Tricked Out Halloween Yards
Check out this post for more halloween yard photos.
Boo!
For my international friends out there (hello England, France, Austrailia, and Greece), today is Halloween. The day we take the kids around the neighborhood to collect chocolate for us parents. This is my favorite holiday of all. Not just for the candy, I love the costumes, too.
Candy gathering is best done like writing scenes, which in turn is like going to a party. Go late, leave early. During the first hour people are rationing. One piece of candy from each house. The visit to goody ratio is not worth it. Kids get tired and want to quit early. It’s better to go during the second hour. People are getting tired of the whole deal, and most of the ladies don’t want to be stuck with all that candy. They give it out by the fistful. It’s good sense to have a pillow sack for the overflowing plastic pumkins.
The final step in effective trick-or-treating is critical. Watching the kids’ every move when they get home. They have a tendency to stash the candy in another dimension. While they are at school the next day… It’s razoo time!
For a nice Halloween drawing, check out Roch’s blog entry.
I’ll post a photo later, we’re going trick-or-treating.
Project Runway Blues
This season’s Project Runway had me enthralled. I looked forward to Wednesdays. For a show on tv, a damn reality show. And yes, I am glad Jeffrey won, I was pulling for him from the very beginning even though he had tattoos all over his neck, punk hair, and a bad attitude. The dude was an ex-drug addict, a former homeless person. It’s not just that he was the underdog that had me pulling for him. He rocked the runway.
I grew up watching my mother sew. She loved doing costumes, Barbie clothes, and gorgeous dresses for me. She never used a pattern. She would take a newspaper, put it up against my back and draw her pattern like that. No instructions.
When I was a teen, I wanted a tennis dress, a special one. I couldn’t afford one anyway, so I busted the piggy bank, bought a pattern and some fabric and taught myself how to sew. I never was able to make things without patterns, but I sure did make a lot of pretty dresses for my little girls. And tons of costumes.
My girls have also done some sewing and have worn their “creations” to school. Elemetary school. I was afraid for them going to school like that with some Frankenstein-stitch looking skirts. Turns out the other kids liked it and wanted some custom skirts too. It worked wonders for their self esteem and I made a big deal out of their bravery. Sewing rocks!
Too Fast
I refuse to blink an eye lest I miss something. Happy Birthday, Sweetpea. 
Wanna Fight?
You wanna fight? Huh? Wanna fight?
Did that make you laugh?
Someone used to say this to me and it would always crack me up. Ask somebody out of the blue if they wanna fight and see if it makes them laugh.
Pretty Animals
You have to go over to AJ’s blog and check out her zoo photos. AJ’s a professional photographer from Austrailia and she has many talents which I can’t tell you about because she’s so modest. But go look and tell me if that’s not the prettiest tiger photo you have ever seen. Check it out,
AJ’s “Bus it or Die”.
Hurricane Tracking Chart
There were five of us kids. I can use real names here because in our family real names are just for birth certificates. Except for me, Kitty is my real name. My mom almost named me Katrina. I used to wish she had named me that. I wanted a proper name to put on important papers. Damn good thing she didn’t.
Saying “I have four brothers” was always good to make conversation. “I have three brothers” just doesn’t sound like it’s going to start anything. I’m not ready to say, “But I used to have four.” I know where that conversation will drag me.
I’d like to say I’m a lone griever, but, well, look, you’re reading this on the world wide web. I could be writing from a storm cellar, though.
James, the oldest found Shane that day. James is underwater, in the storm surge. He’s got a life preserver on but hasn’t figured out which button to press to inflate the thing. He’ll come up.
Lorne is a tropical storm, spinning out there. Doesn’t seem dangerous, but you never know. He never gets the attention he deserves.
Robert is a tornado. Came into town unexpectedly, left Mommie a bunch of mean sticky notes because he was locked out of her house. A trail of uprooted trees, that boy.
Mommie is my mom. She’s unusually calm and normal right now which is abnormal. Her whole life is a cat 5 storm and always full of overdramatics. Which I miss.
Me, I’m watching for the birds and small animals to leave town. High tides. Just watching.
This is an old photo I got from the house, and yes, I got it before that big fire. It always looked like this. Except for a few years back, I sketched in the missing lower corner. I should have sketched James in there while I was at it (he spent that summer at my grandparents).
Mommie made these old fashioned bathing suits for a costume contest. We won. This is the photo they put in the newspaper.
Robert is the baby, I am the only girl, Lorne is holding the balloon, and Shane is to my left with Mommie’s hand on his ear.
Here’s another photo and has my dad in it. But Lorne is looking away.
And I could swear that blonde headed boy to my left is the guy I married because he looked just like that back then and came from the same town. He says it’s not him.
