Halloween Decorations Post #8

Okay, folks. This is it! It's Halloween today, so this is the last one. In today's post, I'm sharing the Halloween decorations I have that don't readily fit into a category.

We'll start with Pez. I have this group:

They're up there with another one of those foam pumpkins. So cute, amiright?

Every year or so, they add more dispensers to their holiday choices while dropping the older ones off. Here's another set of them:

I'm always adding a few every year or so. I even have one bat dispenser that I had to leave off the shelves this year, because I had nowhere for it to go. Maybe next year I'll have a friend to go along with it, and it'll work better.

The last group of Pez is this one:

What better group to put up at Halloween could there be than the Mystery Gang. Next to them is a werewolf figure that I picked up this year. It's from a video game that I don't think I ever played called Altered Beast. I bought it just because it's a werewolf, not because of any appreciation of the game it comes from. I considered getting a few of them, and giving them custom paint jobs so that there could be a whole pack, but I didn't go that far.

Okay, now, we move on.

About ten years ago, my friend gave me this zombie viking statue for my birthday. He got himself the Green Bay Packers version of it and liked it enough to get another for me. It stays up all year round, though it may get supplanted soon. I'm full up on the space, so soon, whenever I get new stuff, I'll have to take old stuff off. Then this guy will go in the box and only come out for Halloween. I gotta be careful, though. He's kind of fragile.

Next is my Knight of Asperity.

That skeleton faced guy is a Vitruvian H.A.C.K.S. figure. I was really into these guys for a while, and considered buying tons of them. However, I only ever picked up this single one. It's really cool, and I love it. Also, the bad guy from my book The Gauntlet is based off the look of this guy. Fun, right? Hopefully, this year, I'll get that published so that you can read it if you'd like (he says, knowing that no one will).

Next is Carrot Chomper.

This is an Imaginext guy. They had these Imaginext blind bag figures for sale at the local grocery store by my house, and for a while, Little and I had a good time collecting them. Little was the one who gave him the name Carrot Chomper. I guess seeing all the teeth on the skull face made him think of chomping down on carrots, hence the name.

But wait, there's more. Here's another Imaginext guy names Pumpkin Stealer.

He's a ghost pirate with a pumpkin on his head. You can take the pumpkin off, and he has a translucent green face underneath. Altogether a pretty fun character. Not sure if Pumpkin Stealer is the best name for him, but it's hard to convince a three-year-old to pick something different, so I just let it stand.

Pumpking Stealer has another one of the plastic jack o'lanterns there beside him. It has a light in it, but I don't think the thing has worked for years.

Now, the final Imaginext guy...who doesn't have a name.

This grim reaper came out years later than the other two, and by that time, Little was old enough that he didn't care to bother giving it a name. He does have the cool feature like the old jawa figures from Star Wars back in the nineties. He has that spot on top of his head, and if light shines into it, it makes his eyes glow.

After that, we have the bone spider.

Yes, spiders don't have bones. They're arachnids, and have exoskeletons. That didn't stop people from making creepy Halloween decorations depicting bone spiders. I complained about this once on a blog post many years ago, and Rish thought it would be fun to mess with me, get one of those spiders, and even give it a custom paint job for me before sending it out.

Ever since then, I hang it on my books every Halloween. It's silly, but fun too, I guess.

Now, to the pièce de résistance. Years ago, not long after getting into the Vitruvian H.A.C.K.S. figures mentioned above, I discovered Mythic Legions. They were these really well-made, detailed and beautiful figures set in their own little fantasy realm. They were super expensive to buy second-hand on eBay, but if you paid attention and waited for one of their waves to launch, you could buy the figures for a normal price.

Well, one day, they had a special sale of their All-Star figures, the most popular ones, and I was paying attention, so I grabbed some. Particularly, I grabbed skeletons, a demon, and a vampire knight. I made a graveyard for the skeletons to be rising out of, and some spooky trees to be in that graveyard.

