Bullets Within Bullets

1. Chicks have lots of stuff, as it turns out. My apartment is now part warehouse.

2. I have lots of boardgames. I went to Goodwill today to drop off some furniture and look for shelves to put my board games on. I succeeded in buying more board games.

3. But they were really, really cheap! C'mon. I had to.

4. I then went to Wal-Mart and bought shelves because I didn't feel like driving all the way across town to Meijer. Also, I'm unsure of what selection Meijer has in furniture.

5. I haven't even gotten around to clothing, cd, and book sorting yet.

6. But, let's kill the suspense and get to the question everyone has surely been contemplating for over a week now: How awesome is Kelli? Let's go over the checklist:

A. Not too impressed with The Tick. This, of course, is a terrible start to any awesomeness checklist, but it's not a dealbreaker yet. As it turns out, she's never been a big fantasy/sci-fi/comic person, so a lot of the humor may be lost on her. I don't know.

B. Loves board games. This is a big one. I've already hooked her on Backgammon, played a couple other strategic two player games like Mancala (ok, but overrated in both of our estimations), and Roundabouts, which is fun and exciting. She has yet to beat me at any of these, but I'm sure her day will come. We've also played games with friends, such as Trivial Pursuit, Life, and a trivia game I bought for five bucks called Mental Floss. She tends to be good at Life, even though it always appeared to me as the sort of game you couldn't actually be good at. She's not a fan of Monopoly on accounta it takes too long, and she's never played Risk, so there's room for improvement on this front too, but this just means we're at Severely Awesome levels with the potential for Completely Awesome levels in the future.

C. Plays a quality game of Euchre. Also important, as mocking my brother-in-laws after shellacking them at Euchre every year is a tradition I don't plan on breaking.

D. Understands most of my allusions. I don't feel like I have to throttle down my intelligence when I talk to her, and she catches most of my references. If she doesn't, then I can just explain it without anyone feeling inadequate. Plus, she talks all smart and shit too, and makes references I don't understand frequently. It works.

E. Loves movies, but does not share my quest to see all the best pictures. This is because, like me, she is resistant to seeing really really long movies. I keep telling her that I always thought the same thing but I keep loving these movies I thought I wouldn't, but she hasn't budged yet. Instead, we each pick out a movie from the 2/$1 section of Family Video, either something we think the other one will like, or something we've always wanted to see.

F. Loved Gil Thorp and Judge Parker from the moment she saw them. The fact that she instantly saw the vast potential for humor in the soap opera strips negates the lack of love for The Tick, I think.

So, she's passing the awesome quotient so far.

8. Where was I? Oh, speaking of Judge Parker, why are we bouncing around from story to story here? We go from Sam's new law partner search/sandwich order to Legless Steve getting threats from the Taliban to Abbey Spencer wandering around the abandoned Dickens compound. C'mon, Judge Parker, it takes you 8 months to wrap up one storyline; you cannot handle three at a time. And speaking of the Dickens, am I supposed to believe that the kindly elderly woman who gives pot brownies to her neighbors while her loony husband buzzes around in his biplane all day is the villain of this story? On the plus side, this is better than having absentee Taliban villains, and I can now refer to her as Evil Elvira and her Brownies of Doom. Also, since practically nothing bad ever happens to the villains in this strip outside of the Paris punks, I suppose there is no cause for concern.

9. I take my soap opera comics very seriously.