Rosie Dee

Make me get off this couch and I will bite you.

2009-12-01T18:18:02Z

I told a friend of mine I was going to do a marathon, and he gaped at me and said, "But that's, like, fifteen miles!" DUDE, IF ONLY.

We were slow. Oh, we were painfully, embarrassingly slow. But thanks to a mix-up trying to hand off my car keys to my parents, we literally started in last place, and we did not finish in last place! In fact, we cruised along quite nicely until about the eight-mile mark, when the fact I hadn't run in a month and a half finally caught up with me. Even then, we were doing kind of okay until I started to lose momentum around mile fifteen. I think mile twenty is when I noticed my speech was slurring, and I'd had swollen sausage fingers for miles by then. (My brother is a peach and sang me songs when I thought I might cry.)

While I was jogging downhill in mile twenty-one or so, the left ankle and the right knee got together and voted no on proposition marathon, and so I think the reason I'm able to walk at all now is that we had a pleasant five-mile cool-down stroll until I winced my way through the last half-mile so I could at least cross the finish line running. It wasn't a good marathon, but it was an epic marathon, and we were in good spirits all the way to the finish, and so I am proud of us even as I cringe at the idea of giving up another whole summer to another training program so I can do this marathon thing properly.

Having all ten toenails feels like an accomplishment.

2009-11-24T11:01:28Z

I ran a half-marathon awhile back! With a hangover and about three hours of sleep, plus a two-hour pre-dawn drive during which I think I may have been hallucinating a tiny bit! I AM A MACHINE.

I AM A MACHINE THAT IS SLOWLY BREAKING DOWN INTO A PATHETIC, RUSTY HEAP:

When I started sketching this comic out last month, I was training for a marathon this coming Sunday. Then I got the flu. By the time I inked this thing (a few hours ago), I was training for a half-marathon this coming Sunday. Then I talked to my brother, and now I guess we are maybe going to struggle pathetically through a marathon on Sunday after all, never mind that the farthest I've ever run in my whole life was fourteen miles, about a month and a half ago. And my brother (who's run several marathons) ran eleven miles back in June, so yeah, I think we're all set here!

...
I'm just going to offer up this picture of my running shoes next to my climbing shoes and let you make your own guesses about how hideously malformed my feet are these days. Oh, you thought I just couldn't draw feet? THESE SHOES ARE BOTH SIZE EIGHT AND A HALF.

I HAVE THE WORST FEET.

Or maybe I should just stop eating produce by the pound.

2009-09-17T06:55:28Z

Remember that time I was allergic to pineapple? And then it turned out I was also allergic to kiwi? And it turned out that people allergic to pineapple and kiwi are often also allergic to figs and papaya, but I hadn't personally eaten enough figs or papaya to know for sure whether that was my case?

Yeah, it's probably a good thing I don't like papaya.

I had hives for TWO WEEKS, people. And also BLISTERS ON MY LIPS. I didn't leave the house except to go to work. For two whole weeks. It was actually very depressing and lonely. Did you know? Figs cause depression and loneliness!

I didn't have the good sense (or good sense of humor, anyway) to take a picture of the hives until long after I'd stopped looking like a leprous chemical burn victim, but I managed to get a shot while my face was still swollen, puffy, blotchy, figgy — just less so:

FIG FACE
Also, the day after establishing that I am allergic to figs, I called my mom to tell her about my ordeal while I walked to the grocery store, which is part of how I established that I am not allergic to bee stings.

August was a month, yes it was.

rosiedee @ 2009-07-30T02:32:00

2009-07-30T09:32:09Z

OH HEY REMEMBER ME

I am not the happiest with this comic, in part because I am trying out drawing at a new size that will print up a little nicer, and I clearly haven't got it figured out yet. But the important part is: I'm back! With comics for you! And more to come, I think!

