My Decorations

Took these pictures last night.  My decorations look the same every year. Keep wishing I could do something different, but there's just not enough lighting outside.  Maybe another year.

106 Degree Weather in October

OK, this isn't exactly Halloween-related, but having to endure 106-degree weather in October is enough to make me not think of anything Halloween-related, at least right now.   It's been this way for at least three days now, and it's the hottest I ever recall it being this early in October.  This is California, after all, so hot weather in early fall isn't unheard of.  Once the fall equinox occurs in September,  it doesn't necessarily mean that it's time to retire the shorts and put the fans in the closet just yet. But I don't recall it every being in the 100s at this time of year.   Not recently anyway.  Two years in a row, I endured hot weather on the last weekend of September to get my Halloween decorations by the first of October.  My decorations for this year went up last Saturday and Sunday, and the hot weather hit when I went to bed on Sunday night.  It's been nearly impossible to get any sleep these last two nights.

I'm still looking for a pink-striped shirt and pink jacket for my 50s costume, but to no avail.  I guess I'll have to buy the jacket from Halloween City next week.  I'm a little out of it right now because of this weather.  But I'll get back to it.  Also, I have seen very few houses in my neighborhood decorated yet, but I haven't hit all the trailer park yet to look.  I've only seen those nearby me.  I've already seen political signs around town.  It seems like the election overshadows Halloween, especially in a Presidential election year (I'm going to try to blog more about that later).  I'll have to get some pictures of my decorations on my porch.  Will try to get those up tomorrow.

This Week's League Assignment: Halloween Costume Ideas

Well, it's time again for the annual Countdown to Halloween. Click here for the list of participants.  Also, here is this week's assignment for the League of Extraordinary Bloggers.  I haven't been posting with the League because of a lack of imagination recently, but this week's assignment is Halloween-related, so it ties in with the countdown and makes a great subject for the first countdown post.  The League assignment for this first week of October is:

Remember when Halloween was a big deal? I mean, a BIG deal? What was the most legendary costume you ever wore? What would you dress up as this year?

Taken while draped over a kitchen
chair.

Well, let me start by saying I've already made plans for this year.  Over the summer I was considering doing something from either the 1920s or 1950s.  I'd done a '60s hippie costume eight years ago and decided to try another decade this year.  I was almost certain to go with the 1950s this years when one day last month at the Goodwill I saw  a poodle skirt on their costume rack, which often includes stuff that aren't really costumes or incomplete used costumes.  More on that later.   Even though it was only September and I still wasn't sure what to be, after a while of thinking, decided the 50s it is.  I bought the skirt that day, knowing it might not be there the next day.  Now I am in search of a pink jacket and shirt to wear, preferably one in light pink and possibly one with pink stripes.  The skirt is black with  light-pink poodle, with a leash of faux pearls.  And of course some scarves.  See the photo at left.

As for legendary costumes I've worn in the past, well, let me include the ones I remember the most. Don't know if I'd call them legendary, but I'll interpret that as I please :-)  One was Miss Piggy when I was 11, another was Pebbles Flintstone when I was about seven. Another was clown costumes my cousin and I both wore the same year.  Hers was  made of blue polka-dot fabric, mine of red polka dots material.  Sorry for lack of photos, but I'm sure you can guess how long ago this was.  All my family photos are at my mom's house and I have no scanner (long story).  The Pebbles one, however, was from a burlap sack with images of dinosaurs drawn onto and cut out of different colors of felt and glued onto the sack.

I'd also like to mention a ather unusual costume I did just four years ago:  The Seven Deadly Sins.  I'd already told my coworkers what I would be doing that year, but I knew others who saw me might not know what I was.  And not surprisingly the "What are you supposed to be?" question was asked several times that day.  This is in the photo at right.  The sins were represented as follows:

Pride: The tiara, with a black skull symbol and black and purple tinsel trim
Envy--Green hair piece and green makeup (can't really see the makeup in the picture)
Sloth--the bathrobe
Gluttony--plastic dog toys shaped like food tied around the waist. The food included Oreo-like cookies, donuts, a cheeseburger, hot dog, and an ice cream cone.
Wrath--a white bath glove stained with fake blood.
Lust--fishnet stockings with lacy garters.
Greed--a boa made of fake $100 bills.

