This Week’s Haul

Due to the unfortunate timing of the Christmas holiday this year, there was only one comic published this week. My local store threw a sale this week, too, so it was actually quite busy when I went in Wednesday afternoon. Sounds like a win for them.

By the way, you can also read what their top-sellers were for 2009; no huge surprises, although Irredeemable vol 1 being their 10th-best-selling graphic novel was interesting. It’s well worth checking out, too.

  • Blackest Night #6 of 8, by Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis, Oclair Albert & Joe Prado (DC)
Blackest Night #6 Has Blackest Night been a smash hit for DC comics? Commercially, there’s no question, it’s been a huge success, building on top of the growing readership of Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern run, and trying to use that to build interest in other DC titles. To put it cynically, that’s basically the point of comics “events”: Get people to pick up some books they wouldn’t otherwise read, and hope a few of them stick around to keep reading them. While I think they could have executed the crossover aspect better (I’ve griped that the free ring promotion was undercut by the issues promoted by the rings didn’t make much effort to explain to new readers what was going on or why we should care), overall DC certainly deserves credit for their marketing of the event.

But is the story any good?

To compare it to other recent events, it doesn’t have a high bar to cross. Of DC’s recent events, Identity Crisis was a collection of continuity navel-gazing mixed with a vile rewriting of some characters’ actions and motivations; Infinite Crisis had a plot that made no sense whatsoever and which introduced one of the least-welcome villains in recent years in Superboy Prime; and Final Crisis was no more comprehensible while additionally being pretentious and focusing on a lot of third- and fourth-string characters. Marvel’s events have been better-executed, although the stories haven’t been much good either; Civil War mucked up characters’ motivations in unbelievable ways, and Secret Invasion (Marvel’s equivalent of DC’s awful late-80s event Millennium) had an unbelievable plot.

By contrast, Blackest Night is fairly comprehensible, and rather than working with long-forgotten details of continuity, it grows out of Geoff Johns’ current storylines in Green Lantern, in which he’s introduced a full spectrum of magic-ring-wielding organizations, each tied to a different emotion. While perhaps a bit cute, Johns has established that he’s more interested in moving his story forward than in making everything line up perfectly with all the GL history from the past, and these days that seems almost novel.

As for the story itself, here’s how it’s developed so far:

  • Blackest Night #0: In this Free Comic Book Day giveaway, Green Lantern (the Hal Jordan version) and Flash (the Barry Allen version) catch up on recent developments in the DC universe, especially characters who have recently died, including Batman, whose grave they’re visiting during their reminiscence. After they leave, a minor GL villain Black Hand shows up to claim Batman’s skull (a good trick, since the last pages of Final Crisis showed that Wayne wasn’t actually dead, even though there was a body, but I suspect Johns is ignoring this detail) and state that by his hand the dead shall rise. Green Lantern #43 goes into detail about the Hand’s background.
  • Blackest Night #1: From the giant black lantern in space sector 666, black power rings emerge and fly across the universe, on the same day that the Earth remembers all his fallen heroes. Meanwhile, a “war of light” erupts among the various lantern corps. The black rings resurrect many of Earth’s dead heroes, and several of them kill and recruit Hawkman and Hawkgirl. In Green Lantern #44, Flash and GL fight the undead Martian Manhunter, learning that the zombie-like creatures cannot be killed.
  • Blackest Night #2: Undead Aquaman kills Aqualad, and the black ring takes over The Spectre. The black rings are unable to recruit Dove, however. In Green Lantern #45, the black lanterns start attacking other ring wielders.
  • Blackest Night #3: The black lantern Justice League fight Flash, GL and the Atom, the tribe of indigo lanterns show up to save them, revealing that a Green Lantern’s ring combined with one of the other colors can sever the black rings’ connections to their hosts. GL is spirited away by the indigo tribe, and the black rings take over Firestorm and claim the villains whose corpses are (oddly) buried below the Justice League’s headquarters.
  • Blackest Night #4: The world’s heroes fight a losing battle against the black lanterns as the black power levels reach 100%. The main black lantern is transported to Earth, and we learn that the entity behind the rings is a minor villain named Nekron. Over in Green Lantern, GL and the indigo lanterns recruit different colored lanterns to fight the black lanterns.
  • Blackest Night #5: The Justice League shows up to help Flash, Atom and Mera fight the black lanterns, and GL’s rainbow corps arrives to fight Nekron, but they don’t have the power to shut down Nekron’s battery. The black rings execute and recruit all the heroes who have died and been resurrected, such as Superman and Wonder Woman.
  • Blackest Night #6: In the latest issue, Flash’s quick thinking saves him and GL from the same fate as the other resurrected heroes. One of the Guardians of the Universe, Ganthet, uses his power to cause the various colored rings to generate new rings and recruit various candidates from Earth, to boost their power against Nekron.

