December 31, 2008

Greetings and Salutations!

This must be some sort of record; it’s the very end of 2008, and I’m actually getting the 2008 holiday letter written. Hopefully nothing will happen that puts off its completion until March or something…

I should probably do the Victorian thing and put a black border on these holiday letters, because it seems like every year I include at least one obituary. There was Angelo the Toad in 2004, Grandma in 2005, Lily’s father in 2007 and my dear friend Ewa Barycka in 2008.

Only a few weeks after posting the last holiday letter, on February 22^nd of 2008, Lily’s mother passed away after an extended illness and hospital stay. We had a very lovely memorial service at the Veterans’ Cemetery where her husband’s ashes are kept, after which her urn was placed in the same vault.

Picture of Mr. & Mrs. Waters from 1967, which was used on the program for the memorial service.

A violinist was hired for the occasion: a Rowan University student named Frank Lakatos. He’s a foreign student, from Hungary, so I just had to ask him if he was any relation to the great Hungarian Gypsy violinist Sandor Lakatos. Well, he wasn’t directly related but knew who I was talking about and was pleasantly surprised that I knew who he was. (I have three of his records!) He said, “I hope that I play at least half as well as he.” Anyway, Frank Lakatos did an excellent job, and I believe Mrs. Waters would have been very pleased. Sandor would have been pleased as well.

Lily and her sister Conni are doing well, although they still often feel very sad about losing both their parents in just over the span of a year.

The other people we lost over the past year were a couple of pets. In mid-November, I returned from work one night to find that a certain troublesome feline named Misha (more on her later) had knocked over my fax machine and a glass “Eco Globe” that contained sea water, a bit of artificial seaweed, several million diatoms, and a single surviving brine shrimp. We may never know if Misha at least ate the shrimp so that his death wasn’t totally in vain; since the little dude was only about 2½ mm in length, the cat may not even have been aware that he was there.

That shrimp had lived for at least three or four years. I think it ate all the other shrimp in the globe and then subsisted on diatoms for the remaining years. I know – some of you are thinking “Cannibal!” and recoiling in horror. But we can’t go around imposing human values & taboos on non-human species.

The other pet was Rorschach.

Not that Rorschach! This one.

He was a coal-black cat my parents acquired about 17 years ago as a stray kitten. Originally, we were going to call him Asterisk, because he looked like *. But as he grew older, his torso lengthened enough that he didn’t look like an asterisk anymore, so we named him Rorschach after the psychoanalyst’s famous inkblot test. Of the two cats in my parents’ house (Rudy the tiger-striped one being the other), Rorschach was the less friendly, more dominant, but oddly enough more likely to appear when “strangers” were in the house. I guess he had to assert his ownership or something. Rudy’s more friendly, but too much of a scaredy-cat if he doesn’t know you. Anyway, Rorschach became diabetic, and passed away in his sleep on Monday, November 24^th. The last I saw, Rudy looked kind of lonely. But I think he’s pulling through all right.

I mentioned a troublesome cat named Misha. Interesting story there! One day right before summer, I opened up the store Preston and I have in Greenwich Village, New York City (by now re-named Thompson Street Comics), and I heard a “meow”-ing in the basement. Preston managed to catch this very small (although full-grown) white cat, with a black tail and two small black spots on her head. The building’s superintendent sort of explained things to us later: The cat’s name was Misha. One of his daughters had just had a baby, so they couldn’t keep Misha in their apartment (??? I have found no logical reason for not allowing cats and babies to inhabit the same apartment), and he’d locked her in a tunnel adjacent to the basement. As long as Misha was refusing to stay locked up in the tunnel, would we be so kind as to take care of her for two weeks? Preston was thrilled to have a cat in the store, although I was pretty leery. I like cats, too, but keeping them can be a major chore.
Two weeks became two months, then more months. Misha proved to be a real problem! She’d jump into the window display, knock things over and shed hair everywhere. She went into heat so often that I jokingly said we should re-name her “Œstrus.” And she always wanted to run around the neighborhood and go into all the stores… especially restaurants. We had to get a harness and leash for her. Every day, hundreds of passers-by had to remark about “A cat on a leash!” and take her photograph. (If they’d have come in and bought things, that would have been fine; but apparently the rare cat-sighting was enough to satisfy all of their needs.)
I told Preston we should track down the superintendent and inform him that we were keeping a running tab of all the expenses Misha incurred after the agreed-upon two weeks; maybe that would get some action out of him. I don’t think he was ever told this, though. The superintendent did eventually admit that he had abandoned Misha. Well! At least now we could probably get her spayed, at least. I took Misha off to South Jersey with me, and she’s doing fine here. When Preston has a good place for her to stay, he intends to take her back. Meanwhile, everyone loves Misha! Lily commented that she looks like “a little white doughnut with some chocolate icing” when she sleeps. Awww!

