That's Not A Raccoon House!

I smellz colitas rising up thru the air.

oh, no, just catnip. Carry on.

Nothing to See Here

Quarantine. Day Two. Here's a skunk. 

I Hope They Have Triple-A

I seldom look at my work phone and no one (including me) has the number.

Shame about the fan belt.

Now What?

Hey, Monday. I love you too.

Winning Waffles

Remember the Great Grocery Tragedy of 2018, when I won frozen waffles in supermarket Monopoly and then my refrigerator stopped running?

You’ll be delighted to know I won frozen waffles as my grand prize once again this year. I was sorta hoping for the $1000 Vons gift card, but this is almost as good.

Scarcity=Value

Yesterday, I found rice and dried beans in the store, and now this. It’s almost normal...except I don’t think I’ve ever bought 8 rolls at once before. It’s all the supermarket had.

When we look back at this time, one of my first memories will be how happy I was when I found potatoes after days of all the potato shelves being bare everywhere in town.

Widening My World

Today was the day I expanded my world beyond the mile surrounding Warner Bros. and my condo.

I figure nothing is going to change in the near future--possibly not for more than a year. So the question is...what is it like out there? If California reopens on 5/15, how do we alter our behavior so our world is safer than it might have been otherwise?

I donned my homemade mask (two layers of quilting cotton and one thin interfacing between), stuffed latex gloves into my bag, and headed out.

I caught the #222 bus north to Pacific and Hollywood Way. All buses are free at the moment, and able-bodied passengers can only enter and exit through the rear door. There were only three passengers on the bus, all keeping their distance. All wore masks.

I used my bag to push the button when I wanted the driver to stop, and then walked a mile to Lowe's. I only saw one other person during that walk, a dog walker two blocks away.

Lowe's was...not empty. It wasn't crowded, and everyone had on masks, but the number of shoppers was disconcerting.

I headed on to Target, but the line to get in was kind of nutty, so I walked over to Walmart. There was a queue there too, but Walmarts have actual sewing sections, so I was interested in stopping there. The line went quickly...but apparently so did the fabric. I haven't seen shelves this empty since my last look at the toilet paper section in any major grocery store. I bought the last fat quarter of fabric--it has tacos on it. (Not sure who will want a taco mask, but someone will.)

I left Walmart, passing a tremendous queue of cars all waiting for their curbside pickups. The line to get into the store stretched around the block now.

I'm Supposed to be A Writer, so...

...I guess I wrote a poem.

Will a take-out sandwich be the death of me? I wonder if it’s worth it.

The baguette. The turkey. The gouda.

Death by gouda.

Two scraps of quilting fabric and a pipe cleaner

will protect me.

A pipe cleaner will save me. Gouda will kill me.

It’s Saturday. The radishes on the balcony need thinning. 

I saw a pack of Charmin in the wild.

Evening Stroll During Lockdown

As far as places to be locked down, Burbank is pretty good. Less crowded that the city over the hill, and the weather was perfect throughout March and April.

Getting a bit on the warm side now, but it's still lovely at dawn and dusk. More photos here.

But Only the British Kind with a U

So this happened. Click to see the larger version, or you can go to the site. 

I am not sure what it's specifically about. Maybe for trying to get out assignments to people, spreading them out when a lot of people were suddenly out of work? Or maybe the digital material I'm overseeing side-by-side with a big event comic and a young readers graphic novel.

Or maybe just a slow news day.

Semi-Progess in Burbank

It took a global pandemic to get Burbank to automate its pedestrian walk signals. 

This is only temporary, of course, because this is car country.

I'm sure there will still be plenty of motorcycle cops out ticketing people jaywalking across alleys, though.

"Pedestrians in Burbank will no longer need to worry about pressing a button at traffic intersections to activate the walk signal as the city has automated the process in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Best That We Can Do

Here's a free concert. Kinda brief.

Longtime pal Steve B and I were going to see X at the Wiltern tonight for my birthday (which was a few days ago) but I guess we get to see this instead.

I always loved this band. I even spray-painted the cover to More Fun In the New World onto the back of a black denim jacket when I was a teenager. I only wore it a few times before giving it away though...broadcasting affinities makes me uncomfortable, even for awesome music.

Maskmaker Maskmaker Make Me A Mask

Look! It's my unsolicited opinion on face masks.

How exciting for us, surely.

The pleated kind and similar (like a cloth version of a surgical mask) are more comfortable than the bra-cup looking masks, but your glasses fog up. This isn't a problem if you don't wear glasses, but today I put on my sunglasses and they fogged up immediately.

The bra-cup ones are better for people with glasses, but they feel a bit more suffocate-y.

Both of the above are more comfortable then the N95 pro masks, the kind I've worn while tiling the floor or scraping something likely to include lead paint or toxic fumes.

I'm pretty sure the comfort is inversely proportional to the efficacy. Meaning...the more breezy the mask, the more pleasant it is to wear. The more you feel like you're going to hyperventilate from being unable to breathe normally, the more likely the mask is to be doing its job.

Of course, you might not want to take medical advice from a comic book editor. This is purely anecdotal.

At least the handmade ones look like a bit more fun. Here are a few I've been working on recently. 

Best Birthday Pressie

March, 2017. Emerald City Comic Con.  Boss and I met up with Gene Luen Yang. This wasn't our first meeting with Gene—he was already writing comics for us. But I'd had great results with the DC Super Hero Girls series I'd been producing for a few years, and we were ready to expand.

"I have this idea," Gene said. "It's about Superman."

Boss and I leaned forward. Yes? 