Everyone seemed to notice the money boa the most.  It's over six feet long and made up of about 100 fake bills.  Many people asked if the money was real and wished that had that much money.  I'd actually planned this costume in advance (hard to explain) and bought the money thing in June of 2008 from a  costume website. The site is in California about 50 miles from where I live in CA,  so the package arrived two days after I ordered it.  I wasn't home when the mail came that day and when I came home and saw a yellow package on my front door step, I knew it had to be the boa.  It arrives in the package flat, and must be fluffed out, which took me several weeks to do.  I still have the thing, not sure what else I could do with it.

FYI, I came up with a way to explain the costume to those who asked what it was supposed to be without getting tired of explaining.  This is one thing you have to be prepared for if you choose something unusual.  You might also get people thinking that you are supposed to be one thing and you will have to say, "No, I'm ___."  I strangely did not get this sort of thing that year, but a year later, when I donned the Pumpkin Spice costume. Some people thought it was a relative of the Flintstones or Jetsons, but others just asked what it was.  But someone actually knew what it was.  I wasn't counting on that to happen.

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Looks I'm the second person to respond to this assignment.  Often I wait until others have responded so I can post links to their websites, something leagues bloggers are asked to do.  Here is the other response so far:
Hobgoblin


For more responses on this subject, check back later to the League link in the first paragraph.

Getting Ready

It's almost time for the annual Countdown to Halloween.   I will be participating again, as I have been since 2009.  It's always fun.  I've just changed the background on my blog to look spooky for the holiday.  It's always fun.  Not sure what I'll be posting, but I'm always looking for and thinking of something.  I try to think ahead about what to post, but it isn't always easy.  Just so I get something.

And tonight I began my annual decorating of my front porch for Halloween, along with decorating my kitchen windows.  I just hate the fact that there is no lighting or working light sockets on my lawn area.  I keep getting the idea to set up a graveyard there, but without lighting no one will see it. Also, since I have neighbors on all sides, including behind me, it's likely no one but those people (whom I have never actually met) will actually notice if I decorated on the lawn.  But that's just the way it is. I do what I can do.  Pictures of my decorations will follow once completed.

Still a few things to do before my decorating is done and will be sure to finish it tomorrow.  I like to have it up for all of October, which begins on Monday, and always start as close to the first as possible.  I knew I would have to do it this weekend if I wanted to have it up by the first.  Unfortunately, this was also the weekend I had to do laundry, so I did that first yesterday.  I had a free movie ticket for our local cinema and wanted to see "Hotel Transylvania" so I used my ticket to see the show at 7:30PM.  I rarely go to night shows since you have to pay full price after 6PM on most nights, but since this was free, I went last night.  It was quite crowded, since it was Friday night and lots of families with kids were there, naturally.  The movie was fun, and funny at times.  Good way to kick off the Halloween season, and I'm waiting to see "Frankenweenie" next weekend.  Sounds like a good one too.

Can't wait to see what others have planned for the countdown.

End of Summer Post

It just doesn't feel like summer is over. The fall equinox is either today or tomorrow, yet the warm weather is still lingering.  But then this is California, and that's how fall weather often is at least for a month or so, maybe longer.

