gs_silva

We finally got to Thanksgiving, which in the US occurs on the 4th Thursday of November. They're having a big feast at Ren's family's house, and Jon and Ella Sievers came along in order to avoid having to navigate the drama of their own family. First stop, A&Z Grocery General, the little general store Maurice's family owns. Everybody grabs a dish or some merchandise to carry over, and Maurice talks strategy with Ella: "We'll leave the Rabbit (Ella's car) in the store parking lot and walk to the Swansons'. It's quicker than driving, and Jon says he wants to try the path."

"Here are my keys in case he changes his mind," Ella says, holding her car keys out.

"I'll stay with him," Maurice says. "Grab a casserole and go have fun."

I think at this point I was going to have Jon and Maurice give up on walking and take the car, but Jon ended up doing all right walking through the small patch of forest on crutches. It's very well-worn. "There's a whole neighborhood back here," Maurice explains to him. It's based on my grandmother's store, also in a rural community. The 'town' was barely a town at all, but it had a paper mill, a main street of sorts, a school on one end and a church on the other, and our grocery general store right in the middle, with my great-grandmother and her daughters living in a small apartment upstairs. And then a hill behind it, with the 'town' built up the hillside. You could drive the long way around or walk straight up the hill.

The town suffered for a while when the paper mill closed, but now it's become a suburb of a nearby town, with more development, an arts community, and I guess everyone commutes elsewhere to work. The days of walking down a narrow flight of stairs to begin your shift are over now.

At the end of the path, the neighborhood comes into view, and the yard of the nearest house is full of cars and car parts, piles of tires and various other items. The house itself is sprawling and run-down. "Whoa, look at that old house," Jon exclaims. "It's a whole junkyard."

"It's the Swanson house," Maurice says. "See, there's Ella."

Ella is standing in a less-cluttered spot in the front yard with a young boy and two dogs. More children run around behind them. Ren approaches her from the house. "Ella, do you want to come in and meet the grown-ups?"

"I will!" she replies. "I'm practicing being the weird aunt!"

Today is free comic book day. If you're out, swing by a participating venue and get to know your local comic book peeps.

I was invited by a shop in CT to sign up for a table when I'm ready. I'm not ready yet. Maybe next year!

"I'd totally be an extrovert if other people weren't so awful," Ella fumes as she and Maurice walk past clusters of university students.

Maurice "hmms" thoughtfully. He has a lot of work to do on his self-esteem and his perception of his place in the world, but Ella is a few steps ahead of him in the process, so he gets a free ride off of her rants sometimes. Ella herself needs someone to drop wisdom on her, as well, but she also needs to vent the stewing brewing thoughts in her head before they explode. They provide important services to each other.

They were always supposed to be close friends, but for some reason, as soon as I started to write it all down, Ella and Maurice began to lean into the conflict and bickering and stomping all over each other's boundaries. It wasn't until the scene on the airplane that they got over a hump and started to genuinely get along. Now they're where they were supposed to be all along.

What happened on the airplane? Ella confessed that she's asexual but that she thought that she and Maurice would be compatible as partners aside from that. And Maurice assured her that he was still 100% there for her, and he was still marrying Cathy.

Ella and Cathy are on the floor, looking under Ren's bed while Ren stands in the foreground and watches,

"I see him!" Ella exclaims. "Here kitty kitty! Foomie!"

Cathy makes the pstpstpst noise.

"Sorry, Ella," says Ren. "He IS a barn cat. Not very sociable."

They leave Ren's bedroom, with Ella saying, "I can come back another time."

"I'll let you know when he starts acting friendly," Ren offers.

"Cool, thanks," Ella sighs as Cathy looks on, trying to follow the conversation. "Head to my place now?"

They get ready to go to Ella's house, which is their typical hangout spot because she lives on the ground floor and Jon can't easily do the stairs to Ren, Cathy, and Maurice's attic apartment. "Coming?" they ask Maurice, who is sitting on the futon spread out to function as his and Cathy's bed.

"I have to learn this song," Maurice replies, but Ella encourages him to drop by later.

Finally alone, Maurice starts strumming on his solid body Yamaha, which needs an amp, but if you don't have an amp, it still makes notes - just very, very quietly. He doesn't notice little cat ears pop up behind him.

The line of tiny notes turns into one crumpled note as Foomie pounces on the strings. Maurice frowns and mutters, "Really?!"

***

Based on about a hundred true stories. Typhoon has never pounced on my ukulele while I was playing it, but it's only a matter of time, I'm sure. She's pounced on a large number of other things I was using while I was using them.

Ren and Cathy wait in the lobby of the veterinary clinic. They turn to look at a young woman stepping into the room. "Smoky?" she calls out. "Looking for the owner of Smoky?"

Getting no answer, the vet tech tries again. "Gray male feline coming out of eye surgery?"

"Oh! That's ours," Ren responds. "But he doesn't have a name."

"The vet tech must've given him one," the veterinary assistant explains. "We can't intake patients without one."

Cathy looks at Ren to ask for a translation. "What is this? Smoky?"

