From the local newspaper’s website:

Jobs? In the Altoona area? Yeah, that’s pretty much the reaction everyone around here had. :P

I keep meaning to post more of my thrift-store purchases here (and post more here in general), but on Saturday, I found something that I finally decided was worth charging the camera batteries for. :P I have wanted one of these for years and years, and found it just in time to take on vacation with me. :P

A hat box!  Joy!  And only four bucks!

I have no hats to keep in here, but who cares.  It would seem that the previous owner didn’t either.  Other than a thick layer of dust and a small stain in one of the inside pockets, this thing is immaculate.

Here’s the interior.  Should have taken a better picture of the bottom.  Those blue things are built-in ribbons, I suppose to tie the hat into place.

This is slightly better, but not by much. :P

Oh, and Buttercup says hey. :P

I recently realized that the vast majority of the comics I made up last semester still wasn’t online. So here’s something:

http://www.comicspace.com/hellogina/comics.php?action=gallery&comic_id=21259

However, I’m mostly posting this as an excuse to post photos and random reflections on here. Click the cut to view photos of the places depicted in the comic so you can see how far off I was in some cases. :P  Almost all of the photos are enlargable, so click away. :P

Really, I have no idea why this stuff fascinates me so much, but it does.

This photo and the interior shot further down are from a book called Images of America: Altoona (which had lots of nice pictures, but also lots of misspellings, typos, and gross factual errors galore) and shows the mall in the 60s. The original Logan Valley Plaza was built in 1960 and was just Sears, a Weis market, and apparently a couple of other “small shops.” Penneys came in 1965 and the connecting mall was built a couple of years later. (When I worked at Penneys, the manager had a couple of fantastic paintings of the original store hanging up in his office. He called a bunch of new hires in for a meeting once, and I was far more interested in studying said paintings than I was listening to the whole “a smile is a warm handshake” spiel.)

(photo to be added)

…and here is my doodled-on version. I guess Hess’s and the western portion of the mall was added some time in the 70s? The western section of the mall was the location of my beloved elevator. There are escalators and a jungle gym-type thing for little kids there now. Curiously enough, there’s also a brand-new fountain nearby as well, the kind with fake rocks and plants and real goldfish in it. Of course, it’s also full of pennies. :)

Aerial view from 1993.Note the addition on the left (Penneys is that black roof in the center of the mall–you have to walk thru Penneys to get from one end of the mall to the other.)

The interior shot from the book. Judging from that lady’s pants, I’d say this is from the 70s, huh? :P This is pretty much the way the mall looked all the way up to the mid-nineties. I think. That’s Sears at the end of the hall. If you squint, you can see Thrift Drug up the aisle from Murphy’s, but before you get to Sears.

Here’s the Thrift Drug after the fire, far left. :P Yikes. I’d imagine the ceiling tiles are all gone because of ~asbestos.~

The same area, only zoomed-out. This was all enclosed at one time.

Firefighters were able to stop the fire just as it reached the Penneys entrance.

It took me the longest time to figure out what exactly this was a picture of–this was the interior entrance inside of the actual mall, not a set of doors from outside. Besides, the store had that cool, swanky old Penney’s logo on the exterior anyway.

Here is the aerial view of the mall now.

(to be added)

And my written-on version, woo-hoo.

2nd Floor Entrance to Kauffmann’s (now Macy’s), which, before the fire, was Hess’s. All three stores seem far too upscale for this area. Anyway, see the boring pastel flooring? The new design also features lots of balconies and sunroofs and crap like that.

When you pass Altoona on the interstate, this is about all you see of the mall–a little of Penneys, and the giant eyesore of a parking garage that just had to be built directly in front of the pretty new mall. Go figure. BTW, that parking garage is super rickety and smells like piss and dead babies. It has from the time it opened. :(

