Ok, maybe not, but if you'd had the month and a half I had and survived it, I'd be pretty impressed. Here was my checklist since the last update:

• Write and draw NHS 106
• Pack up my two bedroom house to move to California.
• Create my Spring Pinup Girl costume.
• Run a booth at Animazement in Durham, NC.
• Finish 10 custom wigs.
• Do the storyboards for Chris Bunting's installment of "How to Break into Manga".
• Drive 3242 miles with the Petting Zoo to my new apartment.
• Do 2 more wigs.
• Write and draw NHS 107 in ONE WEEK!!
• Unpack.

The Five Week Schedule.
With the craziness that seems to follow me everywhere I go, my scheduling for NHS has become really screwed up. Originally we were on a three week schedule, then with the consequent delays caused every month by things like freak blizzards, car troubles, computer viruses, and improptu cross-country moves, we're now on a five week schedule. But since NHS is a monthly comic, and there's usually only four weeks in a month... well, my math skills aren't too hot, but even I know that's not a good schedule.

So! Getting issue 106 out on time, in spite of all the other things that occured this month, took a combined effort from Robby, Jodon, and myself. This was Jodon's first comic related "all-nighter", and I think he did a great job. Especially considering he had to still go to his normal job the next day. (He works for the government, so apparently taking a mid-day nap is considered a office faux-pas... )

I didn't get a chance to see the finished pages for this issue, so it'll be just as new to me as to the rest of the readers. '_'

Packing My Life in Boxes
Between working on everything else this month, I had to once again, pack up my belongings to move back to California. For those of you who don't know, I have had to pack up my entire house/apartment a total of eight times in the past ten years. Some people may think that's a pretty high number, but considering the fact that my family had to do the same thing seven times by the time I was seven years old, this is really pretty normal for me. The longest I ever stayed in one place was 11 years. That was the little mountain town I grew up in, Oakhurst, California. When people ask me where I'm from, I always say California, even though I was born in Florida, lived in four other states, and spent 2 1/2 years in Germany.

Although the process is time consuming, I really like moving to new places. The "clean slate" aspect fills me with a sense of hope. As an artist, an empty room is like a blank canvas, as an engineer, it's like a fun challenge to put the room together in a way that best uses the space while still remaining livable. I'll be sharing my new apartment with a friend, and she gets the master bedroom in exchange for the two smaller bedrooms. (One for sleep, one for work.) She said the rooms aren't very big, so I'll need to put my Tetris skillz to the test to fit all my wigmaking, cosplay, and art supplies into the small spaces.

Really though, I don't care how small the rooms are, as long as I don't have to live another day in that sh--hole I just left, I'm dandy like candy.

One other thing I had to do before packing was complete my Katsucon commissions. This was the last one: 22 D&D characters (with their animal companions...) fully colored.

We had a little scare when we reached our hotel, as I thought I had accidentally locked my keys in the trunk of my car. I was very tired and disoriented, since we didn't check in until 5:30am, so doing something that dumb didn't seem out of the realm of possibility. However, I later found the keys in one of the bags I had loaded onto the luggage cart, so the crisis was averted.

The con itself was relatively quiet. (As most hotel-based conventions are.) We managed to get a table right next to the entrance to the dealers room all three days, so we had a good amount of folks stopping by to check out my work. Although almost every one of them assumed it was the male sitting next to me who was the artist, which I found pretty funny. Not only because I got to surprise them when my buddies would say, "Oh no, this is all her stuff", but also because it was so like clockwork, that it got to the point that Jodon would just point at me the second they started to ask.

Our table provided fans with a great view of... the top of my head. ¬_¬

I had to seriously limit the amount of commissions I could take this time so I didn't repeat the fiasco of Katsucon. But even with keeping it to 5 commissions a day, so many people came by to talk with me, that I still ended up having to take a few home. (Commissions, not people.)

The reason I attended this con was to finally meet some friends I had only previously talked to online. They were really fun to hang out with, although Trent was a bit obsessed with the word "Consummate." It's become the new catchphrase for Animazement. Previous catchphrases included:

• Otakon 2001 "A num-num"
• Otakon 2002 "The Yuna that ate Yuna"
• AnimeUSA 2002 "Arf! Arfarfarf! (Menchi's song)"
• Katsucon 2003 "He loooves you, he wants to seeex you..."

