My failure to update Odd-Fish, as mentioned on the update on the 5th May 2009, is blamed squarely on events in ‘real life’ that have conspired to keep me away from biros and Photoshop.
Where to start?
Not least has been how busy we are at work. As some of you may know, I work for the British National Heath Service (The NHS) as a health advisor taking calls from people with health problems, assessing their need and directing them to the appropriate level of care. (anything from an emergency ambulance down to ‘take a couple of aspirin and see your doctor in a week if it doesn’t improve.’) Usually we’re pretty busy but I sometimes get time between calls and in breaks to think of ideas for Odd-Fish and sometimes if we’re unusually quiet (like during something ‘good’ on telly) even get a few minutes to jot down some sketches.
Not any more.
Since the arrival of Swine Flu our phones have been virtually melting under the onslaught of incoming calls from people with a huge range of symptoms, real and imagined, all convinced that they are Swine Flu’s equivalent of Typhoid Mary. There’s no longer any time to even take a mouthful of water or to glance out of the window (if our office had windows) between calls let alone think about pink octopuses or pick up a biro. The additional consequence of being so busy is that when I do get home at somewhere between eleven and night to two in the morning my head is spinning and I just want to veg out.
On top of all that Mrs Nobody and I started making plans to move house. We’re are heartily sick of living in the centre of a busy town like Ipswich with other people living so close by that you can practically hear their thoughts. Or you would be able to hear their thoughts if the sound of their music didn’t drown it out along with your own thoughts, your TV and the sound of the chavmum swearing at her children ten doors down. We’ve GOT to get out of here and move to a nice quite village location or better still somewhere in the countryside or even better an uninhabited planet on the other side of the universe. Quiet apart from our own sanity, we’d rather like to start thinking about producing some mini-Nobodys. At nearly forty-two I’m not getting any younger, I don’t want to be an Old Dad and Mrs Nobody’s body-clock is ticking so loudly you can hear it on the moon. (as long as the neighbours don’t have their music on) We’re absolutely not-never no-way no-how going to have any sprogs living here. I can’t think of a worse place to bring up kids.
So anyway, we started preparing our house to receive potential buyers. We de-cluttered it ruthlessly, we sold a load of stuff we hadn’t used in years and we redecorated every room in the house. I never EVER want to paint another artex ceiling again. I don’t like artex ceilings at the best of times but they were here when I moved in and I’ve never gotten around to doing anything about them. The week leave I had off work when I should have been relaxing and drawing cephalopods we were working intensive dawn-to-dusk and beyond sanding, painting, scrubbing, gardening, repairing, sorting, grouting and scraping until the house is shiny, spotless and decorated in a fresh neutral palette (Thanks House Doctor!)
We booked a valuation, an interview with a mortgage advisor and started looking around local estate agents for something within our budget in a suitably remote location.
Lo! and behold! Almost immediately we found something that seemed ideal. With no time to waste and even though it was rather jumping the gun because our house wasn’t yet on the market and we hadn’t spoken to the bank we arranged to go and see this wonderful three bed house in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere.
It was exactly the right sort of house in every way. Three bedrooms, upstairs bathroom, small but roomy garden, gas heating and even a little mini-study for me to use as a studio to work on Odd-Fish in. What made it especially perfect was that its location in a village I lived in as a teenager which I knew very well and had loved living there. Not only that it but the house was in the same street I had lived in. Couldn’t be more perfect.
The house had been on the market for more than a year and a half with little interest despite it’s excellent price. The agent said the lack of interest was down to its location in the middle of nowhere but that doesn’t bother me. I’ll happily take an hour’s drive to work along winding country roads over living in the fetid hole that is Ipswich. So no interest in the house for eighteen months… until the day we went to view it of course when someone who’d viewed it six months earlier suddenly put in an offer and had it accepted. Arse.
Never mind, we reasoned, if it was so easy to find one house that so perfectly fits our needs there’ll be others, right?
Next was the visit to the bank to speak to the mortgage advisor and this is where it all goes pair-shaped. Sure, in principle, once we sell our house, the proceeds will be plenty enough to pay off the existing mortgage and still leave enough equity to put down a healthy deposit on a new house. The resulting shortfall on price we’ve been looking at houses for is well within the scope of the amount we can borrow based on my NHS wage and still be (just about) affordable. No problem there. But.
But. and it’s a bigger BUT than an elephant addicted to Big Macs, there are two small outstanding debts on my credit history left over from a failed attempt seven years ago to set up my own business. The debts have defaulted and been left forgotten and disregarded festering on my credit file. Together they’re for about £600 and the creditors who own them have neglected to tell me about it for a very long time. We’d thought that the legacy of those very bad times when we were living on nothing, paying off credit cards with credit cards and hiding behind the furniture when there’s a knock on the door were long gone. We thought we’d settled all the debts and were just beginning to enjoy the daylight at the top of the long, hard, slow climb from the pit of debt. But no. These two small debts, the result of a bank closing our account while overdrawn were still sitting there at the bottom of the pit like some kind of financial Sarlacc waiting to drag us down into its maw once again.
“So pay them!” I hear you cry.
Ok. yes. That’s sensible. If we tighten our belts we should be able to scrape enough together in a few months and pay off those last lingering ties to our incautious past. But that’s not the problem. Oh no. The mortgage lender will not touch us until we have had a clean credit file for three years. THREE YEARS! That means even if we paid the debts tomorrow we are still stuck in this hole, listening to other people’s home made speedcore and Vauxhall Corsa street racing for another THREE YEARS.
Sod that for a game of soldiers.
The way I see it we’ve got four options.

