When real life attacks!

I’d pledged to try to blog something every weekday. Oddly enough, the more regularly I blogged, the more motivated I was to try to find time to work on something creative as well.

But sometimes, real life gets in the way. I’m a stay at home mom, and my two boys (4 and 2) take up most of my energy and time. While I’m on the computer a fair amount, it does make it hard to write during the day. Stopping and starting every 5 minutes is hardly a good environment for creative thought.

So what happened this time? My oldest has been sick. Stomach pains led us to a trip to the doctor on Monday, and a fairly grumpy child who wanted lots of attention yesterday. In fact, the only reason I can blog is that he’s asleep on the couch right now. Though I hope that any of this makes sense. He kept me up most of the night, so I’m running on fumes.

Though I do have exciting things to talk about, food-wise. I bought an ice cream machine with a late birthday present, and made an inaugural batch of vanilla ice cream from the machine’s recipe book. It seems a bit too sweet to me, but I think it might actually just be the vanilla I used. I’m going to play around with ice cream once a week, so I’m sure I’ll get plenty of experience. While I was tempted to try out more of their recipes, I think I might go with some of the recipes I’ve seen from David Lebowitz’ The Perfect Scoop. Which more or less seems to be the new Bible on amazing ice creams you can make at home. Almost every food blog I follow has reposted a recipe from it, and quite a few food columns in papers as well.

Any ice creams that you enjoy? Anyone out there? Bueller…. Bueller…

Originally published at American Whitney. You can comment here or there.

Webcomic Wednesday: Questionable Content

Next up in Webcomic Wednesday is Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques. With years of archives, this probably the first that might give you a lot of reading before you catch up. And yes, I always recommend starting a webcomic from the beginning.

Questionable Content follows the life of Marten, his roommate Faye, and his AnthroPC Pintsize. There are quite a few more characters, but it’s essentially a “group of friends” type of webcomic with a fair amount of humor, music and geekiness thrown in. Unlike The Dreamland Chronicles, this is not an all ages comic. There’s swearing, frank discussion of sex and Pintsize has the tendency to mention things from the internet that would likely scar you if you started to Google it.

The art is great, though admittedly it started a bit rough. So part of the enjoyment is in seeing Jacques improve as an artist. Honestly, the real star of the show is his writing. He has the ability to create three dimensional characters that have real reactions to realistic problems- relationships, jobs, difficult pasts- all without straying into territory that’s too familiar. I find him to be quite funny as well.

Like all the webcomics I’ve mentioned so far, Jacques does put out merchandise (through Topataco)- mostly t-shirts based on t-shirts his characters have worn or things they’ve said. He and his wife used to manage their t-shirt business themselves, and it was a lot of work. I bought a t-shirt from them a couple years back, and honestly, I couldn’t believe how quickly it arrived and how well they ran their shop. He’s someone who definitely takes pride in what he does and that’s another reason I recommend QC. There are plenty of webcomics out there where the creators don’t stick to a schedule or think that because they’re popular they don’t have to run their comic’s business end like it is a business.

Jeph Jacques has a Twitter account (@jephjacques) as well as a Tumblr. The cast of QC is also on Twitter, though you might not want to follow Pintsize if you have a client that automatically expands image links.

Originally published at American Whitney. You can comment here or there.