That I am tired.  Tired of driving my kids hither and yon 24/7.  I used to enjoy my time with them much more than I do now, I think.  At least I remember enjoying it, but these days I am a taxi driver and breaker upper of fights, a walker of eggshells (with my oldest at least) an ump and a maid much more than I am a snuggler and a reader of bedtime stories, a kisser of boo boos and a dreamer of dreams.

Yes, we are firmly entrenched in the world of teens, preteens and tweens.  (Oh my!)  Siiiiggghhhh.  What this house needs is a baby!   Shhhh.  But don’t tell my husband I said that.

…Can’t we all just get along?

On the home front it’s been almost a month on P90x.  I haven’t missed a workout and I’ve lost 12 lbs.  (I am not following the diet.  I am following a much stricter diet which is working for me.  FINALLY)!  The downside is that I havent’ missed a workout and I’m following a very strict diet, so I am exhausted AND cranky AND feeling very sorry for myself.  Gee, I guess I’ll go have an apple to make myself feel better.

Man, that was a totally depressing sentence to write!

And, after all this, I still can’t do one damn pullup unassisted.  But, you will be happy to know, my legs are looking fabulous!

Anyway, sorry for the delay with the toons.  The biggest reason they keep being so tardy is something I cannot share, so I will just end on a high note.  I have quit one of my jobs (my family really needs me to be home.  We just don’t have the kind of family where two working outside of the home parents is feasible), and this should ease some of the time crunch I have been feeling.  The toons posted are for this past week (Mon-Friday…today!)  Better late than never!

First, new toons are up.  They are for last week (10/19-10/23).  Sorry for the delay. I really am not as big a flake as it appears that I am.  Here’s the deal.  I am working part time now, and so a huge chunk of my time is gone.  I also have 5 kids with multiple needs and wants and demands, I’ve started exercising again… there’s just not enough time in the day.  I have time to write my cartoons (I have a TON written) and I have time to draw it, but I cannot seem to find the chunks of time it takes to ink it and put them into the computer.  I am trying to work it out.  Sigh… I think I just need to demand some ME time from the very demanding folks I live with.

I mean, some of the stuff I’ve written I just love!  Anyway, about these cartoons… when I reread them before I posted them I realized that I’d posted too many in a week where Manny is poking fun at Eve.  I don’t want to make him a dick, (well, not a COMPLETE one!) and so next week I’ll have to try to balance this out.  I do like them, even though he’s not being very nice.  I think they are funny and Manny and Eve do have a rather combative relationship even on a good day… my point is I am aware of it and next week we’ll maybe see Eve’s revenge.

In other news, my husband and I started P90X this week and it is HARD!  I’m actually not as sore as I anticipated being, but I am sore.  During the plyometrics tape I actually had to stop it or I would have thrown up.  Totally not used to that level of jumping around.  And they kept asking us if our heartrates were in the zone.  Um, no.  Pretty sure mine was just a wee bit too high…  So far I like it a lot.

Taking the before pictures was not so fun.  I really don’t need them hanging around.  I can’t imagine being one of those people who post their before and after pix.  Because no matter how great the after is, you are still letting the whole world in on how nasty you looked underneath it all before.  No thank you.  But I am interested in seeing if there is a change for myself.  I am following a modified version of the diet (less calories) and I am upping the cardio portion a bit since I want to lose weight and this is not billed as a weightloss program.  It’s for getting people who are at or near their goal bodies into the best shape possible.  …I just kinda skipped over the part about being at or near my goal body.  Oh well, hidey ho, maybe it’ll still work!

By the end of this thing I want to be able to do at least 5 pullups unassisted (right now I can do half of one.  Pretty pathetic).  At one point in my life I could do quite a few, but that time is not THIS time.  Then, I had both youth and fitness on my side.  Now I have middle age and sloth.  Let’s just say, it’s a different place where I find myself now.

Anyone else out there doing this workout?  Done it before?  Thoughts?

…Eve and Manny totally need to do it together.  I mean, it is RIPE for the pickins’…

I have been SO sick the last few weeks!  Sicker than I can remember being in years and years.  Just when I’d think I was getting better, I’d suddenly plunge downhill again.  I finally went to the doctor and got some antibiotics (I figured it wasn’t viral as I was the only one in the house who was sick) and man, I feel sooooo much better now!  I don’t think I’ll wait so long to go to the doctor’s again.  Thankfully, I have health insurance though.  I have a friend with none and she has to pay ridiculous amounts of money right up front to be seen.  It’s shameful.  But… that’s not what I wanted to blog about tonight.  (Another time, perhaps?)

