Don't owe anybody anything!

It's been awhile. I've been overwhelmed. Now that the bureaucracy that was overwhelming me is nearly taken care of, I can finally address all the other real-life responsibilities that I'd put on hold... and there sure are a lot of them. Alien Romance is a fairly high priority, but it shares that top space with a number of other things.

So... Cathy, Ren, and Maurice had gone to Ms. Upton's stables to help their old neighbor from back home load the horses and evacuate them. I don't show Bud Farriss leaving with the horses. While I try to include enough transitions in the story to avoid it feeling jumpy, if nothing important happens then I figure you can just assume.

I never finished the art here either. Sometimes you have to move forward, to make room for other things.



Maurice spreads his arms as if to embrace the whole farm. "We could buy this place! I'll quit my job, we'll all move here, build ramps everywhere, and never have to deal with people."

Ren, in the foreground, muses, "Tempting."

I haven't gotten into Ren's struggles at this point in the story. He's been doing very well at masking as an adult, buoyed by the fact that everyone treats him with respect and expects mature behavior out of him. He's only 20 here, two years younger than Maurice, and he's still dealing with the "rural kid in college" effect, but he has a lot of support, so he's keeping his head above water for now.

Cathy, still sitting on the ground being surrounded by barn cats, gets Ren's attention. "The eyes of this cat," she says, pointing to a little guy who is head-butting her.

"Ugh, they're infected," says Ren. "Think we could take him to the vet? Let's do it."

But the cat is well-armed with teeth and claws, and doesn't want to be grabbed.

"Cathy," says Ren, "Take off your scarf."






This is a deeply simplified portrayal of catching a barn cat. In reality, they'd stalk it for hours, possibly over the course of several visits. Making a minicomic entirely about them chasing the cat might be fun, but I won't do it here.

Cathy corners the cat in one of the empty stalls and manages to approach it. She grabs him by the scruff and holds him in place. Adult cats shouldn't be handled by the scruff like kittens can, but holding them firmly by that spot can induce a calming effect. Sometimes. It depends on how panicked the cat is.

Ren wraps him up in the scarf, including his head. "He really wants to claw me. Careful," he warns Cathy before handing the cat over.

They all get into Ren's pickup truck, Ren driving, Maurice in the middle. Maurice eyes Cathy clutching the scarf full of yowling cat and asks, "What's going on? Are we bringing a barn cat home to our attic without telling the owner?"

"Don't have a cow, man," Ren sighs.

"But are we?" Maurice asks.

***

I was going to add the next two, but I'm already late for the next thing I'm doing. Plans today will put me back even further, because they'll be very strenuous and I'll be exhausted enough to need multiple days to recover. It's caregiver stuff, and I won't go into detail, but I will say that the US healthcare system is being difficult to navigate and requiring us to make extraordinary efforts.

***

Today was the first day I woke up and the weather was nice already! No frost on the grass... I know I said earlier that my backyard doesn't have grass, but some grass came up - it's an early riser, and will soon be overtaken by other things, but for a short while, I have a lawn made of grass!

Anyway, right now it's in the 50's F, low teens C. Pretty nice. I'll bring my sketchbook and probably do some more of the daily comics in pencil.