Basically, I have not been posting at all because I have been too busy enjoying the shit out of this summer. In particular, we have been spending the last few days sitting around on the back porch in as little clothing as we can get away with, drinking beer and eating popsicles until the temperature breaks in the wee hours of the morning and we can finally get some sleep. I hope this heat wave never ends.

...
If you ordered minicomics from me, did they finally, finally arrive? Long after you'd forgotten you'd ever sent me money in the first place? Oh god, I sure hope so.

I guess wombats are basically tiny, fat, Australian bears.

2009-05-14T07:10:42Z

Have I promised you that I would draw something for you sometime in the last, oh, six months or so? And then utterly, utterly failed to deliver on that promise? You are the reason I have not been posting comics and won't for a bit yet, because now that the minicomic is finally put together, I have time for you again. (Embarrassingly, there are several of you.) And so in lieu of stories, here are some little sketches, two thirds of which I didn't even draw myself!

Let me tell you about another comic artist you might like: americanbeetles! The woman is an ACTUAL ENTOMOLOGIST, I SHIT YOU NOT. And she lives in Australia, and she loves Bob Dylan, and she's ridiculously cute, and she draws the most adorable comics! I am harboring a tremendous girlcrush on Ainsley.

Anyway, a long, long, long time ago, she offered to draw cartoon portraits of people, and I elbowed my way to the front of that little line, promising I'd draw a portrait of her in return. She drew these two little pictures, both of which look ASTONISHINGLY LIKE ME, more like me than anything I have ever drawn myself! Aaaand she included a lame geology joke! <3 <3 <3

Did I own up to my end of the bargain? Oh, ho! Of course I did not. Not until today, more than six months later!

(Now that I have uploaded this tiny, hilariously amateurish portrait and posted it next to Ainsley's, I am thinking this was just an all-around terrible idea!)

SHE IS AN ENTOMOLOGIST AND SHE HAS HUGGED A REAL LIVE WOMBAT. And I will fight you for her love.

Incidentally, this song has felt mildly anthemic lately, and do you know WHO HAS ALSO HUGGED A WOMBAT?

Incidentally, you can still buy comics from me RIGHT HERE. If you've already bought one, it will be mailed to you by this weekend! There has been a mild delay because I felt compelled to draw little things on them, things like worried-looking animals and disappointed-looking foodstuffs. And so that is what is up with that.

YOU BUY IT.

2009-05-05T07:13:40Z

Okay, so! I went to Stumptown Comics Fest a couple of weeks ago, for all of a couple of hours. I met the disarmingly charming tiny_vice, and the pleasantly mysterious maria_sputnik, which is to say that both of them were exactly what you'd expect after reading their comics. And I heartily recommend that you do, because they both make some very fine comics!

I made some comics, too! In a book and everything!

...

Minicomic #3: THIS WAS NOT MY YEAR

This minicomic is twenty-eight pages long and contains one comic that has never been seen here on rosiedee, and never will be! It is not a terribly great comic, mind you (or it would be seen here, on rosiedee). However, it will make you feel very special to hold that one comic in your hands, knowing that all the moochers reading on the internet do not know some small and unimportant detail about my life that you will know! Plus, comics just plain look better on paper, it's so true.

It is four dollars for this here book, and that is with shipping and everything. (Do you live somewhere that is not the U.S. or Canada? Then add an extra dollar to the price and paypal me directly at rosiedeecomics at gmail dot com).

And! I printed up some more of last year's minicomic, which is almost as nice! And you can get both of them, if you would like, for $6.50! How exciting!

Minicomic #1 exists only to embarrass me, and will probably never be available again, ever. But maybe! I don't know.

Anyway, I think we should celebrate. With a cake!

toddv tricked some people into coming over and doing yardwork in return for a fantastic dinner. I further tricked myself into baking a cake, because I don't know, I will take advantage of basically any excuse to bake fancy things for an audience. Also, here is a helpful hint about meeting internet people for the first time in person: Bring them a cake. Or at least a pie or something. You cannot go wrong.

