Saturday, March 19, 2011

You realize this means war!

I believe this was in 1986. My roommate, Shannon, was heavily involved in Boffers, a Live Action Role Playing System (LARPS) and as his parents had a hundred acres to play on, he hosted a few games.
Jon, Jo, and Mark set off on their adventure.

The adventurers approach something cautiously. Who, or what is it?

It's the Shannon Troll. Wait, troll?????

Run away!

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner

For a while I lived on the third floor of a three story apartment building. We had big wooden porches in the back with an external stairway. One day I heard some kids outside sounding like they were chasing something alive around the area. The noise was coming from the street, so I went out to the back to escape it. After being out there for a little while I noticed a pair of eyes staring at me from the dark of the overhead rafters. It was a raccoon.

After talking to her for a while and offering some dog biscuits, I got her to come down and visit for a bit. She was very scrawny and kinda mangy looking. She started coming by on a regular basis to visit and get some handouts. She slowly began to get fat and her coat was looking nice and eventually she was coming inside. I even introduced my roommate to her.

Then she stopped coming around. I didn't know if she got sick of my food, found better offerings elsewhere, or became roadkill. Probably just as well, I thought, because I had been looking to move pretty soon. I'd even found a new place to rent and was due to move out about two weeks after I'd last seen her.

My last day at the apartment I was taking a look around to make certain I'd not forgotten anything and guess who was on the porch? I went out to talk to her one last time, relieved she was alive and worried about what might have kept her away for so long. She looked so skinny!

Looking up in the rafters I saw the reason. And the reason for her dramatic weight loss. She'd brought her kids over to introduce them to me.
















Sorry, no pictures of the young ones. My camera was at the new place. I hoped the new tenants liked raccoons.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Moonlighting

For a while I worked at Moondance Comics in Massachusetts. I started part time and made it to manager fairly quickly. We had a pretty unique customer base, really into alternative comics partially because we were close to a bunch of colleges and partially because we who worked in the store were into them and happily promoted them. We did well enough with Cerebus that Dave Sim told us our numbers actually registered in the total sales figures.


That's Dave at the table on both the b&w pictures. He's talking to Dainis (one of my employees) and George (one of our customers) on the right.

The top photo shows me (in the Cerebus shirt) next to Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird (far right in the photo) who came in to talk to Dave. They created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I used to see the two of them around Northampton a lot. Even ran into them atop Mt Holyoke when Carrie and I went for a hike on her first visit to me.