This year, I added a couple more skeletons to the group, but I think I've probably taken it as far as I can. I don't think any more figures can fit on this shelf without making it look bad. Here it is, this year's Mythic Legions graveyard scene:

So, there it is, the 2024 decorations. I hope you enjoyed it. I'll see you next month with a whole new exhaustive set of posts detailing my Christmas decorations. They may well be more extensive than the Halloween ones. Sorry.

Anklecast 72 - The Frayed Ends of Sanity Available On Patreon

The new episode of The Anklecast is now available over on Patreon. If you are a member, then you can check it out. If you're not a member, you should consider it. It may be a long time before the new episodes are available on the free feed. I host those files on archive.org, and they were attacked by hackers a while back. They are most of the way back, but uploads aren't allowed yet, and I have no idea when they will be again. Until that happens, Patreon will be the only place you can get The Anklecast. So, you know, it would be the perfect time to take that plunge and sign up.

This time, we have the story of Greg, who is going through a nasty divorce, which is the worst thing happening in his life...until the day when his phone starts ringing and whatever is on the other end of the line has the power to take over his mind and drive him toward thoughts he's never entertained before. How far will the mystery caller take it? You can only find out by listening to the end of "The Frayed Ends of Sanity."

Afterward, Rish and I talk about Metallica song titles, Broken Mirror events, and doing things differently for a change.

Head over to Patreon, and give it a listen. You won't want to miss it!

My Birthday Week, Did I Blow It? | Lion Diet Carnivore & Alternate Day Fasting | Week 73 Roundup

Another week trying to maintain a positive attitude, and I did pretty good, I think, but Sunday was my birthday. Could I handle that? Or would I give in and go crazy eating cake and candy and other garbage? Could I handle it? On top of that, it was a generally depressing day. Who wants to get older? Particularly, who wants to have a landmark birthday like their 50th? Did the depressive nature of the day get to me? Watch the show and find out.

Still One More

This one, I don't really have an excuse for. I shouldn't have given into this temptation.

A few years ago, Hasbro went all in on Lando Calrissian. They made figures of Lando in all of his different costumes in several different scales, and made them available all at once in high numbers. This led to Lando being the biggest pegwarmer ever. Any store you went to was overrun with Lando figures clogging the pegs and keeping new merchandise from ever arriving. The demand for Lando just wasn't anywhere close to the supply that was available.

I avoided buying any of these Landos, because I knew that they would definitely make their way to Ross. There were just too many of them for that not to happen. Eventually, all the figures disappeared, but I'm pretty sure they weren't slowly bought by Lando fans. Instead, stores realized they'd never sell, and they pulled them off and sold them away to secondary retailers.

Well, just the other day, I saw my first Lando at Ross...oh, wait, let me be more accurate. I saw my first ten Landos at Ross. Yeah, they had them on the pegs there now, and there were a bunch of them. At least ten.

I only wanted one, and I'd be done. I bought it, and took it out to the car.

It's a pretty good figure for a 3.75 inch scale guy. That really looks like Billy Dee Williams to me.

The cape is a little wonky, but I'm sure some work on it would make it look alright.

I thought about buying more of them and using the heads on other figures, but that's not going to work. There's only one Billy Dee. I can't just put a Lando head on somebody else and pretend like it's a rando, because it definitely isn't. It's Billy Dee. 

So, this will be the only Lando that I buy, and sadly, the rest of them will probably warm the pegs at Ross for months or even years from now on. Hopefully, Hasbro will learn their lesson, and only produce figures in the numbers they need to sell so this doesn't happen again...of course it will. There's always some pegwarmer or another.

There Was More

Okay, I talked about Krrsantan yesterday, and how I broke my oath to avoid buying more Vintage Collection figures for Ankletown Station until I built a building for the thing. I went to an Ollie's and bought Krrsantan even though I shouldn't have. Well, while I was there, I also bought a Stormtrooper figure that I shouldn't have.

