Tag Archives: anniversary

To my wife on our anniversary…

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To my wife… on our wedding anniversary:

You’re the best thing that has ever, or will ever happen to me.
You’re a pain in the ass.
You’re caring.
You’re frustrating.
You’re kind.
You’re demanding.
You’re beautiful.
You’re stubborn.
You’re perfect.
You don’t know(or refuse to accept) how beautiful you are.  You just doesn’t believe it.  That only makes me tell you more.  You not thinking you’re beautiful just makes you more beautiful… and a tad frustrating for me.  I want you to see what I see, but at the same time I want to keep what I see all to myself.  I’m kidding myself though… because anyone who spends a moment with you will know what I get to spend a lifetime with.

I appreciate every moment.  Even the moments you asks me to take the garbage out or clean up the dog puke.  It may not be immediately apparent, but there’s appreciation there.

We are the definition of opposites.  And that’s fine.  You probably never thought she’s fall in love with a dude who still has the Voltron action figure he got on his 9th birthday.  A man that lives for 1970’s funk music, silent comedies, the early space program and Hootie and the Blowfish.  A man that paints clouds on the shed… and the garage door, and the garage wall, and the fence, and the gate and the ceilings.  A man who buys light sabers, eats gummy worms by the bucket, drinks diet soda by the gallon and whose best friend is an imaginary talking squirrel.

You once told me you went for the weird ones.  I’m not sure who you’re talking about but obviously you didn’t mean me. 🙂

It’s taken me two years to finally get comfortable calling you my wife.  Not because I didn’t want to… but because I still couldn’t believe it was true.  It is true.  Boy, is it true.

There’s a big difference between love and romance.  Romance is great and wonderful but it’s like the petals of a sunflower.  You nurture the plant for weeks in anticipation of seeing the bright yellow petals reach for the sky.  They bloom and stay for a while, but eventually wither and fall away… leaving the sunflower seeds behind.  Those seeds are love.  Love is planted and grows and grows… building off of each season… always there, always providing, always replenishing.  Without love, there is no romance.

Love is working at your drawing board all evening and you bringing a brownie… just because.  To be fair that brownie was accompanied by an order form for Lauren’s 2017 yearbook.  But the brownie was good.  Really good.

You know me and I know you.  I’m lucky.  We’re lucky.  Very lucky.

Happy anniversary sweetheart.  I love you more than you know.

Thanks for the brownie.

Categories: announcements life love

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Bobthesquirrel.com turns 13 today

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Today, April 14, 2015, is the 13th anniversary of the launch of  bobthesquirrel.com.  It’s not Bob’s “official” birthday (that’s in February) but it is the anniversary of his introduction to the internet.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a screen capture of that first website and the stone tablets the original html code was on are long lost.  Here is a capture of the site from May 2002:

I’m just wondering what I had against eyebrows on squirrels.

Screen shot 2015-04-14 at 7.20.08 AM

Categories: announcements art

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John Glenn, Friendship 7 and another year…

Astronaut John Glenn is a hero.  With the passing of Astronaut Scott Carpenter last October, Mr. Glenn is the last of the Original Mercury 7.  Every February 20th, I take a moment to reflect on what Glenn, his mission and his place in history means to me.

This is a post I made on the 50th Anniversary of Astronaut John Glenn’s Mercury mission. I thought I’d re-post if for the 51st.  And the 52nd.

Today marks the 50th 52nd anniversary of John Glenn’s Mercury mission…America’s first manned orbital space flight. There should be no question in anyone’s mind that John Glenn is a hero. the word ‘hero’ gets tossed around an awful lot…in some ways I think it’s meaning has been diluted…but that’s another talk for another post.

John Glenn

photo courtesy of NASA

I have been a space history nut for as long as I can remember. when I was a kid I wrote to nearly all of the early pioneering astronauts. some of them actually wrote me back… sending brief notes and even photos. I realize now how truly special that was…but then I just thought that that is what those guys were supposed to do. Those letters made an overweight kid who wore glasses and liked to draw feel like he was as strong as they were in their prime. It was great. Unfortunately, through moving and time, a lot of those letters and photos were lost. I still have some, but not nearly what I once had…

Which leads me into being stupid.

I had an autographed picture of John Glenn. I got it when i was 11 years old. Mr. Glenn was a US Senator then. I just wrote him a letter and a few weeks later there was a return note and glossy black and white 8×10 of him in front of his Mercury spacecraft. At the bottom there were the words “Best Regards, John Glenn” in brand new sharpie scrawl across the bottom. that pic meant the world to me…I was so excited that i went out and used my allowance to buy a picture frame for it. It was real, it was from John Glenn and it was for me.

