After almost five months of applications, I have a job at last! I was coming home regardless, but it is a huge weight off of my shoulders to be coming home to a job.
Lori gets a cameo here! She is my friend and mentor from Johnson-Brock and is the one who told me about the NC job.
I don’t know if I’ll do any more full strips of my family’s visit, but there may be some more throwaway panel gags. It was very windy and unusually cloudy in Aswan (they rarely get cloud cover).
This may be my favorite NoaC comic so far, partly because of all the self-indulgent references I included here. Then again, NoaC itself it pretty self-indulgent, so…
I’m not sure how exactly or when this family joke of ‘looking at a river in Africa’ started (although I suspect it’s been even longer than 15 years…yikes) but I definitely never expected to ACTUALLY look at the Nile River with my family. And then we took a Nile cruise aboard the Blue Shadow from Aswan to Luxor, and there you have it.
I was amused to draw my family younger. Some of the other small references in this comic include Jass (a Swiss card game we play, pronounced YAHSS), of which I bought a French Swiss deck last summer that doesn’t actually mark face cards but all jacks carry axes. You can also see the scorecards with the reverse S (not a Z) because the Swiss do things backwards (the order of turns is also reversed in Jass). I also have gotten very good at falling asleep on planes before takeoff. Linda is Mom’s sister, and another running joke in our family is how often Wendy gets called Linda.