Misha meets Frankenstein’s monster. She managed to destroy this fiberglass sculpture one night. “Destructo” the Cat.

To everyone who’s up on their Russian: yeah, I know, “Misha” is diminutive of “Mikhail,” a boy’s name. I’m not the one who named her. Her previous owners are Hispanic; maybe in Spanish it’s a girl’s name – although I’ve never heard it outside of Russian before, and I know a lot of Spanish names. Maybe they just made it up. Anyway, she’s Misha the Cat, and she’s where it’s at.

Where am I at? (And, yes, I know better than to end a sentence with a preposition.) After Lily’s mother passed away, she was left with a house, and a lot of cleaning-up to do. Meanwhile, Park Crest Village Apartments raised their rent again, to the point where it became unaffordable. After talking with Lily, I found that the property taxes on the house were a mere fraction of what I’d been paying in rent. We decided to allow me to move into her parents’ bedroom and pay rent, and assist in cleaning up and making repairs when I could. (Apparently, I was not alone; by the time I’d moved out, nearly half the apartments at Park Crest Village had emptied.) Clean-up started out rather briskly, then slowed down when what remained was mostly a lot of memorabilia and potentially valuable antiques. Lily and her sister are still sorting it all out, and planning to auction off some of the antiques. For a while, my books & stuff were in boxes, bags and piles on the floor. After the clothing was sorted and removed from the bedroom, I was able to get my bookcases inside and start organizing. The bedroom looks like a library now, but that’s fine with me! I’ll have to discard or sell some of my books as well. Hopefully we’ll have a spot in the living-room soon for that gigantor TV set; I could hook up my VCR and DVD players to it, and then people could watch TV in the living-room, sitting on chairs or couches, instead of hurting their backs sitting on the edges of beds. And the bedroom will have more space in it…

This is not intended to be a permanent settlement. I need to pay off some outstanding debts, save some money, and see about finding a new place to live. However, that will take time, perhaps a year or two. Meanwhile, this house needs repairs, after which Lily and Conni can decide whether to keep it or sell it. I recommend keeping it, as that would be most cost-effective; but it needs renovating.

The store in New York City has not been doing very well. Thompson Street is just not a shopping destination, and the economy, as everyone knows, has been dreadful. Although we certainly had good days, and even a few good weeks, we had far too many poor days. Preston and I considered getting out of our lease as early as the end of January 2009. We didn’t want to have to do it, especially since we were getting repeat customers; but it seemed to be necessary. On the bright side, we managed to tap into Internet sales, which can generate almost as much income per unit without the rent costs. There are shipping charges, but those can be handled more easily.

The landlord has seen a lot of this lately, and offered to lower our rent for six months and see how things go. We’ll see what happens!

Oh – the store’s name changed to Thompson Street Comics last year, and now we’re considering changing it to The Lost World. (I hope this one sticks – the postal carriers are always terribly confused when they have mail for Nick and Preston’s Imaginarium or the store that used to be there.)

New York City’s a pretty interesting place. I’ve never been much of a “city person,” but I managed to get used to it and even enjoy some aspects of it. There were certainly plenty of colorful characters around!

