Waffle

I've gone through my sketchbooks over the past week to pick what all I was going to keep and what was going to get thrown out. Pickings from the year 1998 have been slim: unless I find another sketchbook from that year that I haven't torn up yet, the images below are all that I want to keep at all. All are early sketches for White House in Orbit and what's noticeable is how little character art I did. It was pretty much one or two drawings per character, no turnarounds, no height charts, not even many repeat drawings to hone and stylize the characters. Just one or two, and then I got on with drawing the actual comic. Things have changed a lot since then.

Trust me, it will get better as I zoom through the years.

Decluttering, decluttering, decluttering! I have thrown out my old term papers, and spent several hours going through 15 years' worth of old utility bills and other documents relating to living in the apartment I've lived in for the past 14 years. That was depressing stuff, seeing the years blend into one another as represented by the paperwork. Then I started work on the sketchbooks. I have abandoned the scan-and-destroy approach for now in favor of sorting the art and ideas I want to keep by year. That was less depressing: I'm already getting a good feel for how each of those years worked out for me creatively: in 1998, I had a lot of ideas and was good at getting them developed even if the art quality was often poor; this pretty much stopped in 1999, which was a lean year in which very little stuff worth bothering with came out of my brain and my hands. 2001 and 2005 were both years during which I did little that wasn't directly connected to my ongoing comic projects. 2006 was a very good year creatively and was also noteworthy because my sketchbooks became less scribbly and more developed. In fact there are many sketches from that year that make my hands itch to develop them into full artwork, and I may try some of that during the weekend. Decluttering any kind of paper archive is a slow process even if most of what I find can safely be trashed. I never know if there isn't some essential item tucked in with the crap. But it is progressing. Good; I won't be able to take all those sketchboks with me. Once I've got all the years sorted out and all the pages full of squiggly old crap are gone, I will scan-and-discard whatever is left.

I've been looking for a place that makes visa-compliant photographs (the requirements are different from those for regular passport photographs). No luck yet, but I need to put more effort into that.

Most of my time today got swallowed up by re-scanning old comics for the Drunk Duck mirror. Too bad, but that too needed to happen, and at least I got to throw out some photocopies that I made to use with the old A4 scanner back in the day.

Money-wise I kept the groceries budget down to below 15 Euro including some non-food items like toothpaste. Food was about 11 Euro. It'll take a lot of creativity to make that stretch across the whole week, but that's becoming a bit of a sport for me now. In the process, I will probably declutter the kitchen cabinets a lot too. A year ago I was enjoying filling that up with durable food and snacks for every occasion. Now I want all the canned stuff out of there and reclaim some cabinet space.

I'm cleaning out my bookshelves full of old sketches, and I'm planning to be quite brutal. I've already thrown out two whole sketchbooks, pausing only to tear out the sketches below so I could scan and post them. The paper versions of these sketches will also be thrown out, but I do want to share these drawings.

The sketches are from 1996, my first visit to Norway. I stayed there for three weeks as a guest of Daniel Østvold, Geir Strøm and Anne-Kristin Mathisen, and his brother Trond and Trond's wife Tanja. Being around so many creative people and around so much good if expensive Norwegian beer meant that a number of ideas got spawned there: a beery conversation with Geir resulted in him writing The Eye of the Underworld for me a year later. But there was another idea from those conversations that we only touched upon and Geir only revisited a year later:

I doodled this 1920s-looking charater and the robot, briefly discussed retro-sci-fi with Geir, and evidently forgot about it until Geir came up with the script for the first White House in Orbit story, a lightweight, flimsy little piece that nonetheless introduced the principle characters and setting well.

I also drew these trolls: as preparation for a story called Hej, Kalle! for which Trond wrote the captions (but not the script). This story is not currently online, which is a bit of a pity as it's by far the daftest thing I've ever done.

Finally, there was this: Geir and I had already discussed what would happen if Kel from Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan met the Baron von Fieffelfalsfaffel from The Double. From that came the idea of a meeting between the general casts of both comics... but I already had other plans for Kel, so Daniel and Geir ended up creating a young witch as a prototype Kel. Krakatoa Hekludottir, of course, ended up in my comic instead... The above drawing was the first time I tried to draw her, and as you can see, she looks nothing like the present version.

More old art coming soon as I find, scan and destroy it!

