Obdormio.com

It isn’t easy, especially when you have friends clearly set out to sabotage your academic development in any way possible – by, say, lending you five seasons of quality television-series mere days before you need to really start writing your assignment. Or lending you even better books, mere days before that. Or nagging you into joining a board game taking up one of your precious set-off-for-writing-afternoons. Get the picture? ‘Cause Obdormio sure has.

That’s right folks, your one and only beloved GUEST-BLOGGER is back, and I’m here to tell you, our gracious host simply doesn’t have the time to stop by and complain about how he doesn’t have time to stop by and complain.

Thus, I’ll do it for him, despite having tons of stuff to do myself, because that’s just how nice a guy I am.

WAAAAH, I DON’T HAVE TIIIIIME!

There, now that that’s over and done with, what has Obdormiboy been up to lately? Well, aside from his compulsive just-one-more-episode-habit of watching ”Babylon 5″, he’s been writing his assignment in ”Academic Writing”,
a compulsory introductory-course in Norwegian universities. Booh-yeah, right? No problem for good ol’ Dormie?

WROOOONG!

He’s struggling, people! Struggling! He needs all the help he can get, and that’s not all – he needs MORE help than he can get, which might be the problem.

You see, he can’t get his summary summarized enough. Mind-shattering, I know, but the man turns out not to be perfect after all. While the rest of us are now no doubt sighing as one in unison relief, we have to be understanding if Obdormio doesn’t join in. He is, after all, way too busy with shortening down his summary. Something which presents quite the challange, considering his working-schedule opens for maximum four minutes work per episode of B5, and that DOES include mentally preparing oneself for working, a ritual which has been known to take at least five minutes.

In other words, our boy is in a dire mess. We should help him out. I should help him out. I don’t have time, though, because the only spare time I had today has been used up writing this post. But at least I got his weblog active again. I’m sure he’ll be ever so pleased. :D

Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

What? So I’m taking Roman History this term. Sheeesh.

… and rarely has it been more anticipated. This summer has really helped convince me that the job I’m aiming for (teacher) is the right one for me. The hellish graveyard job in particular has made me eagerly await the beginning of fall.

It wasn’t so much the mowing itself, as the lack of equipment, communication and understanding. This job will not be applied for next year.

Tonight, I am leaving for Bergen, and on Monday, I will begin my studies at the university there. I do not know how long it will take to get set up and online again once I arrive, so bear with me if I disappear completely for a few days.

That is all.

So, have a look at the latest Casey and Andy.

All right, there were hints. Weir has kindly provided us with a list of them. Some of them, even I picked up on.

We knew she was rich. We’ve seen her with jewels. Both of these I noticed. And I actually did wonder what on earth she was burying. But I never added it up to this.

I somehow completely missed the Interpol thing. I know I’ve read it, more than once even, but it’s just been pushed out of my mind, I guess.

I figured she just had a good job, like jeweler, or maybe she came from a rich family. She was supposed to be the normal one, you know, the poor girl that had all the weirdness thrown at her.

She became fairly weird herself, eventually, but that was to be expected really.

And then Weir hits us with this revelation. Well, those of us who haven’t bought the RPG.

This is why Casey and Andy is Highly Recommended.

I don’t like to use the word ‘review’ on anything I write here. It sounds too serious for my tastes. A review is supposed to be structured and give reasons for all its opinions, maybe analyze and dissect the subject, and be all serious. It is easy to do badly. I don’t think of myself as a proper critic. I much prefer to simply say, “I like this, you might too,” which is basically what I do with my comics links page. That’s hard to screw up.

Even so, in this post I am attempting a review. Bear with me please.

So, Count Your Sheep. Click that link for the definition of bittersweet.

Count Your Sheep is a strip I’ve been avoiding for some time, for no good reason at all. Seriously, I have no idea why I haven’t read it before. It’s not like I haven’t seen links, on Websnark if nothing else. And it’s not like those links weren’t really, really good. I had just, for some unfathomable reason, decided that I wouldn’t read it. I guess it just has to be chalked up to stupidity.

Count Your Sheep chronicles the adventures of young Katie and her widowed mother Laurie, and their imaginary friend, the sheep Ship, who often helps them fall asleep at night. Counting Ship appears to be far more effective than counting normal sheep.

Count Your Sheep is cute. Very, very cute. Cute and sweet. Seriously, it’ll give you diabetes if you look at it too long. Un-manly though it may be, I actually like cute, especially when it is the kind of cute Count Your Sheep delivers on a pretty much daily basis.

Katie is a pretty believable child, innocent and curious and full of energy, and capable of cause plenty of mayhem. She’s too sweet to actually be a fully believable child. I have two younger siblings, and they both had a screaming streak that Katie seems to lack. This is not a real drawback, as the sweet and innocent Katie is much more fun to read about and more suited to the comic world than a screaming, realistic Katie would have been.

Count Your Sheep is funny. It’s not necessarily spit-take, laugh-so-hard-your-belly-hurts-funny, though there are strips that do that. Mostly, it is a warm kind of funny, that makes you smile or chuckle a bit. Be it from the relationship between Katie and Laurie, from the interactions with their mutual imaginary friend, or from the young Laurie’s relationship with her future husband.

Count Your Sheep is sad. It is heartbreakingly, painfully sad. Even at its most cheerful, there is an underlying melancholy, reinforced by the blue colors, and the purples used for the little Laurie strips.

Laurie is a struggling single mom, who works two jobs trying to make ends meet. As seen in the strip linked earlier, they had to pawn their TV, breaking Katie’s heart.

As I said earlier, this strip is the definition of bittersweet. Adrian Ramos manages to deliver heartbreak and humor, often in the same strip, which is extremely hard to do. Of the top of my head, I can’t think of any other strip I read which manages to do both simultaneously, and certainly not as well as Count Your Sheep does it.

If I was to complain about something, it would have to be the many unrelated sketches you have to flip through in the early archives, but other than that, reading Count Your Sheep is a joy. A teary, heartbreaking, gut-splitting joy. Count Your Sheep is now Highly Recommended.

(Also, it really needs Oh No Robot.)