Berry Surprise Cake

I read many, many reviews and blog entries about this particular recipe. All of them mentioned that the cake fell rather miserably as it cooled. Personally, I was banking on the cake falling, because then I could just put the filling in the hollow and not have to mess around with cutting it into layers, which is not a skill I have historically possessed. Anyway, this was the very first time I baked a genoise cake, and genoise cakes are apparently rather fussy, difficult little affairs. I opened up the oven and... My first genoise cake. It did not fall. It could not have turned out much better, in fact. Of course.

So I stabbed that fucker with a fork and doused it with rum simple syrup, and tra la la, it fell quite nicely. Incidentally, if you are baking something and it isn't going as it should, you have two potential courses of action. If you are baking cookies, dip them in chocolate. If you are baking a cake, soak it with rum. None will be the wiser. Especially once the rum hits them.

Anyway, the cake! It was lovely in the end, forced failure that it was. And toddv and beastule are lovely people who like cake and did not make me feel the least bit strange about my internet-friend self showing up at their house to hang out with them and their real-friend guests.

To the upswing!

2009-04-16T10:14:00Z

I think it is probably a hard thing, to be my best friend. Ben regularly gets what I imagine must be totally maddening emails and text messages from me, in which I am panicking about the newest completely ridiculous situation I have unintentionally managed to manufacture for myself and I NEED HIS HELP RIGHT NOW. He pretends to be cranky about it, but I know he loves it.

Well, not without a lot of complaining to his coworkers, who then know an alarming amount of detail about my personal life when I meet up with them!

(By the way, if you find yourself in a particularly tumultuous phase of your life, you could do much worse than handing over all your major decisions to your coldly logical engineer friend.)

Anyway! Being my best friend is not the worst thing in the world. For instance, I love making cupcakes for people's birthdays, and I put an extraordinary amount of thought into figuring out what kind of cupcake best represents each one of my friends.

Ben is a vanilla cupcake with salted caramel frosting.

Did you know that Amy Sedaris, of all people, has created a recipe for vanilla cupcakes that the baking-obsessed portion of the internet agrees is the best, even better than the infamous Magnolia Bakery recipe, and better than the time-honored Martha Stewart standby? Yes, my friends, we live in a wonderful world.

I used this recipe for the frosting, which was absolutely heavenly, and makes such a ridiculous amount that I have been eating frosting with a spoon from a tupperware container in the fridge all week. It took me three rather frustrating tries to get the caramel sauce perfect, though, and I am a veteran actual-caramel-maker. (Don't let the caramel cool before you add the cream, by the way.)

What sort of cupcake are you? When I go to my favorite cupcake shop, I always pick this one, but I think we can all agree that such a cupcake does not actually represent me very well as a person at all.

I run on beer and nachos.

2009-04-02T07:59:21Z

Oh, right. Hello there.

I meant to post something last week, but then I hung out with counterfeitfake, who I guess has the ability to speed up the passage of time! And so: I intended to go home and ink a comic in time to post it before my self-inflicted weekly deadline, but I went to bed instead.

This week, we resume our regularly scheduled programming and attempt to make up for last week's absence with 1) a comic making fun of Texas, and 2) a comic making fun of me. You know, the usual affair.

1) MAKING FUN OF TEXAS AND ALSO ILLITERACY

2) MAKING FUN OF ME AND ALSO COMPULSIVE OVEREATING

(Eric = counterfeitfake)

Oh, and I might as well mention it because it's starting to pop up on my friends list in places: I will be wandering around at Stumptown Comics Fest later this month, with a new minicomic on hand to trade! I will not be at Emerald City ComiCon this weekend, because that is for dorks.

I think this is the last thing I have to say about bacon for awhile.

