Category: holidays

obligatory Halloween photos

Here are my witch and frog.

The frog refused to wear the hood for most of the night.


Here, the witch completes the transformation of her brother into a frog.

We didn’t manage to carve pumpkins this year. However, we did manage to make some snowmen. Here’s hoping that this is not a new Halloween tradition.


Here was Saturday night’s pre-dinnertime snowman. My only contribution was to bring out a carrot.


This is one Phoebe made all by herself on Sunday. (Should I be concerned that she made a right-leaning snowman?)

We really lucked out with the storm, actually. You may have heard that much of the Northeast lost power, and many are still without even days later. There have been lots of trees down on powerlines in our town and neighboring towns. At least when we lost power back in August it was warm! So, again, we were lucky.


For us, it just looked like a lovely December snowstorm. With more leaves.

the ghosts of Halloween costumes past

Halloween is probably my favorite holiday. I have always loved costumes, plus the goth in me¹ loves the dark and creepy trappings of the holiday. While I may not be able to tell you every costume I’ve ever worn for Halloween, I can sure remember a lot of them. What’s more, I’m a big fan of making my own costumes. While I do like to see so many people get fired up about getting into the holiday spirit, all those cheaply made polyester costumes you see in stores these days make me a little sad. Part of the joy for me is in the creation, or at least the assembly, of the costume.

You may well be wondering what great schemes I have devised for this year’s costumes. The sad answer is “not much.” I have been very focused on work and other life things. Having perhaps gone a bit overboard with last year (cf. last Halloween’s post: “Quiz: How compulsive are you? (Halloween costume edition“), I decided that I would try to meet Halloween with a better attempt at sanity.

Phoebe had decide a few months ago that she wanted to be a witch, and I heartily approved. I thought I might be able to make her a dress. But then I was shopping at the second hand children’s store (and no, they don’t sell second hand children), I found a witch’s dress and hat on the rack. In Phoebe’s size. Since I had made a point of not asking Theo about what he wanted to be (in part so that I could have a chance to run with a theme, and in part because I didn’t want to get stuck committing to something tricky when he’s not likely to even remember this costume by the time he’s 6), I didn’t have anything particular in mind for him. I thought I could go with another traditional Halloweeny costume (ghost, mummy, frankenstein, bat…), but didn’t find any such costumes on the rack in his size. I did, however, find a rather cute green frog. Theo likes frogs. And green. I bought it.

So, while one might be able to relate the witch and the frog in a more narrative way, I’m not really working with a theme. And I don’t have any schemes for a costume for myself that would tie things together. So be it.

Instead, I will have to console myself by looking back at some of the fun costume themes I have put together in the past:

  • butterfly (Phoebe), caterpillar (Theo) and munched-looking plant (me) (2010)
  • firefighter (Phoebe), dalmatian (Theo) and fire (me) (2009)
  • bunny (Phoebe) and carrot (Theo) (2008)
  • squirrel (Phoebe) and tree (me) (2007)

carrot squirrel

Other Halloween costumes that I have worn as an adult have included:

  • a witch
  • a spider
  • Morticia Addams
  • a ghost
  • a mummy
  • half man/half woman

At some point, I’ll have to dig up descriptions and/or photos of some of these. (Well, I already wrote about the mummy.) For the record, none of these were pre-fab or packaged costumes, though I did buy and assemble occasional pre-made parts. I’m rather pleased that some of my descriptions of past costume creations have been of use to others out there. I even once heard from someone who modelled her daughter’s squirrel costume after the one I made, and she and her husband were trees following my tree costume.²

I’m going to declare this post to be among the posts on Things I Like: I like costumes. This is only number 4 of the proposed 40 posts on things I like. I’ve realized that my slowness is in part due to my wanting to give each of the Things I Like its due attention, and in part to my having trouble deciding how to sort out the things I like into individual posts. (There is often overlap. I mean, I like costumes, and Halloween, and Halloween costumes, and themes, and themed Halloween costumes.) There is also this desire to have them presented in some sort of logical order. I need to get over that. (Screw logic!)

