Few creatures walk the Castle. I’ve found only a couple of crawlies, one dead, the other barely moving. A healthy proto-queen flies through the Castle, but I haven’t caught it, yet. When I do, it’ll learn to fly within the confines of my vacuum cleaner. (For those who’s hearts go out to the little buggers, when I emptied my vacuum into the trash yesterday, most of the ants were still moving, leaving me with two possibilities: (1) they’ll survive their garbage adventures and start a new colony in the dump; or (2) they’re suffering a slow and agonizing death in my trash bag, begging for it to stop with no euthanasia in their future. I’m hoping it’s the latter.)

I leave for NYC tomorrow, and as part of my tradition, I’d like to share the weather report. But before I do, I have exciting news. I caught the wayward flying ant (stop thinking of your spinster aunt—she neither flies nor infests the Castle). In an exciting turn of events (as if a turn of events could ever be anything but exciting), the flying ant, which flew surprisingly well for an ant (I think all the flights I had previously witnessed were injured flying ants), flew through my dining room and slammed into the ceiling. It bounced off the ceiling and onto my ledge, where it remained quivering on its back. I turned on the vacuum cleaner before she had a chance to right herself, and sucked her up. She’s now crawling—I assume is contently—in her glass cage. Does my heroism know any boundaries?

Getting back to the weather, in Brooklyn, my first stop on my five-day trip, it is now a balmy twenty-eight degrees (Fahrenheit for all you foreigners), with a wind chill making it feel like twenty-one degrees. For my visit, the weather will range from a low of twenty-one degrees to a high of—get your swimming trunks because there’s going to be some beach going—forty-two degrees. I don’t know about you, but I’m having second thoughts about leaving Seattle. It’s fifty-five degrees during this beautiful night, with highs of sixty-nine (tomorrow), and lows of thirty-four (on Monday evening). As I keep reminding you, Seattle has had an atypical winter. These last few weeks have been sunny and warm. I’m sure that this afternoon, the temperatures rose into the seventies and the skies were that diamond blue I spoke about in one of my poor attempts at a story. If this is what winter is like in Seattle, I’m not sure I’ll ever leave. (I bet that made a certain Brooklyn mother’s heart thump faster.)

Do you see what a bug-hunting incident did for me? When I started writing the first paragraph, I was dragging my feet, unsure if I would gather enough energy to write about anything. But after I successfully sucked up the bug, with adrenaline pumping through my delicate system, I was the man of steel, the righter of wrongs, the doer of things that needed doing. And how can such a man not write insightful and provocative things? (Imagine that: me writing something insightful and/or provocative. I kill me!)

I’ve reached the end of my thoughts for today. I’ve been reading more web comics, and I’m anxious to start drawing another pictures. I’m hoping it comes out better than yesterday’s pitiful painting. I drew that with a new drawing program I’m trying out, which let’s me sketch and color in layers. It’s the same program I used on my flights with my work TabletPC (remember the geometric designs), but a different program than the one I used to draw the troll. I’d like to find that troll program again one day.