1. Stay here until I lose the plot, buy a gun and climb a clock tower
2. Win the lottery and buy my own island somewhere
3. Buy a gun, rob a bank and buy my own island somewhere
4. Sell this house, invest the equity and rent for three years

I’m leaning towards option four but I’m concerned that it still puts our plans to spawn on hold and what of our pets? Will we be able to find a nice rental house that allows pets?.
Of course there’s always option five: Become a famous illustrator and get rich on the proceeds but if it hasn’t happened yet, it seems unlikely that I’ll get ‘discovered’ any time soon. I’m not holding my breath.
Can anyone think of an option six? Better yet, can anyone give/lend me a hundred grand?

So there you are. The reasons why Odd-Fish hasn’t been updated in a month. Not excuses, just real life.
Sorry about the blog being a bit of a downer, it’s all been a bit trying lately. On the plus side though, at least we’ve now got a tidy, clutter-free and freshly painted home! Ooh! Silver lining!
Back to Odd-Fish

Today we learned that our lovely sleek tabby tomcat, Ziggy has cancer.
He has a large lump on his right shoulder that seemed to come up pretty much overnight so we took him to the vets who did x-rays and took a biopsy sample of the lump (Hence him being shaven & stitched in the photo)
Then today we got a call from the vet with his biopsy results and confirmed that Ziggy has a malignant fibrosarcoma. That’s a cancer of the connective tissue in his shoulder and right ‘arm’.
The vet has tentatively offered the following options (she won’t be totally sure until after consulting with her colleagues tomorrow):

1) Do nothing and enjoy Ziggy for however long he has left. The type of tumour is apparently slow-growing and so he might have several months or even years left. It’s also possible the tumour will stop growing. The downside is that if the tumour does grow, we may lose the chance to operate. I’m also concerned as the tumour appeared very quickly and I don’t trust that it will slow down or stop.

2) Full chemotherapy, regular MRI scans, bloodwork etc until the cancer goes into remission. This has the highest chance of complete recovery, but is likely to cost several thousand pounds and we’re very worried about Ziggy’s quality of life while undergoing this type of treatment.

3) Remove as much of the tumour as possible. However, there is a 70% chance the cancer will return in the near future.

4) Amputate the leg and shoulder. This would offer a more complete removal of the cancerous tissues as it’s on and around the shoulder blade and the cancer is much less likely to return.

After much discussion this evening and assuming these options are going to be valid, we’re leaning towards option 4. We’ll find out more tomorrow, including detailed costs and such.
I hate to be mercenary but we have to be realistic the final decision is going to boil down to what we can afford which is why I am appealing for donations towards the prohibative cost of this surgery. I hate to beg, but poor Ziggy cannot ask for himself and it is my duty to help him if I can.

Hurrah!
I’m 41 today.
Not hurrah. *sulks*

I’m always starting new projects, I must have ten or more on the go at any one time. I do get them finished… eventually but I find it hard to stay focussed.
In fact Odd-Fish as a whole was partly an attempt to break this habit and force me to keep up a sustained effort over an extended period of time without letting it fall by the wayside and so far it’s pretty much worked. Odd-Fish has been studiously undated regularly for the last ten months.
But at what cost? Other projects, most notably Biro-Art have fallen foul of my old habits in favour of Odd-Fish and nor Biro-Art has only been updated once in nearly a year. It’s not that I don’t want to update, it’s just that I never seem to get the time. There’s always something else that needs doing, like an new Odd-Fish strip or something to watch on telly or the constant daily urge to eat and sleep.
I’ve even been avoiding getting any new games so that I don’t spend hours shooting monsters when I should be wrangling a biro.
It doesn’t help that it’s become a hell of a lot more busy at work either. I used to use drawing as a way of avoiding boredom on long, quiet shifts but now there’s no such thing. Our branch is no longer open overnight so my beloved night shifts are no longer available and the service stays stupidly busy well past midnight these days so I’ve pretty much given up even taking out a pencil at work any more.

Today Ziggy had his trip to the vet for his x-ray. We took him in at 8:45 this morning, howling like a banshee in his cat box. Honestly, if Schrödinger had used Ziggy in his experiments, there would never have been any doubt as to  whether the cat were alive or dead, he would have been able to tell just by listening!
So we booked him in and were given instructions to phone in the late afternoon to see how he’d got on, then come in for another consultation at 6 to discuss the results. Unfortunately, cats have to be given a general anaesthetic for x-rays because there is no way that they’d stay still enough otherwise, that’s why Ziggy had to be there all day.
At 4 we phoned and were told that all went well and Ziggy was coming out of the anaesthetic now. So far so good!

At 6 we went back to the surgery and nervously met with the vet.
I’m going to tentatively say it was good news! It seems that Ziggy doesn’t have a tumour at all! It’s actually swelling around a nasty fracture to one of his wrist bones, and friction abrasion to the head of the radius. A fairly serious injury for a four-legged animal but one that should heal naturally with minimal intervention!
So we’ll be keeping him dosed up on analgesia and anti-inflammatories and regular check-ups at the vet for the next month or so and see what happens. All being well it will sort itself out and the swelling will go down. If not we may have to return to the vet again and perhaps think about some kind of intervention to help it heal.
So a huge and very heartfelt thank you to those wonderful people who left a little something in the tips jar, you made a big difference and lightened the load on the vet’s bill today. We still had some way to go to make up the shortfall and it has left us short on other bills this month, especially as our horrible car has started signs of dying died (a strong stench of sulphur, repeatedly blowing fuses, three new scraping and clunking noises and a gearbox that pops out of gear without warning!) but your donations lessened the pain considerably!
A million times thank you.