—

¹ The goth in me shares space with the hippy in me, the uptight schoolmarm, the curious 12-year-old, and a variety of other characters, including a short balding guy named Ned who won’t share his Cheetos with any of the others.

² If a tree costume falls in the closet, and nobody hears it, do you still have to pick it up? ³

³ No. But you may later need to rake.

easy as pi

Happy Pi Day!

Pi Day caught me a bit off guard this year, but was not going to let my unpreparedness result in pielessness. I had some errands to run this afternoon, so I stopped by the store while I was out to get a pie crust and some frozen berries, and voila! The Pi Day Pie tradition has been upheld.

This pi pie is the 3rd such pie I have under my belt. (Not to say that I ate three whole pies today. Though I could imagine such a feat. I do love me some pie.) My Pi Day tradition started with a pi post back in 2008, which then inspired me to bake my first pi pie. Pi Day of 2009 was a pieless day, due to traveling and attending a wedding, but then I did recapture the pi magic in 2010.

In celebration of Pi Day, I offer you a gallery of pi pies past and present.


My original pi pie, from 2008. I was so fond of it, I even wrote its obituary.


Last year’s pi pie was an apple pi.


This year’s pi Pie is of mixed berry heritage.

a big, squishy heart for you

Happy Valentine’s Day, friends. I cut out some hearts just for you.

For more Valentine’s treats, please revisit eat your hearts out (all about little candy hearts), heart in my hands (an anatomical heart-themed list), and getting over V.D. If you are seek more heart-warming valentines, please see giving a rat’s ass for Valentine’s Day. Don’t say I never gave you anything for Valentine’s Day.

down the rabbit hole

Happy New Year! It’s Chinese New Year today, marking the start of the year of the rabbit. In keeping with my tradition of welcoming the lunar new year with a themed list,¹ I present to you a bunch of rabbits:

  • “rabbit, rabbit” A tradition of saying “rabbit, rabbit” first thing when you wake up on the first of the month to bring you good luck. I used to do this as a kid. I hadn’t remembered it in years. (Maybe my luck would have been better…)
  • Bugs Bunny: a famous cartoon from the Looney Tunes/Warner Brothers. (What’s up, doc?)
  • Binky and Bongo: somewhat less famous rabbit characters from Matt Groening’s comic Life in Hell. (Bongo is the one with one ear.)

  • Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) A movie combining live action and cartoon characters, one of whom is a rabbit.
  • Harvey (1950) A movie starring Jimmy Stewart and a 6-foot-tall invisible rabbit.
  • Little Rabbit Foo-foo/Little Bunny Foo-foo. A folk song. …hopping through the forest. Scooping up the field mice and bopping them on the head…
  • The Bunny Hop: a conga-line type dance involving hopping
  • Rabbits are popular anthropomorphic characters in children’s literature, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit and others by Beatrix Potter, or Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown.
  • Watership Down: a novel by Richard Adams about a very complex rabbit society. Complete with their own language. I’m quite fond of the Lapine words tharn (which is the feeling one gets of being a deer caught in the headlights) and hrair (which is a number larger than 4–rabbits can only count up to 4.)

  • Other well-known stories feature a rabbit among other characters and species of creatures, such as Rabbit from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books or the White Rabbit in Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland. There was also Thumper from Disney’s 1942 animated film Bambi. Br’er Rabbit: is a character from the traditional African American Uncle Remus folktales

