Today’s guest strip comes from Boxcar buddy Fred Grisolm – the very excellent author of the equally excellent Hate Song.

Some of you might read Fred’s strip and say he was stealing a page from Brandon J. Carr’s guest strip from last friday. To which I would say "Stop flappin’ yer gums about things you don’t know nothin’ about!" Fred developed his comic totally independent of Brandon. They never looked over their desks to see what their classmate was doing. Scout’s honor. Just goes to show how great minds think alike!

Either that, or there is a powerfully strong undercurrent of homoerotic tension running through Theater Hopper that I’m totally unaware of putting out there.

I really like Fred’s strip because I thought he did a really good job of capturing my writing style. Something about the pace of this one felt right. Kind of like how I would write it. Fred is right on the money when it comes to serial killer movies with the newspaper clippings on the wall. Can we find a new cliche to exploit, please?

At any rate, thanks to Fred for an excellent comic. If you liked his work here, check out Hate Song where he consistently knocks it out of the park.

Changing gears, I’m back from vacation and it’s good to be home. Well, good and not so good.

The thing I hate about taking vacations is that time doesn’t stop on all the crap going on back home. When you get back to work there are a ton of messages to follow up on, you have to do all the laundry from the trip, catch up on the bills… all that garbage. Honestly, it stresses me out to the point I was stressed at BEFORE the vacation. Thank goodness it’s a short work week. At least I don’t have to do Friday’s comic, either. That gives me a little breathing room.

Walt Disney World was – of course – totally excellent. Although I’ll be glad not to have to side-step fat parents pushing double-wide strollers for a while.

WDW gets a bad rap for all the long lines you have to wait in to ride the attractions. And even though it was Spring Break, I think we got off pretty light. We didn’t have to wait in too many lines that were longer than 15 or 20 minutes.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the Magic Kingdom, but is there a more disproportionate wait time vs. ride time for any other attraction than Peter Pan’s Flight? Seems to take two hours to enjoy a ride that’s maybe two minutes long.

I’ll tell you something that really cheesed me off about our visit. Cami and I were really hyped up to ride Pirates of the Caribbean, right? We loved the ride when we went with our parents in our youth, but when we went 6 years ago for our honeymoon, the ride was closed down for repairs. So this time, we were ready to go. Guess what? It was closed down AGAIN! We found out later it was because they wanted to make the ride more like the movies and were adding in scenes with Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow. Double-ugh! That would have been really cool to see. But not this time. So now I guess I gotta wait until Cami and I have kids who are old enough to appreciate the expense and planning that goes into a Walt Disney World trip before I can see the ride again. Of course, by then it’ll probably be 2020 and the ride will be under construction again to replace the audio animatronics with holograms.

That’s another thing. For the life of me, I don’t understand why parents bring their babies and small children to Walt Disney World. I wanted to punch every sleeping child in a stroller. Have they no idea what their parents went through to bring them there?! When I have kids, I’m going to wait until they’re 20 before I take them. Then maybe they can chip in for a plane ticket!

I don’t mean to make it sound like we had a bad time. Far from it. Cami and I had a great vacation and it was really good to go down there any enjoy it together. We got to see everything we wanted to see and had a great time celebrating our 6th anniversary. I have some more to say about the trip, but nothing I really need to share in this space. Keep an eye out on my LiveJournal page for some extra thoughts about the trip!

Until then, see ya’ real soon!