Grandpa Has a Brand New Ride

Grandpa Jim had a pretty funny strip with his scooter today, but it did not get people going in the commentaries or on April’s Real Blog, where we continued with the Anthony storyline for the most part. I tried to throw in a few scooter-related posts. The family life was a little busy today, so there was not too much time for posting. I was quite pleased to see the number of comments to April’s Real Blog in the double digits, despite my lack of participation.

In tomorrow’s strip, Liz gets a little comeuppance as far as her anticipated plans of spending summer time with April goes. Liz has been a little odd about this whole thing. It appears as if she had all these plans to spend time with her family, but then decided not to do that until she got a new car. If Elly realized this and played the banker role on the car loan, just to call Liz on this point, then bravo Elly! qnjones rightly pointed out that Liz should have been aware of April’s August travel plans, in her Liz post. They were together at the picnic after all. It was in the monthly letters. The fact that Liz did not know it shows once again how good this girl is at isolating herself. I think she would feel as though she missed her family even if she lived next door, with Connie Poirier.

April’s return to Manitoba will be very interesting to me. Back last year, I predicted that the whole way John and Elly can move into the retirement home, and sell the big house to Mike and Dee, is if April is not there and living in Manitoba with Aunt Bev. Lynn loves laying the ground work for things way in advance, and if my prediction is correct, then we should see a little of that during this visit. It would also make Gerald’s nasty comment about the special needs kids last year make sense, i.e. if the relationship with Gerald gets worse during this coming school year, then it will be much easier for April to make the move. So, I have been waiting for April to go back to Manitoba to see if my prediction is correct. Bring on next week!

Anthony and Liz and a Brick to the Head

The problem with strip-to-strip reading is that you sometimes do not get the appropriate perspective. For example, Thursday’s strip ends with Liz thinking she said the wrong thing and Anthony thinking she said the right thing. Reading all 3 Anthony strips this week together reveals that the wrong thing was that Liz revealed to Anthony, she still cared for Anthony. It was the right thing for Anthony, because he was basically begging to have a chance with Liz, which she has effectively granted. Ultimately, that was the decision Anthony help Liz to make in today’s strip. Not a decision to have Anthony as a husband, or boyfriend, but the decision to allow him back into her life, even though she already has a boyfriend. This was cemented by the usual, Liz and Anthony holding hands and staring deeply into each other’s eyes, which is the physical sign they are still both interested in each other for the last 4 years running.

The website updates for Elizabeth also confirm this:

Although their friendship never had time to become a serious relationship, Warren helped Liz renew her confidence. She needed it when Constable Paul Wright came into her life - now that Liz is moving home from Mtigwaki, she hopes that the love she shares with Paul will be strong enough to bridge the distance between them, at least until Paul can get a transfer to her area.

And in Elizabeth’s Friends and Influences, this:

Despite Elizabeth's denial, she has to admit - Anthony does remind her of her father - steady, honest and loyal, which is probably the reason she still cares deeply for Anthony, even after all this time.

I think the way the reader was intended to interpret these strips was that Liz was supposed to realize that Anthony is grown up, responsible and mature; and this ignites her old feelings for him again. Unfortunately, the dialogue-writers have still not figured out that it is far more believable to show someone being a good parent than to have him say, “I’m a good parent. You would be proud of me.” A better story-writer would show it, and make us, the reader, fall in love with Anthony too, so we would root for Liz to consider Anthony. As it is, the story-writer has made us think of Anthony as a self-absorbed twit, still obsessed with his high school girlfriend, 6 years after graduation.

Tomorrow’s strip: cookie77 didn’t like it, but I actually did. When grandpa Jim goes scooting away with Elly and John in pursuit, it is one of the funniest things I have seen in the strip in a long time.

Anthony Recaps

As of tomorrow, we have three strips in a row, where one of the characters has to point out that Anthony is his name. It’s kind of hard to build up any dramatic tension with your readers, when the main character who is supposed to end up with the girl, rarely appears in the strip. I am sure this situation will alleviate itself over the next year, but in the meantime, the Lynnions are working hard just to get us to remember who Anthony is.

Right now, Lynn is working a sort of Same Time Next Year sequence where the man and the woman meet one weekend every year, tell what has happened between them and their respective significant others, while the audience is supposed to root for the moment when they realize they are actually meant for each other and start a life together. She has been doing this in the strip since Liz and Anthony went to different universities, and they have seen each other only over the holidays and summer breaks ever since. The story is even more long and drawn out than the “Elly wants to retire” story, which lasted a mere 3 years.

