Vacationed with family for my birthday! In San Francisco, where I checked out the Cartoon Art Museum, rode the streetcars, saw some sea lions, bought imported snacks in Chinatown, had dinner in the Castro, and walked up too many hills.

Not sure I got a single Art Thing done all week. Just a lot of Tourist Things, and a lot of extra sleep in between walking around all the Tourist Things.

The Leif & Thorn 10th Anniversary update went live somewhere in the middle of that. Along with an announcement that I’m officially dropping from a 7-days-a-week schedule to a MWF schedule. I hadn’t come to terms with “yeah, this is a commitment I need to change” when I originally queued that update, so I had to edit it in later…which I ended up doing from my phone in the middle of the Bhangra & Beats Night Market.

All of this is the longest I’ve ever been away from the cats. A local friend checked in on them a couple times. (Got investigated by Fiddlesticks. Never saw the Fluff.)

I always wonder how they perceive changes in their routine like this. Fiddles was certainly ready to get back on her “wait next to my bed in the morning until she gets her wet food” schedule. Thought Fluff might be suspicious, but he emerged from hiding within 15 minutes of me getting home, and has been his normal cuddly self ever since.

(“excuse me sir, I was trying to write”)

Got a couple of Art Things done yesterday. Will I do more over the weekend? Or will I distract myself with doomscrolling and cat-spoiling? TBD.

One bright note for the future: I spent the back half of October low-key stressing about a flood of spam traffic on my comic sites. Even after I figured out how to cut it off (longer post about this later, probably), it had already blown through so much of my hosting-plan resource quota, my legitimate traffic for the rest of the month would’ve easily filled the rest.

Since I had a lengthy conversation with SiteGround tech support to get the problem fixed, I was hoping some admin put a note on my account that says “disregard the limit this month, it was messed up by a wave of spambots which the customer has dealt with.” But nobody outright told me if that could/would happen. I was just quietly crossing my fingers.

Well, October is over! The sites never went down. The quotas have reset. And my account stats show actual-human-reader traffic holding steady at a rate that isn’t going to break them in November.

Sigh of relief. Knock wood that this keeps up.