We Missed You aprilp_katje

You can tell the difference when aprilp_katje is gone on a play date. One of the nice things about her is that she always reads everybody else’s material and tries to interact with it, no matter how bizarre it may seem. The net effect is that when you post something, you know that in a short time there will be a reaction. I remember my very first Howard post that way. I was saying, “Well, let’s see if this works.” And then it was, “Oh my God. Somebody read it and reacted to it, instead of just ignoring it as some strange person trying to interrupt their fun.” This morning I dropped off the posts of my 3 characters and read a few posts of adrianne_p and then the whole thing sort of died. No aprilp_katje. It was sad.

Fortunately she came back. I tried a “Jeremy gets advice from April” sequence, but he didn’t actually get any advice. So, he is going to pretend he did, when he really didn’t.

The main event of the evening was qnjones’ plans for Howard to disguise himself as Becky’s father Thorvald for a dinner with Becky’s mother and Dr. Ted McCauley. Going into it was interesting, because I had no earthly idea how it was going to end. qnjones’ had not shared that particular detail with me and knowing qnjones, she may not have decided how it was going to end until it actually ended. In any case, those live action posting sequences are what I would call action-packed typing. My little fingers type as fast as they can, as to not hold up qnjones, and then when I do finally post it, I have to push the “Preview” button to make sure that what I am laying down is not different from what qnjones has most recently posted. Well, let me tell you, qnjones is freakishly fast. I did literally go through a point where I had to revise my post 3 times from pressing that “preview” button and finding yet another qnjones post had suddenly arrived. I think my problem is that I have a tendency to mull over my posts. “Is that the way I want to word that? Could I word it differently to be funnier or to make more sense?” Then when I type very quickly, I have a tendency to drop words and the funny part is, when I read over what I have typed, I mentally fill in the dropped words. I have to read it carefully to overcome this mental problem and find the words I dropped. All these things slow me down. In addition to everything else, I like to put in little researched schtick. qnjones had suggested that Howard mangle the classics, since that was Thorvald’s field of expertise. So, for me, I found a website with quotations from the classic writers and I would try to find one appropriate for the situation and then mangle it in a humourous fashion. Again, qnjones adopted my method and then started buzzing by me with mangled classical quotes. I started feeling very old and slow. She is marvelous.

Tomorrow’s strip: I may now trumpet the fact that my postings for Howard’s aunt Winnie Kelpfroth this week called it. The fight between Mira and Melville involved a lot of yelling and nothing happened. However, I never would have guessed that Mira outranks Melville in the villain world. It was another extremely poor treatment of the Sobinskis, at oddly enough the time when they least deserve it, in my opinion.