On the missing week: a reminder.

As we all know, there was a week a few years ago right after John and Elly's first kid-free vacation in the Sun that went missing somehow. Lynn made an arch claim that the sled dog died or something and they were forced to show a week of older strips instead of continuing on with John's parents talking about how they thought that a little of him and the others went a very long way.

As I said at the time, I'm convinced that the missing strips might have tried to humanize John to an extent. What would happen is that we'd get Will or Carrie alluding to the fact that their son had a rough go of it as a kid when he first got eyeglasses and it turned him into a defensive, thin-skinned jerk. We'd also get a bit of talking about how Carrie really didn't think all that much of the crazy, short-tempered idiot John married. You can readily see why Lynn didn't mind losing them. On the one hand, we'd have a back-story for John and on the other, another reminder that older people don't like Elly.