We had a really great 4th

I hope everyone out there had a fun and safe 4th of July.  We're down in Flordia visiting my folks.  We were having a cookout on the beach when a really strong rain came in off the coast.  Between that and the strong wind, we were absolutely soaked.  But we stuck it out, and the rain passed and we had a nice cook out despite.  Afterwards we took the boys swimming.  The gulf was really rough after the storm, and Michael and Jacob (and us) had a wonderful time swimming, and getting bowled over by the waves as they crashed on the beach as the sun went down.  It was a profoundly normal, and wonderfully blissful time.  And unlike last year, they were OK with the fireworks after sunset.

I hope everone else had a great time.

A note to my readers

As I mentioned last week, we’re out of town, so there won’t be an update this week. I did have a story I wanted to share with you though. Last week I was cleaning up my desktop, moving files into archive and deleting ones I no longer need. And I happened to have my jump drive plugged in at the time, and I didn’t notice that all of THOSE files were still highlighted – including the file where I keep all my ideas and notes for this comic strip. And as I hit delete, nothing goes away from my desktop, but my jump-drive got completely erased. And if you don’t know, unlike on hard drives, when you delete a file from a jump-drive, it’s gone forever, instantly, with no possibility to “undo” or “restore.” I figure I lost about the next eight months worth of strips (about 32, pretty much completely scripted out, IIRC.) I seriously thought I was going to cry. LOL

So I frantically set about writing down SOMETHING, from as many as I could remember, so I could recreate the file. I think managed to remember about 29 or so, so in the end I guess I only lost 2 or 3, but wow… Lesson learned: MAKE REGULAR BACKUPS OF YOUR IMPORTANT FILES! (I actually HAD a backup of this particular file, but it was at least 6 months old, and only went up to about issue #60 or so and I’d long since posted all of the strips that were in it.)

On an unrelated note… Some of you may have noticed that a certain troll using the handle 于庭 has been regularly leaving comments with links to sites that are a bit *ahem* inappropriate. Since I’d prefer to continue let everyone else comment as they wish, I do not plan to start moderating comments, or limit who can comment. (And THANK YOU for all of your comments, BTW!) So instead I’ll be looking in Google to try and find out how to ban just that one profile from commenting. In the meantime, hopefully he’ll take the hint and just knock it off. I apologize to anyone who followed any of his links and came accross any objectionable content.

Again, I hope everyone has a happy, safe and fun 4th of July, and I'll see you next week!