My point was, this was not the flu.  No fever or body aches, just a persistant, awful, miserable cold.  Why did this hit me so hard?  I am in fairly decent shape, I’m not old (well, to some I am, but I say to those babies, go put your pacifiers back in your mouth and hush)!  Why couldn’t I shake this cold?  And then it hit me.  In the three weeks I was sick I suffered two significant losses.  Our dog was the first and though I know plenty of people who don’t mourn for their pets and who would think I am crazy for doing so, I really am grieving for Luna.  The other was a loss of a different kind, but it left me no less grief-stricken.  I think that I got and stayed so sick because I was ill AND sad and this is a very bad combination.

And then, just when my antibiotic engorged cells were making me feel better physically, something really neat happened that seems to have snapped me out of my mental funk as well.  Honestly, right now I am feeling perfectly marvelous and that is a very nice change after a very difficult few weeks.  This really neat thing that happened concerns my oldest daughter (I’ll call her Clementine as  I am not comfortable sharing her real name.  Suffice it to say, it ain’t Clementine)!

Anyway, Clementine is very musically gifted.  She plays 3 instruments, reads music fluently, and writes her own songs.  She also likes to sing, but I have never paid that much attention to her voice.  I knew she could pretty much sing on key, but she was always shy about singing in front of me, so I mostly heard her singing in the shower and in her room through her closed door.  As far as I could tell, she had an okay voice.  Not great but she didn’t suck either.  Just… average.  In fact, she told us this year that she wanted to try out for American Idol and we talked her out of it.  We were very blunt with her and told her that they were looking for the next Christina Aguilera, and that wasn’t her.  That if she had a bad audition, it could be broadcast for sport to a national audience.  So she didn’t try out.  She knows a girl that did though and she didn’t even make it in to see the judges, and she’s got a pretty good voice.  Definitely good enough to see the judges at least, I’d think!  (Though she isn’t a freak, so there is that…)

Anyway, then last  year Clem tried out for some play or something and she sang Summertime and apparently she was fantastic.  All her friends kept telling me what a marvelous voice she had but she would never sing it for me.  I even tried to bribe her, to no avail.  I put it down to the hyperbole of friendship and thought nothing else of it.  Then this year Clem decided to try out for the talent show.  She played three songs for me and asked me to pick one for her to sing.  I wasn’t familiar with any of the songs (one was a John Mayer one, I remember that) so I picked the one I thought was the prettiest.  I had no idea if she could do it justice or not.

Clem made the talent show and then steadfastly refused to sing her song for me.  I have no idea why she is so nervous about singing in front of me and not in front of the entire school!  To make a long story only a little bit shorter, the talent show was this past weekend.  I was SO nervous for her.  When she walked out on stage I literally hunched over in my seat and squeezed my eyes shut and prayed “Please don’t suck!  Please don’t suck!  Please don’t SUCK!”

And she opened her mouth and…  blew the fricking roof off the place!  My baby can SANG!!!!  It was one of the neatest things I have ever witnessed.  I had completely underestimated my daughter and I thoroughly enjoyed being proven wrong.  It was all I could do not to twirl my panythose over my head and scream “Go Clem, go!!!” and stomp and whistle repeatedly  before running a couple or three laps around the auditorium pumping my fists and hyperventilating…  perhaps I’ll save that for her graduation from college…

Anyway, so I taped it.  Our camera has been thrown about a bit by my kids and is still functional, but the video portion is kind of broken.  Suffice it to say, I got an audio tape of her performance, but you couldn’t see anything on the video.  I got home and told my husband how good she was and he didn’t believe me.  Kind of rolled his eyes and smirked.  Suuurrre she is.  Uh huh.  Sure.  So I played him the tape.  After 30 seconds he got this big ol’ grin on his face and said in an awed voice, “WHEN did she get good?!”  Followed by, “Are you sure that’s OUR Clem?”

I tell you, it was like… it’s like finding out your child has secretly been going to medical school or something, and you find out about it  by happening upon them performing complicated  surgery out of the blue (well, maybe it’s not EXACTLY like that but I’m sure it’s close…)

So, the next night Sawyer’s aide offered to watch him so we could go to the show as a family and this was marvelous.  Clem sang it even better the second night.  Then we found out that this local music guru was also blown away by my baby and he has asked her to sing backup vocals on some record!  She will get paid good money for this.  My baby’s first gig!  I am so proud I am about to break out in hives!