There are still 2 issues to go – plus whatever Johns does over in Green Lantern – and the story feels fairly convoluted. It’s essentially been a running battle between the living and the dead, with the living having little hope of winning unless the lanterns can pull together and somehow destroy Nekron’s battery. The story seems to have taken place over only a couple of days (certainly no one’s caught any sleep or even had a shower during the series), which makes it rather brief for a whole war. But that’s comic books for you.

The motivations in the story are reasonably sensical for superhero comics: Nekron is an avatar of death who wants to eradicate all life to return the universe to a peaceful state (oddly, this detail is explained in an issue of Adventure Comics rather than in the main series). Why he needs to work through Black Hand to do this is not explained, though. The main emotional tension in the story is in the seven different ring-wielders trying to work together, especially since the red and orange lanterns aren’t exactly joiners. But it’s not exactly deep stuff.

And that’s really the series’ flaw: Even though it’s not the usual cynical crossover series, it’s basically just a big slugfest, with desperate situations and some witty dialogue thrown in. Johns has certainly done much better character-oriented drama in Green Lantern and I wonder if Blackest Night would have worked better had it been constrained to just the GL titles rather than roping in every character in the DC universe. The cast of characters has gotten so large that it’s difficult to care much about anyone, because there’s not much room for proper development. (Obviously, this ended up being the case in the grand-daddy of all crossover series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, but back then we didn’t really know what the drawback of such sprawling stories would be. Marv Wolfman, the writer of that crisis, took some interesting approaches to make the story more personal despite its huge scale, too, and Johns only occasionally personalizes things in Blackest Night.)

Could Blackest Night be better? Certainly, although it would probably be a fairly different story. Is it better than other recent DC events? That’s also true. Event comics always have a tendency to go for the lowest common denominator (although Marvel’s tried to avoid that at the cost of making uncomfortable and sometimes implausible changes to their characters and settings), so seeing one rise above that low level is interesting enough. Still, unless Johns has a big surprise up his sleeve, Blackest Night looks like it’s going to end up as just one more sprawling fight, a very nicely drawn one by Ivan Reis and his cast of inkers, but still, not a truly memorable series.

Check back in two months and we’ll see how things turned out.

Ringing In The New

2010 started about as poorly as 2009 ended, with me suffering from this nasty cold. I thought I felt better when I woke up, but I quickly went downhill and slept for a couple of hours a little after noon. I’ve spent most of the day on the couch, alternately half-dozing and finishing John Scalzi’s Zoe’s Tale.

Debbi – who’s still getting over he own colds – has been very nice in taking care of me, making me tea and bringing me things to eat. IF I sound like a wuss, well, I rather feel like one, but then I try to get up and it takes me a couple of minutes to motivate myself, and then I feel a little dizzy as I walk around. So yeah, I’m pretty sick.

What I hate the most about being this sick is that I just can’t do very much. I can’t clean up the leaves in the back yard, I can’t do more cleaning of the study, or measure the closet for new shelving, or even help much around the house. It feels like a wasted day – doubly annoying since it’s on my holiday break! But, I guess these things happen.

I’m feeling better tonight than I was earlier today, and definitely better than last night, when I was totally zoned. So that’s something. It’s a crappy way to kick off the year, though.

Ringing Out The Old

I’d hoped to close out the year with a round-up of 2009, but instead I’ve been hammered by this cold, mainly making me dog-tired. Not the best way to end the year, although I’m trying not to complain too much since Debbi’s been struggling with this thing for almost two weeks (her doctor thinks she may have caught a second cold on top of her first one). It’d be better if I were just congested rather than so tired.

So we’ve had a quiet day at home, with an outing to take care of my friend Andrew’s cat, and to pick up pizza for dinner. I napped for a couple of hours, and I set up our Wii for Internet use, and Debbi was playing Mario Kart with her family back east when I woke up. We also watched Monsters vs. Aliens, which was okay, with a few good bits, but the plot and script were a bit too contrived and cliche (even allowing for the fact that it was playing with cliches). Still, a decent enough light movie.