2009-03-17T08:32:25Z

It is one of my greatest regrets that I took a hiatus from cartooning during a time when I took up residencies in both Texas and Louisiana. I lived in a perpetual state of ohmygod ohmygod this would make the best comic!!! for two whole summers, and now all of it has been run through my sieve of a memory and lost forever. I've got a couple wisps of stories left, though.

...

It's been awhile since I posted a cookie recipe, huh? Let me make up for lost time with a completely overambitious and ill-advised recipe, then.

I walked out of the grocery store last week, arms laden with cheap organic broccoli, only to be accosted by a chipper bunch of Girl Scouts at the door. "Last day to buy Girl Scout cookies!" the child sirens chirped at me.

I resisted, resting on my organic broccoli laurels. And then later that night, I couldn't fall asleep. How could I have been so stupid? An entire year until the next time I could lie on the couch and stuff an entire box of Samoas* into my mouth, eyes goggling at the ceiling in diabetic bliss?

I now know that those cutthroat Girl Scouts were lying to me, but the damage had been done. I had to make these:

Homemade Samoas

Making these stupid cookies took up my entire Sunday afternoon, from the time I woke up (on Sunday afternoon), until it was dark outside. Almost makes four bucks a box sound like a pretty good deal, really. On the other hand, man. I fucking love Samoas, you know? These cookies, they do not disappoint.

*Samoas are clearly the best Girl Scout cookies, and if you disagree with me, know that you are wrong.

Comics about every food I have ever eaten, I guess:

2009-03-02T09:35:17Z

For reasons I still do not fully understand, it turns out that if you create basically anything themed around bacon, the internet will show up clamoring at your doorstep. You would think that after a sudden and rather unnerving spike in attention, I would commit myself to a higher standard of quality in my comics and strive to create something equally charming this week. But of course, I have done no such thing.

Instead, I have drawn a comic about a rutabaga. INTERNET FAME, YOU ARE MINE.

Also, my stepdad is one of my favorite people in the whole world, so I guess that was a pretty good plan of his.

...

Can I use a bit of this modest increase in popularity to tell you about some other comics, comics that you might enjoy even more than mine?

I have been in a strange place for the last few months where on paper, it kind of seems like maybe everything in my life is falling apart at once, and yet I am the happiest and calmest I've been in ages. I have learned to take great pleasure in small, quiet things, and joedecie's comics somehow manage to channel my mood exactly. They are so perfect and so lovely, and I like to imagine you might think so too.

Stop me if I've told you this story already.

2009-02-23T08:49:51Z

Someday, you and I are going to be sitting at a pleasant little pub together, chatting merrily away, and we'll decide we're hungry enough to order some food. We'll flag down the waitress, who will arrive shortly to take our order. I'll order the nachos. You'll order the bacon cheeseburger. You'll briefly notice a trace of unease flicker across my face. I'll look as though I'm about to say something.

I will not say anything.

The rest of our meal will be awkward in a way we can neither fully identify nor resolve. When the check arrives, we'll go our separate ways and we'll never wish to see each other again. This is the future you have condemned us to. Just so you understand what it is you have asked of me.

THE PEOPLE GET WHAT THE PEOPLE DEMAND,
AND THE PEOPLE DEMAND THE BACON STORY:

Basically, my first job set up completely unreasonable expectations in my mind about how exciting the rest of my working life might be.

BACON STORY intentionally left blank.

2009-01-29T08:55:10Z

Oh my, but it's been a week. I am drawing comics about things that happened four years ago instead.

It matters not, since I apparently never have anything new to say, just the same things over and over again:

While I was working on this comic, I asked Ben to remind me of a story I tell over and over. I think it took him about ten seconds of thought before he turned to me with a heavy sigh and said, "THE BACON STORY. OH GOD, THE BACON STORY."

Hi, Doug! <3 <3 <3

Meet the new bar, same as the old bar.

2009-01-21T08:10:22Z

Man, I have been thinking about it, and 2008 wasn't the worst year I've had, but I haven't been able to say I've had a real live good year since 2004. And so far, 2009 is pretty okay kind of I guess! I spent New Year's Eve at my favorite terrible hipster bar getting roaring drunk with someone who's been my very good friend for almost a decade now, and it felt like the right way to start things off.

