Extended Thanksgiving weekend laziness

All this month, I’ve been tossing ideas around in my head about productive things I could do with my four-day Thanksgiving weekend. And now it’s Sunday, and I’ve done very little. I went to a friend’s house on Thanksgiving, and had a very good Thanksgiving dinner. Then I started feeling sick on Friday, and just sat around the house all day reading comics and watching TV. I felt better Saturday, and actually got a few things done in the morning, but then I started feeling bad again in the afternoon and went back to my “TV, comics, and napping” agenda. Today, I almost talked myself into going into NYC to see the new David Hockney exhibit at the Met, but didn’t quite manage it. (It’s not actually open yet, but member previews were this weekend.) There’s still time for me to get some stuff done today, but so far, I’ve only managed to shower, eat breakfast, and read comics, and it’s 10am already.

I made one more Black Friday purchase yesterday: I broke down and bought a 27-month Quicken subscription via Amazon for $54. Quicken had their own Black Friday sale, marking down a one-year subscription from $45 to $30, but Amazon had a slightly better deal, essentially $27 per year, for two years, with three extra months tacked on. I almost talked myself into trying MoneyWell, since they haven’t changed to subscription pricing, but I’ve been using Quicken for so long that they’d have to do something really horrible for me to switch at this point. I almost bought the sub from Amazon last month, when they were charging almost $90 for it, so I’m glad I waited. So now I should be set through 2018 and 2019, and I don’t need to think about it again until 2020. (Which doesn’t mean I won’t think about it again, just that I don’t have to…)

My comic book reading this weekend has been eclectic. I finished the Sandman: Dream Hunters adaptation that was done by P. Craig Russell about ten years ago. That was really great, as I expected. (Neil Gaiman is one of my favorite writers, and Russell is one of my very favorite comic book artists. Maybe my all-time favorite.) (That book is only $5 for the Kindle version, right now, by the way.) I read the original illustrated (not comic book) version a few years ago, and that’s also pretty great. (Yoshitaka Amano is a pretty amazing artist, too.) It’s a little weird how a number of Neil Gaiman’s books exist in multiple versions like this: one with prose and illustrations, and one done as a comic book. But I can’t complain. When both versions are so good, I don’t mind buying and reading the same story twice.

I also read volume 2 of Megatokyo, which is a fairly low-key manga-style web comic. I read the first volume some time ago, but wasn’t really into it enough to go straight to the second. But, yesterday, it seemed like a good “lazy day” book. It was good, but I’m not planning on picking up any more of it right away. If I’m in the mood for it again, maybe I’ll try reading it on the web.

Reading Megatokyo has gotten me somewhat interested in reading manga again. I’ve got a lot of manga paperbacks lying around the apartment, but I haven’t really been in a manga mood lately. I thought maybe I’d finally finish reading Rurouni Kenshin. I have all 28 volumes of the manga, but I’ve only read the first 19 or 20. But now I’ve read that Kenshin’s creator has been arrested on child porn charges, so maybe I’m a bit less enthusiastic about that now. (One slightly alarming takeaway from the linked article: possession of child porn wasn’t “completely illegal” in Japan until 2015? Yikes.)

 

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