How I Almost Killed Pancake City

Subtitle: Finally, it's finished.

I love my family. They are my biggest support network and constantly share their kindness with me. I wonder who reads my web page, but I know my family does. When I ran a contest a few weeks ago, Tina was the first to fulfill the stringent requirements (post a comment) and "won" a cartoon based on a word or phrase of her choice.

Her choice was "space monkey balls," which I later learned was her variation of my Flickr account name. Time passed. She bugged me about my progress. "Still in the conceptual phase, Tina. I'll have it done soon. Probably tomorrow. Tuesday at the latest."

More time passed. I had some difficultly moving past the conceptual phase, i.e. a sheet of paper separated in uneven quadrants. Tina kept bugging me. Finally, to motivate myself and to show my sister how important it was for me to make a cartoon for her, contrary to my lack of action, I said: "I tell you what. I won't make another post until I finish your cartoon."

Dumb idea. The overall dumbness of the idea is that if I had the skills to make workable self-motivation plans, I wouldn't have needed to make that promise in the first place.

The specific dumbness of the idea is that I, an incredibly lazy person, said, nay, promised, laid my integrity on the line, that come Satan's dominion or a great flood, I just wasn't going to do the ordinary work I avoid doing until I do the extra work that I'm really trying to avoid doing.

That happened two, three weeks ago? I could check, but again, re: laziness. What finally motivated me is Tina driving four hours to here to celebrate her birthday this weekend. The threat of a face-to-face meeting was a shameful enough thought to spur me to get the cartoon done.

Also, and I wish I was making this up, I kind of don't have her Christmas gift done yet, and I am hoping this appeases her for a few days.

The cartoon.