So the T&K website is no longer hosted at Yahoo! That only took a stinkin' month!

I rarely have to deal with red-tape and computer bugs and general hassles, so I guess it was time to pay my dues in spades. But that's all sorted out now! Thank goodness.

Yahoo!, I decided, was no longer a good place to be hosted. --In fact, I never decided to be there in the first place. It was one of those, "Big Ugly Company swallows up Small Cool Company' Scenarios.

The terms & conditions Yahoo! want people to agree to are very long, wordy and creepy. Yahoo! refuses to accept payment by cash, check, credit card, or any other means other than through their 'Yahoo Wallet' system. --A system, which can only be used if you agree to their crazy terms & conditions, which (go read them sometime), have some very slippery wordings which sounded very much to me as if they were declaring all content you upload to their servers to be owned by them. --These heady days of inter-corporate copyright squabbling are just getting more and more ridiculous, and the common people more and more exploited. . .

But I've pulled up stakes and no longer have to worry about that for the time being. Safe.

Anyway. . .

As you can see, I've done a little bit of updating to the graphics and format of the T&K site. There is a bit more on the way, but I didn't want to leave the site down any longer. I'm, as per usual, racing deadlines with my normal comics work, and while I find web design a fun distraction, it's just that. A fun distraction. I'll get to it after the next issue ships in a couple more weeks.

Among those changes, PayPal will be represented; I'll be accepting payment through them. --Which, I know may seem a little ironic having just gone through a moronic number of red-tape hoops and digital clowning in order to avoid using Yahoo! and their version of a similar payment scheme. But I'm pretty sure PayPal won't be making any grabs for copyrights in the foreseeable future.

I've got a number of items I hope to be posting shortly; comments and bits of news and such, and I'll get to them in due course. --When I get a decent computer to work/write on. Right now I'm sitting at home with my personalized PC set-up, but I'm just here for a day and will be leaving again shortly. A friend of mine who lives on the other side of the city, is out of town and I've been living at her place, taking care of her cats. I never thought of myself as 'cat-guy', but it's actually quite nice. --These two are friendly animals who seem to act more like dogs, always following me around, always wanting to be sitting with me or next to me. It's nice. But my friend's computer is murder to do any work or writing on, so I don't. Her computer desk and chair are designed for somebody a lot shorter than me, and upon it sits a big buzzing CRT which I fear and loath, having become an LCD screen snob in the last year.

Though, living away from my studio has provided the opportunity to build a small portable drafting board! What fun! I got to play carpenter, which I always enjoy, and better, I also got to play 'Thief.' --I had to pick the lock on my landlord's storage room so I could get at his wood working tools. (Actually I have many of my own, but he has an electric jig-saw, and I don't.)

See, James' friend was looking after all the landlord duties while James is off on his European/African world journey/vacation. So this stand-in landlord, Dan, is a really nice fellow, and he was living in the basement, collecting rent checks and such at the end of each month, and joining us upstairs for dinner now and again. But a couple of months ago, when the big house shuffle hit, (new room mates, etc.), Dan's situation changed, and he retired from work and moved up to a farm he bought out in the country side. No more basement duty for him!. So now Jane, another friend of James' took over the latch-key duty. Did you follow all of that? Good.

Now upon leaving, Dan decided that he should do something about James' tool collection. --Perhaps he thought that unscrupulous friends of my new room mates might steal things. Dan, while a likeable fellow, (who reminded me of Grisly Adams before he cut off his beard), is a first-class worrier. One of those people who is simply wired to hear the bad news first and dwell upon it. As such, he figured that new room mates could only mean a threat of theft and property destruction. Sigh. And so, despite my pointed sighing and musing aloud about the world being what you make it, he installed a big lock on a thick door and put all of James' tools and nick-knacks behind it, among which was his electric jig-saw. --Which at 2:00 A.M. while working on my portable drafting board, I needed more than any other item in the entire world.

And so I got to play thief! --I'd known some years ago a locksmith who showed me how to use a tension wrench and rake to open up the front door of my house. I wasn't any good at it, but I did learn the basic principals behind lock picking. And after messing around for 20 minutes, I actually managed to turn theory into practice, and that annoying lock standing between me and James' electric jig-saw slid open.

Ah! And let me tell you! There's no feeling in the world like that of a lock turning without a key after you've been fussing over it with noodly bits of metal for 20 minutes! First lock I've ever successfully picked.

--And then out to the back yard to cut up the shapes I needed for my portable drafting board. (--I also borrowed James' wood chisels and some wrenches.) The end product is a cool little folding board which I can set up on any table anywhere to do my work. --A pre-requisite to doing any kind of cat-sitting, I decided.

The other trick, with the chair, also worked.

"I can't stand trying to work at your place!" I complained to my friend. "The cats keep distracting me. They keep trying to stand on my work. They keep looking at me like if I don't give them attention, they're going to go crazy."
"No, no. What you do is put a chair next to the one you're sitting in. Then they can sit next to you. --All they want is to be near you."
"And that'll work?"
"Uh huh."
"Hm."
"You know," she said looking me up and down. "When I leave for Japan, I'm going to make sure that you end up taking care of them."
"The hell you are. You're going to be gone for two years!"
"Yes, but they really like you."
"Good for them."
"And you really like them. Anyway, I'll convince you." She nodded to herself, smiling. "I've decided. That way I'll know they're being properly taken care of."
"Hrm. It's not that simple. Some of my room mates are alergic. Though I'm sure we can work something out by next year."

--And I finally, (like just ten minutes ago), met the third and final new room mate of mine. This house is filling up again. Alexia will be living in the basement apartment. We've known she was going to arrive for a month now, but nobody has had a chance to meet her. Until now.

She's twenty-something, teaches yoga, comes highly recommended by Jane, (who I highly recommend), and she wants to paint the basement walls warm yellow. A fine color for a basement. --I want to install some proper lighting down there, too. The nasty fluorescent tubes are, well, nasty fluorescent tubes. Nobody should live like that. Pale white tubes flickering at an endless 60 hertz is just plain wrong. . .

But later. Later.

I've got to finish this update and get myself back across the city so that the cats don't starve. I'd kind of like to draw a page tonight as well. Cuz you know, it's what I'm supposed to be doing. . !

Ah. . .

And so, life is good.

Take care!

-Mark