In tomorrow’s strip, Liz is obviously concerned about making a decision. The decision we all know is: Will she choose Paul or Anthony? As I was reading it, I suddenly realized which romantic cliché is going to appear to resolve this plot point. Here is my prediction:

Over the next few months, Liz will spend more and more time with Anthony and his daughter. She will particularly bond with the daughter. I am really hoping for a Liz vs. Thérèse moment, where the daughter prefers Liz to Thérèse. In the meantime, Liz will feel a little guilt every time she talks with Paul. Eventually, Liz will realize Anthony is the one she loves, and they will have a nice kissing scene, met with the raucous approval of Francoise. Liz decides to finally tell Paul the news. It will go like this:

Liz/Paul: I have something to tell you Paul/Liz.
Liz/Paul: You first.
Paul: OK. I’ll go first. I don’t want to hurt you, but I don’t want to move to Toronto.
Liz: You don’t?
Paul: Not only that, but I think I have fallen in love with Chipper, I mean Susan Dokis.
Liz: You have?
Paul: Yes, and I reapplied to get the transfer to Spruce Narrows and it was accepted.
Liz: Wow! I don’t know what to say.
Paul: I don’t want to hurt you. You mean a lot to me. But I think it’s for the best.
Liz: Gee, Paul. Well, Susan is a great girl. She will be very good for you.
Paul: I know. That’s why I asked her to marry me. She wants to know if you will be her maid of honour.
Liz: This is all so sudden. I guess the answer is yes. Can I bring my boyfriend to the wedding?
Paul: Boyfriend?
Liz: You know. The guy I have been talking about with you, ever since I moved back to the south. Anthony Caine.
Paul: Absolutely. I would love to finally meet him.
Liz: That’s great.
Paul: So, what was your news?
Liz: Oh, it’s not important anymore. I can’t wait to come to your wedding. I can also see Jesse Mukwa, and live up to my promise to come back and visit him.
Paul: That’s right. He will be so glad to see you. He says the White Goose owes him a stereo.
Liz: Well, I will have to “wing one” out to him.
Liz/Paul: Sticky-out tongue laughter.

If Lynn goes for this method, then Liz and Paul can get to their respective others without either of them losing face. That’s how I think it will go.

Here's Anthony!

Faster than I expected, Anthony shows up. In tomorrow's strip, he immediately launches into a "I just got divorced. I'm a great guy because I am a single parent. Please forgive me for that whole marriage thing" speech. And as expected, Liz gives him an out. She doesn't say one word about her relationship with Paul, but actually even tells him that he is still one of her favourites. The leaves the door wide open for Anthony to make his next moves. Even if the next words out of Liz's mouth are "I have a great boyfriend", she has told Anthony that he is one of her favourite friends. And who could possibly refuse a request from one of your favourite friends to, say, "Have a picnic with me and my daughter" or "Let me give you a ride somewhere." Then Liz slowly falls back in love with Anthony, gets betrayed by Paul,... yada, yada, yada..., gets married next September.

Anthony appears so pathetic, if Liz marries him, it will literarily be a "pity" marriage. The upside is that Lynn appears to be having Liz realize how pitiful he is. This may lead some to believe that there is still hope for Liz and Paul. What is really means is that there will a short period of time where Liz has to be convinced to marry Anthony. I liked all the unspoken subtext of today's strip dialogue, but if that is Anthony's idea of wooing a girl, we are in for a long, painful and awkward romance. I am not looking forward to that.

Liz is Nervous

A late post for me, but my computer at home is starting to flake out on its internet connection and I couldn't get on-line last night.

I wasn't sure how long eeknight would have to play his Anthony-preparation posts, but it was not as long as I expected. Anthony has appeared and his resolute demeanor from being around John earlier in the year, is now completely gone. The theme established last year when he asked Elizabeth to wait for him has come true, and he gallops out to meet her, as if she is a knight coming to rescue him. Lynn is portraying the man as being completely and utterly spineless.

