Spring Demon

Arrrgh! It’s 77 degrees here at the moment, which is unnatural enough in mid-December, but this unseasonable warmth has a weird effect on me. It never fails. The first warm day after several successive days of cold makes Ursula’s hindbrain go “SPRING! MUST CLEAN!” and I throw the doors and windows open and go a little psycho. (This was particularly dangerous in Minnesota, where the first warm day might be thirty-three degrees.) It is as if the temperature is the last ingredient in a summoning circle, and lo! it emerges, in a puff of warmth, the Spring Demon.

This would be fine, of course, except that my apartment is already pretty clean. I’m generally pretty good about picking up after myself, hanging up the towels, putting the clothes in the hamper, and cleaning up after Ben’s ninja hunting. (Yes, okay, the studio section is cluttered and has stray bits of gold leaf, but c’mon, how am I supposed to work otherwise?) However, this does not matter to the Spring Demon. It looks at a stray piece of cat-food on the floor and a single dirty cup in the sink and screams “I am tired of living in squalor!” and the next thing I know, I’m on my hands and knees scrubbing out the bathtub and contemplating alphabetizing my paperback science fiction.

This does ultimately lead to more congenial living quarters, and since I quite like my apartment, this is a good thing. But still, when you’re trying to get a comic done and an anthology submission done and do laundry and run prints, it isn’t helpful to find yourself constantly stopping and carefully aligning books or organizing the stack of games by platform and genre. Damnit.

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