April Gets Elly to Pack for Her

The theme of the day was packing and I had a good time imagining what each character would say about it. Then it was off to a school orientation meeting and going birthday shopping with the kids for their mother, whose birthday is on Tuesday. Back in the house and only aprilp_katje has responded. So, I opted to introduce a storyline relative to the Heritage Festival in Rocky Falls. I don’t believe Rocky Falls is a real place as far as a town goes. aprilp_katje pointed out that there is a falls called Rocky Falls in Elmira, but no town to go with it. susannamoodie mentioned that there are Heritage Festivals all over Ontario and a little searching uncovered that the North Bay Heritage Festival was occurring this weekend, and had to be the inspiration for the April’s August monthly letter to mention it. The North Bay Heritage Festival, from its on-line information, appears to be a pretty big deal. It runs all week, and they have musicians doing concerts every night. So, opted not to do jokes on how small it was (which I think was the intent in the monthly letter), but on the idea that the Corbeil women would come to mock Becky McGuire. The cat departure was intended to be a separate event, since newly adopted kitties often run away; but aprilp_katje’s comment as April was that the two events were related. And so, then I decided they were. I decided to snark on Lynn Johnston’s current naming habits and also make a few jokes on the creative decisions behind the monthly letters, today’s strip, and my 2 majour artistic complaints with the strip (characters don’t look like people, backgrounds don’t match lead characters' sizes).

On the other hand, it was also time to explore the dynamics of the "Liz visiting Paul's parents" idea presented in Elizabeth’s August monthly letter. qnjones set up some marvelous aspects to the idea in her prior posts as Elizabeth, so I worked off those and then developed, what I think would be the majour parts of such a meeting:

1. The parents are going to be irritated Liz blew them off last December. You know they were expecting a visit from Liz then, and Liz neglected to Paul she was not going to do that until they were on the road. So, Paul’s parents would have found it out when Paul showed up at their house and said, “Oh, she’s in that helicopter, riding with her old boyfriend.”
2. Susan Dokis and the powwow trail. To go on the powwow trail implies heavy parental involvement. So, we know Paul’s parents know Susan Dokis and they may even know she is out of university and unattached.
3. Liz’s change in job.
a. Means Paul moves far away from his parents, if his transfer goes through.
b. Paul’s dad is Irish, so the implication is that he chose to live in Northwest Ontario and was not born there. There would be some friction over the fact that Paul is choosing a different lifestyle in order to stay with Liz.
c. The abrupt nature of the change could not have gone unnoticed.
4. Liz’s general withdrawn and uncommunicative demeanor.

I don’t expect this meeting to show up in the strip, so it should be fun to explore it, since we know that Lynn won’t do it.

Tomorrow’s strip: Deanna gets to be the bad parent for a change, which is a nice change of pace.