7/20/2002:

I had an ending to the Stripey storlyine, but my art skills were not up to the challenge of rendering a boy hugging a shirt and the shirt hugging back, or the ninjas that swoop in or the sentient radishes. And so you will just have to wonder how that all would have looked.

This strip is all about food, since my life revolves around meals. Wake up, breakfast, teach for a bit, morning break, more teaching, then lunch. Then afternoon activity, more teaching, another break, more teaching and then dinner. Food and breaks. Mmm.

When I was a freshman, I really didn't understand why people complained so much about the food. I figure that it's like bad haircuts for the military: give everyone something in common to whine about and they'll bond. Maybe. The old urban myths surrounding the food were that we had lower grade meat than prisons and that our dining halls frequently failed health inspections, but the school hushed it up. I didn't really believe the stories, but after two more years of dorm food, I was getting pretty sick of eating the same stuff. Junior year especially, I thought about how nice it would be to have a kitchen and cook food that I wanted to eat, all the time, instead of always hoping for chicken patty day.

And for the first quarter of living in an apartment, I was good about cooking. Sure, I might have had eggs and bacon for 3 meals a day at the beginning, but soon my skills expanded to macaroni + cheese w/ ground beef, steaks in the Foreman grill, sandwiches, noodles, and brats. I stopped cooking so much when Sil moved in, winter quarter. Sil's mom would also send tons of strange leftovers and so I'd eat those a lot, once I realized that there was no way Sil could eat it all. But towards the end, I just went out to eat a lot. Especially at the very very end, when moving out loomed and I could not bring myself to put any new items into the apartment, especially the fridge.

And now, I'm back to dorm food and I'm eating a lot of it. Being free definitely is the biggest plus. But besides that, I'm back to my freshman year thinking that it's really pretty good. Most of the time.

I finished Coraline today. Brr, creepy. I gave it to my sister and told her to read it to my niece, but it'll be at least 7 more years before she can comprehend it. I liked the story very much. When you can't think of anything more you would like to have seen in the story, I think that's the sign of a successful book.

I went home for less than 24 hours due to a strange mix of events and plans. Truly a pop in visit. I'm still catching my breath from driving back in, but now I have to go to my sister in law's birthday dinner. Happy Birthday, sis in law!

kip

PS Today marks strip #150. This is where I wanted to end Scrubs way back in June, thinking "150 is a nice round number," but hey, we're going to continue until Sil finishes the real ending strips and sends em to me... Thanks for sticking around through the late updates and sticky figures.