Even if the weather is no reminder that summer is ending, other things are.  The items in the back to school sales that began in July have been discounted to about 86 cents each.  Halloween items have been appearing in stores since August.  My place of work began getting Halloween even earlier that--beginning on the last two days of July.  The temporary Halloween stores popped up before or after Labor Day.  So far I've been to Halloween City more than Spirit.  The Halloween City in Gilroy, CA is near where I work but Spirit is over the bridge from the intersection across the street from work, so walking over to Halloween City has been easier to do.  I found a used poodle skirt at my hometown Goodwill almost tow weeks ago.  I'd begun considering costumes for this year, and had a 50s one in mind among others.  Once I saw this, I just had to get it and am now looking for a striped shirt, some scarves and pink jacket to go with it.  I also need to know what shoes I should wear.  and next weekend my Halloween decorations will be going up.  I always try yo get them up as close to the first to October as possible. This year, the first will be on Monday, so I will likely start next Friday or even Saturday.  Two years on a row, it was 90 degrees during the last days of September and I endured hot weather those two years to decorate the front porch for Halloween.

What did I do this summer?  Well not too much unusual or out of the ordinary, but the first week of July I managed to go on my first casino trip, something I'd love to do again sometime.  And two days later, went for the first time to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, in Monterey, CA, about 45 miles from my home town of Hollister.  Here are some photos from the aquarium.
There are a lot of displays at the aquarium and I took a lot of photos that day. It was hard to just choose a few for this post.
Unfortunately I did not get may photos of the casino trip, as I feared we would not be allowed to take photos inside the casino.




Summer may be officially over, but that doesn't mean I'm ready to retire the shorts just yet or go without sunscreen if I'm going to be outdoors for a long time in one day.  The warm weather is still there,  as of now at least.

Back to School: This Week's Assignment From the League

I haven't posted on my blog in over two weeks and only once in all of August, and I haven't posted in the League since that one date that month.  But here I am with this week's League topic:

Summer’s over, it’s time to go back to school! (Interpret it as you will.)

Here's my take.  In the early years of school, the end of summer meant getting new clothes and supplies for each year.  I can remember having more than one Trapper Keeper binder in several different school years.  Remember those things?  I don't know if the one in the photo below was one that I had, though that design is certainly one that I would have liked back in the day.

And of course to go inside the binder I always had to get paper, pencils, pens and a pencil pouch. I pretty much gave up on binders once I got to high school and we were required to have notebooks for each class.  I must confess I never used a backpack all that time and always had a ton of homework each day! And I had to walk home for most of those years.

Until fifth grade, I would always get a new lunch box, one of those with some currently popular character.  I don't know what happened the ones I once had, but I know I had a Strawberry Shortcake one once.  Beginning in sixth grade, my lunch went into a paper bag.

College was more of the same with buying school supplies.  Going to community college first meant getting the same supplies as in grammar school, middle school and high school, as well as having to buy textbooks and supplies from the campus bookstore.  Anyone who has been to college will know how expensive this stuff can get.  It was good thing I took both semesters of Spanish since the same textbook was used for both terms.   Going to a four-year after ward was still more expensive textbooks from the campus bookstore as well as buying writing supplies and paper,  but now that I was living on the campus, I would need dorm supplies--bathroom stuff, some snacks, my own TV set (which last years after I graduated) and my own phone. This was in the late 1990s, before cell phones and when everyone had a cordless phone with an answering machine (I still have one of those!)

Though I'm done with college and have no children,  I still find the back-to-school sales at stores to be helpful.  I always see a coupon for two packages of Bic Pens in the Sunday paper at some point during the late summer.  I always keep it because  I know that some store will eventually discount the school stuff, including these pens.  I took advantage of this last week when target discounted these pens to 86 cents a package and used the coupon to buy them.  When I last worked at Dollar Tree, they had pocket calculators in their back-to-school display and when I got off work one day, I bought one of these, which I still have today.  It's been seven years since I last worked there, but my cheap calculator from then is still working.  Everyone still needs pens and stuff, so even if you don't have to worry about children and are no longer in school yourself, these sales can still be of some use to you.
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Some of this weeks other participating bloggers are:
Monster Cafe Saltillo
Memories of Toymorrow
Green Plastic Squirt Gun

This Week’s Assignment from the League: Mixtape

Here is this week's assignment from the League:

What songs were forever being looped on your car’s stereo back in high school. A cassette could only hold a dozen or so songs, so that’s the magic number of songs to list. If your car didn’t have a cassette deck in high school, go ahead and pretend it did, you punk.