My groceries were only €15.40 this week, which is great; I even had room in that amount for nuts and (bliss!) potato chips. That means my expenses for this week, including a trifling little sum for travel, are €745. I booked my next plane trip to the US. To get the cost down to approximately €730, I had to book a trip with two stopovers instead of one (serves me right for not booking earlier, grumble, grumble). I'm sure I'll regret that come travel day, but I was beginning to fret and worry over the travel cost, because four of those trips in a year is such a huge bite out of my paycheck. This shaved 300 bucks off my travel costs, which right now is worth a little hassle.

I clocked 43:47 at the 9K event of the Bommenberendloop today, which was about 10 minutes faster than my target time. I was going to take it easy but I figured out pretty soon that I could comfortable pace myself at under 5 minutes a kilometer, and did, even though the route had hardly any distance signs posted.

The weather changed from sunny to rainy during the run, and afterwards I was not pleased to find myself cycling home in my sweaty running clothes in a cold downpour with an outside temperature of 12° Centigrade (54F).

The run, incidentally, is part of the festivities to celebrate the end of the Siege of Groningen on August 17 (according to the Julian calendar; August 28 according to the Gregorian), 1672. The siege was initiated and led by Bernhard von Galen, nicknamed Bommen Berend —"Bommen" means bombs, which he liked to fire into the city with his cannons. Despite this, the city and surrounding villages of Groningen kicked his ass and he lost 12,000 men. As the year 1672 was one that the Dutch people would otherwise have preferred to have skipped, this was and is a big deal to the townspeople (The Dutch versions of the Wikipedia pages linked above are much more extensive if you can read them and are interested in the history of this historical event).

Emigration: I now have a list of the documentation I need, plus a rough budget for the whole process through status adjustment after marriage. I think we'll be able to do it all for less than € 2000. What I don't know yet is a timeline for the project as a whole, but it looks like US consulates are capable of processing visa applications reasonably fast (the status adjustment/green card process is a whole 'nother matter. I've heard horror stories. As for citizenship, that's gonna take years, but it also happens to be something I'm not very concerned about at this point). I have also been reading up on other people's subjective experiences emigrating from the Netherlands to the US. However, the stories I've found (in Dutch and not bookmarked) were both from people who won the Diversity Lottery, which obviously isn't going to be my route to emigration. I did get the message that I should expect a lot of surly/grumpy behaviour from people at the consulate, and that this is one process where mistakes can cost you dearly. This may also be of interest.

Health/exercise: The other day I ran 500 meters in 1:41. I should not do that again. The reason I overdid it was that my running group had picked that day to test everyone, and it felt to me like we'd only just done that. So instead of going for a time that would guide me towards target times for real runs, I just went all-out. Of course when I thought about it later, the last test was actually back in May, before I went to the US. There seems to be some sort of mental compartimentalisation going on, in which I remember my stays in the Netherlands and my stays in the US as separate, uninterrupted experiences. Sticking to my budget means there aren't any fattening snacks in the house and I'm eating very healthily.

Work: Working normally, going to discuss my contract renewal tomorrow. Contemplating doing some temp work on the side in the early evening.

Stuff/Money: Nothing much to report. I've started mentally marking out specific items in my home for giving away to specific people, and I've put in some work to unclutter my finances. Specifically, I was still getting rent and health rebates on my taxes that I am no longer entitled to, and I've finally reported this so I can start paying the money back (I have not spent it and did not report it earlier out of pure laziness and inertia). This will give me a much clearer picture of how much money I actually have.

Comic: Still unmotivated, but doing practise sketches to keep the skill up. I'll put some of these up as on my DeviantArt site as soon as I've accumulated some usable ones.

This week's groceries expenses were €35 - they'll be €37 when I get the peanut butter, which I forgot. Most of my groceries were bought at the farmer's market, and because I brought a list and stuck to it, I did not splurge on expensive cheeses and sun-dried tomatoes. Last week's groceries expenses were €27; the week before it was €70 because I was re-stocking after my trip to the US (and got tempted by said expensive yum-yums). Numbers not exact because I don't always get receipts and I don't always keep them when I do. Even this week, I am still buying a lot of stuff to replace what was in the pantry before I left for the US; when I get the peanut butter, re-stocking will be complete though.

