Balsa Wood Boat

aprilp_katje had set me up to do snark on a workshop being done by Dr. John Patterson on balsa wood boats. I enjoyed looking at the models on-line for these. They can be incredibly complex, so I opted not to go for actual instruction, but doing everything to avoid actual instruction. Writing for John Patterson is usually a lot of fun, as long as I don’t have to do it too often. In the case of his lecture, I relied heavily on a thesaurus to get me words similar in meaning to the ones I wanted and tried to find ones I could work in the words balsa, wood, or boat. Nothing for balsa. However, wood and boat worked nicely with a lot of different words, and I was pleased with the final result. I tried to squeeze in some text references to the day’s strip about Elly Patterson talking about how much better her bed is than a Mexican hotel bed. On the whole, it was enjoyable to write.

Continuing on, I had set up Jeremy Jones to go on a blind date with someone, and I decided it would be Avery, the a-girl who was desperate to get a boyfriend and who skirmished with Becky McGuire over Jeremy briefly only to lose. Avery’s parents were Moglie and Marito Scambio, which means in Italian, “wife and husband exchange.” The running joke is that Jeremy’s mother is going to be extraordinarily successful in finding girls suitable to be Jeremy’s girlfriend, but then mess up the situation with an altercation involving the girl’s parents. In the olden days of yore, matchmaking was a common practice, not only to make sure that the kids didn’t make the horrendously poor marital decisions they make today, but to also establish in-law relationships with people you can stand. The closest thing to that today, in my world, is the selection of playmates for your kids—the family socializing. The key ingredients are: the kids have to play nicely together, the moms have to like each other, and the husbands have to tolerate each other. If anything goes wrong with that, then the relationship is dissolved. I saw it happen with some very friendly neighbours of ours, whom I liked quite a bit, but their son had this nasty tendency to injure our son every time they played together. By injury, I mean he drew blood. My wife called a halt to it, and stopped inviting them over to do things. Our current favourite family is one where my wife adores the other wife, and my daughter adores the daughter which is her age, and their older daughter has problems socializing with most kids but gets along pretty well with my son. It is with these ideas in mind, that I am writing this story for Jeremy.

Constable Paul Wright. Since Lynn touched on him in February, it will be months before he returns. My guess is one more time before Liz has to come back to Milborough for the summer, probably in May. In the meantime, he gets to reinterpret all things in his rose-coloured glasses with respect to Elly Patterson.

Tomorrow’s strip: The return of Jennifer the dental assistant in one panel, upon whom aprilp_katje and I had written a long story on how she was engaged to marry Dr. Everett Callahan and had her head shaved to please him. Her hair is shorter and a different style. If I were vain, I would consider that to be a shout-out to our head-shaving plot. I am sure it is just coincidence that a character which hasn’t been seen in 3 years suddenly reappears with a new hairstyle, when the main characters of the strip haven’t changed their hairstyle in years.