It’s Halloween Week! Besides Christmas (and probably Spring Break), it’s quite possibly my favorite week of the year.
It’s also the week of my third annual (and second on the front porch) Spooktacular! As such, I spent a good portion of the weekend making the preliminary preparations for having lots of people sitting on my front lawn for a couple of hours or so.
Among the myriad tasks I completed (such as some long overdue weed eating, and applying more ant bait to the lawn), I engaged in my favorite Halloween season ritual: carving a Jack O’Lantern! I picked up a couple of massive pumpkins from Sam’s Club for $7 each, and this one made for particularly attractive gourd. Just look at its perfectly jaunty, stout stem!
I’ve also been working on getting the front porch put together. It’s starting to look pretty good. I’ve purchased some more tea light candles, which should soon help illuminate all of the pumpkins—real, ceramic, and red Georgia clay (pictured below)—spookily.
Even my dog has gotten in on the fun, although she is mainly just waiting for food and pets to come her way. While snapping my front porch pictures the other night, she couldn’t help but keep an eye out for me.
There’s still much to be done, but I think I put a good dent into the major stuff. With another virtual learning day on Monday, I was able to knock out some other chores around the house. There’s also practicing the music that we’ll play—easy to lose sight of in the midst of all of this autumnal cleaning, but probably the most important part!
For now, though, I’ve just got to make the place presentable—and get all the loose dog toys and bits of dog food stored and swept away. Murphy can help with that.
—TPP
The Portly Politico 
This post was so much fun – I can feel the hustle and bustle, the excitement of anticipation. Love the pictures, too.
I’m going to ask you to do an intervention. When I read this, “… and get all the loose dog toys and bits of dog food stored and swept away. Murphy can help with that.”, I immediately thought of Alys and her cat, Sweetie. They’ve been together for years and never once – not one little time – did Sweetie ever take her turn at vacuuming. Never so much as offered to do it! Perhaps you could get Murphy to send Sweetie an email extolling the virtues of helping out at home?
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An excellent idea our Audre but Sweetie is far above getting her paws dirty helping me with the housework even though a fair part of it involves cleaning up her fur off everything. She makes up for it by being so beautiful and such an ornament to our little home.
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Aren’t all cats ornamental, at least to some extent?
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Thanks, Audre! I will see if Murphy can send an e-mail to Sweetie admonishing her to eat Alys’s crumbs off the floor. She’ll be glad she did!
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Your front porch looks amazing, Port.
Carving out the pumpkins for jack o’lanterns is the only thing I despise doing. It’s messy and it’s time consuming though the end results are usually pretty cool. I’ll take some pictures (as we usually do) and send them over to you.
We’ve got 25 hours of Halloween this year (clocks go back on Sunday) so an extra hour of scary movies – woohoo!
Film itinerary for this year? We’re starting with Halloween (a tradition) and Halloween 2 before moving on to Ringu 1 and 2 (Japanese originals) and then the Lars Von Trier serial killer film, The House That Jack Built. Bizarrely, Tina doesn’t think we have enough horrors for this Halloween but I think we’ve got more than enough.
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Thanks, Ponty! I’m glad you like it. I don’t have a ton of Halloween decorations, but I do what I can with them.
I find carving a pumpkin to be very enjoyable, but that might be because I don’t remove nearly as much inner goop as I should. This year I was much more thorough, and even trimmed the slimy stuff with my carving knife. There’s still a lot of sinews and such in there, though, but I figure for a pumpkin that will be out for a week, it’s fine.
WOOOOT! One extra hour of Halloween! Sounds like fun.
I love your “film itinerary.” I’m hoping Shelby and I get in some of the _Halloween_ flicks this year. We watched the first three last year (yes, we watched _Halloween III_, which should be an entirely separate movie, independent of the franchise). _The House that Jack Built_ is VERY good—and VERY disturbing.
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Hello Tyler. I love your little wooden house, it appeals on so many levels. I would like a tiny place, well, I already have a tiny place in a part of this vast building that once housed the local lunatics but a little stand alone secluded – but not lonely – tiny place surrounded by trees so I could listen to the wind soughing through the branches, hear the rain beating on the roof, see the snow settling on the window ledges and I could feed the birds from the veranda would be heaven. Inside I would just like one big room which would essentially be mostly kitchen with a bed in it. There would be a separate bathroom and utility room naturally where all the unmentionables could be performed. Other than that an open space full of books, paintings, cookware and a solid fuel stove with a cosy corner for my darling Sweetie. Not much would be be better than that. And Audre for company of course.
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Thank you, Alys! I love my little house, too. It’s a great little place—very sturdily built (in 1945!) and cozy. It sits on a generous half-acre, and I have grapevines, a fig tree, and several pecan trees.
Your ideal home sounds… well, ideal!
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Touched. And humbled.
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We would have such a wonderful time together Audre, eating together, praying together, laughing together and we could invite all our blogging chums along to have fun with us.
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Oh, Alys – it’s a wonderful dream. We’d have to make sure there was room for Birtwistle, too! Neo doesn’t take up much space so we can squeeze him in and Portly could visit on school vacations. 39 and Tee2 could visit whenever they wanted to. What a delight that would be.
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I’d love to come visit your _Golden Girls_ in England house, Audre. : D
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