Ren puts his fingers up to his face to mime smoking a cigarette. "Like this."

"Fumer!" Cathy exclaims the French word for smoking.

"Foomie is cute too," Ren says. And then asks, "Is his right eye going to be okay?"

Finally we get to see the cat close up; his right eyelid is stitched closed. The assistant explains, "No. It had to be removed. Sorry."

I'm truncating the process again - there would be a few steps in between, and the cat would have to spend the night under observation after being anesthetized. And of course the veterinary team would press Ren for a name before adding one themselves, so I guess he brushed them off until they had to handle it themselves.

***

Another cold day. I'm having trouble scrounging up enough energy to do anything. Can't wait for the warm weather.

The cat seems to be quite a popular character in my writers' Discord! So that's been fun to do. He's getting a little love over in my Patreon too.

"We need to tell that lady we stole her cat," Maurice tells Jon as they walk together in jackets, hats, and scarves. He wants Jon to do it for him, but Jon only retorts, "You know how to use a phone."

Maurice calls the hospital. "Hi, I want to talk to Angie Upton? No, I'm not family. Maurice Arzamastsev. Arza... no, Maurice. A, R, Z... Z! A... tell her it's the horse guy."

He finally gets to talk to her, and she asks her to come in person.

"My poor baby." Ms. Upton's eyes tear up. It must be hard to cry while immobilized in bed in an industrial-sized neck brace. She doesn't move her hands at all, either. They sit limply on her lap across several panels. Finally, Maurice reaches over and puts his hand on hers to comfort her.

***

I need to tell you all the story of Typhoon's early-life medical escapades. Not right now. It's nearly midnight and I didn't mean to stay up this late. It's below freezing again tonight and I'm annoyed. I tried to keep the windows open as long as I could, but the cold snap won. It's going to be a long one. Check back with me in a week to see if Real Spring has arrived.

It's been awhile. I've been overwhelmed. Now that the bureaucracy that was overwhelming me is nearly taken care of, I can finally address all the other real-life responsibilities that I'd put on hold... and there sure are a lot of them. Alien Romance is a fairly high priority, but it shares that top space with a number of other things.

So... Cathy, Ren, and Maurice had gone to Ms. Upton's stables to help their old neighbor from back home load the horses and evacuate them. I don't show Bud Farriss leaving with the horses. While I try to include enough transitions in the story to avoid it feeling jumpy, if nothing important happens then I figure you can just assume.

I never finished the art here either. Sometimes you have to move forward, to make room for other things.



Maurice spreads his arms as if to embrace the whole farm. "We could buy this place! I'll quit my job, we'll all move here, build ramps everywhere, and never have to deal with people."

Ren, in the foreground, muses, "Tempting."

I haven't gotten into Ren's struggles at this point in the story. He's been doing very well at masking as an adult, buoyed by the fact that everyone treats him with respect and expects mature behavior out of him. He's only 20 here, two years younger than Maurice, and he's still dealing with the "rural kid in college" effect, but he has a lot of support, so he's keeping his head above water for now.

Cathy, still sitting on the ground being surrounded by barn cats, gets Ren's attention. "The eyes of this cat," she says, pointing to a little guy who is head-butting her.

"Ugh, they're infected," says Ren. "Think we could take him to the vet? Let's do it."

But the cat is well-armed with teeth and claws, and doesn't want to be grabbed.

"Cathy," says Ren, "Take off your scarf."






This is a deeply simplified portrayal of catching a barn cat. In reality, they'd stalk it for hours, possibly over the course of several visits. Making a minicomic entirely about them chasing the cat might be fun, but I won't do it here.

Cathy corners the cat in one of the empty stalls and manages to approach it. She grabs him by the scruff and holds him in place. Adult cats shouldn't be handled by the scruff like kittens can, but holding them firmly by that spot can induce a calming effect. Sometimes. It depends on how panicked the cat is.

Ren wraps him up in the scarf, including his head. "He really wants to claw me. Careful," he warns Cathy before handing the cat over.

They all get into Ren's pickup truck, Ren driving, Maurice in the middle. Maurice eyes Cathy clutching the scarf full of yowling cat and asks, "What's going on? Are we bringing a barn cat home to our attic without telling the owner?"

"Don't have a cow, man," Ren sighs.

"But are we?" Maurice asks.

***

I was going to add the next two, but I'm already late for the next thing I'm doing. Plans today will put me back even further, because they'll be very strenuous and I'll be exhausted enough to need multiple days to recover. It's caregiver stuff, and I won't go into detail, but I will say that the US healthcare system is being difficult to navigate and requiring us to make extraordinary efforts.

***

Today was the first day I woke up and the weather was nice already! No frost on the grass... I know I said earlier that my backyard doesn't have grass, but some grass came up - it's an early riser, and will soon be overtaken by other things, but for a short while, I have a lawn made of grass!

Anyway, right now it's in the 50's F, low teens C. Pretty nice. I'll bring my sketchbook and probably do some more of the daily comics in pencil.

Angie Upton's niece expressed worry that she couldn't coax the horses back into the barn. Maurice, standing in the open doorway, assures her, "They've been coming in. We'll need to muck the whole barn and fill the oats."