I am pretty sure Liz is going to end up with Anthony with the clues that have been given (Paul doesn't want to move to Toronto, the overly friendly greeting with Susan Dokis). However, I am trying to understand how Lynn must be viewing this. Lynn is all about female empowerment, i.e. when the woman says "Jump," the man says, "How high?" We see Elly regularly browbeat John. We see Iris regularly browbeat Jim. We saw the long torture that was the Deanna and Mike courtship, where Deanna pushed away Mike again and again before finally agreeing to marry him. I can only reference those strips in my head, since they are not on-line and I don't have a collection, but I remember lines like "I can't get engaged until I get a job. I can't get engaged until I go to Honduras." I remember at the time being shocked Mike didn't drop her for being so controlling. Anyway, now we have Liz and Anthony. Lynn really must be looking at this with the traditional Knight rescuing fair maiden attitude, except with gender reversal. Liz is going to be the hero, because Liz is going to rescue this poor man from the perils of single parenthood. Lynn might be thinking that it is a great modern spin on the old Jane Austen kind of material. I am reminded of the old George Gershwin musical, "Oh Kay" where Kay, the daughter of a rum-runner, rescues the leading man from a snooty society girl.

Except of course, the problem is Anthony doesn't need rescuing. Therese has already left and Anthony has been handling things fine without her. Anthony is coming off as a completely delusional guy, who believes that Liz is the only girl for him and now she has finally realized that too. He is coming off as obsessive, and the eeknight portrayal is only a few notches away from the Lynn Johnston portrayal. Even if Lynn were to turn around and portray Constable Paul Wright as a child-molesting, serial killer; she cannot erase the taint she has put on Anthony in today's strip. Whatever job she has tried to do to erase the repulsive Anthony from last August, it is all back today. If Liz rejects Paul, the readers will still not want her to be with Anthony.

I am really curious what Lynn is going to do now. Under normal circumstances, the setup is for Liz to really trash Anthony for the crap he put her through last summer. If she does that, Liz's character is redeemed. The more likely scenario is that Liz and Anthony will have a series of meetings. "Come and have dinner with me and see little Francoise. " "OK. But remember I have a boyfriend." "Come and close dance with me." "OK. But remember I have a boyfriend." "Look at the romantic stars with me." "OK. But remember I have a boyfriend." And all the while, Elly gives Liz more lectures about how nice it is have the attention of a man, so much like John, living so close, and with a job that isn't dangerous. It will be so awful. I can hardly wait.

Let’s Refocus

In Monday’s strip, Lynn has established that Liz misses her old job, her old community and her old boyfriend, I mean her boyfriend. Now we segue into the car purchase, for which we have been waiting. Elly, out of the blue, decides she is going to be Liz’s banker. Most of the message boards discussed how this was a bad idea, because it will prevent Liz from ever getting a credit history of her own. Foolish commentators. Don’t they know that Liz doesn’t need a credit history? She’s going to be married by September next year to Anthony, and they can make purchases with his credit history.

Anyway, I took great delight in this strip because 3 years back, Elly Patterson loaned Mike $1K and when he paid it back to her with interest, she rubbed it in his face. When I post as Mike Patterson, I have made that incident a running joke. “Don’t borrow money from mom, because she will make you pay forever (or use money to steal your friends).” Tomorrow’s strip pretty much shows that to be the case, as Elly and Liz get Gordon, the business owner, to act as their personal salesman for Liz’s new car. Gordon probably would have done it anyway, because he is a nice guy. However, I can tell you the number of times I have been to an auto showroom and the owner of the business showed me around -- exactly 0 times.

Since we are now duplicating the sequence of car-buying established with John earlier this year, we can expect the test drive that leads to the convenience store and Anthony. The only question now, is how can Liz ditch momma Elly, for those close and personal conversations you know she and Anthony are going to have over their angst of once again not being able to be together, because this time Liz is with someone, and Anthony is not. I think that’s what we are going to get first time meeting post-Thérèse. I am not sure how they are going to get around the Paul issue, but with the hints they have left, obvious choices are:

a. Paul admits he is not really trying to get the transfer to Toronto, because he just plain doesn’t want to live there.
b. Paul is messing around with Susan Dokis.
c. Paul does move to Toronto, but absolutely hates it and he breaks up with Liz when she won’t move back with him.
d. Paul and Liz have a fight over the moose tapestry.
e. (My favourite) Paul moves to Toronto and Liz decides she wants to teach English in Japan.

The other question is how intimate Liz and Anthony are going to be, while she is waiting for the situation with Paul to resolve. When Anthony was with Thérèse, Liz danced with, had close hugs with, held hands with, and flirted during his wedding with Anthony. Not to mention the whole rape rescue thing. But Thérèse was a jealous French bitch, so it was all right. Paul has been portrayed as a good, if a little clingy, guy, so it will be interesting to see just how far Liz goes with Anthony, before the good constable finds his way out of Liz’s life. It’s hard to root for Liz at all as it is now, but I have every confidence that Lynn Johnston will find a way to make her even more repulsive and unlikable than before. Go, Lynn, go!!

