Soup Bones (Patreon)

I’m currently enjoying my favorite part of Thanksgiving: The leftovers. I have a ham stock slowly simmering away as I work today and I intend to turn it into ham and navy bean soup before the night is over. It smells incredible. I’ll probably have enough leftover stock for cream of potato with ham or split pea with ham. I almost always do another ham at Christmas so I can get a second round of stock. How many times can I say ham in one paragraph? Ham - I Love It.

I went out on Black Friday for the first time in many years to hit up a comics retailer in Carlsbad with a friend. There’s a place in the mall called Ninja Exchange and within it businesses can rent booths or tables to sell their wares. It’s decidedly pop culture oriented with booths for comics, video games, trading cards, Pops, and more. The comic booth we went to had 40k books marked at 50 cents each. I cleaned up and got 2/3rds of a Classic X-Men run. I’ve been picking them up slowly here and there because they have nice covers and reprint good arcs. They also have the benefit of being cheap. I have to put the numbers into a spreadsheet, but I think I only have 20 or so left to find.  I also found a handful of loose Iron Fist comics from my favorite run and noticed that five were signed by the writer Matt Fraction, one of my favorites in the industry. It was an all around great morning and I was back home before the traffic or crowds got too nuts.

My travel is done for the year and I’m happy I can skip the Christmas Party in Texas for my day job. I enjoy my co-workers, but I don’t want to get on another plane for at least a month or more. I’m looking forward to being at home with Vani and catching up on some video games and reading backlog. More on that progress next week, maybe?

-Ian