Great big good news

I like to think that this time I have a pretty good excuse for at least some of the delay in posting to this blog. You see, there was news, and it was big enough that it didn't feel right posting about anything else, but at the same time I couldn't post it here until certain people had been told in person.

So if you haven't heard already, I'm getting married.

Let me try that again.

I'm getting married!

Sorry. Exclamation marks don't come naturally to me, but some situations warrant them.

Shortly before Easter I gave Fiancée (née Girlfriend) a ring. Some people brag about how much their engagement rings cost; we're the sort to brag that I got this ring from my mother and only had to pay to get it resized. It looks like this:

Is it weird for a guy to show off an engagement ring? I'll stop.

As it happened, we were soon to see both our sets of parents over the Easter holiday, so we naturally held off on telling the internet at large until we had told our immediate families.

But since I mentioned Easter, I'm sure what you're really wondering is whether I colored any interesting eggs. In fact, Fiancée introduced me to the use of rubber bands in egg-coloring. This allowed some stripy experiments.

Here is Fiancée's, which I'm sure everyone recognizes as the flag of Scania. (That's not actually what she was going for.) I, on the other hand, didn't have the discipline for straight lines. I did this:

It's not the flag of anywhere.

Then I did this, though:

That's actually my attempt to reproduce a sunset that Fiancée and I saw through the tree branches when we went out for a walk to discuss how hard it is to get my whole family in one room at the same time. Because we had been staying with my parents for a full day at this point and an opportunity still hadn't presented itself to tell them that we were engaged. In fairness, this was because my sister was laid out from an adult tonsilectomy and spent most of the day unconscious, and my dad was at church the whole day on account of him running the church's music program. We toyed with the idea of writing "We're getting married" on the eggs and letting my family find out that way, but decided against it because that would be bad.

We finally got the news to them the next day after everyone was home from the Easter service. Everyone was suitably excited. And a few days later, after we had told Fiancée's parents (with much less logistical difficulty), everyone was suitably excited again.

Anyway, now you know, whoever you are.

Spooky deadlines

October draws to a close, and November swiftly approaches. This means several things. First, it means that I and everyone else who agreed to write a story about mermaids in September are late. The end of October also forms something of a hard deadline for that, since everyone who had planned on writing a mermaid story is also doing NaNoWriMo, so new adventures will soon take precedence. I already talked about my own plans for the month.

But the end of October also brings us the yearly ritual of gouging the innards from a gourd and carving it into a human semblance. This year, because there is so much television and only so much time, I did my brainstorming while watching the episode of Angel with the killer tree, and then did the scooping and carving while watching the latest episode of The Walking Dead. But my creative mind, apparently, was elsewhere.

I was pleased with the result.

A dapper o'lantern.

And here is the gentleman in his natural habitat.

Hullo children.

That was yesterday. Sadly, he has been nibbled on a little by the ravenous beasts which scour our neighborhood at night, but the result is merely that his mustache is a bit lopsided.

Today Girlfriend and I realized that a pumpkin on our stoop would of course be an invitation to roving packs of children tonight, and if we didn't want to be paid in the currency of "tricks" then we would need to acquire some "treats" with which to buy them off. Thus I ran out to Target today to pick up some candy, half fearing that they would be thoroughly picked over by the time I got there. Fortunately, they were still well stocked, and wisely so, because I wasn't the only adult in the candy aisle.

However, enjoying the capabilities of my new phone, I did take a surreptitious picture of the Target's "seasonal" section.

Winter is coming.

The staff were already at work converting the display. I remember when it was fashionable to complain about this happening the day after Thanksgiving. Apparently if we had wanted to hold that line, we should have instituted a policy of exchanging Thanksgiving gifts or something. Because this year it looks like T-day's just getting a pass.

A pumpkin again this time

Another Halloween, another hollow fruit. I considered a watermelon this year, but they aren't in season. I also considered a few different kinds of squash out of apparent necessity, seeing only small and moldy pumpkins at the Home Depot where we happened to be looking for pumpkins and storm supplies.* We decided to have a go at another store, though, and they had plenty of pumpkins, so we bought one.

I've tried to be arch or clever with my Jack-o-lantern designs for the past few years, maybe because I had housemates to impress. This year I tried a design or two that amused me but I settled on something more sincerely creepy. Maybe because I've been reading so much Lovecraft. But this is what I came up with:

Not bad, I think. Thought you might like to see.

Sweet dreams.

* We're fine, by the way. The power stayed on, obviously, since it's still on and now I'm posting to my blog. There's a swampy patch in the basement, but we've had worse.

Holiday crafts, oviparous rabbit edition

Happy Easter, everyone! I think for most of my readers it actually is Easter as I post this. For the rest of you, wait for it...