This Place is a dump
My kids have really messy rooms. Not that I go in there and poke around much, but I’m working on my daughter’s bathroom wall. She wants wallpaper and the plaster is textured, so I have to replaster it before we wallpaper.
Her bathroom was soooooo sloppy, I had to clean the spot near her sink just so I could work in there. But I didn’t clean the whole thing, just my work area.
I learned a long time ago in a parenting class that kids get rebellious by nature when they hit the teen years. One good way to let them express this independence is to let them keep their room as they please. So here’s the question, messy rooms or them doing donuts in the car?
Oh La La
I am so not surprised.
| Your Inner European is French! |
 Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything – at least, *you* think so. |
Party Animal
I’m so glad I have these damn dogs. This is Mireille, she’s a westie mix we got from a shelter. One Mardi Gras just before giving her a bath we got out some markers and colored her hair. She seemed to like it.
Funeral Crasher
So there’s this lady in the lobby at the funeral home last week and she’s crying her eyes out, mascara down her cheeks, lipstick smeared all over. She tells me she’s sorry about Shane. I tell her thanks for coming and ask how she knew him. She said she didn’t. Later, I see my mom and ask her who is that lady and she says she doesn’t know. Nobody knew who she was. I wasn’t bothered by her at all.
Then, there’s people I haven’t seen since high school. It’s a game to guess who’s who. There’s a crowd of Shane’s old friends around me in a circle. I point and say a name. They seem relieved they haven’t changed that much. One woman wearing dark glasses, I skip over her. She doesn’t like it.
Woman in dark glasses: You don’t recognize me?
Me: Uhhhh. Take your glasses off.
Woman: How ’bout now?
Me: Your eyes look familiar, what’s your name?
Woman says her name.
Me: Where do I know you from?
Woman: You don’t.
I bust out laughing. Another thing that cracks me up is my nephew calling my blonde teenage daughters “Nicky and Paris Hilton.” The girls like it, too.
“Comfortably Numb”
I went out to the tracks yesterday in a spot where my brother and I used to throw rocks as children. I asked myself what everyone has been asking this week, “How are you feeling?”
I felt comfortably numb.
“Hello?
Is there anybody in there?”
My brother was lying on the floor with his eyes wide open. He wasn’t breathing. His lips were black they say, but I think they were probably the darkest blue. He had been listening to music on his computer when he fell to the floor. I wonder what it was, that last song he heard? What was he looking at as he lay dying?
“Well I can ease your pain,”
The coroner took a bag of his prescriptions when they came get his body. My mom found these later and asked me to scratch his name off and throw them out.
I stacked them by month starting with April of ’06 (far left). The tallest stack is what he took in August. Over a thousand Lortabs prescribed by the same doctor. He took Soma and Valium too. Hundreds of them. September would be the tallest stack, but as I said, the coroner took a bag of medicines.
I wondered why my brother kept all these empty bottles of the pills he took over the last six months. I see it and it tells me a story of a man who suffered greatly with substance abuse. Maybe he kept these to remind himself of his problem? Or maybe he knew they’d kill him and he wanted us to know how bad it had gotten? We decided not to throw the bottles away, to keep them to show people and scare them off drugs.
“There is no pain, you are receding.”
Seeing him in the coffin all I can think is that his pain is gone. I see his children in the parlor. They are suffering.
“Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re sayin’.”
I kiss his cold face goodbye. I tell him thanks for cooking for me when Mamma was at work, for letting me listen to his records. His Pink Floyd I remember the most. That “Animals” one he scared me with. But I don’t feel anything by the casket. I don’t feel his spirit; I don’t understand that he is really really gone.
People say stuff to me and I have to ask them again what it is they said. I hear a real voice exactly like my dead brother’s and for a flash my brain says, “see, he’s not dead,” but I look and see it is one of my other brothers talking. They all sound alike.
At the burial the sun is blazing hot for October. No breeze. Everyone is sweating. At the very end of the service, someone hands me a rose from his casket and at that very moment a chilly breeze passes over me, it lifts my hair and I close my eyes. I thank him for the cool air as I feel my brother leaving.
Edited Note: We still don’t know the exact cause of death for Shane.
No I don’t, yes I do
So I’m reading this memoir and it’s an amazing perspective on some really crazy stuff. I quote some of it to my kids. They laugh. Then I get to this part that is horribly graphic and nasty. I put it down. Can’t read it. Five minutes later, I pick it up again, read, then shred those pages in case the kids see the book lying around. Repeat the above about three more times. The book is “Running with Scissors” by Augusten Burroughs.
I can’t wait until the movie comes out in October.