I’m hoping to make it to midnight for the new year (which is the year 57 in trinary, in case you were wondering). We’ll see, though.

Kind of a blah way to end the year.

Holiday Break: The First Half

We’re a little more than halfway through our holiday break, so here’s what we’ve been up to:

The break has unfortunately been marred by Debbi’s illness, which she’s had for over a week, and which has progressed through the usual cold symptoms, but has taken forever to progress. After hearing her chest coughs yesterday, we finally decided that she should go see a doctor about it today. (I even hauled out our humidifier to see if damper air would help her cough less.) The doctor diagnosed it as just a cold, so there’s not a lot she can do except take it easy and take some cough medicine – and try not to overmedicate.

On the bright side, our friend Karen came down for the Christmas weekend. She usually heads east to visit her family over the holidays, but the price of air fare persuaded her otherwise, so instead we invited her down here. She flew in on Christmas Eve, which I had off but Debbi didn’t, so I picked her up from the airport and we went to Whole Foods to pick up the fixings for Christmas dinner, and lay in food for Karen while she was here. We went to Cascal for dinner, and then drove around the area looking at Christmas lights as there are some impressive displays around.

Christmas morning we sat around the tree (our artificial tree that we bought last year, because real trees have gotten astonishingly expensive around here) and opened gifts. My big gift to Debbi and myself was to replace our aging comforter with a nice new one. It’s even larger, so it fits in the comforter cover whereas the old one was a bit small for it. I also bought her the third season of Corner Gas on DVD. I received a goodly haul of books, CDs and DVDs from various people.

Karen has been training for a long race, so she needed to get some training walks in during her visit, thus in the afternoon we went out to the Stevens Creek Trail so she could do her walk, while Debbi and I took a ore leisurely one. We went directly to have lunch downtown at a Thai restaurant, and then vegged for a while at home, before finally cooking dinner in the evening. I made meatloaf, Debbi made mashed potatoes and steamed carrots, and Karen baked a blueberry pie.

Saturday Karen headed out for a long walk, and Debbi and I went over to Bill’s for his annual Boxing Day party, where we played some Fluxx, one game of which was epically long and I won in a particularly improbable way (involving randomly switched followed by randomly chosen cards). We picked up Karen (just before the first of the week’s rains came in that evening), and went to dinner at Sundance the Steakhouse, which has to be one of our better recent restaurant finds in the area.

Sunday we drove to the coast and had the champagne brunch at the Moss Beach Distillery, then stopped off for an outing at the beach the beach near Pillar Point. Monday, Debbi’s cold was starting to get her down, so we had a quiet day mostly at home and went to dinner at Amber India, before taking Karen to the airport, where she caught her flight home only a little late.

Tuesday, as I recounted yesterday, I went to play poker at a local card room, coming home as Debbi went out for dinner with some friends. I spent the evening puttering around in the study, and afterwards we watched some Corner Gas until we went to bed.

Today I went to the comic book store for the one comic that came out this week (Blackest Night #6). Due to the holidays, shipping companies couldn’t guarantee that books would arrive on Wednesday, so most companies decided to skip this week, as it was the fifth Wednesday of the month anyway (often called a “skip week” in the industry). DC decided to ship one book last week instructing stores not to put it out until this week, on pain of whatever tortures DC has at its disposal, I suppose. You can sometimes tell how ethical a store is by whether they abode by these requirements or not. My store, of course, held the book until this week like they’re supposed to, and held a sale besides – the store, surprisingly, was quite busy when I arrived!

I also went to an Apple store to buy a new keyboard, since the wireless keyboard I’ve been using since I got a stand for my laptop has been terribly unreliable, dropping connections every 10 seconds at times. Very disappointing, but web searches suggested that the keyboard has been problematic for a lot of people (apparently 2.4 GHz devices – wireless networks, cordless phones, etc. – can interfere with the keyboard’s bluetooth connection). Oddly, I’ve never had any such troubles with wireless mice.

And that brings us up-to-date. Now, to go read that comic book – and the few others I bought at the sale!

