This has always been a problem for me and my friends.  Every time we want to screw around and figure out if our significant others really are the people who won’t murder us in our sleep, there they are.  Most recently, they’ve been moving towards the Manga section.  The evolution of their shapes, colors and expressions as they ooze from genre to genre is fascinating.

I’d like to say my sister’s stubborn sense of survival has only been attained by my frequent attempts on her life.

Athleticism runs in my family.  My father played baseball, tennis, golf and whatever that sport is called when he chased down my boyfriends with a gun.  My mother was such a successful tennis player that at the age of forty she was playing on a college team and kicking girls butts half her age on the court.  So you can imagine that they both wanted their children to be fit little buggers.  Motivation from my father came in the form of either jumping out at us before dinner time and boxing us into submission or flat out chasing us away from any static position we assumed for more than an hour.

We’ve only lived on the river for almost a decade now, but even before that we always had a boat tied up at the marina.  If we wanted to get away, we always went somewhere that we could plausibly drown.  There’s nothing like relaxation without a little perilous adventure.  When you’re cruising around lakeside you’ll often see people wading about and it’s courtesy to make sure they aren’t out there stranded.  This guy probably just paddled out there all day to use this line on someone.

Okay, I admit.  This is a weird one.  I watched a lot of cop thrillers growing up (Lethal Weapon probably counts, right?) and because of that I am suspicious of everything.  At any moment, I could be witnessing a potential kidnapping or a drug deal.  That day, I was pretty certain that blind dude stole her cane.  If I had only acted on my intuition, she could have been saved.  Instead I let the car drive on, because I couldn’t even fathom how to sort out that situation.  Someone please notify Dick Wolf so I can know how to handle this next time, okay?

This one was drummed up by Hawk after witnessing it enough.  My sister’s cat (the white one) is named Luna.  Luna’s pupils are big dinner plates of insanity.  It’s not when she will strike, but where and how often.  Jasmine often pre-empts these acts of violence with her own.  Jasmine, for the record, is very rotund and does not like to fight.  First strike method, I suppose.

My father is a little hard of hearing.  I think.  Because it’s either genuine or it is his only strategy to drown out me babbling in the background.  As I have lived with Mad Max at notch 11 for all my life, I go a little ballistic when the television in my apartment gets loud now.  I was conditioned.

Putting together furniture with my father is more than an adventure, it’s an odyssey.  There are triumphs, failures, near murders and spanish mysteries in the instructions.  This piece was for my office in which it actually required us to use metal bending on the bottom of the chair.  Why the piece didn’t already come bent from the factory, where they have those big fancy machines instead of fragile human hands for bending metal, I’ll never know.

But it got bent.