Well, things have really gone to heck with Minions at Work this week, and I apologize (especially to Patreon supporters, who aren’t even getting this cartoon early). Life got complicated, and I won’t go into the details, as they’re just too involved. Serve it to say that we finally (at a total cost of close to $2000) got our van back from the VW Dealer (a dealer 125 miles away, for reasons too involved to explain here) last Thursday, following multiple botched attempts to fix our air conditioning. On Friday, though, the air conditioning was working fine until I pulled into a store parking lot, put the shifter in park, and discovered that I could not get the key out of the ignition, nor could I move the shifter, nor could I lock the car, and when I exited, I discovered that the backup lights were on, draining the battery. The dealer had removed the dash to fix the A/C and screwed up the dash mounted shifter in putting it back together. Yesterday we drove to a DIFFERENT dealer 30 miles away to pick up our (hopefully) fixed car, and now I am working with VW to maybe get some kind of compensation for our two month service nightmare. My letter explaining what happened (and trust me, this was the SHORT version), ran to 2,250 words, or about nine printed pages!

Oh, and our building project officially ran over budget and is running WAY late. But we did get our concrete floor slab poured today, and it is beautiful, even if we had to write a big check. But I had concrete trucks and pumps roaring in front of my office this morning, people working right outside until mid-afternoon, at which point the fumes from the concrete sealer sent me fleeing my office (and my home) for the rest of the afternoon.

This “remastered” cartoon was all I could pull off this week, and all I am LIKELY to pull off this week. And like I said, though I had it done days ago, I just haven’t had time or energy to get it out to anyone till now, including Patreon folks. I’ll try to make it up to you in the long run, folks. I’ll try to do better next week. Thanks for the indulgence.

But right now, I’m tired and emotionally wrung out and I’d rather be in bed right now. Next week will be better. It had better be better! Man, I hate being a whiner. Sorry!

Keep it evil, folks!

-Steve