This week, my meal plan will be based on the How Low Can You Go meals Trent has posted on The Simple Dollar; specifically, meals will include Potato-peanut curry and Moorish-style chickpea and spinach stew. I will also have Fish curry and Sweet potato and lentil curry. Yes, it's a week of mostly curry, and mostly vegetarian food. Going (mostly) veg for a while after 2 1/2 months on a meat-heavy American diet with large portions has helped me fit into my pants better already. It's not a lifestyle for the long term for me but I can do it for a few weeks.

The recipes on The Simple Dollar are pretty much the first bit of food advice from any frugality blog that I'm taking action on. Most of the food-related advice from frugality blogs is either stuff that I figured out for myself ("dried legumes are cheap!") or things that I've been doing all my life, i.e. box up your lunches, make your own coffee, cook from scratch. In fact it is fair to say that frugality blogs have introduced me to a lifestyle of wanton profligacy: until I started reading them, I was not aware that there were people on average, middle-class incomes who ate out for lunch and drank coffee at Starbucks every day. To me, boxing up my lunch and making my own coffee is not something I call "frugal", it's something I call "normal" - one of those unquestioned assumptions about my life in comparison to other people's. Advice like that, advice that tells me to do things I already consider normal, annoys me, especially when it's repeated over and over again. Of course, to a person who regards eating a nine-dollar lunch every day as normal, these repeated messages count as counter-marketing: they need the repeated messages telling them to consume less just to counter the endless bombardment of media messages telling them to consume more. (Another one that irritates me but is probably useful for many people is the one telling people to turn off their TV and use the time saved to do other, more productive or interesting things. I haven't had a TV in the house since 1995, apart from a few months when I borrowed one, but most people do and waste a lot of time on it)

Anyway. I'm glad that there is some advice there that I can actually follow and it does look like I'll be eating very well on a budget this week. I may be ready to move onto frugality-related material that takes more of a "guerilla" approach like the old Tightwad Gazette used to do, or that questions fundamental assumptions more, such as Early Retirement Extreme.

Update: Thirty bucks a week may come in handy for bringing my budget down further.

Here's what I've done in the past few days to reach my various goals in the run-up to my wedding and emigration:

Emigration: I have looked at the requirements for a Nonimmigrant Visa for a Fiance(e), and started taking action towards fulfilling them. The proverbial low-hanging fruit here turned out to be getting a copy of my birth certificate, which I ordered online.

This weekend, I will inventory fully, sort the requirements, time path and budget into a format that is easy for me to access and read, and start gathering up the other documents. Compared to when I last looked into this stuff, the process doesn't look so hideously complicated, but I will need to break it down into simple, manageable steps.

Stuff/money: I have found a taker for my old, large drawing board, who is willing to pay €100 for it. That will go towards paying for that visa application. And the drawing board will go to a good home with someone who will take good care of it.

Health/excercise: I have trained my guts out on Monday and Wednesday with my running group, running at the highest level even though I'm out of shape. It was hard, but if I do this three times a week, I will be back in shape in time for the 4 Mijl in October.

That's it for now. Work starts in earnest on Saturday with the emigration process inventory.

Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan is going on indefinite hiatus starting today. All the stuff I need to do in preparation for my wedding has a lot to do with it but the main reason for calling it quits for now is that my motivation has gotten very low.

Actually, come to think of it, those two factors work in concert. Imagine waking up on a Saturday knowing that this, the weekend, is the time you have to work on your hobby. But it's a nice, sunny day, maybe the last of the year, there are friends you haven't seen in months and may soon never be able to see again. There are unread books on the shelves, unwatched videos on your hard drive. There are vague ideas for new comics buzzing around in your head, that you haven't developed but they seem fresher than your project of the past 18 years, and may have wider appeal. There is maintenance to do on your existing, 1400-comic archive. There is grocery shopping, chores around the house, and all the time you were planning to work on the comic, your attention goes to those things. Oh, and it won't be long before that short time window opens when both you and you fiancee in a different time zone are both up and available to talk.

Doesn't seem like a whole weekend is all that long anymore? Those four or five hours for a comic suddenly look like a big chunk of your free time. Now imagine all that, plus being aware that you need to get off your ass to prepare for a big, permanent change to your life.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining or making excuses. I know perfectly well that if I really wanted to, if I was really driven, I'd sacrifice all the other stuff I want to do, the stuff that normal people do on a weekend, to get my art out for you to read. But right now, unlike say four or five years ago, I'm not that driven. I want to do it, but at my own leisure. And as a result, making myself sit at home working on comics over a weekend makes me feel like a rat in a cage. So I'm calling the schedule off until my head is clearer and the drive returns.