I still hope she stays away from American Idol (that show can chew you up and spit you out) but I have learned my lesson.  I will never again underestimate my kids or try to talk them out of something they want to do.  Sink or swim, they should always be encouraged to try.  I thought I was protecting her, but by doing that I was actually holding her back.  I don’t know if God wants her to pursue singing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if He does.  Clem has always wanted to be a Vet, but lately she’s been talking of double majoring (pre-med and music).  The desire is there, the talent is there, the luck and the looks (you KNOW it’s a factor!) are there… who knows?

To sum up, finding out my baby is a sublime singer has both knocked my socks off AND knocked me out of my funk, and I am so very grateful for it.

Highly recommended…

(Toon to be posted tomorrow.  Sorry for the delay again).

Sorry about the glitch. Last night we had some minor computer problems. But now, the strips that were due last week are up.

Again, sorry for the delay. New toon due on Monday now.

A few weeks ago I went to pick up something I needed from a friend’s house. At the time, she was very sick with the flu and when I got there it was like a plague house from the middle ages. She opened the front door as I came up the steps and waved me off. She threw me her keys and told me to get what I needed from the garage and then leave her keys down there. Don’t come up, you DON’T want to catch this!

Let me tell you, it freaked me right on out. I went home and scrubbed my hands and hoped I didn’t catch anything.

Well, I didn’t catch the flu but I have come down with a horrible cold. And it’s just lingering on and on and on. I feel sicker now than I did last week. I sound like crap as I have almost completely lost my voice, and my cough sounds like a wet death rattle (now THERE’S a vivid image)!

And the thing is, I never get sick. The last cold I had was years ago. The other thing is that I’m the only one in my house that’s sick! How unfair is that? And where the hell did I pick up this bug?! (Being as I’m fanatical about hand-washing). And the thing is, I don’t even get to enjoy being sick. To get a nice break and lie down while people bring me hot soup and sandwiches. No, apparently life is determined to just keep marching on no matter HOW I happen to feel. …I HATE that.

Which is why it has taken me so long to post my cartoons (I am about to post the missing one’s for this week. Tuesday through Friday. Which means that yes, this week I only manged to do Sunday and Monday. I suck). Anyway, remember, I take Saturday’s and Sunday’s off, so my next cartoon will be on Monday. I should be better by then. No, REALLY. At least I HOPE I am.

On the bright side, at least I’m losing weight!

Today we picked up the ashes of our dog Luna from the vet’s office. It was a very sad thing to get back this small, heavy little canister and realize that it was all that was left of our good friend. In the spring, we are going to plant a tree and bury her ashes underneath it, along with the ashes of our cat Butterscotch who died 2 years ago. Let me tell you, I’m glad our cats are just kittens right now and will hopefully live good long lives because I am not emotionally ready for another death.

That being said, we have started discussing what kind of dog we’d eventually like to get. Luna was black lab mix. We got her from the pound, so I don’t know what her other mix was. I always suspected it was a doberman because she had a very deep bark and she was a very protective of us, and she had a doberman’s small, fine head. She was a good mix. The joy and friendliness of the lab mixed with the dobie’s protective nature. What a great dog.

All we do know is that we don’t want a really small dog (they can’t get out of the way like kittens can and someone would trample it in this house!), nor do we want a huge dog. No terriers because they dig too much and we don’t want a dog that barks constantly either. I’d take another lab in a heartbeat but Luna’s hips were bad and they were bad from the time she was quite young, and they got progressively worse. Add arthritis to the mix and she was a hobbled dog in pain. It was horrible to watch her decline and I don’t want to do it again. So no breeds with bad hips either. And they have to be good with children.

I was leaning strongly towards a border collie because they are so beautiful, but then I started wondering how barky they were. They’re herding dogs… probably QUITE barky. Hmmmm…..

So, being in need of some fresh ideas and perspective, I thought I’d ask this here. What kind of dog should we get? What are your favorite breeds and why? We will most likely get this dog from the pound too, but the pounds here are SO full of dogs all the time that we really will be able to decide on a breed and just go save one. …Probably.

We will not be getting a dog until next year some time, but I want to get this decision finalized.

I’ll keep you posted on what we decide.

I admire Bill Clinton for a lot of reasons. First off, I just LOVE adultery. …Kidding! I just thought we’d haul that elephant in the room right out of the corner and into the light before moving on! Ok, so that’s adultery, not so fond of, Bill Clinton? Love him. The reason I like him so much is that he’s so different than me. He’s charming and outgoing. A people person who is also fiercely intelligent and well-educated. He appears to have been a good father to Chelsea and I thought he was a good President. Oh, and I adore his wife.

