Comic for Wednesday July 7th, 2004

"A very long and winding road" Monday - July 5th, 2004

Okay, here we go... filler is up for today and that means that the usual Monday comic will be up tomorrow, Wednesday,  and then the Thursday comic will be up on Friday. You can sort of see it as a holiday trash day bump over. I would've liked to have been able to put the comic up on Tuesday, but alas I didn't get home from Long Island till 11:30 at night. It was a hellishly long day and as soon as I got in the door I updated the page and started writing this here post. So before I get to Monday's day of nightmar4es, I shall go back to the beginning of the weekend to fill you all in.

Friday was spent at work and then driving back to Long Island. The trip went as usual and The Kelly and I made it there in about 5 hours at around 12:00 at night. We unpacked and went to bed. Not so bad right? Right.

On Saturday, The Kelly and I went to Ikea to shop for furniture for the home we had recently purchased and were now trying to furnish. We had already taken care of appliances earlier in the week and we were now looking for something in the neighborhood of a sofa and dining room table. I knew we could find a bunch of cheap stuff at Ikea that would look rather nice in our new home. Ikea wasn't too crowded and we window shopped and found a table and chair set we liked and a sofa and love seat combo we liked. We decided that we would leave and look online to see if there were any Ikea stores closer to Syracuse so we wouldn't have to lug everything back to home from Long Island. So end of Ikea trip Day One.

That night we went out to Gasho's with Gza, his girlfriend Marisa, my brother, and his girlfriend Anna. It was rather tasty as usual. Afterwards we picked up Dave and went out to see Dodgeball since nobody besides The Kelly and I had seen it. My brother called it a night after that and the rest of us went back to Gza's and played a board game I had purchased recently, The 90's game. It was some good times and after the game was over, we called it a night.

On Sunday, The Kelly, Dave, and I went to see Spiderman 2. I will preface the following by saying that I loved the first Spiderman. I know a lot of people who had problems with the first Spiderman movie, but I thought it was, as Ron and Harry would say, brilliant. You know how many comic book movies are actually made decently enough to stomach watching as compared to the wealth of forgettables and untouchables? Let's just say it's a rather disproportionate ratio. Spiderman works because it's more a story of Peter Parker than it is Spiderman.

The second movie not only continues what made the first movie good, but it fixes what wasn't working in the first and expands on what did. Out was the over the top Dafoe and Green Goblin and in was the simply awesome Dr octopus and Alfred Molina. He did such a great job. Plus I loved how the second movie didn't cheese out at all. There was no second villain, no cheesy sidekicks, no stupid side stories. The Movie kept to it's central theme of a movie about Peter Parker and it ran with it. I'd recommend the second Spiderman movie to anyone who loved or thought the first was okay. If the original Spiderman wasn't your cup of tea, I say maybe catch it on video, but you might be sorry you missed out on this one while it was out in the theater.

So anyway, after the movie, we all went back to my house where my mom cooked up some amazing barbeque ribs and wings. Delicious. We eve had watermelon and watched the fireworks at the baseball stadium like a minute from my house. After that we played a round of Killer Bunnies, watched a bit of the Twilight Zone marathon and then went to bed.

Here's where the weekend gets trick folks. Monday morning, The Kelly and I decide to just go back to the Ikea on Long Island to buy our stuff. So we go back out there. We measure the car space using the tape from the store, but The Kelly makes the critical mistake of leaving her keys in the car after locking the door shut. After AAA comes and unlocks the door, we discover that the sofa we want is out of stock and the table we had wanted to get wouldn't fit in the car.

After hemming and hawing over the possibilities and dealing with an Ikea store that was insanely packed, we called up the store in Paramus, NJ. It was sorta on the way. Luckily they had the sofa we wanted and we drove all the way out there. We end up getting the whole set up, dining table, four chairs, a sofa, and a loveseat. The trouble then became how to fit all this into The Kelly's car. It took around 40 minutes of careful planning, shoving, and unpacking of cardboard boxes in humid July heat, to fit everything in the car. Not to mention that we had sofa cushions on top of the car and hanging out the trunk, secured only by Ikea plastic twine.

By this time it's a little after 6 PM and we still had about a 4 and a half hour drive ahead of us and thanks to the heat, I had a pounding headache. Let me tell you, we had to stop once to fix the twine binding because the cushions on top of the car were flipping up, fix the trunk binding, and also stop to get something to eat. All told we got into Syracuse at a little after 11, unloaded ALL the Ikea stuff into my apartment and then I sat down to do this. So I hope you can understand the delay. To say this day has been arduous is akin to saying Michael Jackson is simply an eccentric guy.

But anyway I did leave you all with a filler today. It was the one that was supposed to go up on Monday, but I didn't have a computer to upload it from. Not only did I leave you with a nice filler picture of Yuki, Kelly, Dave, and Joe in their English classroom, but I also posted some step by step frames of hoe the final picture came to be. it looks kind of simple, but a bigger picture like this can take a day or two to finish and I still tweak it here and there after I say it's done. Anyway enjoy and I'll have the regular comic up tomorrow!!!

Vote for Ninja Spirit!!

River gets beat down by the Ikea dog!!