Poker Outing

It’s been a while since I played poker in a card room, so with the week off I headed over to Garden City Casino this afternoon. Garden City is an old-school card room, with a whiteboard for a waiting list, and tables jammed together on a big floor. Or rather, it used to be, but since I was last there – over a year ago – they’ve completely renovated the inside, with a new room for high-stakes games, electronic screens and waiting lists, and a spacious middle aisle and side area near the eatery. It’s still a little crowded with tables (though that’s to be expected in a card room, I guess!), but it looks much more modern.

(Oddly enough, they still don’t have betting lines on the tables, which was an issue in one hand today when one player thought another had raised, but the other claimed he was only counting his remaining chips, as raising would have put him all in. I’m not sure why they even make tables without a betting line anymore.)

I sat down in a 3/6 game after a short wait. 3/6 is what you call your low stakes game; maybe if you worked at it, you could lose a few hundred dollars in a few hours. I once lost $100 in an hour at 3/6. That was a pretty bad session. But it’s by far my worst hour in the hundreds I’ve put in at these stakes. So we’re not exactly breaking the bank here.

(Don’t ask me about my comic book habit, please.)

This was a pretty rough session, with a number of bad beats. Some notable hands:

  • My worst-played hand was probably pocket Queens on a K62r board, calling a flop bet, then folding on the blank turn, figuring someone had to have a King. The two players who showed down had pocket Tens, and a 6 for middle pair on the flop. I played this too timidly.
  • My pocket Aces got cracked when my opponent rivered two pair. Gah.
  • The roughest hand was playing Q9 and flopping a straight on the JT8 flop. Sounds great, right? Except my surviving opponent hit his river King and show AQ for a better straight. Painful.
  • The most amusing hand was ATh on a A98 flop, one heart. The turn was the Jack of hearts, giving me both the straight draw and the nut flush draw to go with top pair, giving me 20 outs to improve my hand. I didn’t improve on the river, but top pair was good anyway.
  • I lost with a set of Threes to a set of Jacks. What can you do? I flopped a set of Twos in another hand, but the board turned a four-flush and I was sunk there, too. If you can’t win your flopped sets once in a while, what can you count on in this world?

Thanks to the set-over-set hand, I ended up down for the day. Sigh. But I’d been down a lot more earlier in the session and clawed my way back to even. And I had fun, so it worked out. I’ll get ’em next time, right?

New Look

I’m experimenting with a new theme for the journal. Rather than try to get it all right before using it (which would virtually guarantee that I’d never actually finish and deploy it), I decided to just go for it and make changes incrementally. Changing the image, tinkering with the color scheme, and fixing up the sidebars are at the top of my list. Other suggestions are welcome, too; please leave them in the comments!

This Week’s Haul

  • Green Lantern #49, by Geoff Johns, Ed Benes, Marcos Marz & Luciana Del Negro, and Jerry Ordway (DC)
  • Justice Society of America #34, by Bill Willingham, Travis Moore & Dan Green (DC)
  • Madame Xanadu #18, by Matt Wagner & Amy Reeder Hadley (DC/Vertigo)
  • Victorian Undead #2, by Ian Edginton & Davide Fabbri (DC/Wildstorm)
  • Criminal: The Sinners #3, by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips (Marvel/Icon)
  • Fantastic Four: The Master of Doom TPB, by Mark Millar, Joe Ahearne, Bryan Hitch, Neil Edwards, Stuart Immonen & others (Marvel)
  • Fantastic Four #574, by Jonathan Hickman, Neil Edwards & Andrew Currie (Marvel)
  • Guardians of the Galaxy #21, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Brad Walker, Andrew Hennessy & Victor Olazaba (Marvel)
  • The Incredible Hercules #139, by Greg Pak, Fred Van Lente, Rodney Buchemi & Reilly Brown (Marvel)
  • Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. vol 129 HC, collecting Strange Tales vol 1 #154-168, and Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. vol 1 #1-3, by Jim Steranko, Roy Thomas, Frank Giacoia & Joe Sinnott (Marvel)
  • Powers #2, by Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming (Marvel/Icon)
  • Absolution #5 of 6, by Christos Gage & Roberto Viacava (Avatar)
  • Irredeemable #9, by Mark Waid & Peter Krause (Boom)
  • Hellboy: The Bride of Hell, by Mike Mignola & Richard Corben (Dark Horse)
  • Invincible #69, by Robert Kirkman & Ryan Ottley (Image)
Fantastic Four: The Master of Doom Why do I keep reading Mark Millar’s comics? Hell if I know. I guess he’s just enough of an ideasmith that I’m hopeful he’ll provide some entertaining stories a la Grant Morrison, so I keep giving him another try, yet I keep being disappointed. The saying goes that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, so what does this say about me?

