Halloween redux

Still feel disgusting. Not to mention I woke up the first time my alarm went off and stayed awake. That never happens unless you know, the house is burning down or I'm feeling too gross to sleep or something. I'm pretty convinced the culprit is a Crohn's thing. Probably triggered by stress. I haven't been writing about it really but there has been quite a bit of emotional shmoo floating around my general atmosphere, which tends to result in lovely little feedback loops. Ugh.

Despite that, my day was ok. Spent the first half of it chilling out with sundart and hiding under blankets in the living room and watching morlock's DVDs of The West Wing. Dear Gods, that show was fabulous. I've always liked it, but this is really the first time I'm managing to see a good many of the episodes in order instead of one here and there like I used to. morlock joined us after a bit and I set about carving the three big pumpkins we'd been saving up. I have to say pumpkin carving kits are wonderful wonderful things. Especially the sharp edged scoop they give you precisely for scraping out the pumpkin guts. It seriously made what is normally a seriously disgusting, messy job kinda enjoyable in a zen-like here I sit scraping pumpkins sort of way. Anyway, I scraped out all three and let morlock carve one (he put three interesting faces on his) carved one for me (mine has a ;) smiley on the back and a ^_^ on the front) and then carved one out for sunny after she drew the design on. They looked amazing lit. Really once we got the porch all set up with the pumpkins and the paper bag luminaries we picked up a little while ago and the giant skull leering out of our living room window, it looked really nice out there and made me quite satisfied with my Halloween, even if I didn't managed to arse myself into doing anything huge. Which was a good attitude to have as we got exactly three trick or treaters. :) They were all cute tho... and hey, more candy for us. Not that we haven't been eating it already... *looks innocent and fails*

The evening also included a short visit from wrpigeek and jade_eyes13, watching the Modern Marvels marathon of episodes about candy, and watching The Most Extreme Halloween... stuff. We found out about a huge ass Halloween... emporium I think might be the proper word for it, but it's just over in Worcester... they're open all year, so I'm thinking a field trip is a must do. Also a jack o' lantern festival in Keene, which isn't that far from here either. Definitely fun stuff to consider for next year. And after we blew out the candles outside me and the gals turned off the lights and had a viewing of Session 9, which was delightfully creepy but probably not quite as terrifying as I remember.

I did manage to leave the house for a little bit last night to go with Sunny to the big crossroads in the middle of town armed with cookies for our own dearly departed. We were quite amused to find the detrius of some other Pagan group's offering in the middle and left ours on top of it. We left quite a few cookies this year... ones for my Grandma, my Mom, sunny's grandma and the grandpa on her other side, our friend Mary Elizabeth, anzovin's dad, morlock's uncle, Bosslady... it's funny how some people think that celebrating on Halloween and Dia de los Muertos is a macabre thing, but someone in one of the shows we were watching really did put it into perspective. Death is a part of life, and the reason we take these days to honor, remember and celebrate the memories of those who are gone is because our own lives were enriched in some way by having these people with us when they were alive. And when you think about it... leaving a cookie at a crossroads, lighting candles, having ritual and dressing up in silly costumes seems, to me, much less morbid and macabre than many mourning rituals that said judgemental people participate in without really thinking about it.

Well, anyway. According to general Paganery, this is a new year. And ... eep. I have a silly novel to write at some point and work-from-home to do. But first... breakfast.

Not quite a GIP

Well, I finally have a NaNo icon that will serve for this year. It's not quite the one I wanted to make, since I was having a wicked amount of trouble pulling screencaps out of a Quicktime. I swear it was easier than than before, that's how I got images to animate before. They must have changed it. The bastards. I was totally going to do an animation of Weird Al typing from White and Nerdy, but I think that's going to have to wait until next year, when I have more patience. Meanwhile I think the modified footage from The Shining works quite well. :)



Mostly raw dialogue. I have to let my sulky teenagers talk to me more as I don't have a handle on their voices. Well, three of them. I have Jimme down, I think, but he was really the only defined character I've had from the beginning. Let me tell you, it's going to be a bit of a relief getting his story down finally. It's kind of annoying having an extremely hot flamingly gay Japanese teenager stomping around your head.

Ugh. I'm going to try to force something solid into my digestive tract now. It's kinda hard to make yourself eat when the very thought of food makes you want to throw up on top of having nausea be one of the first signs that you're really hungry. :(