Missing

I had a fun time with the For Better or For Worse strip today. Elizabeth made such an easy target with her repeated “I miss” sentences. The monthly letters and the strip were full of the word from Elizabeth. It is what she does best. Constable Paul Wright just started down the list of everything she missed. The monthly letters discussed at length, Elizabeth taking early morning walks by the lake to watch the sunrise, and not the sunset. In the monthly letters, Elizabeth loves the native teasing style of humour, but strip Elizabeth always seemed to hate it, even when Jesse Mukwa zinged her with the Ojibway Lizard Breath reference, which I thought was somewhat amusing. I also had the good constable take advantage of research done by the_berserker on Mississauga education, and Liz’s lack of qualifications for the job.

Judging from tomorrow’s strip, that little hug from Elly is all Elizabeth needs to feel better and she is on her way to getting back to her actual true goal of her trip to Mississauga, which is to buy that car and get back together with Anthony Caine. I predict we will see Anthony Caine before the end of the week, as fast as this strip is moving. Considering that Elizabeth spent the last week fantasizing about Paul, I am looking forward to Anthony’s arrival. His appearance and Liz’s reaction to it will be the true test of their future together. Bring it on!

Back from Boy Scout Camp

I am back from Boy Scout camp in lovely Camp Lawton on Mt. Lemmon in Arizona. My boy had a reasonably good time, despite the fact he smashed his glasses, and we experienced hail and a lot of rain. I however, did not have as much fun, as I found myself forced into a scoutmaster role, taking care of 3 other kids, whose parents dropped them at the camp, expected camp staff people to take care of them, and the camp staff people expected me to take care of them. It was a long and rough week.

Back in For Better or For Worse, the story shifted gears mid-week from Mike to Elizabeth, and really wish that Constable Paul Wright had been around to comment. Elizabeth's portrayal in the strip is really starting to confuse me. In Liz's May monthly letter, she commented about a job following the Mississauga one in Markham, but it has not been mentioned since, so I am starting to get suspicious that she may actually leave to go back to Mtigwaki. However, I will reserve judgment until Liz gets that car and sees Anthony as the consequence. If the mere sight of Anthony causes Liz to settle down and sleep well, then we will know where things are going.

Mike's List

Michael Patterson made a list today, and it was a godsend as far as snarking today's strip, which was yet another strip where Michael Patterson makes fun of someone. In this case, the person was a coworker who displays an active interest in Mike's book. I am not sure where this is going to go. It is an odd ending to the week, but the panel does have some reference to the air-conditioning problem that has been the main source of the storyline for Mike, and would make for a good single strip joke. So, there is no real reason to go into a story with Mike at work, unless Lynn really wants to introduce the Sheliagh story into the strip story. If she does, there can be only one reason for it. Yes, Michael Patterson will become a best-selling author and this will provide the money that will allow him to purchase the Patterson homestead from his parents. Don't try to find any other reasons, that will be the one. Plus, the current strip writers haven't gone against the multiweek story arc method in a looooong time. I suspect we have more Mike to come next week. The real question is now: Can Lynn make Mike Patterson even more insufferable than before? That is quite a challenge, but I am sure Lynn is up to it.

Tomorrow's strip: The Pattersons together again at last.
Me: Gone to Boy Scout camp all week.
My characters: Howard and Jeremy are still on tour, which is their excuse for not posting. I am counting on Mike Patterson to keep the strip busy, so Constable Paul Wright will not need to post also. I have posted a lot as Shannon Lake and Michael Patterson, but they are both open characters, so anyone can feel free to drop in the Mike or Shannon perspective on the upcoming week, whatever it is.

Educating Merrie

One of the things I love to do in April’s Real Blog is to take something presented in the strip with an obvious meaning behind it and then turn it around. Today’s strip was devoted to bad-mouthing the Kelpfroths and a sudden and startling realization that Merrie was hanging on Lovey Saltzman’s every word. Considering that Lovey is probably raising Merrie and Robin, it was interesting to see this demonstrated via Merrie’s final joke, which was very Saltzmanesque and not Pattersonlike. The other thing it demonstrated was that the Pattersons and Lovey’s boorish behaviour of calling the Kelpfroths names behind their back, is a characteristic they wish their children to emulate. So, I decided via Mike, to take the Merrie phrase and turn it into a Melville Kelpfroth praise-a-thon. It was quite enjoyable and was startlingly easy. Melville Kelpfroth has won virtually every battle he has been in against the Pattersons and Lovey. He may be hairy and wear his underwear outside, but he stands up for himself. Oddly enough, I think Melville is a better role model (except for the smoking).