In the new Fantastic Four collection The Master of Doom, the second half of his run on the title with Bryan Hitch, Millar demonstrates how to write a really bad bunch of FF stories. The run produced lower sales numbers than you might expect from a run by a pair of supposed super-star creators, but frankly the quality just wasn’t there. Oh, Hitch’s art was nice enough, although stylistically he hasn’t really developed much since his days on The Authority: Toothy grins, near-photo-realistic renderings, rather blah layouts. But the writing is really awful.

The first chapter is an epilogue to the previous collection, featuring the funeral of the Invisible Woman (sorta), the Thing getting engaged to his latest girlfriend – an ordinary schoolteacher, and Doctor Doom threatening that the man who taught him all he knows about villainy is coming to Earth. All well and good, but then it goes off the rails. (Well, the revelation that Reed and Sue’s 2-year-old daughter Valeria is smart enough to be creating tesseract vehicles inspired by Doctor Who isn’t exactly welcome. Writers have enough trouble figuring out how to thread the needle with Reed’s brilliance, let along adding another impossible-level genius into the mix, but fortunately Valeria’s brain isn’t a big factor in the story.)

The next chapter starts with the Human Torch having brought a couple of, well, prostitutes or strippers or just plain sluts, back to his apartment when he’s interrupted. Oh yeah, the two women are dressed as Storm and the Scarlet Witch. Johnny may not be the most admirable member of the team, but this is a new low, and a clear indication that Millar just doesn’t understand the characters. This is followed by further foreshadowing of the arrival of Doom’s master, and then we get a 2-part Christmas story where the team goes to Scotland to visit a cousin of Reed’s. Valeria ends up being the intended sacrifice to a creature that’s been haunting the town for a long time. This is classic Millar: A bunch of superpowered characters hitting things, but no real consideration for the larger issues that he introduces, such as what the creature’s actually been doing for the whole time, even if the price it exacts is disgusting.

Then we launch into the main story, about Doom’s master and the new apprentice arriving on Earth, being not at all pleased with Doom’s lack of progress in villainy, and disposing of the bad Doctor before turning to take down the Fantastic Four. The build-up to the master’s arrival involved him destroying whole parallel worlds, including killing one world’s Watcher, and there’s plenty of potential here: What sort of being would be so vile that he’d have been Doom’s teacher? Exactly when did Doom manage to hook up with an entity of such power, and why did he leave him? Why have they been out of touch for so many years? Heck, why did the master – with the rather generic name the Marquis of Death – leave Earth at all, given his predilection for destroying it?

But Millar finesses all of this by making the Maquis a minor character with no real personality and just the barest of backgrounds, and the new apprentice a means to advance Doom’s character in a rather pointless manner, inasmuch as it’s just a set-up for further stories which Millar won’t be around to tell. And then, our FF manages to take down the pair through some trickery which somehow none of their parallel-world counterparts were able to envision. It doesn’t ring true. And none of the potential of the set-up is realized. It’s just a big slugfest. Zzzz.

Millar wraps up the story with an utter cop-out of a resolution to the Thing’s engagement, which after Ben’s past relationships just seems completely unlike the character for him to handle things this way. Millar twists the characters to fit the story, and so the story just doesn’t work at all.

Millar is one of the hottest writers in comics, and I just don’t get it: His writing is mean-spirited, poorly plotted, weakly characterized, goes for the cheap thrills and doesn’t realize the potential it does have. The Master of Doom illustrates all of this perfectly. Maybe the fact that it didn’t sell very well shows that readers are starting to realize this. I’d had hopes that, reined in by working on a major mainstream property, Millar’s Fantastic Four would be inventive and readable, more like what we see from Grant Morrison (when Morrison hasn’t himself gone astray), but this is just more of the same from Millar. This should probably be the last thing I read by him.

Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. vol 2 Jim Steranko’s work on Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. is legendary in the comics field, and it’s collected in hardcover this month in the latest Marvel Masterworks volume. (The pre-Steranko S.H.I.E.L.D. stories were collected a few years ago.) If you haven’t read them before, this is an outstanding package to read them in.