"And he smashes the Klan. It's based on the old radio show."

We both approved his idea on the spot. Sure, we still had to run it through the P&L process, but neither of us ever had a single doubt, and as anticipated, neither did anyone else.

Three years in the making, and the bound preliminary copies showed up today on my doorstep during social distancing lockdown.

It's beautiful. Perfect.

I can't count the number of amazing books I've had the privilege to work on on one hand, but I can count them on two.

This is one of them.

Happy Earth Day 2020

Gonna wait until evening to dig into this pile of bounty. I'm conflicted about how to view today. Yes, it's my Earth Day, but I'm not 8 years old or 40, so it's not exactly a huge deal.

And I've certainly had my share of bad Earth Days, and this isn't one of those. I usually go home this time of year and have dinner with friends, but obviously I had to cancel my flight this time.

My most memorable this-is-odd Earth Day was during the last MariesWorldTour. I'll post that day's account in below, so we can all relive it together.

* * * * *

I woke up on the Endurance ferry (why would I worry about that name, NO REASON) from Calabar to Limbe just in time to catch the end of a rain shower outside and a Nollywood video inside.

Where was my passport? I was starting to get nervous. A man from the shipping company had taken my passport at the start of the journey and I'd figured it would show up eventually. Now I was getting worried.

We pulled into the Limbe port and anchored.

Whole New World

People protesting the stay-at-home orders should read some firsthand accounts by health workers. I have...and I'm ready to stay home until the governor of CA, the mayor of LA, Elizabeth Warren, my friends in NYC, Spain, and Italy, and my mom all tell me it's okay to go out again.

But it's not just about me not wanting to end up drowning in phlegm (alone, but that's just the icing on the goop when you think of drowning in phlegm). It's also about not adding to the dangers of exhausted people working in hospitals.

And yes, I'm statistically on the safer side of all this, but you know what, I didn't try to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro either. Because the thing about altitude sickness is you can't know if you get it until you've got it. And at that point, it's a little late to be going "Oh, hey, I didn't know I'd get altitude sickness."

Only the finest in mask fashion for my trip to the building dumpster.

Shopping Instincts

Cairo, 2007.

I sometimes wanted pancakes for breakfast back when I worked at Teshkeel’s Egypt office. Something familiar for Sunday mornings in Zamalek, a touch of home in a world where Sunday was the first day of the work week, where I’d have to get to the office in Dokki by 9.

I knew how to make Euro-pancakes, the flat kind you use as a crepe, or put in Bavarian pancake soup, but that’s not what I wanted then. I wanted fluffy IHOP-type pancakes, the kind that kept me from desperately wanting lunch at midday, when the only nearby lunch options were McD’s, a Moroccan place (I spent many long lunches there with colleagues), and BYO.

There was one problem with my IHOP-mimic recipe. One of the ingredients was baking soda. Bicarbonate of soda.

My local supermarket nearest my apartment didn’t seem to have it. Nor did the other supermarket, the one across from the hotel I’d stay in for four months later that same year.

So I set out on a quest across the supermarkets of Cairo. I went to the suburbs. To the mall. To the upscale and local markets. I knew how to do this—I’d traveled the world enough times, lived overseas in Berlin, Australia, Barcelona, Kuwait, Uganda, Cape Town, Namibia. When you want to make something that tastes like home, you have to visit multiple outlets just to make breakfast.

In the end, I made a lot of Euro-pancakes without baking soda. Then one day, bicarbonate of soda showed up at my local supermarket. The first one I’d visited in my quest for pancakes.

I snapped it up, even though suddenly it was everywhere, like a giant container full of baking soda had found its way through the Suez last night.

This was no different from my experiences around the world, or how I’d lived in Kampala in 2005, once scouring ShopRite and Woolworths and Game stores in my quest for sesame oil, which was nowhere until it was everywhere.

This is all a longwinded way of saying I think I know why I bought this today, even though I’m pretty sure we’ll be out of quarantine long before a single person with a bidet gets through 36 rolls.

I never did get through all that baking soda either, though I did use up the sesame oil.

Good or Bad Friday?

I got into an argument at the supermarket today. Which isn't really how one expects to spend one's day when making a grocery list.

A raggedy-looking woman tried to cut because "I'm just buying cigarettes."

I jumped in before the person queued up in front of me could respond. (She looked taken aback, at least as much as I could tell since we're all in masks.)

"Get in line like everyone else."

"Oh, you're gonna be a bitch?"

"You're the bitch, you see all these people in line? You're gonna try to cut in front of them all waiting here?"

"It's just a pack of..."

"YOUR ADDICTION IS NOT MY PROBLEM."

By now people were turning around and staring.

"You've got a pro..."

"YOUR ADDICTION IS NOT MY PROBLEM. YOUR ADDICTION IS NOT MY PROBLEM."

She slinked away. Sigh of relief.

The woman in front of me turned around with a nervous laugh. "I'm so glad you said that!" The woman in the line next to us said "Me too! The other day someone tried to cut because they only had two things."

"I was scared," I admitted. "I'm glad that worked."

Then the woman in front of me told me "You are cool," so that's a win

 Good Friday indeed.

(Yes, I would've let her go ahead if she were buying flu medication or diapers, and I wouldn't have used the addiction line if she hadn't continued to push. I'm not completely heartless, just mostly.)

Short Commute

I got a new (used) Thunderbolt display, so now a swap of a Thunderbolt cable and I can commute from work (right) to personal (left).

Overkill?

Maybe.

Masks

The lightbulb went out on my sewing machine, and I'm not sure I'm going to get to make anymore of these, but here are my favorites.