I am generally pretty against resolutions in general — I prefer to measure years between birthdays anyway — and you can probably see that I have in no way resolved to post more comics in a timely manner.

Compounding problems, my phone was actually in the freezer.

2009-01-08T08:32:10Z

STAY TUNED! Next week, I will probably have a very timely comic about what I did for New Year's Eve!

If LiveJournal is still around, of course! Though if something unfortunate does indeed happen, I guess that would finally motivate me to do something with rosiedee.com rather than just redirecting it here. Which you just found out, if you were silly enough to click on that link just because it was there.

...

Hey, in addition to owning a KitchenAid mixer and making excuses to wear skirts even in winter, I knit things. OF COURSE I DO. I am under the impression that at least several of you also knit things, and I think we should be friends on Ravelry, if we are not already, okay? In these anxious, uncertain times, it is important that we LiveJournalers shore up our lesser social networks, no?

Scream 2 gave me nightmares, as it turned out.

2008-12-04T11:10:21Z

You guys, November 2008 might have been the best month I've had since moving to Seattle more than four years ago, which is even more remarkable when I consider that I spent fully 10% of the month in bed with food poisoning. Such a marked change from September — when even grocery shopping made me so sad I cried at frozen foods — is indeed welcome. Moving to a new house made a huge difference, but things are generally shaping up into a pretty great life right now.

And I am so intensely thankful for all of it.

...

We had a lovely, extravagant Thanksgiving dinner last week, and then spent two days hiking and eating sushi in our attempts to detox. By Sunday evening, we were ready for cookies again. I asked Aaron what kind of cookies he wanted, and he wanted mocha cookies. Here is where Google steered me:

Mocha Cookies: My god, these cookies! A pound and a half of chocolate! A half cup of flour fighting an uphill battle to hold the whole goopy mess together! Oh, but it is so, so worth it.

I shared these cookies with co-workers, roommates, and friends, all of whom marveled at how especially good these cookies are. I found very similar recipes I discarded purely because they were unappetizingly named "fudgies", but it turns out that the cookies actually do turn into cookie-shaped fudge overnight. It is the time of year to bribe those around you and remind them how deserving you are of gifts! Do it with these cookies.

(And either crank up the amount of espresso powder you use, or don't even bother spending another five bucks on it.)

Mum is a delicate flower.

2008-11-18T09:17:00Z

I have really taken to drawing people with eyeballs lately.

...
Awhile back, Aaron and I were at the bar and decided it would be fun if we each drew a portrait of the other, without looking down at the page.

Here. Meet Aaron.

Frankenaaron hangs on the fridge along with the present I made Aaron for his thirtieth birthday, which is probably THE LAMEST BIRTHDAY PRESENT EVER.

A SPICE RACK.

ALSO, AN HERB GARDEN.

I would say I have become almost aggressively domestic at this point. It's getting kind of embarrassing.

Victory and defeat come twelve hours apart.

2008-11-12T09:52:54Z

I was very well-behaved on election night. I had a couple of beers while a whole bar cheered and cried through the poll returns and the speeches, and then I caught the bus straight home instead of heading for the spontaneous street party on the other side of the hill. I got home plenty early and crawled into bed, feeling all warm and happy.

Then I woke up with the worst hangover of my whole life. Except it was not a hangover at all.

You guys, it was terrible. I thought that throwing up while naked and shivering and dripping wet was probably hitting bottom, but it turned out the bottom was just a bit further down!

Three days of barely subsisting on Gatorade and ginger ale! I lost eight pounds! (Mostly fluids, I am sure, as I am now mostly reinflated.)

And yet, I LOVE AMERICA.

...

