I have to choose between traditional (and very good) insurance vs a high deductible health insurance plan by tomorrow. It would be a no-brainer except that we will have to shell out approximately $100 per month for the traditional plan while the high deductible plan comes with a health savings account (HSA) into which $100 per month will be deposited, and it is portable. So at some level I have to figure out whether I will use more than $2400 of insurance next year.

In other news, life is stressful, I'm behind on everything and I led a pretty crummy board meeting this weekend. And I'm not running enough.

Last year at this time, I felt equally as bad and I regained a lot of equilibrium over Thanksgiving. I hope that happens this year too. If it doesn't, I might run away.

Posting frequency is obviously way down, and that's largely because the novelty index is down too these days. The progress of the oddly demarcated seasons here remains interesting to me, but perhaps not so much to you any more. I also am spending a lot of time and thought these days with a bunch of fictional characters, and it's neither helpful to me nor interesting to you if I write about them here instead of in the places where they belong.

There's a door handle on a meeting room here at work that looks like it should turn, but it doesn't. It's just a handle for pushing.

I've been a little prickly in the nose and sore-throaty lately, with a bit of a cough; experiencing some attendant paranoia but basically otherwise fine.

The cottage in the back still isn't rented. Scott the landlord is getting pretty worried.

Today I am mostly sad about Sunny, who is a dog only a handful of you know. I'm about to leave the building early, run a few time-sensitive errands, and finish the day from home.

To be fair about my paralyzed reaction to this sort of contact, I had no idea how to deal with boys, despite being about 13 and having almost only male friends. Up until that year (when Gareth noticed I was female), I was...um... I had a singular style, and never had to think about boys beyond how much I enjoyed hanging out with them and playing Ren and Stimpy on Sega Genesis.

In order to draw this comic, I did a little research into bottle-base sidewalks. They were made to illuminate the basements below the city buildings, because NYC is so crammed that it's mostly built up and down. Turns out, there are a TON in downtown Manhattan, where I was a kid. They exist in other cities too, but they aren't that common, anymore. What's really sad is that a lot of them are wearing away-- the prisms busting out and breaking. But look: aren't they fascinatingly beautiful?

I spent this week totally re-organizing and cleaning out my studio, so I'm sorry I don't have a proper comic for you guys (but I've started one). Instead, I thought I'd share some of the work being done by my 10-year-old comics students, and some of my thoughts on teaching comics to kids. (Also, if you'd like to see the first five handouts I made for the class, you can read them here)

( My students are just brilliant. I have nothing to do with it. )

Man, kids comics are absolutely the best.