and leaving as soon as we were done to try and beat the snowfall that was to come up in the latter part of the day. We wound up leaving about 3 hours earlier, plus, all schools and most businesses were either closed or closing early, so when I left for home, it was kind of cool and weird, because it was like the SuperBowl was on or something-- not many cars were on the road.
It only took me a little over an hour to get home (versus a good 45 minutes during regular rush hour traffic) and later that night, I shoveled our driveway and sidewalk before going to bed. I waited until late in case more snow fell, and I didn't want to shovel too much in the morning before work Thursday morning, especially since I'm really NOT a morning person. Fortunately, we have a fairly small driveway, but we did have about a foot of snow, so it was a solid hour of sweating for a fat guy who doesn't exercise as regularly as he should (uh, I'm talking about me).

April 17, 2017

...And, uh, yeah.
There you go.
I wrote the above three years ago and left it. I just re-read it and have no idea where I was going with it. Sorry.
In hindsight, it’s interesting to know that the following happens in my life, though:
A month later, in April 2014, the place where I work (Metro Community News, which printed weekly shopper papers, like the Pennysaver, although we didn’t print Pennysavers specifically) will be sold to James Austin, the publisher of the Angola Pennysaver. This isn’t a complete surprise because ad sales had been diminishing prior to this. That is, it was a complete surprise that we were sold; I had never heard of James Austin prior to the sale.
Metro’s president, Bernard* Bradpiece (and also president and CEO of Strategic Publications), and Metro’s upper management had been struggling for a while to figure out how to deal with the impact of the internet on classified sales. And at the first company meeting with Austin, my department learned that we were eventually going to be out of work because his plan was to find another printer rather than print our own. We just didn’t know when that would happen (it would be mid-August, 2014).

So, that’s one thing I can add after re-reading this. But, I really don’t know or remember at all what my actual point was. Was it about snowfall? Maybe. Was it about how out of shape I was which I realized when I was shoveling? Maybe.
I have no clue.
However, later that same month, this happens...

Anyway, I saw this draft sitting here (along with at least three other unfinished posts), so I thought I’d formally "tie up" at least one loose end here.

April 19, 2017

You know, it occurs to me that one clue about what I might have been wanting to write about was either comic- or art-related because, hey! This is (supposedly) my comic and art blog! Hey, and also, duh! So, maybe I can figure out what I was going to talk about... maybe I did some drawing? Or was working on a comic book story? If so, I was probably writing...

(To be continued?)


*pronounced BIR-nerd, emphasis on the first syllable.