Financially, I hit some very hard times. Summers are generally difficult because I’m not teaching, and temp jobs pay less than teaching does. (“Less than teaching?” you say. “Is that possible?” Hey, that’s why teaching is a “calling.” You gotta love it!) Anyway, this summer the temp agencies could find nothing. Nada. Not one little McJob for me to do. I got a few furniture-assembly gigs, thank goodness, but hardly enough to make ends meet. I very quickly ran out of money and incurred some pretty serious credit card debt because I couldn’t pay the bills. I’m still trying to catch up, three months after the paychecks started coming in again!

In better news, though, I did manage to land a part-time evening job at a furniture store as a technician (assembly, repair, service calls). I’m now very busy, but the additional income certainly helps! Hopefully this will also help me get a few more furniture-assembly gigs. Since I’ve had to free-lance after WRTA pulled out of South Jersey, I get turned down half the time by people who assume I don’t know how to assemble things (my years as a full-time professional assembler notwithstanding); hopefully my current steady employment in that field will restore my credibility by serving as a professional reference.

I’ve gotten a bit farther with Preston’s graphic novel Honshirabe. Check out these views of the spaceport!

…and this one of the Magistrate’s inner sanctum:

Jordan gave me a Genius® MousePen™ for Christmas. I’m still figuring out how it works, but it looks like I might be able to use it to assist me in adding half-tones to Honshirabe. The stylus is much more efficient than a mouse when it comes to delineating areas to be worked on in Adobe Photoshop, especially if the areas are irregular in shape and should not be outlined in ink.

Lily and her sister purchased a trailer at Seashore Campsites, a seasonal resort community in Cape May, New Jersey. I visited a few times. It’s very relaxing, and it has a lake, a pool, a game room and plenty of hiking/biking trails. It’s only five miles from famous Sunset Beach, the southernmost tip of New Jersey. Holli-Joi and Tom (Lily’s niece and nephew) got plenty of exercise and had lots of adventures there this summer!

(A picture of the trailer was supposed

to go here. It turns out nobody photographed

it! I’ll have to add it later.)

Holli graduated from the Barbizon Major Modeling program in September. She’s quite the young fashion plate, and enjoys hanging out with her friends, taking snapshots and reading the Twilight series of vampire novels. Tom continues to hone his skills at all kinds of sports, and likes to watch Jackie Chan and Alfred Hitchcock movies from Uncle Nick’s collection.

Lily has taken on more tutoring jobs and continues to host cancer-education events for Underwood Memorial Hospital. She enjoys taking care of Misha and a large neighbor cat named Navy who likes to hang around.

Lily and Misha relaxing in cat-like fashion.

Navy on his edge-of-the-table perch. He won’t let anyone clean the table while he’s on it!

Misha is very much into hygiene.

During the delay in posting this letter, a bit of drama happened. On the night of Friday, 23 January, Misha decided to run outside, and a car hit her a few minutes later. One motorist saw her lying in the road and stopped, and another motorist turned out to be an intern at a veterinary clinic. They were both very helpful in directing traffic and assisting us in getting the little cat off the road and into a box with a towel in it. She was still alive, but coughing and bleeding. Lily and I drove her to the veterinary clinic the second motorist recommended, and from there we were referred to an all-night facility in Delaware. By the time we got home it was 2:00 AM, but Misha seemed to be on the road to recovery! (MishMosh, try to stay on that road and away from the other kind, okay?) It looks like she was sideswiped – lots of facial cuts, a swollen jaw, an inflamed nictitating membrane and an injured front paw. For a few days she really looked terrible. But it’s now 13 February and she looks and acts very much like her old self again! Lily and I extend our thanks to the people who helped save little Misha’s life. (It’s now a certainty that the little cat has fewer than her factory pre-set complement of nine lives.)

Well, I must post this before it gets any later. Happy Valentine’s Day to all, and may 2009 be the start of better times for all of us.