Incident at Monroe Harbor

As promised:

Labels: comic, journal, personal

posted by Tony at 2:50 PM | 1 comments

Magical distractions

Still working on that comic from the day I went sailing. I got distracted along the way by the arrival of the new Harry Potter book, which I started Monday and finished Tuesday. It was good, but it's hard to talk about without feeling like you might be ruining someone else's reading experience. I can see why Rowling wanted to be sure all her fans got the book on the same day.

Then I needed something completely different to read, and so I'm reading Manil Suri's The Death of Vishnu — it's set in Bombay: the man who sleeps on the first landing of an apartment building is dying, and everyone in the building seems to be losing their grip for various reasons generally unrelated to Vishnu's death. It doesn't give a very good impression of the human condition, but it's a good book.

So my comic just needs to be inked at this stage... soon... I promise it will not be as exciting as I'm building it up to be.

Labels: personal

posted by Tony at 6:35 PM | 0 comments

No news...

I have nothing to post just yet. I went sailing on Tuesday, and started drawing something about that, which is turning into something much more elaborate that will take me a few days to complete. So patience will be rewarded.

A woman saw me drawing on the train yesterday, and said "Oh! He's making a comic book! Are you a cartoonist?" She was sort of excited, and I was a little embarrassed by the attention. "How many pages have you done?" "It's just the one page." She said I should submit it to the Chicago Reader, which, on reflection, is a pretty good idea. They like little stories about real life in Chicago. She also said I should copyright the characters — only in my case they're not characters, they're real people... so I think I can skip that step.

On a side note, drawing on a moving train is very hard.

Labels: personal

posted by Tony at 5:40 PM | 0 comments

What to do with do cell phones

I just read this article from the New York Times. Very interesting. Basically, if you have old cell phones around the house, you can sell them. Cell phones and other electronics are the sort of thing that it's best to avoid putting in landfills — so basically you can help the environment and get rid of your phone, too.

The Times provides a few useful links, too, including www.ripmobile.com, www.cellforcash.com, www.oldcellphone.com, and www.phonefund.com.

File this under "useful information".

Labels: neat stuff

posted by Tony at 6:25 PM | 0 comments

I went for a swim...

After living across from Chase Park for a year and a half, it occurred to me that they might have a lap swim in their pool, and I might like to do that there, rather than driving to my gym in Evanston or biking to the lake. So I checked their schedule, and indeed there are about 8 lap swims every week, each one 1 1/2 to 2 hours longs. So I went at 7pm last Thursday, just me with my bathing suit, towel, and sandles, crossing the street. I felt a bit naked.

The pool itself is not terribly long — 15 to 20 yards. It's about wide enough for 4 lanes, but instead it's divided into 3 rather wide lanes. This is just as well, since the people swimming there seemed to have very little idea of pool etiquette: one at a time, swim on the right side, etc. At one point in my swim, I took off across the pool and saw that all three of the guys sharing the lane with me (my lane happened to be all-male at the beginning) had taken off from the opposite side and were swimming more or less abreast. I managed to squeeze through, however.

A number of people, who seemed to congregate in the farthest lane, weren't swimming at all, but more or less lounging along the wall. Perhaps they were left over from the earlier "Adult Swim" period. It was a hot evening (the last night of the heat wave) and so I figured they didn't want to get out just yet. The water was cooler than the air, after all, if not especially cool for lap swimming.

When I got home my eyes were burning from the heavy dose of chlorine. I will need to haul out the goggles next time.

(I experimented with color here, two show what's above water and what's below. I'm pleased with the result; I think it creates a nice feeling of depth.)

Labels: drawings, journal, personal

posted by Tony at 6:44 AM | 3 comments