Since my wigmaking tools got packed up by the moving guys the day after Animazement, I was in a bit of a bind for finishing up my last three wigs for the month. I had to pull out every MacGuyver trick I could think of to simulate my missing tools and materials. To make matters worse, I had to have the house clean enough to pass inspection, so I couldn't concentrate on just the wigs except for very late at night. (After everyone else passed out from exhaustion...) I didn't get any more than 3 hours of sleep that week, since my dad was still operating on California time, and kept waking me up too early.-_-'

Now normally, my dad is a very efficient packer, but I guess he was kind of tired too, because his packing job managed to block most of the view out the rear windows. This wasn't too much of a problem when we were driving the empty highways of I-80, but parking lots became rather precarious to manuever. I was doing pretty well in spite of it, until the third night, when I backed into a Ford F150 as I was pulling out of the check-in area of the motel. The Ford won, and Superchamp now has a rather large dent in his trunk and taillight. It looks like a basketball hit him at incredibly high speed. ;_;

The next day, just as I was contemplating how much car repairs were going to cost, we got another rude surprise. The "Engine Malfunction" light came on as we drove through "middle of nowhere" Nevada (or was it Wyoming?), and we pulled off to the side to try to figure out what was malfunctioning. All my fluid levels were fine, and most of my major servicable parts had been replaced a few months ago. The handy Honda manual described it as "There is a malfunction with your fuel/exhaust system. Try replacing the gascap. The light may remain on, even after the problem has been fixed."

Great. That was so helpful. So we drove on, and once again, I started to think about how much I'd need to save up to get my car back in tip-top shape. ("Lets see, $500... that's 50 commissions at $10 a piece..." -_-')

Also, I don't know what it was about this trip, but normally I have no trouble driving long distances without getting tired. Instead, I was nodding off all the time, and so was my dad! We had to constantly switch, constantly stop at rest areas, and the trip ended up taking forever in comparison to some of my previous cross-country drives.

So there I was, sitting in the empty living room and trying to decompress from my hectic journey. (To make matters worse I ALMOST lost Burb that morning, when a cat decided to jump on his travelling cage. Luckily, he likes me enough that he actually flew to me when I started singing to him, and I was able to pick him up and put him back in the cage.) None of my belongings (except for those inexpertly packed into my car) would be arriving until the following day, and although I had my computer, I didn't have an internet connection yet, so I couldn't start the monumental task of catching up on my email. (I can't remember how many messages I received in my absence, but it was a lot...) My friend had been running my spam filter while I was gone, so any email I got was REAL email, and therefore required a reply. So I figured I might as well just relax, since I really couldn't work without any of my tools or supplies.

Then I got the phone call. My friend called to let me know that Robby Bevard, my editor for NHS had emailed me and said I had to get the next issue done by Friday. (This was Tuesday afternoon, mind you.)

"You're kidding, right? That's insane! I just got here, and I don't even have any of my stuff yet!"

But no, he was not kidding, it seems what happened was that all of the core books for AP (Gold Digger, NHS, Warrior Nun Areala, etc...) had come in late the previous month, so they needed to get an issue out right away to not miss the early printing deadline for June. They chose NHS since it was the farthest along in the normal schedule, completely oblivious to the fact that I was in a car driving through the Rocky Mountains at the time of their decision. Robby had told them there was no way we could get a 22 page issue out in 3 days, and proposed that we do kind of a "Collage" issue, with several different artists contributing 3-4 page short stories, but I guess the other artists couldn't commit to that, so that fell through. He did manage to get me 7 extra days though, which was still absolutely ridiculous considering the circumstances, but better than 3 days.

"Um... I'm not exactly set up to work yet."

So, the next day, my belongings showed up, along with the cable modem installer. However, that came with its own set of problems.

You see... moving trucks are fairly large vehicles, and I live in a gated community. So the moving truck couldn't pull up to my house, or even close enough to just carry things from the truck. So they had to unload my posessions onto a smaller truck (an additional $546...) and then drive the smaller truck up to my door. Then came the joy of trying to direct four movers as to "what goes where" on a 102° afternoon, when only the boxes packed by me were actually labeled correctly. I found later that the 4 large boxes they put in my room, laboring under the delusion that they were clothes, were in fact completely devoid of clothing, but instead contained a bunch of junk from a hall closet, including car-cleaning products and batteries.

So somewhere among the 57 unlabeled boxes were my art supplies, which I desperately needed as the clock ticked away. I didn't even have enough money to buy temporary replacement supplies, so through the boxes I went digging. It took me nearly two days to find just the basics, and another one and a half to find things like my pencil sharpener. (I still haven't found my "magic" ruler, my 30/60 triangle, or my good eraser.)

There was only one snag: one of the boxes, namely the one with the half-done Aisha Clan Clan wig I was working on, didn't get shipped with the rest. In fact, I learned that it hadn't been shipped at all, and was still sitting in my friend's living room. The wig was due on the 10th, and the package finally made it to me on the 9th at 7pm. >,<!

As always, feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think of all this nuttiness.