Well, second week as a Londonder has been… up and down.
On Monday, Paul and Mayko came over to watch X-Men 3. It was only upon her arrival that I discovered Mayko hadn’t seen the first two films! I think she enjoyed it okay anyway, though. She gave me as a gift some bonafide Japanese brush pens, which I look forward to experimenting with. (I haven’t done any drawing at all since the move… yet.)
Fred was his usual combo of cute and temperamental with the guests. We enjoyed a curry and some music before the film itself. A nice evening, though I wish the house was in a better state of organisation for entertaining guests. :-/
Also on Monday, I commissioned Gene Colan to draw the cover to the new comics anthology we’re doing, Freedom. A lot of money, but I get to keep the original, so what the hell! A very exciting prospect, and Gene estimates 4-6 weeks for completion.
The superb Croatian artist Dragan Kovacevic recently posted the first page of his strip for Freedom, as scripted by Ed Berridge. You can view it here.
After that, I came down with a cold/flu virus, which I’m still fighting off as I write this, though I feel a bit better.
During all this, my new wireless broadband connection was activated. A big wakeup call came regarding my three-year-old computer. In spite of the use of a USB widget, it just didn’t want to cooperate with the network at all. The connection was A-OK on my laptop, so, transferring my e-mail activity to that was necessary. On Wednesday I bit the bullet and went and bought a new computer from PC World. Into the bargain, I bought a new 19″ widescreen monitor, a 400GB external drive and a b&w laser printer. I won’t mention the sum involved, but everything’s working well (fingers crossed) and, thanks to the new drive I was able to take all the important files from my old computer and archive them on portable storage, so all is well.
I was wiped out with the flu on Thursday. I managed to walk Fred briefly but did little else except loll around feeling like death warmed up.
I have found a picture framer locally who, I am hoping, will be able to frame and mount the original artwork I own at a nice price. ‘If you find anyone else who can do it cheaper,’ he told me, ‘I’ll do it for free!’ The samples in his workshop looked very nice and I need to take some pieces in for him to look at tomorrow (well, later today).
Also, new lead on possible housemate. Have had a couple of disappointments on this front so am cautious, but it looks fairly promising.