What in the world does all of this have to do with cartooning? Well, I am getting to that, in my roundabout way. The other day I posted about my experiences being syndicated. I was nervous about putting all of that into the everlasting print of the internet, but I thought it needed to be said. I posted it on my first day back because I kind of wanted to sneak that one in under the radar when no one was reading over here anymore. Yes, it’d still be in print, but soon enough it’d be pushed back in the archives and you REALLY have to love a blog to pour back over the archives. But then it was picked up by the Daily cartoonist (Great site, but the way) and suddenly I am getting a lot of traffic and emails about a subject that I’m still uneasy that I wrote about.

It would have been much funner (not a word. I KNOW!) to write about being so wildly successful that people were literally shoving money at me from all directions. To be able to shit and have it turn to gold. To have newspaper editors chasing me down and throwing great handfuls of money at me (like I assume they do to Jim Davis). To have it falling out of my pockets and tripping the masses, instead of bleeding money like my cartoon actually did. Sigh…

Oh, I don’t regret writing that post. Not REALLY. I’ve wanted to tell this story for a year and I’m not embarrassed by my story or about my honesty. It’s just that I am an intensely private person who just aired their laundry publically. For good or bad you’ve seen me bloomers. But, at least they were clean…

I do have regrets about my syndication story. Mostly that I chose to stay in the background and in the dark about so much that was happening with Clear Blue Water. I am NOT like Bill Clinton (no, I didn’t forget him. I’m bringin’ it on home!) I am not a natural salesman. I am not a bull-shitter, a charmer, a glad-hander. I am a natural wallflower. I like to watch people but not actually interact with them too much. I’m a shy loner, not to put too fine of a point on it, and I think that not being able to overcome my natural personality was a detriment in this instance.

If Bill Clinton had drawn and written Clear Blue Water, if he hadn’t changed a thing, if every gag was exactly the same, I GUARANTEE it would have been wildly successful. It would be in every newspaper in the country. The gags would be on everyone’s lips. Not because I think Clear Blue Water is better than everything out there, but because I’ve come to realize that the person behind the cartoon really can make or break it. They really can. He would have made it a success DESPITE the marginal art. Despite the niche audience appeal. Despite all of it’s flaws.

Bill Watterson does not need to be like Bill Clinton. …I did.

What would Clinton have done differently than me? First, he would have charmed the pants off of everyone he met. By the time he got off the phone or left the syndicate every person he met would have been desperate to work their tail off to make him successful. I’m sure he’d have worked the phone and sent out letters and by golly, somehow, coming from him it wouldn’t be irritating. At the very least he would have faced his checks with complete confidence that they were going to keep increasing rather than fear that it was all going to fade away…

What I’m trying to say is that Clinton would have been a success no matter what he was trying to do in life. If film making had caught his fancy, he’d be Spielberg. And if cartooning had caught his fancy, he would NOT be me.

What I wanted to do was cartoon, not be a businessman. I let the syndicate handle everything. I rarely questioned them and I never made waves. And this did not work out too well for me. If I was to get syndicated again, I don’t know if I could do anything differently. I would WANT to, and I would try to, but moving out of my comfort zone is hard for me.

Hence this post…

I have a useful tip for any of you suffering from a bad cold.  This will most likely not work on that porky flu thing going around, but your run-of-the-mill cold is ripe for the pickins.  A few years back, someone told me that if you had a cold, you should slather your feet in vicks vapor rub, put socks on, and go to bed for the night.  In the morning, you would be feeling better.  It seemed like a ridiculous claim, AND, being a bit of a hypochondriac, I worried that it might stop my breathing or my heart (how could it possibly do this?  I am such a dork!) and so I never tried it.

Cut to this week.  I have been around a bunch of little kids lately and they are hot beds of infection.  Literally oozing with snotty, germy goodness.  And I have picked up my first cold in about 2 years.  It sucks and I was pretty miserable.  And then I remembered the Vicks.  I didn’t think we actually had any in the house (I know I’ve never bought it before) but lo and behold, there was a small bottle in our medicine cabinet.  God only knows where it came from but it wasn’t expired and that was good enough for me!

So, feeling foolish, I slathered my feet up, put on my socks and went to sleep. Before I fell asleep I felt like an ass because it didn’t appear to be doing anything. I still felt bad and gross  and phlemghy and sorry for myself.

The next morning I awoke feeling like a million bucks.  I didn’t feel sick at all.  Now, I didn’t stay well.  My cold symptoms started coming on again after a few hours and that night I was sick again. (I didn’t try the Vicks for a second night, but next time I will.  Anything for science!)

My conclusion?  It works!  For a while.  If you have something important you need to do in the morning, it’s totally worth a shot.