He turns to head to the paddock, adding, "I'm gonna go introduce myself."

"To who?" the woman wonders. "To the horses? But they're horses!"

"They are that," Ren agrees.

He and Ms. Upton's niece look down at the bouncing dog. "I'll take the puppy with me. You wanted him, didn't you?"

Ren, who lives in a 4th floor walkup with Maurice and Cathy, did want the dog, but he concedes. "It's all right. What else do..." He looks around at the grounds to see if anything else needs doing, and spots Cathy sitting cross-legged on the hill, surrounded by cats. "Oh," says Ren.

"I'll come back with cat food," the woman offers.

***

I don't have a lot of experience with horse life - most of what I know comes from other stories and other people who were horse people, and all that was a long time ago. So this is my disclaimer that I'm hoping to catch the flavor but can't guarantee insider-level accuracy.

I have many things to do today and am hanging on by a thread so here we go...

...been buffeted around by disappointments too much lately and I need them to take a break for a while, don't worry, I'll be around to deal with more disappointments later...

There's no way I can catch up on transcribing, so I'll summarize.

Jon, the paraplegic, had agreed earlier to be a mentoring volunteer in case the local hospital got any new patients with spinal injuries. He finally gets the call. The patient is 55 year old woman who is immobilized in an upper body brace and head/neck stabilizer. Jon tries to talk to her about what mentoring is all about - dealing with grief, facing the future, sharing concerns about her medical care. But she cuts him off - she owns a boarding stable and she doesn't want to talk when she's about to lose her business.

Jon's thrown off - he's only 25 here and he's used to being in control of social interactions. But he calls up Christine, his friend in med school who is always good for some amateur talk therapy. Jon explains that he fights off despair day after day after day by being inspired by his offbeat friends. Especially Christine, an Evangelical Christian who is entering a male-dominated field, and Maurice, a short Asian guy who doesn't care that everyone else thinks he's weird. Jon wishes he could help the woman more...






Well, Jon does know some people who are good with horses! He introduces Ms. Upton to his 'horse people' (and here we can assume that she agreed to see him again, maybe because the volunteer coordinator informed her that Ren and Maurice are horse people). She's impressed by Ren, who is 6'5" and quite jovial by nature, and Ren points Maurice out as the better horse handler. Maurice is wearing a biker jacket and a knit cap, so Ms. Upton isn't initially impressed. But he calls up a friend from his childhood home - the father of a girl that Maurice was sweet on.

Ms. Upton is suddenly having a much better day; a fellow stabler with real horse experience is coming to take her horses to his own stable, and she gets to see Jon on crutches. He was in a wheelchair before. He'll do both in turns, but in general he feels that facilities like hospitals that are flat but large are best experienced on wheels.

If it weren't for the social stigma and the fact that almost nowhere else in the community (at the time this takes place, 1990) is accessible to him, he'd be on wheels most of the time. The thrill of riding a motorcycle got him here in the first place, but he still craves that thrill. And even though his current personal ambulatory vehicle isn't quite as good at that one, it's easier than dragging himself about on sticks, and he keeps hoping.

As an added bonus, he's gotten Cathy, Maurice's wife, to take up roller blading. I really should put the roller blading story arc all in one place. It's piecemeal right now.

Cathy is putting icing on cupcakes when Ella demands she go get dressed. Does Cathy understand her? Probably not immediately, but someone surely escorts her to Ella's bedroom and hands her the bat dress.

Ella, sans bat dress, holds her gigantic witch hat. "I can still wear the hat," she muses. "I just need another outfit to go with it."

She knocks on her bedroom door. "Cathy, almost done? I need to get dressed too!"

Cathy exits, flaunting the fancy, lacy black dress, her arms raised to show off the enormous sleeves. On her head is Maurice's rubber spider mask that Ella hates so much.

Ella facepalms. "Why do you do this to me?" she laments.

Jon, in his wheelchair and still not dressed because he's been doing party setup and he can only do 27 things at a time, remarks, "I dunno, Ella, I think it's pretty hot."

***

I'm still doing it by pencil. The entire Halloween/birthday story arc is done, in pencil. I'll try to switch back to the more legible digital art at some point, but hopefully for now the transcriptions will clear up any visual confusion.

***

Gardening notes: not much today. The backyard swamp turned into an ice skating rink overnight, but not a very safe one because the yellow grass makes it very bumpy. My lettuce seeds are sprouting in the tray on the windowsill. It's a small tray, but a big windowsill, so if I get a bigger tray, maybe I can have year-round lettuce all winter next year.

The potato eyes I planted in the other tray are a loss, but something is sprouting in there. Backyard weeds, most certainly, because some of the soil was dug out of my backyard.

***

By the way, I know a lot of my readers here have works of fiction you're working on, and characters you think about. If an Alien Romance comic ever makes you conjecture what your characters would do in a similar situation, I'd absolutely love to hear about it. I live for that kind of connection.

Or if you know what you would do in a situation! But I already get a few comments along those lines. Those are some of my very favorite comments.