  • Other stories feature bunny-shaped toys, such as The Velveteen Rabbit, by Margery Williams, or the more recent Knuffle Bunny, by Mo Willems.
  • The Easter Bunny: a rabbit said to bring colorful eggs and candy for children on Easter.
  • Here comes Peter Cottontail: a song about the Easter Bunny. (…hopping down the bunny trail…hippity hoppity...)
  • Cheddar Bunnies: rabbit-shaped snack crackers.
  • Welsh Rabbit: a kind of food that is not actually made from rabbit. It is a thick sauce, traditionally made with cheddar cheese and ale, and served over toast. (Here’s a sample recipe.)
  • VW Rabbit: a kind of car, not traditionally made with cheddar cheese or ale.
  • rabbit food: what some call salads and other raw vegetables
  • rabbit’s foot: a good luck charm made from the foot of a rabbit (less lucky for the rabbit)
  • rabbit ears: antennae for a TV, not generally made from the ears of a rabbit (lucky rabbits)

  • Rabbits have appeared as mascots for products, especially in TV commercials, such as the Energizer Bunny (it keeps going), the Trix rabbit (Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.) and the Nesquik bunny (I have nothing to say about this rabbit.) For that matter, the logo of Playboy magazine is a stylized rabbit in a tuxedo. (I don’t have anything to say about that rabbit, either.)
  • Finally, we must not forget that rabbits, while typically portrayed as docile, may have big pointy teeth.

—
¹ …with pigs in 2007, rats in 2008, and cows in 2009. Last year, I didn’t put up a list for the New Year, in part because I had put up my tiger list before, and in part probalby because I was busy with something else.²

² In fact I shouldn’t be doing this list now, as I have loads of other things I am supposed to be doing, but I can’t resist. So I will be quick like a bunny. And I will pull this rabbit list out of my…hat. I’ve tried to keep it short, but the bunnies seem to keep multiplying. (You know how rabbits are. Though I can’t help but notice that just about all of the rabbit characters on the list are male. You’d think that would make the breeding tricky…)

Image sources: Book cover for Watership Down, movie poster for Harvey, Peter Rabbit, Bugs Bunny, TV with antenna, Binky, Bongo, and John Tenniel’s illustration of the White Rabbit.

Welcome, 2011! (Please suck less than 2010 did.)

Here we are, welcoming in another new year. Which is, quite frankly, a big relief. Because, chances are, this new year will be better than last year. If not, please allow me to enter a coma. Right now.

2010 was The Year of Big Suck.

I know I whine, and I know things could have been worse. (Believe me, I’ve imagined ways in which things could have been worse.) But let’s face it, this has been a Really Bad Year™ for my family. It wasn’t All Bad, certainly, but the ratio of Good to Bad was dramatically lower than in most years. Especially given the size of the Bad. When a loved one in the family has cancer, it is hard to imagine the size of the Good to offset it. When that loved one is a small child, even daily deliveries of home-baked cookies, fuzzy puppies, and attractive massage therapists would barely provide a distraction. And not only did I not get any such deliveries, the year instead delivered international catastrophes as well as other more localized family- related, friend-related and personal woes.

I’m not a big one for New Year’s resolutions, but I have often enjoyed looking back in nostalgia at the events of the previous year. “Nostalgia” is not quite the right word the way I feel about this past year. In addition to the aforementioned Bad Stuff, I remember being sick. A lot. I was sick something like 9 times in the first few months of the year, and then got a severe case of poison ivy that lasted for weeks. And while I haven’t really wanted to mention it here, I’ve been feeling pretty awful, as in physically unwell, for a while. Like probably 2 years. I had attributed a lot of that to lack of sleep, but then even once I started getting sleep, I still haven’t felt well. There’s certainly been a lot of worry, and so I thought that (and the ensuing stress-related dietary tendencies) was to blame. But things have been ongoing in spite of various adjustments. (I finally got around to making an appointment to start to address the problem.)

I finally decided to make a push to make progress with my degree, but due to complications of life, health and family, the progress (while not imperceptible) was slower than I’d hoped. The year ended up on a disappointing note after I gave up on a deadline I’d been pushing for.

2010 wasn’t all bad, certainly, and maybe I’ll try to write about its better moments. But not today. Today I’m still holding a grudge.

