Weekly Dose of Dangle

Our Tahoe vacation’s over. I made it through three days of skiing without killing myself and we escaped before the latest huge snowstorm hit in the mountains. During all that skiing and falling my old injured knee never bothered me, then I slipped on some ice and jerked it so that it started hurting again. I’ve been icing it and limping.

Christmas was full of the usual sparkly joy. We put on an internet radio station playing syrupy Christmas tunes that ambianced the background. Oscar opened all his Chinese-made plastic toys and there was an ocean of wrapping paper left on the floor. Within an hour he was complaining that he was bored. Yes, we've spoiled the child.

We were back in Oakland for New Year’s eve and had dinner at Carrie’s house with her and her friends, Johnny and Lynn, who we re-met after a ten-year hiatus. We popped the corks and poured the wine down our gullets and talked about music and bands Hae and I had never heard of. We have an eight-year-old, so it’s been at least eight years since we were hip to the music scene and even then we weren’t really. From Carrie’s apartment we could see the fireworks over San Francisco and the night was free of gunshots as far as we knew. We stood by the window without fear. I remember New Year’s in the past where Hae and I would hit the deck and stay on the floor until the shooting stopped.

I drew a lot in my sketchbook during the vacation. I wasn’t disengaged from the family though, which sometimes can be a problem when you draw too much. I built snowmen and played and cooked meals and did all that stuff. In the sketchbook I made lots of pictures of me skiing and falling on my ass in gruesome ways. I was trying to get one that was just right. Oscar asked if I ever drew anything but pictures of people getting hurt. He should talk, all his pictures are of bombs and guns and wars.



Hae, Auntie Soo, cousin Sarah and I all had our computers with us and we checked our email and Facebook constantly. Every time I read my email I learned from the Yahoo group of another break-in in the neighborhood. An attempted one happened on our block but was thwarted by some alert vigilantes. We had the visiting family of some other neighbors staying at our house and feeding Coco for part of the time we were gone so that may have deterred the burglars from hitting our place. We were happy to find that everything was intact when we got home.



The roads were slick and icy some of the time we were up in Tahoe and one day I drove up to an intersection where a type of giant snow-blowing truck was clearing snow. On the front was a set of rotating blades three or four feet tall that churn the snow up so it can be shot up into the air. When I hit the brakes we just slid. We were helplessly sliding straight toward those grinding blades. Luckily the snow-blower driver had control and made a quick maneuver so that we could slide right past. As the skiers say, we just about ate it, dude!

Anyway, it’s good to be home. Soo and Sarah came back to Oakland with us, but they left today for LA. It’ll be great to get Oscar back in school so that I can work and no longer have to entertain his spoiled ass. (I love him more than anything). I have some complicated proposals to write and of course I’m hoping to book some graphic recording gigs for January and February so I can get to work and make some bucks. I have to draw a Troubletown cartoon tomorrow and have zero idea of what I’m going to do. I’ll spend the day reading news then get up at five tomorrow morning and crank it out.