Today's Spotlight On: Halloween Decor!!

It's that time of year again.......to drag out the multitude of storage tubs from my attic to start decorating for Halloween! I usually start doing it pretty early because I have so much stuff and I have a Halloween village, which takes a week in itself to set up. Not that it's overly large; I certainly don't need a whole room for it, but it is sort of putzy to unpack all the little stuff from their boxes and set everything up just right.

We were planning on having a costume party again this year, but some unexpected bills that are going to be due this month (and extra $400 I didn't count on) will prevent us from having the party after all, even though this year we were going to go low-budget on the food and have it BYO for drinks (other than wine and hot mulled apple cider, which I usually make), to help keep the cost down. It's disappointing, but we can plan one for next year when, hopefully, things will be better.

But, I thought I'd share a few pictures of some of the Halloween decor that I have already put up!

This and That...

I cannot believe it's September already! September tenth, to be exact! Where did the summer go?? It seems like it was hardly here at all.  What did I do with my summer? Apparently, nothing much....

I had a lot of plans for the summer; I was going to get a tan (maybe). I was going to ride my bicycle more often. I was going to make Erik jog with me so that I could work my way up to being one of those people who run  several miles every day and not feel like I was going to keel over and die after a mile.
But, I didn't get a tan because I never seemed to have the time to make the drive out to my mother's house to lay by the swimming pool and I refuse to lay out in the hot sun without a swimming pool nearby. Oh well, I don't really need a tan. I think white skin is coming back into fashion anyway. If freckles ever become the rage, I'll be all set there too.

The running thing started out well, but then I hurt my knee somehow in July, while cleaning the baseboards in the house. How stupid is that? I don't even really know what I did to cause the injury, but it's been 2 months and my knee is still messed up and sore.I think I severely strained or pulled a muscle or tendon. At any rate, I have not been able to work out like normal or run without making it worse, so I've been sort of "benched".

 As for the bicycle riding: during a bicycle ride with Erik in early July, my bicycle got a flat tire when we were 4 miles from home. Even though we had a bike pump, repair kit and extra inner tube with us, it was too severely damaged to repair the tire and we were being swarmed by mosquitos as well. The bicycle was acutally formerly Erik's so I know nothing about how to change the tires or fix anything on it. I've never owned a mountain bike, like this one. I had a ten speed Schwinn when I was a teenager, which incidentally, was the last bicycle I owned. Erik said he would get a new tire for it and fix it, but weeks and weeks passed without it being fixed, so the last two months of summer passed without me being able to ride the thing as planned. He just fixed it this last weekend, so hopefully we will still have some nice fall weather this year, so I can ride it some more before winter. I think my injured knee will handle it okay, more so than running.

 As for the rest of summer: Well, my youngest sister had foot surgery because she dislocated all the bones in her right foot after stepping in a hole in her yard and then tripping and falling over a drainpipe. She can't drive or walk or put weight on her foot for 12 weeks, or work either (she's a nurse). Being a mother to young children, two young active boys to be exact, she has needed help at home during the week when her husband is at work, which means that my days off (Fridays) I have been at her house all day, which I suppose might be why it seems like I haven't had time to do anything at my own house! I am happy to help her though, of course; but that extra day to do things sure is helpful to me, and I am surely missing it.

And of course, as usual, the recession and poor economy surely has not helped make it a wonderful summer for most people, including us. Many of the summer activities we usually do have been curtailed for money reasons. Any extra money we managed to have was used for some necessary car repairs, some of them expected and some of them un-expected, as is usually the case when it comes to cars. Some of it also went to vet bills for my cat, Baby. He has been doing well on his new medicine, but it certainly wasn't easy the last 3 months trying to figure out what was wrong with him and trying to get a treatment regimen that worked for him. Erik's work is expecting to pick up again in the next couple of months, so we are hoping he may be getting back some of his usual overtime, which will be very helpful. We'd like to go back to Door County again, like we did for our first anniversary, and hopefully this next year will be better for us, budget-wise, and we can plan for  fun activities next summer!

I just still can't believe it's fall already.......!

A Funny Thing Happened in the Cemetary....

This is not usually the way most people start out a story. There usually aren't humorous things going on in cemetaries, admittedly. But then again, nobody has ever accused me of being unaware of the concept of "gallows humor". For a definition of gallows humor, click here. I don't know if this story really applies to the concept of gallows humor; probably not, but it was the first thing that popped into my head.

The other day, E and I were walking through a cemetary that is near our home. The Prairie Home Cemetary is quite large and the oldest cemetary in our town. I believe they started doing burials in it in the 1850s or 1860s or thereabouts. While it may seem strange to some people, both E and I actually enjoy walking through cemetaries and do so quite often. It is much like being in a park; it's usually very pretty and usually very quiet. I love to look at the older burials of course, and wonder at the stories of these people's lives. Sometimes I feel a sad sort of poignance about it, knowing that these folks buried over a hundred years ago no longer have people alive to remember them and all is left to show they were here at all is a worn stone marker with a few words and some dates. I feel somehow gratified to pause at their stones, read their names and acknowledge, if only for a minute, that they were here, even if no longer mourned. I am not naturally squeamish about death, as an abstract, which I suppose explains my enjoyment of hanging out in cemetaries.