I am optimistic that 2011 will be a better year. My nephew has finished his treatments, and hopefully he will recover soon from the treatments and the complications so that he can get back to the important business of being a little kid. I am hopeful that I can get my own health in order, and can speed up my own progress with my degree. It looks like this year will involve potentially a lot of travel, and that’s a good thing in my book. In addition to some trips for family-related things (I’m heading to California in a few days!), I am hoping to go to at least one conference in some exciting place. Maybe even Hong Kong.

So, welcome, 2011! I look forward to seeing what you can do.


With 2010 coming to an end, things are looking up for 2011…


…unless this guy is right. In which case things are just coming to an end in 2011.

Tikoli tea towels make cool gifts.

I know I’ve told you that my sister is an amazing writer,¹ and I think it’s pretty clear that she’s an amazing person overall, but have I mentioned lately that she’s also an amazing designer? I’d like to take the opportunity to direct your attention to some of her über-cool new tea towel designs at Tikoli.

I really love this one she calls kern, an elegant pattern which reminds me of stones. I particularly like how it coordinates with the fun swirly vortex of harmonie. She’s got two more new designs, as well, which you can see on the Tikoli website along with the established ones. (There are 9 mix-and-match designs now, in all.)

Kern (left) and harmonie (right), two new designs from Tikoli.

I know I’ve said it before, but these tea towels make very thoughtful gifts. They are earth-friendly, as they can be used for many purposes in place of disposable paper goods, and they come with minimal packaging. They are both compact and functional, which are two criteria that I like to use when choosing gifts. (I’ve found myself more and more turned off by the bulky, over-packaged and largely useless items that are so frequently marketed as gifts.) To top all that off, they are distinctive and very pleasing to the eye.

What’s more, there is a promotion going on right now to get 20% off purchases from the Tikoli online store if you order by Monday, December 20, 2010.² (Just use the promotion code MERRY20 .) You know what else is cool? Right now, giftwrapping is free. It is also very festive.

(You can also look for Tikoli towels at a retailer near you, but the discount won’t apply there.)

Images from tikoli.

¹ She can be pretty damn funny, too.
² If you want gifts to arrive in time for Christmas, you need to order by midnight tonight, though.

an ambiguous array of vegetables

Tonight we had dinner with my in-laws, and we had a lot of vegetable options: green beans or peas and carrots and rutabagas and potatoes or butternut squash. As you can imagine, it was difficult to keep track of them for serving, not to mention difficult to determine their syntactic bracketing, due to the combination of the coordinating conjunctions and and or. In the end, one person had green beans and potatoes only, one had green beans, potatoes, butternut squash and peas, one had peas and rutabagas and carrots and potatoes, and three of us had peas and carrots and rutabagas and potatoes and butternut squash. (Though one of those three did not actually eat any of the butternut squash, though it was on his plate. And one of us got a fair amount of butternut squash on her face. One of us attempted to feed a carrot to his pants. One of us enjoyed saying the word rutabaga.) It is important to mention that the peas and carrots were not bracketed together, as the carrots were roasted with the rutabagas and some of the potatoes. Some of the potatoes were therefore bracketed with the carrots and rutabagas, and some of the potatoes were mashed. While everybody ate potatoes, the potatoes were either mashed, or roasted with sage and bracketed with the carrots and rutabagas. Nobody who ate mashed potatoes and green beans ate rutabagas and carrots. (The green beans only came bracketed with ham, which is not a vegetable.) It is entirely possible that every person had peas. At least 2 peas ended up on the carpet, though the carpet was not given a fork.

I would attempt to diagram this, but then I might not be finished with this post before midnight. Instead, I will show you my plate.

My plate held many vegetables. Also tofurkey and a roll.

thanks accepted here

Speaking of ambiguity…

This was a sign outside a local catering/takeout business I came across a few weeks ago. It made my day. (And I swear I that this was the way I found it. No punctuation marks were stolen in the creation of this image.)