The Incinerator Trooper and Grogu were another set of deluxe figures. A while back, I bought a couple of the Artillery Troopers from Ross, they are figures that are normal Stormtroopers with a little bit of yellow accents to them. They look like this:

So, the Incinerator Trooper just looks like the same guy but in red. I can dig that. He's like an officer or something. It's not a bad look. So, I got one.

He comes with tons of flame effects. I could use them for him, or I could use them for any of the myriad other figures that I have that are fire-related characters like The Human Torch or Firestar. Then he comes with a Grogu figure, which is a tiny little worthless thing, but I don't think I have a Grogu otherwise.

There is also a fire effect specifically for Grogu that shows him using the force to bend the fire around him. Kind of cool, but unlikely anything I'll ever use for Ankletown. I'll just put it with Firestar or whatever.

Here's another figure that can look good in pictures and be fun on Ankletown Station. Now I need to get going on that. I broke my oath, but I still need to get to it.

I Said I Wouldn't

...But, I guess I lied.

I swore that I wouldn't buy more stuff for Ankletown Station until I got around to creating the first building for the place...yet, the temptation came along and I gave in and bought something even though I had yet to do anything on a building beyond take a piece of wood, and look at it for a minute and wonder, "Would this piece work?"

Sometimes it's hard to get going on something like that. I had the same problem with the Wall of Voodoo, but once I got going, I really got rolling and plowed through it. I'd like to say the same thing will happen with Ankletown Station. Hopefully that's true.

Anyway, when I went out to the new Ollie's that opened near me, there were a few of those deluxe figures from the Vintage Collection that they'd been selling for astounding amounts a few months ago. The first one I grabbed was the Black Krrsantan figure.

I think they wanted $35 for this thing in the first place. No way in hell would I pay that for a 3.75 inch figure, no matter how deluxe it was. Now that it's $9.99, though, it's not prohibitively expensive. It's a good figure, and it's a wookiee, an alien that I would put on Ankletown Station.

Since it was Deluxe, it came with a bunch of extra crap, like those electric effects that go on his brass knuckles things on his hands. But it also came with all of this stuff:

Two sets of hands, a big rifle, a big old mug, and a...fruit? I guess he probably used that stuff in the Boba Fett show. I have mostly blocked that show from my memory, so I don't remember a mug or a fruit, but surely they were a thing.

I'm not a fan of Krrsantan himself. I may even repaint him a different color to make him look like a different random wookiee. Who knows. He'll be fun, one way or another.

Digital Wizards Is Now Available!

I have a new story available on Amazon! It's a story I finished this year, just back in April, called "Digital Wizards."

I'm trying to achieve the goal I set for myself in September. I was supposed to publish three stories, but I only managed to get one of them done. Earlier this week, I published the second one, and here is the third! That's last month's goals achieved...let's see, how much time do I have to get this month's goals done? Oh, not much...

Anyway, here it is. "Digital Wizards" is a novella-length story. It's the tale of Keith, an angel investor for Silicon Valley startups. An old friend comes to him with the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of an AI image generator. He jumps at the chance, despite his friend's untrustworthy nature, because the images it creates are so amazing. As they're getting the AI image generator ready for launch, Keith plays with the software at home. He becomes completely obsessed with it, spending all his time generating every interesting image he can think of. Then, his friend calls and tells him not to use the AI image generator for a little while, because there is a problem. Except, he's so addicted that he can't manage to stay away for long. When he uses it, he gets a call from his friend begging for help. He has to embark on an adventure that he never suspected to save himself, his friend, the woman he loves, and likely the whole city too.

You can pick it up now on Amazon. It will also be on the upcoming Angels and Wizards compilation that I will be releasing soon. It's a fun story. I think you'll really enjoy it. Give it a shot. You'll be glad you did.

Who Knew?

While we were camping at the Frio River, we were all sitting at the campfire together. Other folks in nearby campsites were having their own fires, and playing music while they hung out. We could sort of hear their music, but not very well. Many of the songs were terrible stuff we didn't really want to hear, as well. So, my kids suggested we listen to our own stuff.

