December 20, 2007
I had a wonderful birthday party last night at our secluded adobe ranchito. Kathy whipped up a fabulous batch of chicken-fried-steaks (Texan Carole Compton taught her the recipe), complete with mashed potatoes, corn bread and green beans. Oh, and don't forget cornbread gravy. Carole Glenn gave me a bottle of Brut champaigne and a banana creme pie. Deena told Peru stories and Frank told Rhode Island roommate stories. The Deana Bean gave me the new bio Schulz And Peanuts, and I started reading it last night. Really an incredible story of a barber's son from Saint Paul (those Minnesota boys!) who ended up making $64 million a year drawing and inking his little four panels on Charlie Brown and friends. Charlie Schulz ended up doing 17,897 strips all by himself. I remember in the 1990s when neighbor Jerry Scott (Zits and Baby Blues) told me that one time at a cartoonist convention, Jerry and several other cartoonists were complaining about the work load of doing a strip every day (Jerry was doing two strips a day!) and the pros and cons of hiring inkers and others to "ghost" the strip, and Charlie Schulz weighed in and told these youngsters that he thought this was ridiculous, making his point by asking them, "What are you going to do next, pay someone to golf for you?"

A brilliant boy, he was.

Well, it's been a week and they tell me I can finally post images again (Frankly, I'd like to put all the Safari and Firefox people in a room and see who comes out alive). Okay, here we go:



This is a scratchboard of regret (see Cézanne quote on Dec. 14 post). A mysterious woman is riding on a train. Out the frosted window we see—something. I'm going to work on this some more and see what else we can see (a move I'll probably regret). Ha.

Thanks for all the birthday greetings. Here's one I particularly enjoyed:

Owner of chicken chasing dog,
Hilarious writer of a daily blog.

Absolutely no question, a Master of art,
But apparently a pain to a certain Kingman tart.

Let your pen & brush always lead the way,
I hope you had an amazing birthday.

and many, many more!

—Ray Geier

"Do you remember the last time anyone was terrorized by agnostic fundamentalists?"
—Dave Shulman