Meringue Cheesecake

Perhaps you have nice friends who invite you over to their houses for dinner. If you do, I recommend you take along this VERY, VERY EASY cheesecake. Throw in a bottle of wine, and now you are their favorite dinner guest!

I made all of the modifications recommended in the link, which is to say: graham cracker crust, lemon zest, and no sour cream topping. I did not make the modification of adding a water bath, as you can plainly see from the horribly cracked surface.

Whether or not you go to the trouble of a water bath depends on how long you've been friends with the hostess, I suppose. Real friends won't require a water bath. Real friends probably won't even require cheesecake — just the wine, thank you! — but no one would kick you off the doorstep were you to show up with a cheesecake in tow.

The recipe implies that you can whisk egg whites into a meringue by hand. You cannot. Do not try. (I have tried.)

P.S. This is not how I got food poisoning.

I have met several people from NZ, and they were all very nice.

2008-10-28T08:46:48Z

So in my research about my pineapple allergy, I found that kiwis, papayas, and figs all supposedly produce similar reactions in sensitive sorts like myself. But it's relatively inexpensive to gorge on pineapple, whereas things like kiwi and figs are a little more precious, so I previously had no idea if eating a ton of kiwi would make my tongue swell up, too.

THE ANSWER IS YES.

Did you know that kiwis grow in Oregon? They do! We found a U-Pick farm while my mom was visiting Portland, and picked seven and a half pounds of baby kiwis! Even if I am very generous in my estimates of how much my mom and Aaron ate, I am pretty sure I ingested SIX POUNDS of baby kiwis over a period of about forty-eight hours.

...

Friends, if this video does not make you laugh so hard you cry, then truly, I have nothing to offer you.

Sometimes I love the internet so much it hurts.

I am also allergic to Granny Smith apples.

2008-10-13T11:20:00Z

Most of the internet will tell you that geographic tongue* is not terribly painful, but that is just plain not true.

*This link contains pictures of geographic tongue that are horribly unpleasant and I don't actually recommend looking at them, but the second one does look pretty much exactly like my tongue when I eat pineapple, so there you go.

Today, though, pineapples were down to $1.50 at the grocery store!

I bought two.

...
redherring recommended this cookie recipe. Ohhh, man. These might be the best cookies I've ever made. Aaron and I devoured the entire batch within about 48 hours. The ingredients are kind of expensive, but it's worth going all out on these.

Yesss, make these.

Chocolate-chunk Oatmeal Cookies with Pecans and Dried Cherries

For god's sake, lock the front door!

2008-09-29T09:28:53Z

I guess I haven't posted in awhile. It is because the part of my brain that ordinarily produces ideas for comics has been preoccupied with WORRYING ABOUT STUFF:

...
I very much enjoyed the picture meme that was going around over the last couple of weeks. Congratulations, you are all very pretty people! All of you! Here is my very late contribution, a picture of me glaring down upon the internet like the angry housecat I am:

Excessive worry may result in undereye circles and terrible skin.

We were out of bread, I guess.

2008-09-04T08:28:00Z

Sometimes I tell people this story, and they tell me I'm disgusting, and then I remember that I should probably also mention it was not a community jar of peanut butter, but my very own, thank you. I am only a little disgusting.

I was a geophysics major, both of my male roommates were liberal arts majors (English and... drama, maybe?), and yet I had the room painted pink, they had the room painted blue.

Ah, and now we see the reason I have a "distinct walk" — apparently, I have weirdly short legs, one seemingly longer than the other. Someday, perspective! I am going to figure you out.

...

I persist, with the cookie baking! And also, this week: cupcakes! I am just going to keep on posting about this shit until you make your feelings passive-aggressively known and collectively refuse to engage me in discussion about it.

1. Coconut Cupcakes with Coconut Cream Cheese Frosting: I made a batch that did not turn out terribly well, thanks at least in part to a cranky, willful oven, and what may have been old baking powder. ("The, um, frosting is good," my dinner guest said, judiciously.) I made a second batch with cake flour and mixed the hell out of it, and that seemed to do the trick, since they were fluffy and lovely the second time around.

