~ChrisFoxx

Anyone miss me?

Wow, 2 years going on 3 since I've been here! I sure am sorry all, but I AM back!!

And in the groove. I'm working on finishing up the next couple of chapters for Sabrina Online: The Story, I've finished my pre-licensing classes to take the test for my real estate license -- yup, career change! Just finished something like my 35th Valentine's Day with my wife, got a coupon in the mail to have my drapes cleaned, and Frank took a rather nasty fall down the stairs. After the mildest winter I ever remember, mid-December and mid-January on my deck in a T-shirt!, and we got semi-dumped-upon last night with snow, it's still coming down, and I have a cram course to take tonight in Pittsburgh and a room reserved for the night so I'm hoping I make both.

Annnnnnnnnnd, the weirdest thing ... anyone here speak Swedish?

For some reason I've been getting these envelopes for someone in where I think is in Sweden. They have no return address, sometimes no postage, the address reads:

"Sabrina"
Chris Yost
PO Box 154
Eau Claire, PA 16030
USA
(an address you can also send heavy expensive gifts and cash to help me launch my new real estate career, by the way!)

These are not letter-sized envelopes, they're a little smaller than half-letter manila envelopes and said envelopes are not manila, about the size you'd get a greeting card in but a smoother nicer grey paper. I thought, "Oooh, fan mail!" In the original 3 I got at once, one was thicker than the other two and I said, "Ooooh, somebody sent me something?" I opened them each up and yeah, somebody sent me something all right.

The thicker one had a piece torn out of a newspaper ad for an electronics store. This came along with the same thing all of the other envelopes contained: multiple sheets of folded paper, each of them printouts from websites that sell music, CDs, DVDs, books, the listings of different categories of things, some of them highlighted on a lot of the pages. And each envelope has a Post-It® Note with a handwritten message so illegible that even if I could read Swedish I couldn't read it.

I figure the note must say one of the following:

> Do you like these too?
> Would you buy these for me?
> May I buy you these?
> Would you please throw these away for me?

I'm opting for the fourth one.

I haven't looked any further into it, and at least 3 that arrived with postage due have gone unclaimed and will reside in the Dead Letter Office until they meet their fate there.

Is this you? Would you please tell me, in English, what's up?

If this isn't you, any ideas?

91 years of knowledge, study, hard work, fitness, history, has been reduced to a couple of handfuls of ashes I have to assume are his. 55 years in the shoe business and he is now in a plastic box a pair of shoes wouldn't fit in. A plastic box with a paper label that now sits inside a small concrete septic tank-looking shell by now covered over and gone forever.

The insult to the injury is that he was buried like this on April Fool's Day.

And it affect anyone or anything outside of my family, and my sister and her husband; she's bedridden from back surgery 2 days before he passed on and her husband had to be there to take care of her. My dad yesterday had a whopping sendoff of five people, no service, just watched the guy put the small box inside the bigger box and put the lid on it.

Buried next to my mom, my grandmother, and near my stepmother, all in their caskets that were at their funerals that he paid for, all of them. And this is how he goes out.

It just isn't fair, people. It just isn't fair.

My dad. He passed away around 2 AM this morning.

More later . . .

Prayers gratefully accepted.

My daughter has designed three concepts for Squishables and she needs your votes!

Go to http://www.squishable.com/c/voting_category/ and vote for these three:

Jabberwock
Cheshire Cat
Anubis

You can vote with multiple Facebook accounts if you have 'em

Be sure to "Like" them, too!

And on behalf of my daughter Maya, thank you!

I still can't believe the time lag since the last chapter, but there it was. So, does anybody in the furry fandom even remember who I am?

Chapter 58 of Sabrina Online: The Story IS up! Seems I'd forgotten that I did get Dreamweaver 8 to work on my Vista laptop after all, the rest was figuring out how  HunterBahamut's i-frame system worked and she's up for anyone who wants to read it!

This time it was more than personal. It was to take back the insult I never meant to give you all who have been waiting with various degrees of patience and impatience for the new chapter, and to get this done before the end of the month was doubly necessary with hopes to negate the seriously dark and foreboding -- and for me, the scare the hell out of me -- feelings of the last frame of the last Sabrina Online comic update. I'm still trying not to think of it. So we're going to all focus on this instead. Happy thoughts, happy times with a boyfriend who wants to offer her more than simply reproduction.