The Ramones

Thanks to April’s Real Blog today, I listened to the Ramones. www.launch.com had 2 Ramones videos and I observed that their rapid beat appears to be due more to their bass guitarist than their drummer, but it was only 2 songs, and may not be indicative of the whole work of the Ramones.

As for today’s strip, I did variations on swimming from the characters. My favourite twisted post was the one where I hinted that Michael Patterson may have actually been a little excited by the sight of Melville Kelpfroth in his underwear. I am sure that the strip Michael is intended to be solidly heterosexual, but ARB Michael is definitely more in the bisexual vein, and monthly letters Michael is flat out homosexual. In any case, I found the idea very amusing.

In tomorrow’s strip we have a few unusual things. Mike whines to Lovey to protect him, once again, from the machinations of the evil Melville. And out of the blue, Merrie makes a joke, I think is supposed to be intended to indicate her child-like viewpoint, but it is so snarky, it comes off as a joke that would be made by her father. It is quite unusual. The other interesting thing is Lovey’s list of complaints the Kelpfroths have made seems to come out of nowhere. The Kelpfroths complaints are: (a) We don’t like to see your kids’ toys all over the place and (b) we don’t like it when you make too much noise. Those are the only complaints I have seen regularly. Of course there is also (c) we don’t like it when you slander us in your newspaper column, but I view that as a one time only event. It is on occasions like this, I wonder if I have missed a back story or if Lovey is just making things up. For example, when Jesse Mukwa complained about his parents leaving, it was the first time we ever heard of that. The way this strip is being handled these days, I will probably never know.

The Talking Wife

Today's strip I could kind of relate to. Whenever my wife and I have some disaster with the kids, like we get woken up in the middle of the night by a child who says, "I don't feel good." and then vomits, it does wake a body up, where it might be difficult to go back to sleep. My wife has been know to get in the mood for pillow talk after we have cleaned up on such occasions. Of course she is not likely to talk about the temperature of places where we used to live. Most likely, the conversation would have to do with the recently ill child. But we have long established that neither Mike or Dee is interested in being a parent, so this is not too far from the way they have been portrayed to date.

I took the time to read over all the Mike-related posts from the time I was gone to try to figure out what to do with his recent activities, and in order to help the_berserker drive whatever story she has in mind for Mike and Duncan. I liked the result.

Tomorrow's strip: Another opportunity to insult Melville Kelpfroth, who this time is portrayed as a buffoon running about smoking and drinking and in his underwear. Unfortunately for Mike, Melville has a legitimate complaint.

When Air Conditioners Attack

So night problem number 1 is the fan, night problem number 2 is the air conditioner, and night problem number 3 is a chatty wife. Will Mike ever get any sleep? Will Mike learn to sleep on top of the blankets? It seems unlikely. The real question is, as it usually is for us on April’s Real Blog when Lynn takes a particular humourous situation and beats the living daylights out of it, what can we snarkers do with yet another day of “I can’t get to sleep” humour? Moreover, what will we do when this becomes the joke for the entire week?

Fortunately, Howard and Jeremy are on tour, so I can continue to use Canadian entertainment locations and festivals to drive that story. qnjones responded quite nicely with a Marjee and Becky catfight, which I enjoyed reading and it spurred me to do some research on female Viking warriors, which I limited to the Icelandic sagas, since Thorvald seems to favour those as reference material. Also, eye-gouging of all things. I could find no references to fights between Viking sisters, which doesn’t mean there weren’t any, but I just couldn’t find them.

Constable Paul Wright made a statement with respect to temperature and www.weather.com was checked for close by Thunder Bay, Ontario, which has highs in the 60s F and lows in the 50s F. From this I interpreted that heat waves are uncommon in that area of Ontario. I am not really sure where Paul Wright is. He has been figured at 17 hours drive from Toronto by Mike Patterson’s July monthly letter. www.mapblast.com tells me that the distance from Armstrong (a town approximately where Mtigwaki would be) and Toronto would take 20 hours to cover, and the travel time from Thunder Bay is about 17 hours. This would put Paul still in Otter County, since Spruce Narrows has been described as being much closer to Mtigwaki than a 3 hour drive. However, it would also mean that Elly got tired on her trip back last year after just 3 hours, which I guess is possible, considering Elly. It is difficult to say, since I cannot trust the Lynnions to be even remotely accurate when it comes to geography. Unless it is stated specifically in a strip or a monthly letter, I am going to presume Paul is still in Otter County, based on this information.