This was a hard one.   I did grow up in the 1980s and I did like music.  So what was the problem?  I didn't have a car while I was in high school, let alone one with cassette player.  The car I had between 1998 and 2001 was from 1987 and didn't have a cassette player, and coincidentally my Chevy Prism I have now (from 1999) is similarly lacking in a CD player.

As for making mixed tapes, I didn't do that too much. I always preferred to get the whole album on cassette.  The closest I recall was one time when I recorded random songs from the radio.  This was how people in the 1980s "stole" music before Napster and such.  The only problem was that you had the radio personalities talking over the beginning or end of the song, most often at the end.  I seem to recall taping "Slow Hand" by the Pointer Sisters from a local soft-rock station.  I was 10 years old when this came out in the summer of 1981, and recorded it from the radio about three years later. This was before high school.



I also recall recording "Over My Head" by Fleetwood Mac (a 70s hit) from the same radio station and can still hear the radio DJ saying "I'm over my head..." over the end of the song. I'd  turned off the record button at that point so I don't remember what--if anything else--she may have said.




Another thing that came to mind when seeing the assignment was how each Sunday I would listen to the Top 40 Countdown by Radio and Records (different from Billboard).  Too much explanation is needed here, so let me get to how each year they had a two-part, year-end countdown, replaying all the biggest of the year.  In 1987, I got my first job and had to work at 11AM the day the second part of the year-end aired.  That sucked.  I then recorded the last hour of the show while I was working. Songs #10 through #1 were the following:
10.  "Open Your Heart" Madonna
9. "(I Just Died) In Your Arms Tonight" Cutting Crew
8. "Jacob's Ladder" Huey Lewis and the News
7. "Here I Go Again" Whitesnake
6. "Shakedown" Bob Seger
5. "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" Starship
4. "With or Without You" U2
3. "Alone" Heart
2.  "Living on a Prayer" Bon Jovi
Before announcing the #1 of the year, they would then recap the bottom half.  The year-end countdown was always called "The Top _ of '__" (fill in the blanks with the last tow digits of the year).  Until 1987 they always did a medley of the songs from the beginning through #2 (in 1988 and 1989, they did song narration, which sucked).  Then came the biggest hit of the year...
1. I Want to Dance With Somebody" Whitney Houston

I no longer have these tapes.  They eventually got recorded over with who knows what.  This was the closest I ever came to making the ever popular mixtapes in the 1980s.


On the subject of cassettes, I was briefly taking medical assisting at a community college (I never finished, long story). I had a medical transcription class and had to have tapes made.  You would be charged less if you provided your own tapes.  This was in early 2001 and blank tapes were still being sold.  I managed to find a pack of them at Staples.  There were seven tapes in the package, exactly the number of tapes I needed.   After the class was over, I kept the tapes. Later that year, I recorded over one of these tapes.   A classic rock station in my area used to have an A to Z thing each summer, playing the songs in their library in alphabetical order.  Needless to say, I could only hear some of the thing and in the summer of 2001, when I was working at a restaurant for a horrible boss (who'd taken over when the previous owner sold the place earlier that year).  I taped as much as I could from the radio onto this cassette--something that seemed a little weird at the beginning of the new millennium, as I had given up buying pre-recorded cassettes in 1991, when I got my first CD player.  I believe I still have this recording.   This was another time I came close to making a mixtape, though in 2001 it seemed a little behind the times.
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Read some of the other League participants' entries for this week:
Green Plastic Squirt Gun
Monster Cafe Saltillo
That Figures
Shezcrafti
Geek Cultural
AEIOU Sometimes Why
Cool and Collected
Lair of the Dark Horde