Putting the case in a pocket I headed outside. One step out the door reminded me why I liked to hang out in the air-conditioning. Kansas City isn't the most southerly city, and being over 1000 miles from the nearest ocean, you think it would have reasonable humidity. BZZZZZzzzzzzt Wrong answer. It was a balmy 98 degrees with matching humidity. I went from cool and dry to instant sauna.
Muttering a curse I belted my helmet on and locked the face-bar down while leaving the faceplate open for ventilation. Climbing onto my 78 XS-1100 and kicked it over. As I pulled out onto the interstate heading to the house I cranked up the radio and listed to some classic Floyd on the ride home.
After getting home I was totally exhausted. It's only a twenty-minute ride, but on the interstate that 98 degree weather turns into 105 degrees easy. I emptied my pockets on the table by my keyboard headed back to the bedroom, shucked my clothes and headed into the bathroom for a shower. Still tired from my ride I tossed on some shorts and crawled up on the bed. Turning over towards the nightstand, I placed my glasses on the table next to a picture of my father. Rolling over, I said a silent prayer for him and tried to get some sleep.
****
Later that evening, sitting in the living room channel surfing, I realized that Pink Floyd was right... There were 99 channels of crap on the TV and nothing on. Disgusted I turned it off and moved over to my Amiga. Now most people wouldn't keep an Amiga in their living room, but this wasn't just any Amiga, it was a video editing machine. I occasionally would take in videos for friends and edit them together. It was nice to be able to display my work on the big TV for folks as I was assembling their clips.
Tonight I wasn't going to be doing any editing. I figured I'd play around with some of the old games I had. Digging through the directories I came across an animation directory and inside were a bunch of animations by Eric Schwartz. I remembered watching them the first time I downloaded them from the internet. The way Amy moved. The characterizations of his Aerotoons , Flip the Frog and Clarissa Cat trying to have some quality time, and of course Sabrina the skunk in her one cartoon.
After viewing the animations, it occurred to me that Eric should have a site on the web somewhere. If not him, some "fan" would have put something up. So I went over to the PC, opened up MegaSlop Explorer, and started searching around. To my surprise, I found that he not only had an official site, he apparently had a cartoon he did monthly. Heading to the archive I clicked on the first cartoon and started reading.
"This is just tooooooo much!" I said to myself. As I continued to surf around I found various archives that contained stories by other people and was totally amazed at the amount of stuff that was out there related to Eric's work.
After surfing till almost four in the morning, I decided to get a little sleep. As I got up, I grabbed my empty glass and plate from my snack to dump them in the kitchen on my way to bed. Unfortunately, my stupidity got the better of me. Having recently gotten a laptop, I had just strung a cable from my network hub down the hall, behind the couch, across the floor and up on the table next to my PC. I figured I'd get around to wiring it up right over the weekend. Silly me forgot it was there and gravity took over.
Next thing I knew I was laying face down on the floor, laptop, keyboard and half the contents of my desk scattered around me.
With a curse I got up and started picking things up. First was the laptop. I just paid $2500 for the thing and I was going to be seriously pissed if it was damaged. Fortunately it looked like the laptop wasn't any worse for ware, but the Ethernet cable had been yanked out of the network card and I could see pins sticking out of it. Not good.
Disgusted with myself, I started throwing other stuff up on the desk. Without thinking about it, I tossed the box that Lisa had given me over towards my tower. It bounced off and landed on the desk. That's the last I bothered to think about it.
Once I cleared up the trash, took one more look around to make sure I didn't miss anything then headed off to bed with visions of Vixens dancing in my head... (ok, if you must know, the Sheila Xmas-99 Vixen :)
