hey guys.
thanks for all the nice comments.
kathy asked, "Good lord, man, how do you come up with this stuff??"
the long answer is that timmy, the curious little boy who lives in the attic of my mind, goes out wandering from time to time when he has nothing better to do, and gets hit on the head (in a rough but playful manner) by random ideas for stories, inventions, and whatever else. he takes the ones he likes, shows them to me, and sometimes takes them back home to my subconcious to play with them and develop them.
the short answer is "i have no idea."
kathy also said, "Very, very cute! And very nicely done.
"
well, thank you. and thanks for taking the time to comment.
labby, glad i could start your morning off well. always good to hear when you've brightened someone's day. speaking of which, thanks for the warm comments post.
oh, and i should give proper credit...
"No," said a confused man, peering through a set of binoculars, "it's... a repairman."
this is a twist on one of my favorite bits from the pilot. "it's a bird!" "it's a plane!" "no, it's some guy in tights and a cape." the twist is my own, and once i thought of it, i had to include it, but the original idea came from the show.
jose, marnie, and queen of the capes said, "
."
thanks, guys. i'm glad you liked it.
rivka, i found out about the licenses as part of a messy to-do in my grandparent's place in florida. among other things, the resident manager was fired, and it came up that we'd been paying him less because he didn't have a license. i thought it'd be a good detail to throw in, as long as i was going for a modicum of realism.
glad you liked bibbo. he's been one of my favorite minor characters since i saw him in a few eps of the animated superman series. the part about him winning the lottery and opening up the ace o' clubs (in part to give something back to the neighborhood) is from the comics.
laura, merry, laura, and joy - thanks for chipping in, too. glad to hear you enjoyed.
erin, thanks for the enthusiastic response. great to hear. still not quite sure what you found so funny about the paragraph you quoted, but hey, glad you liked it so much.
personally, i just stuck it in because i thought it would be cool to uphold clark's theories about people's reaction to a man in a uniform with a toolbelt. i figured that between the tone of the fic and lois's general reaction to superman, i could get away with it. so i didn't quite think of it as anything funny, but that makes it all the better when it gets such an unexpectedly good reaction.
tricia, thanks for your kind words. always good to get an enthusiastic response.
so, thanks again everyone. been a while since i've written, and it'll probably be a while before the next one, but i'm really glad you liked this.
Paul
Or, as Basil Brush would say (dating myself here 
) Boom! Boom!
