It’s been two years since my last treatment for prostate cancer. If there’s still cancer growing in me, there’s not enough of it to detect in my bloodwork.
If there’s anything good about prostate cancer, it’s that it can be detected through a simple blood draw. The blood draw looks for a Prostate Specific Antigen, or PSA. A high PSA doesn’t necessarily mean cancer, but if you’ve had your prostate removed ( like me ), anything higher than zero is bad.
I get tested every three months. The days leading up to those tests are anxiety-inducing to say the least. I try my best to push the worst parts of my cancer treatment as far back into the corners of my mind as possible, but those memories start creeping up, like clockwork, as the blood tests near.
Staying busy helps.
My daughters, now 12 and 14, haven’t outgrown dear-old-Dad, but their own interests, friends, and hobbies have freed up time for me to take on some new interests of my own. I’ve started taking online art lessons, formed a garage band with some of the neighborhood dads, and have even started doing some freelance software development.
Let’s go Broncos! Make us Proud! Touchdown Broncos! For the Crowd! Stomp Your Feet! Rattle the Stands! We cheer for you. Your biggest Fans! …..BEE!
Pop Warner is over for my cheerleader, which means it’s competition season. On January 20th we’ll be headed ( again ) to Last Vegas for the 2024 JAMZ Nationals. It will be our third such trip. Our first competition was met with the untimely demise of the family van. The second resulted in a new pet. Who knows what will happen this time. Hopefully? Just a trophy. First place would be nice.
There’s that point in life where the training wheels come off, and one’s pride inevitably takes a hit. The only recourse? Hop right back on again, and start pedaling.
Calling it a “cup” is probably the worst decision in the history of naming things. At best it could be some sort of headgear. At worse, you’re just confusing young boys as to what the heck it’s actually for, much less where it goes.
If there’s one thing COVID taught me, it’s how important it is to get up and move. Being confined to a desk for work is bad enough, but being confined to my house is something else entirely. After dealing with lower back pain for a months I tried some things.
First, at the recommendation of my friend and neighbor, Missy, I bought a standing desk. It’s a relatively affordable tabletop model from Vari, just big enough to fit a single 27″ monitor. Unfortunately, my monitor was 32″, just big enough to hang over the sides of the platform and bulky enough to max out its’ hydraulic lifting mechanism. After cannibalizing a smaller monitor from my kids’ gaming setup, my back pain was better, but persisted.
Next, at the recommendation of my wife, Jodie, I started following an online Yoga Instructor, Adrienne. Adrienne’s video, Yoga For Lower Back Pain, is short, concise, and effective. I’ve been doing some variation of her routine nightly before bed ever since, effectively serenading my wife with a cacophony of cracking, popping, grunting, and ( yes ) occasionally farting noises as she drifts off to sleep. Again, it helped a little, but the back pain persisted.
Next, I submitted myself to a chiropractor, specifically Cooke Chiropractic in Rancho Bernardo. I survived 47 years without ever seeing a chiropractor and only did so at the recommendation of my wife. First off, Ian Cooke is awesome. He showed me massaging techniques with a racquetball, various stretches, and encouragingly told me that I would, in fact, be back up and running in no time. Near the conclusion of our first session he positioned me on a small massage table, gently placed his hands on a couple of spots on my back and hip, and rearranged every single vertebrae in my back with a violent jerk. This resulted in a loud audible crack, an even louder shriek from me, and hysterical laughter from my wife. It helped a little, but the back pain persisted.
Finally, I bought a Fitbit and started tracking my steps. I never gave the 10,000 steps-a-day thing much thought until I realized how little, in fact, I was actually moving throughout the day. Sure, I’ve made a habit of regularly lifting weights, prefaced by a short warm-up on a stationary bike. I’ve even been a devotee of Shawn T’s T-25 workout for several years ( basically, Insanity for the less-inclined ). But, I was averaging only 3,000 steps-a-day. Cranking it up to 10,000, with the help of Adrienne, a standing desk, and a few sessions at Cooke Chiropractic finally did the trick. My back pain is gone and I am even running a few days a week, too.
At this point you’re probably wondering what in the hell this long winded monologue has to do with an illustration of a misplaced athletic cup. Well, 10,000 steps is roughly 4-5 miles and can take a couple of hours. It’s a lonely plod without someone to talk to, so I often walk with my family and friends. On these walks I’ve realized that walking not only loosens up ones back, but ones mouth, too.
To my friend, Missy, thank you for sharing your story. And to her son, Allan, I’m sorry you got caught in the crossfire.
Happy Mother’s Day to the best wife and Mom a family of misfits could hope for. We promise we’ll clean our rooms if you lay off that wicked backswing of yours.
Mother’s Day crept up on me this year. I almost ran out of time to draw my wife, Jodie, a Mother’s Day Card, something I’ve been trying to do every year since I started dabbling in comics and illustrations six years ago. Jodie has been really ( and I mean really ) into Paddleball this last year, so this particular theme seemed appropriate. And no – I don’t dare go up her against her on the court less I have my ass handed to me. I’ll stick to drawing her instead.
I’m kind of attached to the stuff on my desk. Apparently my stuff is, too….