the_berserker has started having Duncan threaten Mike Patterson for getting near his girlfriend. My initial guess was that Duncan saw Mike Patterson at the rehearsal for his play, where Zandra is acting as Charles Wallace’s agent, but I have been intentionally avoiding those kinds of confrontations, so Mike can be completely surprised by the way the play has been rewritten by Zandra and Charles on the opening night of its performance. This evening, the_berserker mentioned the Milborough Public Library being the place where he saw Mike with Zandra, but I am still confused about why Mike would be at a public library in Milborough and why Duncan would feel any jealousy toward married Mike. A normal adult would probably speak to Duncan’s parents, and passive Mike would probably write a column about the situation except, the parents in question are family friends of the Pattersons. I am guessing Mike will have a conversation with his mother about Duncan. How I am going to make it funny, I have no idea. In any case, the insults from Duncan calling Mike a poor writer and a user of p)rn pretty much eliminate any possibility of further conversation between the characters. Mike wilts in the face of any adversity in the strip and to be true to his character, that is what he would do here also.

Fan Attacks

I have to admit I have the same problem Michael Patterson has with his ceiling fan. I have the short dangling chains that bounce against the side of the fan and make a tinkling noise when they hit and it can keep me up at nights. The solution is either to turn the fan off, which is what I usually do, or to buy the longer chains with some sort of weight on the bottom to keep the chain from moving as much with the fan motion. Unfortunately, my wife hates the long chains for aesthetic reasons, so the only solution available to me is to turn the fan off.

The strip was a kind of a nothing strip, so it was hard to snark without simply making fun of the extraordinarily stupid way Mike solved his problem. However, aprilp_katje’s comment about the noise sounding like Mike’s typing inspired me to do a little Iris / Jim / squirrel monthly letter snark (a subject virtually untouched by most Foob commentaries). Then I had Howard set up the Jeremy snark of Becky confusing someone’s bizarrely hyphenated last name “Winkle-Wonkle” with the fan sound effects of “Tinkle-Tonkle.” The results were not particularly satisfactory. I did learn that Brunswick Stew did not originate in Brunswick or New Brunswick, and so there was a learning element of today’s tour snarking. The radio station and newspaper mentioned for interviewing Becky are real, as is the musical festival for which she played, not that anyone cares about such accuracies except me.

Ironically, one of Howard air conditioner repairs for the bus comes true in tomorrow’s strip. Water accumulation is a sign of leakage in one of the ducts. Of course, as I look at the Toronto weather conditions on www.weather.com, I see the evening low temperatures and many of the high temperatures are below the temperature we cool our house in Arizona. I am having a real hard time believing the point of the strip that the nighttime temperatures in Toronto are too hot for kids to sleep. They must be used to really cold temperatures in their house at night. Now if Michael and family were in Arizona, like I am, I might have a little more sympathy.

Back from Vacation

I and the kids just got back from a week long vacation at Garden City, South Carolina (near Myrtle Beach). At long last, I finally got my kids to go to a beach where the water is not freezing cold (as it is on the California beaches) and my kids’ response was that they didn’t like the beach because of the taste and sting of salt water. Oh well. We had a pool at the house my dad rented for us and all the rest of his immediate family and my daughter and her cousin that is about her age rarely left the pool. We were close enough to the ocean to see fireworks set off every night and on July 4th, it went on for hours and hours. It was easily the best fireworks display I have seen in a long, long time.

I read the newspaper every day, and I thought how terrible it was that Paul Wright wasn’t posting his reaction every day, but then I considered that he probably would not post anything, while he was visiting Milborough. It would seem too odd. So, that worked out all right. Howard and Jeremy were on tour and even though I am back, I don’t think they are coming back any time soon. The exception is this: The mall talent contest mentioned in the monthly letters. April’s Real Blog has taken the stance that it has already occurred, which is reasonable considering the way Michael’s monthly letter was written. However, given that April is now scheduled to be shipped off to Winnipeg in August, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a July appearance of that contest. If Becky is a competitor, then the tour will come back to Milborough for the contest.

Tomorrow’s strip starts a Michael story arc, and although I have been posting as Michael recently, I am uncertain how to proceed, given that Michael has taken some excellent shots from April’s Real Blog lately on his book, and it might be funnier to not have him respond. By the way, I have the same problem with ceiling fans Michael has, except when they keep me awake, I turn them off.