Years later, in need of some cash, I took that picture out of the frame and sold it on eBay. This is one of the BIGGEST REGRETS I have in my life. There are many reasons for this regret… but the top three are:
1. I do not remember what I needed the money for.
2. I do not remember how much the picture sold for.
3. I do not understand why I would sell something that meant so much to me and was a part of the waning years of my childhood.

I sold a piece of history, my history, at an electronic garage sale. Whatever I got for it couldn’t possibly be worth what I lost in mailing that image out of my life. I didn’t realize that at the time… obviously I do now. I guess I can be thankful that I had something like that for a while anyway.

So if you have a few spare seconds today, think about Mr. Glenn and what he did 50 years ago. He willingly strapped himself into a tin can on top of a re-purposed intercontinental ballistic missile and was shot into space. Would you have the guts to sit on top of a controlled explosion built by the lowest bidder?  Would you have the guts to ride in that tin can as it looped around the planet three times?  Knowing that the only thing between you and almost instantaneous death was a few inches of steel and insulation?  What he did was new. Almost everything about what he did was unknown… but he did it. Just like I did it when I sold that photo.

The difference is I doubt Mr. Glenn has any regrets.

Categories: announcements art space

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Reflecting on SQUIRRELOSOPHY: Year One

embracing your inner squirrelOn October 12, 2012, I launched squirrelosophy.com. I did not have a master plan, a thesis or a mission statement. The only thing I did have was a bunch of little things that didn’t quite exactly fit into the flow of my daily comic strip Bob the Squirrel.

You can see an awful lot in a reflection… especially a very clear one.

I started posting these extra panels of Bob expressing a view on bobthesquirrel.com in April 2012. I genuinely had no aspirations to make anything out of it…other than being a bit of a bonus for the daily readers. Maybe, one of these more timely panels would rope someone into reading the daily. They were going to be “whenever I felt like it” panels… no set schedule. But the ideas kept hitting me, some while I was in the middle of drawing another. If you do what I do, you know that when inspiration sends you down a raging river you need to go with the flow for as far as it’s going to take you.

A raging river can turn into a dry river bed in an instant.

By late September, it was pretty clear that I had to do something about this. There was a feeling that these single panels could take away from the strip. I didn’t want that, but drinking from the inspiration well was addicting. So, I started SQUIRRELOSOPHY. It was as separate thing from the strip…completely separate. That’s fine, but that also meant more work… two sites to maintain, two flows of content to maintain, two of everything. Oh well, I’m no stranger to hard work, right? I did graduate school full time with a full-time job, full-time strip and full-time family, right? Granted, at one point I though my stomach was going to rupture from the stress, but I lived through it, right? A website? Piece of cake.

Uh huh. Yeah.

It has decidedly NOT been a piece of cake. Not a cupcake, a brownie bite or even a cake crumb. It has been hard, stressful and minimally rewarding. It is an extra set of monthly costs and one more piece of time carved off of Frank’s day.
I have not promoted squirrelosophy.com as well as I should have. For that matter, I have NEVER promoted bobthesquirrel.com as well as I should have. And yet, eleven years later, the comic strip is still kicking, while many of my contemporaries packed it up long ago. Over the last decade I’ve thought of Bob the Squirrel as the best comic strip that no one has ever read… not only as a bit of sarcastic banter, but to make myself feel better for the lack of “putting it all out there”.

Along the way, I have earned (yes, I say ‘earned’) countless loyal fans…fans that have been with me through this journey. I am constantly in awe knowing that I’ve earned a little bit of their time every day. People that have been supporting me through art purchases, book purchases, making comments, telling me how they can relate and just reading every single day. It is an honor.

It has NEVER been easy. I’ve thought about packing it in myself on a few occasions. Board up the doors and windows and leave it. Move on to something else before this life ends… before it’s too late to have another choice. When I feel this way, and It always seems to be around the milestone moments, I think not about the hard work that will be off my plate, but the people who won’t stop by the site to read everyday. I think about how this comic strip, this sarcastic, crabby, pain in my ass squirrel has been with me for over one-quarter of my life. How, in 2007, when I was in the darkest, most desperate place in my life, he literally SAVED my life. I didn’t tell my problems, to a counselor, to a relative… I talked to Bob. He was (and is) there for me whenever I needed him or not needed him. That’s is how REAL he is.

The worst days of my new life are still a thousand times better than the best days of my old life.

I’m going to give squirrelosophy.com another year. If it doesn’t seem to be working out, I’ll close it down. This doesn’t mean that I will be any less devoted to it than I already am. I will not intentionally derail it to close it down… if I wanted to close it down, I would obviously just close it down. I owe it to my fans and I owe it to Bob.

Here’s to another year.

Categories: art laugh life love squirrelosophy thoughts

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