Hey kids, COMICS!

Currently finishing up the sorting, cataloguing, and archiving of six or so months of comics. Earlier in the year I finally got around to actually performing an inventory of my collection; I'm about to break 3,700 comics. I estimate I'll have over 4,000 comic books by next Spring, though that rate may change depending on extra stuff I might be getting (I currently get about 30 titles a month). I gots a big Excel spreadsheet with all the issues, titles, and which boxes I've put them in (up to 14 long boxes now, plus the two I keep ongoing collections in). Every once in a while I go through the Overstreet guide and add some prices to the collections of issues, but it really takes a long time to go through the book and calculate prices (there are 570 rows in the spreadsheet, and you have to price each of the issues and so on).

If I had to put a rough value on the collection? I dunno... maybe around $17,000 book value? That's probably a conservative number. Real value is whatever I could actually sell them all for; probably like $5,000 if I could get TE to buy them all, if they were feeling generous. Undoubtedly the overall investment in the books is somewhere in the middle, but at the moment I don't want to contemplate how much I've spent buying comics over the last 15 years.

I would never sell these books though. These books are probably my most cherished possessions, and I really hope to pass them on to later generations somewhere down the line. My original Sandman collection, my Invisibles, my JLA and Incredible Hulk runs... fifty plus years from now I want someone to read the books that I read and have the same feelings of wonder and excitement I did when I read the works of Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Alan Moore, Peter David, Kurt Busiek... not to mention all the amazing artists... Sam Keith, Barry Windsor-Smith, Frank Quitely, Alex Ross, P. Craig Russell... I could go on and on. Comics are a wonderful, wonderful thing.

In other christ-I-wish-that-hadn't-happened news, my freaking smartphone died. Don't bother trying to call me, I won't get it. Some sort of stupid crash involving the wireless modem, and neither a soft or hard reset was able to sort the problem out, it boots up with a Fatal Error and freezes. Any data that was on there is so wiped - I had hotsynced like a good Mikey, but if the damn phone won't work, what's the point? And just when I was getting to become totally dependent on the damn thing too... grrrr FUCK!

O, Frabjous DAY!!

My phone lives! Hoorah hooray! Three cheers for Kyocera technical support!

Who would have thought that all I needed to do was delete my saved preferences file on my PC and hotsync again? Thank heaven it wasn't a hardware problem... *shudder*

Dear J.K. Rowling,

I simultaneously love you and hate you. Harry Potter is great stuff, but the creation of Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans... for this, you I must despise.

I bought a box of these bad boys made by Jelly Belly and Hasbro. They really aren't kidding about the flavors. Dirt, booger, black pepper, sardine, vomit... that's what they taste like all right. And then there's the "mystery bean", a neutral beige color with no hint of what it could be... *shudder*

memory

A touch of love, imbued with the energy of a passion unfettered. Fingers that lightly draw trails across skin, tickling the tiny hairs like a gentle breeze... but these chills are not from the cold. They are born in heat, in the fire sparked between fingertip and gooseflesh.

Would that I could dive deeply into your eyes once more. If only those moments of union could have stretched out to infinity and back... but I would even settle for feeling that sweet caress of our joining just one more time. Just once.

I will always remember you.