Carsblog

Monday, 13th of July, 2009 1:21 pm UTC

Try try again

I'm going to continue trying to get some comics made today. I'd like to remove that "trying", but I tried to work on comics last night, and was constantly interrupted by wandering, grasping, dangerous babies that nobody else watches. There's just nothing I can do about that. Or the fifteen TVs on all at once, or the various people in the house yelling at each other.

We're still waiting to get paperwork on Kai's disability, to get a better idea of what's going on. The money he got was far short of what was expected, and so now, even now, we remain stuck. We've got to get out of here. The threat of being put out immediately has receded a little, but it's going to come back, and we still can't figure out an escape plan. I have to admit, we had to let go of some of the money I raised in donations, simply to put off being put out, because we still have nowhere to go and no way of going there.

With only a couple of thousand to work with, a used car seems to be even out of our reach. We've been looking at rent in other towns, and found that it's very cheap in Paris, Texas, but apparently because it's surrounded by many toxic dumps.

The only place I seem to have made any progress is getting a cellphone, so that I can better keep in touch with folks. The camera is a nice plus, and I hope nobody minds the way the drawings look in my Flickr feed. I'll eventually have some properly scanned stuff again, of course. Does anybody mind if I throw in photos, too? I like the idea of having a quick, cheap camera with me all the time, so that I can take idea shots and reference snaps. Without any explanatory text, though, would that be too confusing on the website?

I can use the phone quite a bit now, too (within economical reason). I got a good deal on Tracfone minutes; the phone, on sale for $40, came with DMFL (double minutes for life, which normally sells for $50 all by itself). So I got a 120 minute card for under $30 -- it's actually a little cheaper at Walmart than it is at Tracfone's own site. DMFL doubles it into 240 minutes, plus a promotional code (14938) added an extra 60 minutes -- a 50% increase over the original total, resulting in 300 minutes, or ten cents a unit/minute down from 25 cents.

Sending pictures costs a unit and a half, or 15 cents. That's for the small default 320 x 240 pixel images. Texting -- sending notes through Twitter -- costs only .3 units, or 3 cents a message. Long phone conversations is what I need to avoid, and then I can make this 300 minutes last for a very long time. Although it would be nice to talk to people, too.

Meanwhile, I've learned that my mom has a cellphone with a camera, but has no idea how to use it. She never even turns it on. I'm going to try to help her learn to use the camera function, so she can send me pictures of her dogs.