Presents are bought, the house is cleaned, and we're braved the roads between Saskatoon and Regina. (Lots of deer, not as much black ice as I'd been led to believe.) Christmas holidays can now officially begin.

I'm down at Layne's folks house today. My family is still working and/or at school (the poor fools!), so I'm just hanging out today and catching up on some much needed relaxation. With any luck, I'll be able to work on some comics and get a good 'buffer' of comics going so that when the holidays do heat up, I won't have to be scrambling to get my updates together.

I foolishly started drawing at around strip #20, since I wanted to get at least a month's worth of buffer together before I started posting things up and hadn't yet got the writing for the intro part of the strip nailed down yet. It's partially a good things, since it means that as soon as I can catch myself up, I'll have a bunch of stuff done. The only worry I have is that I may have to go back and recolor a bunch of things I've already done, since the way I color my strips has sort of evolved away from those initial strips. Oh well, more coloring practice is a good thing.

Apparently, my mom spread the URL for my comic around at her office, so there's now a bunch of profs with color prints of my comic up on their doors on campus. Wierd.

I was going to write something about all the exciting and interesting things that have been going on in my life, but I am grumpy. Why am I grumpy? My new office makes me grumpy.

My old office had but two problems. 1) It was the storage room, and 2) It had two doors, and both locked from the outside. Which wasn't much of a problem until I had to go to the bathroom. Usually, one of my office mates would let me out atfer I pounded on the doors, but there was always a chance that I'd simply have to hold it, or, failing that, tunnel through the drywall.

I miss that office. Sure, it was crowded, and dusty, and the blinds smelled like cheese, but it was -quiet-. If I wanted to take a break to check my email or write blog posts, I had the option. No one ever came in to bug me, and I could exercise with my weights or do stretches when I was getting stiff from sitting around.

Now, I'm sharing an office, and my back is to the door. I HATE sitting with my back to the door. It makes me twitchy. I have no idea who's coming or going from my office, and unless I twist around every time I hear the door open (which is usually several times per hour), I simply have to put up with the uncomfortable feeling that there's someone -right behind me-. (There is, actually. I sit with my back to my officemate. She's wonderful and quiet, but having someone RIGHT behind me all day long makes me paranoid.)

That's the biggest problem with the new office, but it's not the only problem. There is a hole in the roof. Nearly a foot of bound cables spills out of it - all network cables that hook up to the network switcher that humms and buzzes like a small hive of large, angry bees. The hole in the roof means that I can quite clearly hear everything that goes on in the woodshop outside.

*Twitch*

Last week, it snowed. In my office. There's a gap in the door to my left, and as I write, I can feel the cold breeze blowing in across my feet. It's fairly nice today, which means that I haven't had to turn on the industrial heater that sits under my desk, and that most of the ice has thawed. Two weeks ago, after the big snow, I piled up snow outside the door as an impromptu insulator, but they've since dug me out, and now the wind is free to blow through my office once again. I suppose that's one way to keep the terribly expensive computer I work on cool, but one wonders if they've thought about what the floodwaters come spring will do to the system.

I don't ask for much. Give me a comfortable chair, a warm, sealed room, and a little quiet (it doesn't even have to be too quiet!), and I'll work away quite happily. But, holy crap. My office in Fiji was better, and it only had walls that went up halfway.