DISCLAIMER:  Ask your doctor before trying this.  When they stop laughing, they will most likely tell you that it’s harmless.  But the last thing I need is for an allergic reaction or a death to occur on my say so.  So I’m warning you DON’T try this without talking to your doctor and especially don’t try this on your kids without checking with a doctor first.  And if you decide to do it and then you die, don’t come running to me for payment.  The coffers are dry and I told you NOT to do it anyway.

…You’re welcome.

Today’s toon is about how disabled children are often passed on from grade to grade without mastering the skills necessary to actually “pass” the grade.  I understand why it’s necessary for schools to do this, and I don’t disagree with the policy.  If a child is retarded or severely disabled and unable to perform to grade level, well… you just can’t hold a 17 year old back in kindergarten AGAIN.

We just had Sawyer’s first IEP meeting at the new school.  We’ve had one to three of these a year over the past decade or so at the old school, and they have all, almost without exception, gone badly.  We would push for things for Sawyer that he needed, and the school would refuse.  We would threaten to sue and the school wouldn’t back down.  We’ve talked to lawyers and we’ve had IEP meetings full of mucketymucks from the school district, the Principals and moderators and service coordinators and advocates.  There has been cussing and there have been tears (we were NOT their favorite family and I’m sure they were so glad to see us move!)  What we have never felt, from the old school, was that they took our concerns seriously.  We didn’t feel important or that they thought we were worth listening to.

Now Sawyer has had great teachers, and he’s had some marvelous aides.  I have loved each and every one.  But they have had their hands tied by the district on numerous occasions and it’s been frustrating as hell.  And THAT is where this cartoon came from.  It was born out of  the seething anger that comes when you realize that if you lived in another school district, your child might be a lot more high-functioning.  It was born out of the sad realization that my son has barely learned anything in 11 years of schooling.  He has few life-skills, no practical skills.  He cannot read or write.  Just what, praytell, have I been sending him to school for?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I KNOW.  It’s not fair to expect the schools to teach him things he is not developmentally ready to learn to do.  They are overworked and understaffed and he is an extremely difficult, extraordinarily disabled child.  But I also think that letting him get away with doing the same “work” for YEARS because he can and will finish it on his own and you know you can head off a tantrum by doing this, is wrong.  He is teachable, but he doesn’t necessarily want to be taught.  He is teachable, but it has never been, and will never be easy or fun to teach.  He is teachable but he needs his own aide and he needs one on one instruction and he needs behavioral therapy and occupational therapy and tons and tons of speech therapy.  He needs to be WATCHED and he needs to be stretched out of his comfort zone no matter how much he might hate it.

A lot to ask, I know.  Which is why I don’t fault his teachers.  They try very hard with limited resources and staff.  …But it doesn’t make it any easier to bear.  My child is essentially being ware-housed until such time that he turns 21 or 22 and is finally  kicked out of high school with his certificate of participation and little else to show for it.  He has not been given up on… people have tried and tried to teach him things.  But if it’s not working, bring in a specialist!  Get him more therapy!  Figure out a way to reach him instead of trying the same thing day in and day out and then year in and year out while hoping for a different result.  I believe that’s the definition of insanity.  Sigh…

Anyway, to get back to my point… THIS IEP meeting was different.  It was much more informal.  It was small.  There was no one from the district there.  And they asked us what we would like to have for Sawyer and then set about trying to get it for us.   They showed us work that was new that they were forcing him to sit and perform (and he WAS!).  They had high expectations for him, and while he wasn’t exactly meeting them, he HAS upped his game a bit because he is expected to.

It absolutely blew my frickin mind.

So teachers, please don’t write me hate mail.  I understand how hard it is.  I GET it and I appreciate it.  This cartoon was written before this new IEP meeting, but I decided to run it anyway because the feelings in it are very raw and very real.

Let me tell you, it’s nice to have some hope for once.  It feels… nice.  Weird and alien, but nice nonetheless.

I reread what I posted yesterday and I realize that I sound very angsty and over-the-top crazy.  Let me assure you that I am both.  Yes, I get that it was ONLY a comic strip, not deciding whether to adopt a child or drop a bomb or go to war, but it was the biggest decision in my life at that time (we should all be so lucky, eh?) and I really did feel tortured  and twisted up in knots over it.  I know someone who makes major decisions by just choosing one thing or the other because the worst thing that will happen is that they will have a few regrets.

…I could never be like this person!  (Though I secretly admire them for it).  No, I am much more comfortable with agonizing and then second-guessing myself, but hey, we all have our little systems, right?