There. It's been a crafty couple of weeks. First, congratulations are due to certain friends who made a daughter this week. Certainly it is more of an accomplishment than anything I had a hand in creating this week, but that's for them to brag and post pictures about on their own.

Girlfriend and I collaborated on a stuffed owl to bestow upon the child, and got it to the parents just ahead of the baby's arrival. Here's a picture of it (the owl, not the baby) and of the person who did all of the work:

I love how surprised it looks in this picture.

But today being the day before Easter, it was time to dye eggs. I don't remember when exactly we decided to make this a "thing,"  but now it's a "thing" and we do it, rather experimentally sometimes.

 Ready for serious art.

Last year, and I think the year before as well, we used food coloring for dye and were able to use the droppers and concentrated dyes to make some Jackson-Pollack-esque patterns. This year we used the dissolving pellets instead, so we couldn't do that, but we did some things I think are neat anyway.

Two things here. First, on the left, yes, I'm continuing my theme of incongruous jack-o'-lanterns*. You don't have to think that's the cleverest thing ever. As for the one on the right, I'm pleased with it largely because it represents a way to use eggs that get botched. I spent a good long time getting an egg an even shade of red, and then managed to break it. I might have thrown it out, but now my otherwise relatively unadorned "eye egg" is wearing it! In this picture the shell is just wrapped around the egg, but I went back and stuck it on with egg white so that it will survive transport.

Nothing too original** here. I am kind of pleased with my bucolic egg on the left. On the right, another egg salvaged using the remains of a less lucky one.

 If this were local news I'd say something about "sunny side up" here and my co-host would laugh.

This was the first egg where we discovered something that's maybe obvious to everyone else, but Girlfriend and I discovered at age 27. You know those clear crayons that come with the dye? Well obviously you can use them to keep part of an egg white--I knew that already--but you can also use it on top of one layer of dye to preserve it through a second layer of dye. This is a trick we'll tuck away for the future, like the shell-wrapping thing. If we keep doing this this way every year, we are going to end up a couple of old people who are awesome at Easter eggs. That is not something I saw for myself, but I'll take it.

Okay. Because we're crazy, were going to drive to Philadelphia now. Bye.

* I went back to look up my "pineappolantern" post, to make sure I spelled "jack-o'-lantern" consistently. I thought it might be easier to just search for "pineappolantern" on Google than to go through the blog archives. You know what's humbling? Finding out you don't come up on the first page of search results for a word you invented.

** First, I wrote "origingal." In a better world, that would mean something.

The Pineappolantern

Hey, I figured out how to put pictures on Blogger (like it was hard).  This post is mostly about showing off this thing I have pictures of.

Halloween is a holiday I enjoy somewhat.  I haven't enjoyed dressing up in many years, but I still approve of candy in small pieces (the real fun of "fun size" being the ability to eat a Snickers bar, a Reese's cup, a 3 Musketeers, and a bar of dark chocolate in one sitting without endangering one's digestive stability).  I'm ambivalent about jack-o'-lanterns.  Drawing has always been an amateur-level forte of mine, and it's not every day of the year you get carte blanche to draw on things with knives.  Fire, also, is a medium I am seldom invited to work in.  But at least since I've been in the Hedgehog House, there's been an expectation that I would handle the design and execution of the jacks.  I think it started when I did this:

The problem is that I don't generally like pumpkins.  I can enjoy a slice of pumpkin pie in a Thanksgiving setting, but I certainly could never approach the enthusiasm that some of my housemates evinced at the prospect of fresh squash innards.  When I could, I got someone else to handle the scooping.  I think whether or not you find something appetizing can have a lot to do with how you feel about plunging your hands into it.

This year I didn't feel inspired with any clever pumpkin designs, and as usual I wasn't really feeling the pumpkin thing.  The people who would most expect me to perform have moved out now, so I could probably have punted.

But at the supermarket a week or so ago, I saw something that I hadn't thought was in season, and I got an idea.

An awful idea.

A wonderful, awful idea.

...

This probably isn't as big a reveal as it could have been, since it's right there in the post title, but check that out!  I'm pretty pleased with it.

Abby was doing some work at the dining room table and I didn't actually explain what I was doing--I just sat down with a knife and a tropical fruit and went to work.  She approved of the idea, and took the pictures when it was finished.

In the dark:

 That looks a lot better than I expected.  I'm just sayin'.  And you get this translucent effect all around the shell:

Here it is in its proper place, on the front stoop:

 

 

With a long exposure, the thing looks pretty demonic:

This is almost certainly my last Seattle jack-o'-lantern, and I think I went out on a good note.  I just hope it holds together until Halloween proper.