Steranko, like so many of the prime innovators in sequential art, was before my time, and so coming to his work decades after it first appeared. It’s awkward, since Steranko’s Fury stories feel culturally dated, in part because he was consciously trying to make Fury and his friends feel like cutting-edge inhabitants of the real world, and the go-go world of the 1960s seems downright silly to most people who grew up after it (this is probably why today’s conservatives have so much fun pillorying the Flower Power generation). And besides that, so many of Steranko’s innovations in the field have been assimilated, reproduced, subverted and parodied in the years since, that they just don’t seem very, well, innovative. Plus, Steranko’s layouts and renderings have so much of Kirby in them, but without the sophisticated linework of a Pérez or a Byrne, that they seem dated in and of themselves.

Yet Steranko’s work collected here does look different from his predecessors, contemporaries, and successors: The sense of place he provides in Nick’s apartment, the fantastic devices – less contrived than Kirby’s – that S.H.I.E.L.D. works with, the cinematic sense of pacing (which works sometimes yet fails badly at others, but then Steranko was always trying something new), and his gradual breaking free from the often mundane page layouts of the day (Marvel was ahead of DC in this regard, yet the page layouts of the late 60s, even by Kirby or John Buscema, seem downright staid).

Despite being a bit of a mixed bag for the modern reader, Steranko’s S.H.I.E.L.D. still has a lot to offer, both its historical context, and some rock-em sock-em adventure. The premise of the book is simple: Nick Fury and his international spy organization fighting against Hydra, the Yellow Claw, and a mystery man named Scorpio, in comics’ best-known contribution to the 1960s spy craze. Plus the volume contains a fascinating introductory essay by Steranko regarding the approach he took to writing and drawing the book. If you’ve read any of Fury’s adventures over the last 30 years, well, even at his best they paled in comparison to Steranko’s stories here.

Christmas Rundown

Yes, we still come down in our bathrobes to open Christmas presents. Well, I did, anyway: Debbi wore sweats, and Karen had red Santa loungewear to wear. We came down mid-morning and Debbi baked scones, I brewed coffee, and then we opened gifts. My big present for me and Debbi was a new down comforter from Bed Bath and Beyond, which will be nice since our old comforter was not only old, but a little small for the cover it lived in. The new one is much larger.

I surprised Debbi with a couple of DVDs she wasn’t expecting, and we exchanged gifts with Karen (our houseguest for the weekend), too. My family and I always go a little overboard with the presents, which is always a little amusing since we’re also all pretty hard to buy for! Debbi finds that difficulty really frustrating, and was annoyed that she didn’t find anything for me that she was really happy with. She did, however, buy me a pound of marzipan (mmmmm), which makes me happy!

Karen is in training for a racewalking competition, and needs to get in some workouts while she’s visiting, so around noon we went out to the Stevens Creek Trail so she could walk for an hour. She took off and Debbi and I did our own – rather shorter – walk over the same span of time. Debbi unfortunately is still getting over a cold, which has settled into an annoying cough and making her sporadically miserable, so we took it easy on the walk. At least it was sunny and fairly warm.

We were hoping to go to the local kosher restaurant, The Kitchen Table for lunch, but they were closed. (A friend observed that maybe they were out for the traditional Jewish dinner on Christmas – Chinese food.) The local Thai restaurants are always open on Christmas, though, so that’s where we went. By this time it was 2:30 pm, so we went home to vegetate for the afternoon, expecting a late dinner.

I talked to both my mom and dad during the day, but not yet my sister. I should call her today.

Dinner took longer to cook than expected – it always seems to – but even though we ate at 8:30 pm, it was all still good: I baked bacon-wrapped, ketchup-glazed meatloaf, Debbi made mashed potatoes and steamed carrots, and Karen baked a blueberry pie. “Plenty of food” may be an understatement. Plenty of dishes to wash, too.

Today Karen’s doing a long walk as part of her training, so we’re hanging out at home for a bit, Debbi’s playing Mario Kart on the Wii, we ought to have lunch soon, and wemight stop by Bill’s for his annual Boxing Day party for a bit, then we’ll pick up Karen later in the afternoon when she’s done. And hopefully – if we can get a table – go to Sundance the Steakhouse for dinner. But other than Karen’s training, we have a fairly low-key weekend planned. Maybe a trip to the coast tomorrow.

I hope everyone else’s holiday was as fun!