It is not, and was not, very odd for a long time, to consider a cemetary as a public park of sorts. Folks in the Victorian Era often spent Sunday afternoons in cemetaries, looking at the monuments and even having picnics in them. The "garden cemetary", as they were then known, was just becoming the popular thing in that era. Before that, cemetaries were quagmires of filth and the stench of decay, often with multiple burials stacked upon one another in layers so that some bodies were only inches below the ground and cemetaries were avoided by everyone. They were feared to be pits of putrid disease, which in fact, they probably were. The new "garden cemetary" soon became all the rage and as there were few things such as public parks in those days, the cemetary soon became the place to be if you wanted to enjoy a little fresh air and sunshine or some quiet time to contemplate your thoughts.

But, I digress. Getting back to my story; E and I decided to take one of our evening walks to the cemetary, as we often like to do, seeing as the weather was very fine. It was about 6:30 in the evening on a Saturday night; not usually the time of day when you'd find many people in a cemetary. In fact, on all the times we have been there to go walking, we have never seen anyone else there at the same time we have been (unless they were on the very far side of the place; it is a very large cemetary and seems to go on for miles although I don't know it's exact acreage). On this evening, however, we saw several cars in our immediate view as we entered through a small side gate that we discovered and often use. One car passed us by at least twice and we did also see several people walking, as we were. We often stick to the older section where the older burials are, but we did eventually wander into another area that we had not previously been in before (very near the cremation gardens) and saw again, at least 2 cars that seemed to be "looping" through the cemetary. Both E and I commented on how odd it was that there were so many people about and we guessed that perhaps they might have been people who had attended a funeral there, though it seemed rather late in the day. As we paused to admire a particular crypt, one of the cars we had seen paused and a woman leaned out of the open window and said, "Did you find it?"

E and I both looked at one another for a moment in mutual confusion. My first thought was that there had been a funeral, or there was going to be one, and this woman seemed to think we were going to be attending the burial (even though we were both wearing shorts and t-shirts) and that she had mistaken us for mourners who were lost.

I missed part of what she said next, so complete was my confusion, but the gist of her next words regarded how they had been driving around for quite some time (there was a man in the car with her) and that "everyone" they had come upon said they were unable to find "it".

I soon learned what "it" was she was talking about and I had one of those moments where it would seem appropriate to smack a hand against your forehead and then say, "Duh!"

It seemed she had mistaken us for fans of Les Paul (1915-2009), who had died August 13 in New York and then "went home" to be buried in Prairie Home Cemetary( with great pomp and circumstance, I heard), since Waukesha was his hometown and place of birth. If you are not familiar with Les Paul, the musician, inventor and innovator, you can click here. The link is from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, to which he was inducted in 1988. Around here, he is often called "The Wizard of Waukesha", so-called because he was the inventor of the first solid-body electric guitar,known as the Gibson, and also the inventor of multi-track recording among other things.

Apparently, all the people we had been seeing in the cemetary were fans looking for the burial site to pay tribute to the "Wizard" and this woman had assumed that we were there for that reason as well. She must have noticed our evident confusion, so we quickly explained that we lived nearby and often walked in the cemetary and had clear forgotten about the famous person who had recently been buried there. At this point it was her turn to give us a rather strange look; I'm sure she probably did not know many people who walked in cemetaries as a recreational activity.

We told her that during our recent wanderings that evening we hadn't noticed any "fresh" burials, but admitted we hadn't really been looking either, but if we did find it and we saw her again, we'd certainly tell her.

As we walked away, E and I commented to each other on how strange a way to greet someone you came across in a cemetary with a cryptic "Did you find it?".

Then again, she might have found us just as strange, when we told her that we "come here all the time"!

Today's Spotlight On: Great Gizmos

This pottery-looking jar is a garlic pot. It was a Christmas gift, so I don't know where it came from, but it's very handy, especially if you have a lot of garlic around, which I normally do. Not for vampires, mind....I just like garlic. I usually get home-grown garlic from my father, who grows it in his garden. It keeps very well for a long time, if you store it correctly. Garlic does not need to be refrigerated, but it does need to be kept in a dark, dry place with some air flow, which is exactly what this garlic pot does. There are air holes to let air in, but it's dry and dark inside with the lid on. I keep it on my countertop and it looks very pretty as well as functional! Brilliance!!!!

Meet Butter Girl.........I bought her last year at Bed, Bath & Beyond. At last, I thought, an easy way to dispense butter for corn on the cob without making a total mess!! So, here she is, with her smiling face and head attached. Pull off the top of her head, and lo and behold! Butter!

The butter is loaded from the bottom (1/2 a stick of butter fits inside) and as more butter is needed, just a small push of this plunger thingy makes more butter come out the top. Ingenious!

How did I ever survive without the miracle of Butter Girl? Surely she jests, you might think to yourself, but I assure you, I am not. Isn't she just darling? (There is, as a matter of fact, a Butter Boy also, for those more inclined to a masculine butter dispenser. He is blue, naturally.) How can you not like her? She's pink. She has bangs and a bow and an apron!!!