Images of the fire came from a PDF that comes up if you google “logan valley mall fire.” There are other photos, but you can’t see much of anything interesting in them. MOAR random musings: Murphys was by far my favorite store in the mall. I think it was the only one we visited with much regularity. It’s the only store that I remember really, really clearly. It was just a typical old five and dime, made slightly more upscale by the fact that it was located in the mall. Near the end, Murphy’s started selling pets, mostly birds and fish. They had a cool old parrot who lived in the store and liked to greet us with wolf whistles and repeating phrases like “hey, baby” or “hi there, hot stuff” ad nauseum. The fire actually started in the Murphy’s store, and my first thought when I heard about the fire was that that parrot had to have died. The fire was ruled an accidental electrical fire, but I vaguely remember a rumor that it was purposely set. People had been complaining about the mall’s datedness and run-down state (the PDF about the fire lists lots and lots of vacant stores, too), and Crown American was about to begin renovations anyway when the fire just happened to break out. Hess’s had actually just closed down to make way for Kaufmanns. Another rather important thing I remembered is that I DID actually get to go to the Penneys fire sale, though it wasn’t until after my parents went without me. I sort of think I bugged my mom to take me. She took us late on a Sunday night, let us buy some stupid things (that I still happen to have because I am a terrible packrat), then we went home and ate junk food and Mom let us stay up and watch Wait til Your Father Gets Home It was one of the coolest days ever, and I’m not sure how I ever forgot about it.

YOU GUYS!!!

I am on a big Space Ghost kick again. I’ve been watching the really old ones lately and have been a little weirded out as I’ve realized how much this show has shaped (warped?) my sensibilities, sense of humor, and just my childhood altogether. I’m gonna put some of my money toward buying the rest of the DVDs that are out.

And here is some Cartoon Planet stuff I’ve uploaded to the Youtubes!!

Here’s the Wake-Up Song. I didn’t make this video, which is why it’s of such good quality:

And this is the first of a couple of blocks of clips I have:

This video includes the short version of the Wake-Up Song.

I have a few more sketches to add still, but I’m having trouble getting my VCR to play the tapes. It just sort of shuts off at random. I think the relatively new VCR and the twenty-year-old tape hate one another. I guess I have to take one of my VCRs that can read the tape downstairs and hook it up to my DVD thing. I used to have way more CP stuff, but it was all accidentally taped over.

OMFG centipedes are scary. A gigantic one just crawled out of nowhere and I yelled OH MY FUCKING GOD when I saw it. Then when I came to my senses, I tried to smush it, but I think I only got its back legs. I think the rest of it is still crawling around somewhere. o_O

I just remembered the most important thing I should mention in here: that I got into my stupid grad school. It only took two months to get a straight answer out of them. My dad made me call and ask. :P

Also I might apply for a job at the local library. Just because I don’t spend enough time working already.

Posting this because I’m bored and hard up for something to talk about on here.

How bored? I’m so bored, I’ve started doing I don’t think I’ve ever done without being forced to: writing fiction. :( It’s a follow-up to a story I wrote for a class last semester. Someone (who I don’t like very much and whose opinion I don’t really think all that highly of, even though said person seemed to think that s/h/it was the star of the class or some shit) told me the characters were all blatant stereotypes and yet wanted to read more about them, so here we are.

If you want to read the original story, here it is. Beware that it’s kinda longish. Is eleven or twelve pages considered longish? It reads quickly and includes angsty teenagers, stupid teenagers, and a dose of racism, which are always entertaining.

I am a lametard, so I wrote out the new material by hand. Once I type it up, I guess I’ll post it up here. Woo-hoo.

P.S. Guess who didn’t get to see Marc Summers? :( His TV show was filming an episode at the park and I was hoping against hope that I might see him there. But Wiki suggests that he doesn’t actually visit any of the locations, anyway. Ah, well. Marc Summers is way too awesome for Altoona, anyway.

P.P.S. I just thought of something better I could be writing about in here. But I guess that just means I can make one more entry on this horrible thing. Goody.

My dad has a job interview soon.

In West Virginia.

I guess Pennsylvania wasn’t backwards enough for him?

I try to be a tolerant person, but I fucking hate hillbillies. Working at the park and getting to deal with rude people who have more tattoos than they do teeth hasn’t helped matters.

That said, bring on the West Virginia jokes!

This is just a test to see if the comment form is working properly. I’m still not done messing with the layout of this thing (really, I haven’t even started), but why not.

Do you see it? Do you see the huge glaring typo? Do you see the huge glaring typo that was also made at least one other time elsewhere in this article?

Someone at the Altoona Mirror needs to retake ninth-grade English. Just because the Microsoft Word spellcheck doesn’t catch it doesn’t mean it’s right.

Assholes should have hired me when I applied there.

I still have the mother of all Altoona Mirror typos (and perhaps the mother of all typos ever) and I keep forgetting to post it. I saved it almost a year ago. It is genius.