Tough weekend for me

This weekend, I did 3 performances of Handel’s Messiah, did the usual church choir stuff and my daughter had her 8th birthday party. It was pretty busy and I did not have the usual time to devote to doing posts for April’s Real Blog. Today’s strip was particularly uneventful. I thought about snarking all the unusual products seen in the strip, but I went for the Kortney Krelbutz face in the last panel instead. I had planned to do the Mike Patterson workshop snark tomorrow night, but realized I have another choir rehearsal after work tomorrow night, so tonight would be better. I was just getting into it, when the Mrs. informed me that my daughter wanted to go to Red Lobster for dinner, since it was still her birthday weekend. So we went and the place was completely jam-packed. We had a hard time finding a parking space and when we got in, there was a long wait to get a table. By the time I got back, there was the mysterious comment withdrawn on this Blog. In the past, when I have gotten see the comments to my Blog before they were withdrawn, it usually meant that there was a nasty one that the author thought better about writing after they calmed down. So, I am guessing, I pissed someone off. Who knows, since I didn’t see this one before it disappeared? Anyway, I got really confused when I got back.

qnjones had put together a marvelous series of posts involving Howard the dog, but added in items about Gerald Forsythe attending the Knuckles McGee birthday party at Rebeccah’s dad’s halfway house, when Gerald was with April working on a geography group project. Then there was also a comment about Jeremy missing the party also. It could have been qnjones messing with my mind, but the other possibility is that qnjones skimmed the April posts, my Jeremy posts and the Alexandra Love posts about the evening activities and did not take in the fact that they were elsewhere. So, I put stuff in the Jeremy post to cover that and added in a post as Charmaine Lebuke, group working partner to cover the Gerald part. Yes, that was me. I couldn’t figure out a way for Jeremy to cover it and the idea of posting Charmaine’s opposing opinion to aprilp_katje’s April posts was irresistible. aprilp_katje referenced Elly’s teaching April how to do a proper research project from the strips last year, which I then liberally quoted, changing a few words here and there. The funny part about that strip was that Elly was drawing maps and collecting pictures for a research essay. It matched geography so well it was freaky. Also, the funny part was that the strip made a joke about Elly doing a lot of April’s project for her. I could not help but to use that against poor April. I hope aprilp_katje can forgive me. Anyway, I hope I met the qnjones challenge from her Becky and Gerald posts, but I fear I may have missed her point entirely.

The other interesting element was adrianne_p’s desire for Alexandra Love to become angry with Jeremy after realizing what she had missed between him and Shannon Lake at the hockey game from her being so engrossed in it. The whole scenario reminded me of a time when my former girlfriend and I went to a cast party for a production of Camelot. The party was at a flamboyantly homosexual man’s house, who played the role of Mordred in the musical. While I was at the party sitting with my girlfriend, he started thrusting his hips and licking his lips at me, because he had become quite drunk and as people sometimes do when they are drunk, they forget any kind of sense of decorum. After we left the party, I mentioned the man to my girlfriend and she said, “Oh yes. He was flirting with me all through the party.” In any case, my plan had been to engage the other ARB posters to snark Michael Patterson writing, but that idea fell through. I suppose they were all waiting for me to get back from dinner and then went to bed when it took so long. Ah, the joys of being on west coast time. I got a little snark in on Mike, but the altercation with Alexandra actually played out better, since I found it very easy to get Jeremy’s mom into it, with the cheating man angle. I did set Eva up with the comment from Elly’s monthly letter about “commitment.” It seemed to fit well with the tone of the story and established a little personality difference between Eva and Alexandra at least with respect to how they deal with Jeremy. The problem with Mike writing snark, is that you have to rely on the monthly letters because there is virtually nothing in the strip, and you just can’t go any further back than the most recent monthly letter for that to work. I had ideas of having Mike suggest writing topics of evil downstairs neighbours or April murdering Farley or bad pharmacists, but we have just beaten those topics into the ground. So, adrianne_p’s suggestion worked out nicely for the writing topic. I should mention that the Muppet version of the Elves and Shoemaker was Elvis and the Shoemaker.

Tomorrow’s strip. The zits are back and I am not snarking them, even though there are more of them and some of them look like freckles, so April may be transforming into Becky. Not snarking it. Nope. Not doing it. Ironically, compared to last year’s proper essay lecture by Elly, referenced in today’s ARB comments, Elly is actually interrupting a seemingly productive April.