Again, don't get me wrong. It is a very good time to be me. I'm not fed up with my comic just yet, and I'm happier than I've been in a long time. I'm just adjusting to some new realities in my life and one of them is that if you're going to maintain a webcomic on a regular schedule at my age, you can only do that if it's the number one thing you're obsessed about. I'm not, so I won't.

The one thing that will continue on schedule is the Drunk Duck re-runs. As much of a pain in the ass as working on that can be, this situation is a big part of what the re-run project is for: to keep the comic in the back of my mind when for one reason or another, I have to take a break from it. It doesn't take nearly as much time as it used to, and I can do it in small time increments without harming the art quality because all the art work is already drawn. So go there for your daily fix - there have been changes from the comics as originally run.

This is sort of a cross between a memo to self and a public announcement of my priorities for the next few months. If all you're interested in is the schedule of the Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic, scroll to the bottom.

Like I mentioned the other day, I'm getting married in May. Since my fiancée and I currently live on different continents, that means one of us is going to have to pack up and leave, and that's going to be me. Aggie has the public-facing job, the house and land that she owns and the two teenagers; I've got no dependents, no mortgage and a job that I can do over the internet. The planned emigration is a much bigger change than the marriage itself, and a much scarier one for me. There's a number of ways I need to get my house in order before May 29. These are some of them.

The emigration itself. We have talked about it between us in the past year and at some point I was downloading and saving documents from the US INS to study the matter. But it's been a maze of documents to read, I lost track, then the hard drive the docs were on went kablooie. All that I took away from it is that it's a very long process, that as a spouse or prospective spouse I should have it relatively easy but will still have to fill in a bunch of applications and probably have to prove that I actually know this woman and have spent time with her, and that it's a good thing that Aggie's income is well over the poverty line. I will need to start making phone calls and writing to the embassy for more information and incorporate those things into my schedule, soon. In the next few weeks.

Work: I have already experimented with working long-distance from Tennessee at my current job and have the go-ahead from my boss to go back and do it again. There are still some teething problems to sort out and some unanswered questions about the value of it all to the company; all we know is that it doesn't hurt my job performance. I consider this issue 80% covered, but just in case, the next issue will be:

Money: Over the past year, I have slowly built an emergency fund in high-interest savings account. That will have to be turned into a Flexibility fund that should be enough to keep me going for a year in case I do somehow lose my job and am not yet able to look for a new one in the US (or in case I lose my job, am eligible to look for one in the US, but can't find one. It's Middle Tennessee; the demand for white-collar work isn't high there). By my estimate I will need € 20,000 in savings and have no idea how to get there from here (I have € 5000 as my Simplified Net Worth, i.e. whatever is in that account - anything in my other bank accounts may be needed to cover taxes and stuff like that).

Stuff: In the next few weeks, I will start selling or giving away a large part of my books, CDs, DVDs, etcetera. I will also start looking for a transport company that will ship whatever I won't get rid of to th US without costing an arm and a leg. But I'm aiming to keep that part to a minimum: the Stokke chairs, the A3 scanner, my unsold original art and some irreplaceble books should cover it.

Driving: Amazingly, it's a year ago that I started my driving lessons. I had to drop out of them due to being too tired after work to learn anything or indeed be safe. In Tennessee, an adult has to be able to drive, so I'm going to have to go back to driving class and hope I don't run into the same problem again.

Health/exercise: I put on weight while staying in Tennessee. That by itself isn't so bad; it's not like I am being immobilized by carrying a ton of flesh around. But I do feel flabby and spent much of this weekend and the previous one not having much energy at all (see "Driving" above for an example of how that hurts me). Time to pick up running again. Running every other day should reverse the weight gain and help me fit in my pants again so I won't have to buy new ones, and it should help me feel better and get my energy and drive back.

Comics: To be honest, my biggest problem relating to my own comics is that I'm not as motivated as I used to be. If I really wanted to, I could keep the comic going on a weekly schedule between now and May 29 or the day the storyline is over, whichever is earliest. But I'm kind of burned out for now. Having said that, I have no idea what effects the work related to moving out will have on the comic. I do know that I will want to take it easy over the next few months and not bust myself out to make deadline. It's entirely possible that I might find a way to squeeze some extra money for my goals out of the comic, in which case the readers benefit from my plans. Or I might take a long break so I have time to read emigration documentation. It's all up in the air right now.