Well, it appears that my sojourn into the desert did not yield the expected results. I am no closer to becoming the Hulk now than I was on April 1 when I announced that I was going to go into the desert in an attempt to absorb ambient radiation from the nuclear test site. Please note the date of departure (I have been, however, been remarkably thirsty as of late). Also,my car radio stopped working. The volume automatically turned itself all the way to the highest level while I was stuck in traffic, and I have very large speakers (I know, me with a set of anything that could be considered overkill comes as a surprise). Of course it had to be during when the local mix station was playing some song by Carrie Underwood about slashing a cheating boyfriends tires. With my windows down. At 3,000,000,000 dB. Shame. As if the sound of a large, scary looking guy listening to a song like that (at a volume reserved generally for Metallica concerts and televangelists begging for money) wasn't odd enough, since no other button besides the "volume up" button worked I was forced to resort to a solution that has served me well in the past-I punched the ever loving piss out of it until it stopped screaming at me about why it's a bad idea to cheat on a girl if you have a new four-wheel-drive with leather seats. Once again, violence saves the day.

In other news it appears that MSN has figured out how to ban the pidgin chat software from logging into their servers. This annoys me. I do not want to run “real” MSN messenger even once because that integrates messenger in a rather intrusive way directly into the Windows XP operating system. I am aware that its tendrils are already somewhat rooted just by having Windows XP installed, however I do not intend for miracle grow on the roots and watch it try to take over the rest of the yard. I have enough weeds. I don't like software that attempts to anticipate my need to have a single cohesive identity and link everything and everyone to it. I had an unpleasant experience once when I installed an early version of trillion and ended up with some very confused questions from my real-life friends about all these extra “Johnnies” that were adding them to their friends list. Until such time that the pidgin software is able to log back into MSN's server, anyone wanting to contact me will have to use Yahoo or Aim to do so.

Yes, I've been drawing. No, I can't post it here. I've been doing private commissions for a new illustrated story (not written by me) on top of a rather heavy real-life work load. And enjoying grilling. Lots of grilling. I can grill anything now. Veggies? No problem. Lunchmeat? Why not. Sometime soon I will Attempt to grill beer and see how that turns out - after all grilling makes everything else better…