I am home!  For a day or two, before lectures and weddings and things set me to scurrying out of town once more.  Folks, in July, I am pretty sure that I’m just going to chain myself to the front porch and resist all attempts to dislodge me until the month is out.

While in Manhattan, apart from selling comic books, I got to:

– shake Allison Janney’s hand backstage after a performance of 9 to 5
– check out the view from Lerner Books’ offices on the 72nd floor of the Empire State building
– see Angela Lansbury perform two days before winning a Tony for the part from seats so close that I could see up her nose
– eat some seriously dangerous pine-nut almond sugar cookies from an Italian bakery on Bleecker
– pray for death in Times Square (as all sane people should)
– take a survey of all of the red-figure Attic vase paintings depicting chickens in the collection at the Met
– see the awesome Donnetta Lavinia Grays bellow every obscene word imaginable at a reading at the Public
– stalk the turtles in Central Park
– mock Teddy Roosevelt’s unbearably butch statue, and a few other billion things.

Nonetheless, I am happy to be home.  New York is a helluva thing, but it has the effect of making me appreciate the silly provincial charms and humane calm of Portland and the Northwest.  (Although I really do wish there were a better selection of 5th century BCE chicken paintings at the museum here.)

It was a great pleasure seeing so many people at MoCCA!  Thank you to everybody who came and said hello, bought a book, or just gossiped with me.  After four years of studiously keeping to the left half of the country it was delightful to see both old friends and new faces.  I’ll be visiting much more frequently in the future, so you’ll all have a chance to get bored of me before the decade is out.

And now I’m going to sleep off a bit of the jetlag before finishing the most recent page of Family Man writing a detailed outline for a book proposal sending out more book orders mocking up an illustration laying out three small press publishing projects inking three Oscar & Annie strips ordering more stickers ordering a new round of Bite Me redoing the Family Man webpage…ET CETERA!