Last year Jodie bought me a diffuser for my office. It did an amazing job of masking the funk of two dogs and, well, me, until it didn’t. Turns out, just like milk, essential oils can “turn” if left in a diffuser for too long. Jodie started buying me candles shortly after that revelation. Thing is? Candles don’t last that long. Now instead of a smell problem, I have a jar problem.
“Jodie! I’m accumulating jars from all of the burned out candles you have been bringing me.”, I announced from my office.
I looked back at my desk. My lamp stooped over the carcasses of empty jars cluttered around it, its light reftacting off of the colored glass.
“It looks …. kinda sad”, I thought to myself.
“Can you use them as planters?”, Jodie called back from downstairs, interrupting my thought.
“Good idea!”, I called back to her.
But first I have a better idea…”, I thought to myself.
Yes, rabbits can lay eggs, but only bedazzled pastel ones – and only once a year.
And, that obese man who wears a red velvet suit? The one who is ferried about in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer and squeezes down chimneys to give you free gifts? He’s real, too.
It’s no wonder our kids want to be so independent. After all the lies we tell them they just want to figure it out on their own.
This particular comic idea has been lurking in my head for years. It spawned from the Easter Egg Hunts that my cousins, Tony and Michelle, would invite my family and I to every year. The invitations ceased, like many things, during COVID. As luck would have it we received an invitation again for this year, inspiring me to finally put stylus to tablet and draw.
An illustration I drew for a book my friend Kevin and I are working on. It portrays the powerful, but weary Dragon King staring down the evil sorceress, Karakow.
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
My first hundred or so sketches of dragons looked either like anthropomorphic dinosaurs, or “Bowser” from Super Mario Brothers. The problem, as the quote so eloquently states above, is that I tend to draw what I know. Fortunately, as luck would have it my family and I visited “Book Off!”, a used book store in the Kearney Mesa area of San Diego a few months ago. While my daughters searched for Manga and Anime, I dove into the art books and discovered a used, tattered, and very cheap copy of “DragonArt” by J “NeonDragon” Peffer. For a couple of bucks Peffer’s illustrative step-by-step book showed me that there were other tools at my disposal than hammers. It still took a few sketches but I finally got a design that I liked for the Dragon King : Haggard, yet powerful. Intimidating, but intimidated.
Karakow
Karakow was a little easier. She’s an aging sorceress that’s one of the main antagonists in the book. I couldn’t help but lean heavily on Disney’s villainess’ such as Cruella de Vil and the evil ( unnamed ) stepmother from Cinderella. What I came up with is the vain, unyielding woman below. She has sharp, angular features, a big crooked smile, and a wardrobe that is conservative yet loud at the same time.
As always, I like to include some of my rough sketches and design work. As a budding artist I always try to remind myself that behind every finished work is lots ( and lots ) of hard work and mediocre barely-coherent scribbles. Admittedly, the “scribbles” shown here are some of my more refined ones. Trust me, there’s a lot more in the trashcan on the floor next to me.
New toys!
In other news, I broke down and bought an iPad Pro and have started working in Procreate. My old setup was a Surface Pro 7 running Clip Studio Paint. Why the change?
First, although compact, the Surface Pro 7 is far bulkier that the iPad. Although it’s a fully functional Windows machine, it makes for a mediocre tablet, a jack-of-all-trades / master-of-none, per say. Menus are tiny and finger gestures ( pinch-and-zoom, for example ) aren’t always responsive.
Second, the Surface Pro 7 only supports the original Surface Pen, a instrument that requires so much software-enabled “line correction” to function that I never really felt like I was working with a drawing instrument. The Apple Pencil, aside from a slippery glassy screen, is remarkably better in every way.
Third, Clip Studio Paint went subscription-based for it’s latest version. I blame Adobe for this trend and I refuse to subscribe to any of its software products because of it. Clip Studio Paint, like Procreate, was initially a one-time purchase. Now? No longer, so bye-bye. Subscriptions are for magazines that have new content each month. Software, by nature, is far more static; even if new features are introduced I seldom use them. And if they’re good enough? I have no problem buying a new version. Outright. Without a subscription.
A logo I created for the Dad-based Garage Band that I am in. It’s based on a vector image that I created, but rasterized with some distressing thrown in.
I have been playing guitar with a group of dads in a garage band for a little over a year now. What started out as a breakout session in the bedroom of my friends’ sons’ bedroom has grown into a full-fledged 5-person band. Although we try to meet weekly, a plethora of other dad-related duties compete for our time, making our practices inconsistent at best, but we try. Our adoring fans include passers-by and neighbors, either too young to know good from bad, or just too curious to turn away from the train wreck/spectacle that is transpiring in the garage.
We call ourselves “The Rubber Band“.
Part pun. Park joke. The Rubber Band expands to accommodate – whether that be each others’ schedules, talents, or even new members wanting to “give it a try”. The truth is? We’re not all that good, but we sure have a great time not being that good.
Thank you Shawn Burgwald ( Drums ), Kenn Matthews ( Vocals ), Mike Jock ( Bass ), Todd Vandervort ( Guitar ) and to that 20-something couple walking their dog three months ago that decided to pick up the open mic and join us for a song.
drawnandcoded.com 