(Sorry, Ben! It's what you get for being my guinea pig.)

2. Lemon Sandwich Cookies, as requested by modnar: These would have been a lot better if they hadn't been so damn much work. But they were a lot of work, what with the rolling and the cutting and the frosting, and then they were only passably good. modnar: You are not really missing all that much. Keep buying them at the store and helping the economy with every delicious, chemical-laden lemon sandwich you eat.

3. Mini Coconut Macaroons: Sweet holy Jesus, you ought to make these cookies! I made these just to use up the coconut left over from the cupcakes, and it turns out that these cookies are amazing, the clear favorite of everyone who ate them. I dipped the bottoms in dark chocolate to be extra-fancy and make everyone love me. And now they do! Make these cookies, make people love you.

Things I didn't worry about until they were pointed out to me

2008-08-26T08:07:47Z

I still have no idea what those people were talking about, although at least I'm not as self-conscious about nearly as many supposed flaws as I was at nineteen.

...
Right, so. The obsession continues. I was surprised at how many people cared about cookies, but see, here you are.

So keledy recommended a recipe for salted oatmeal cookies, which looked suspiciously like a recipe I had bookmarked awhile back. It turns out that the bookmarked recipe was actually an adapted version of keledy's, adapted to include white chocolate. So I made that one instead.

Crispy Salted Oatmeal White Chocolate Cookies

(We are maybe not the prettiest cookies.)
Admittedly I didn't much like them fresh from the oven, though my roommate didn't understand what I was complaining about. (I don't generally like crispy cookies, though in this recipe, I guess the crispness is a feature, not a bug.) But after they'd had a day to soften up a bit, I thought they were excellent, especially for someone like myself, someone who loves salt so much she eats it right from the shaker.

So, there you go. You tell me what kind of cookies I should make, and then I take pictures of them to show you and eat them all myself. We all win.

I'd make a great housewife, if only I'd get married.

2008-08-14T10:39:59Z

There were no bear attacks on our backpacking trip, though there was disaster aplenty! I can't properly assess the potential for backpacking-themed comics until I am over my current state: bitterly nursing Achilles tendonitis.

MEANWHILE:

four recently expressed disappointment that people on his friends list aren't posting projects anymore. I am reasonably certain he means programming projects, the kinds of things I think of less as "projects" and more as "paychecks".

Instead, let me introduce to you my current mixer-fueled project, which is actually more like an obsession, or maybe even a sickness: baking every single cookie recipe ever created by anyone anywhere.

I average a batch a day.

This week's citrus theme, from right to left:

Lemon Buttermilk Cookies
Lime Meltaways
Orange Poppyseed Cookies
I wholeheartedly recommend all three recipes, although if you could only make one, you should definitely make the lime meltaways, which satisfy that elusive property as something it seems you should not actually be able to bake in your own kitchen, a thing to make people think you're magic.

(Do not withhold your favorite cookie recipes from me. I must have them.)

"Does this bus stop at Snelling? Man, I'm so drunk right now!"

2008-07-30T08:35:15Z

Did you know? More crazy people ride the bus in Minneapolis than in any other city! It's true! Based on my personal experience!

Aaron and I are going on a four-day backpacking trip! This is a quick comic meant to tide you over until I can draw some comics about the inevitable bear attacks.

It really tastes much better than you'd think, though.

2008-07-22T08:20:20Z

Back when I was in college, my favorite coffee shop made a drink that was basically a café au lait with your choice of flavored syrup. (As it turns out, the syrup was necessary to cover up the sludgy taste of their sub-par French roast.) I had a tremendous crush on the doofy, bedheaded barista, who recommended cinnamon syrup as his personal favorite.

And now it is my personal favorite. But I guess I am not as compellingly cute as that barista was, because people mostly just make fun of me.