Another lapse! Excuse me while I flagellate myself. August has kicked off with a bang, in both my professional and  my social non-virtual lives. And it seems like things are just gonna keep heating up through September!

First in both importance and chronology, my better and hotter half has rejoined me. And she brought along our fat little cat of a buddy. What I’m saying is my eternal girlfriend, Caitlin, and our cat, Sheba, have moved to Vermont so that we can once more form like a Voltron of Love and conquer a whole Universe of Haytahz!

Then my TA work at the CCS Summer Workshops started at the exact same time that we began unpacking in our new apartment. The days and the nights have been full. I’m behind on freelance work, on comics, on replying to emails, on the blog, on everything. But! If Doc Brown pulled up in a DeLorean and gave me a chance to take back my decision to help out, I would stand proudly, pointing to my left, and tell him, “Go back! Back to from whence you came!” Working with the students who came for this program, and with the faculty I’ve come to adore over the past year, has been a dream. I can’t believe how many truly talented and enthusiastic people showed up, and how much quality comics work has been produced in just one week. Today marked the end of our Extended Studio option, and ended with a bittersweet tube ride down the White River.*

I also gotta give a shoutout to a couple of my besties that crawled their ways back to the Junction last weekend, by red eye planes and all day trains, Ben and Kevin. The party’s back! And speaking of BFFs, one of my oldest and dearest is going to be visiting starting this Friday. In the meantime I’m trying to get my house in order and catch up on (at least) my actual paying work. And the following weekend I’ll be going to Maine with my fambly. So what I’m saying is, there might be another lull. I’m sorry. So it goes. But don’t feel bad, Internet, I still LYLAS.

*A tube ride that I actually wasn’t on. This is what happens when you try to write about the future as if it’s the past. I had some spare time this morning and was trying to crank out a post, so’s my imaginary horde of fans could stop complaining in my head that I hadn’t posted for a while. And I thought that that tube ride would be a great, happy/sad way to end this session for the summer, which I’m sure it was. But, alas and alack, before I could go on said ride, I broke my front tooth. Combined with my red beard of summer laziness, I am the spitting image of a pirate. Not unlike this LEGO self-portrait. Needless to say, I wound up at a dentist and wondering how I’ll pay for a root canal and a crown. And thinking that Yoda would be very disappointed in me.

I hate to impose any pretentious flower child symbolic resonance on my appearance, but I transformed myself yesterday: I pulled a Richie Tenenbaum. The only difference was that after I cut off my hair and shaved my face I didn’t slit my wrists, wake up and write a suicide note. Instead I freaked out and thought the cat disappeared. I couldn’t find her in any closets or under the bed or the couch, and when I stuck my head out the window it didn’t look like she’d fallen out, and then there she was in her regular spot under the coffee table.

I had thought I’d clean house after my renewal ritual, but I was too pumped up from the abyssopelagically cold water on my face, the long process of shaving off beard hairs that keep clogging a razor, the excitement of chopping off head hairs to myriad lengths and the terror of thinking Sheba was dead.

So I turned on the World Baseball Classic and did crunches and push-ups. Yeah! How you like me now! I hadn’t done working out in at least as long as I hadn’t shaved, which is about three years. It felt so good I popped in Wii Sports and did some boxing. Yes, that is exercising. At least the way I do it. Plus I did jumping jacks whenever my opponent or I was on the canvas. Work it! Hit it! Punch it!

Now that I don’t have a beard, I’m not trying to be a grown-up illustrator. Instead I’m a baby comic book artist. And if we make plans to meet somewhere, and some really pale 16 year-old kid starts coming at you from the crowd, it’s me.

Yup, this is the first new Frog Blog post. We did it! We did it together. Since the last time I made a post, there was this big party for some dude who won a race or something? Also Caitlin and I got a cat. She’s stoned out of her mind on catnip and rolling around on the ground right now. Her name is Sheba, and she was Dan’s grandmother’s before she was ours. She’s marmalade, sorta fat with a kinda stubby tail, very conversational and all-around cute. Before we got her, I drew this cat:

Okay, now here are some composite sketchbook doodles from the last month or so. Can you see a theme here?