Not that I'm jealous, mind you.

Everyone with FA, dA, and alt.fan.furry accounts, hit The Teeming Millions if you would, let them know The Man is back and he's back in control.

 RackyRaccoon has stuff written for the next few chapters and all I have to do is come up with words of my own to add to it, and you're in for a roller coaster ride. I hope!

Chapter 58 of Sabrina Online: The Story is in the can and ready to be posted!

Now I need a WYSIWYG editor that runs on Vista that costs less than free; my copy of Dreamweaver Ultra-Dev 4 is on my XP box and my XP box doesn't want to play nice with my new -- okay, used and slightly wonky -- flatscreen monitor. My Vista laptop works with it just fine, but that copy of D'weaver doesn't work on Vista, and the demo of the latest-greatest D'weaver, in my opinion, sucks rocks, and not in a good way, to quote Jim Hardiman.

Added to that is the fact that I have a 100GB hard drive that's partitioned into 50-gig parts (gawd, I hate partitioning) by Acer Sucks, and the C-drive side is full with little if anything I can delete, while I can clear plenty of room on D and run anything I want from there. BUT, I need an editor. Free or only-slightly-legal would be fine. If anyone can help me?

One that would work in OpenSUSE would be fine, too, I can swap out hard drives.

So the rumo(u)rs and excuses are over. And after the last panel of the last strip this month, this NEEDS to be done fast!

You guys in The Teeming Millions have been led on and jerked around way too long, and I value you all way too much than to let what happened happen. Thank you for sticking with me and supporting me.

Sorry folks, my Internet/CATV/telephone is all turned off due to my inability to pay my bill. God only knows what I'll be able to have it on again.

I'll be sporadically be working from libraries and hot spots around the western Pennsylvania area as I can find them.

Assuming anyone ever actually comes by, let alone reads these, I just wanted to put there that we had a very nice, humble Christmas. Instead of a tree, I picked up a Norfolk pine, an indoor year-round fir tree, more of a bush, which is why I call it our "Chanukah bush"

We were able to exchange some small gifts, received a few had a Christmas dinner at what is now my wife's mom's house (hard to call it her "parents'" house anymore) that couldn't be beat, came home dog tired (appropriate for a fox), watched a little TV with the wife and went to bed. Now it's Boxing Day, something we don't practice here in the U.S., and I'm having the day off. And contemplating lunch.

You?

Well, now it's Friday, everyone's had a night's sleep, things are a little easier. A little, but don't expect miracles.

Patty, my wife, her father had A.L.S., also knows as Lou Gehrig's Disease. This was discovered a few days before Anthrocon 2009, causing me to cut my time at the con short by a day and a half and go home to scoop up our offspring for a road trip to her family's A-frame camp in north-central Pennsylvania for a reunion weekend so everybody could be with him. Some people said that he was having a problem speaking, slurring his words now and then. I never noticed. But despite my missing the rest of the con, we all had a very nice time and nice visit, in the backs of our collective minds coming to grips that it may well be the very last one. Which it was.

It took me longer to notice his speech issues, I just talked with him normally whenever I saw him and never noticed until later. As time went on, he had more trouble talking, then more, over the next year losing the ability to speak altogether. For me, the last time I saw him alive, he had been taken to the Emergency Room for a precautionary thing more than anything.

Now Patty, my aforementioned wife and mother of my offspring, lost her sister Christine Metz only a year and change ago. Her biggest regret was never having gone to see her before she passed away. Last Wednesday she decided to go see her father, and she did. Thursday morning (yesterday at the time of this writing) my alarm went off at 8:15 AM EST, the phone rang maybe 2 minutes later. Her older sister called to say, "I think Dad passed away."

Well, we got dressed and hustled on over. And I have to tell you, it's a very surreal feeling to go to your in-law's house on a phone message like that to walk in the kitchen door and find your father-in-law, dead, lying on the floor in front of the sink, covered with a blanket up to his neck. More surreal was as the family began arriving, my mother-in-law putting up a front and probably having already cried her eyes out, making small talk with people, going out to the kitchen with her son, and talking normally as they stepped around the body. Not being callous mind you, just mid-coversation and in the same room. Of course Ken (the former occupier of said body) wasn't using it, he's long gone to that really big place that all people who lived a good live go (Heaven, for those of you in Rio Linda).

This morning, Patty's a little better. Ruth, her mom, has had time to get used to the idea of her husband of almost 61 years being gone. They're together as we speak, and if I were there I might see a different story, who knows.

But that's what's happening.

It's with a heavy heart that I report that my wife's father passed away this morning.

I was in a technician's weekly meeting. I was one of the last to leave the conference room and when I went downstairs, one of the networking techs told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

I had to feign interest, I had no idea what the "World Trade Center" was, believe it or not.

When I found out it was an office building, and I saw it, I recognized it as one of the buildings from the old Martini & Rossi champagne ads from Christmastime. Then I realized it was in New York City. None of us knew what was going on. I was in email, no calls so I was sending personal emails to James Bruner (of Zig Zag: The Story and Tabitha fame), S.M. Wolf, and Scott Kellogg. James brushed it off thinking it was a Cesna or something, citing that the WTC towers were built to withstand the impact of a Boeing 737.

The news websites were clogged and hard to get to. I knew a shortcut, Fox News was just new and exciting in 2001 and I figured everyone would be automatically hitting CNN.

It was maybe 20 minutes after the fact that we heard about the second plane, then the one that hit the Pentagon.

I was given a service call to run at Port Authority, the bus company in Pittsburgh, one of their garages. When I showed up, they weren't about to let me in, and who can blame them. I called in and told my service manager, he sent me home.

As I drove through Pittsburgh I saw PAT buses filled past capacity, people being sent home. There was a 4th plane that went down, crashed about an hour or two away, they said its target was the U.S. Steel Building in downtown Pittsburgh. The city was evacuated. As were all major U.S. cities that day.

When I got home, two of my fans had sent me emails, demanding to know that I was okay. One of them was a young budding furry artist in South Africa, all he knew was that one of the planes crashed in Pennsylvania and that I lived in Pennsylvania. I assured them both that I was fine and it didn't happen anywhere near me; thank God it didn't happen anywhere other than in a vacant field, imagine all of the cities large and small it could've crashed.

I watched the replays on TV like everyone else did. Soon our kids came home from school, early dismissal as a security precaution.

That's what I remember.

And today, 10 years later, a memorial was held where 2 buildings should have been rebuilt by now.

I, too, fell prey to the hatred of the Muslims and the Islamists. I've borne some very un-Christian feelings. Any feelings I have now I'll keep to myself, I'm recounting 10 years ago, not feeding the start of a flame war.

And 10 years later, we survive, we persevere. America is one hell of a place.

Take that , terrorist fuckholes.

Looks like my regular venue, the EconoLodge in Crafton, is sold out. Dammit.

Thanks to my ever-lovin' wife, she found me a room almost next door at the Motel 6. Queen-sized bed, 2 nights'll cost me $99.98, plus tax. And I'm 10 minutes or less from Dauntaun and the Convention Center.

Parking should cost me about $5-8 in the Strip District -- walking distance to the con -- each day.

I'm commuting Thursday, I'll be sleeping at home, then Friday I'll check in to my room. Not bad for a place to sleep, which is all it'll be to me since I usually milk the con as much as I can before going back.

I just need some people to hang out with. That's what I don't have. Y'know, "friends".

Still, I'm looking forward to it all!

Monday is Memorial Day. Thank you , American veterans and active-duty personnel!

And Thanks to the domestic guys, our local and state police, who keep us safe on home soil!

Pretty technical, try to follow along.

That was yesterday. And it means that my Story Tabitha has caught up to itself.

And I marked the occasion. Readers of Tabitha and Sabrina Online: The Story (which hopefully is all of you!) will appreciate the new homepage at my website www.chrisfoxx.com

I'll leave it up for at least the rest of the week.

Time to get back to work: writing!