I pulled out my phone, brought up my music app, and clicked the custom channel it had made for me. This was supposedly based on what I'd listened to in the past, so it ought to have songs I'd like in it. The first song was a good one, but then the second one hit. What the heck was this?

I looked at the listing for it, and was a little flabbergasted by what I saw.

"The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" by Leonard Nimoy? What the hell? First of all, who knew that Leonard Nimoy had a music album? I would never have guessed. Secondly, he has a song on it about Bilbo Baggins? Really?

Oh, jeez, the dancers on that video!

I took a screen shot, sent it to Rish, and asked him if he knew anything about this.

He texted back to tell me that yes, he knew about it, and also that he hated it.

I guess it wasn't a particularly good song, but I was still blown away that it existed at all. I mean, what a crazy genre mashup that is, though, right? It's like Mark Hamill making an album with songs about Knight Rider or Keanu Reeves doing an album with songs about the X-Men or Elijah Wood going on Yo Gabba Gabba! and doing the Puppetmaster Dancey-Dance!

Oh, wait, that last one actually happened.

Although, this is my favorite version of it, but I guess you can only see it if you click this link and watch it on YouTube. They don't allow it to be embedded elsewhere.

Pre-Owned Is Now Available!

New story available on Amazon! It's the story I wrote just back in July called "Pre-Owned."

Last month, I set the goal for myself to publish three of my stories. I only managed to get one of them done, though. So, I pushed the other two back and added them into the goal for October. Well, we're already getting to the end of October, and I still hadn't published a single one of those stories. The longer of the two, "Digital Wizards," was taking me a long time to get through. So, this week, I decided I would jump over "Digital Wizards" and just do the next story in line. It was shorter. I could come back and finish "Digital Wizards" later.

So, here it is. "Pre-Owned" is the story of Clint. He needs to get rid of his car. It's so boring and beige that every time his girlfriend sees him drive up in it, her libido drops through the floor. He's been saving up, and as long as he gets a good price for his old Mercury Sable, he can turn around and buy a Ford Mustang to take its place. The problem is, when the first person comes to take a test drive of the car, they come back drenched in sweat and filled with fear. They jump out of his car and run as fast as they can to get away. Then it happens again. What's going on? Is something wrong with his car? Could it be haunted?

You can pick it up now on Amazon. It will also be on the upcoming Angels and Wizards compilation that I will be releasing soon. It's a fun story. I think you'll really enjoy it. Give it a shot. You'll be glad you did.

Lion Diet Carnivore & Alternate Day Fasting | Can I Keep A Good Attitude? | Week 72 Roundup

Last week, despite having a bad week, I realized that I needed to change my outlook. I was becoming complacent and forgetting about all the advantages that doing the carnivore diet has brought me, like being healthy enough to try a rope swing, for example. Beyond that, I figured that it would help me make progress as well. Could I manage though? We all know that it's one thing to say you want to do something and completely another to actually do it. Watch the video and see how it went.

Halloween Decorations Post #7

Okay, let's see if I can come up with a theme for another Halloween decorations post. Oh, that should have been obvious. Let's look at my decorations that come from comic books.

First of all, DC comics. A while back, Rish Outfield sent me this Solomon Grundy figure. I think it's the Imaginext version of the guy. Since he's basically a zombie, I had to throw him up.

Next up is this huge Titan Heroes-scale Man-Bat. I gussied him up with a nice black wash, and put him on the shelf. I figure a guy that's half man and half bat is perfect for a Halloween decoration.

That's all I got from DC, though. I'm not really a DC guy, so I don't get very into their lower tier characters, but with Marvel, I go much deeper. Let's start with a higher echelon guy.

Iron Pumpkin. I got him a few years ago. It was a War Machine figure, but I thought I could paint the silver parts orange, and Bob's your uncle, he'd be a Halloween decoration. He probably could use a second coat of orange, though, and probably a black wash over the orange after that. I haven't done what you might call a stellar job of customizing this guy yet. Also, I really want to draw a little jack o'lantern face on the arc reactor on his chest. That would look really rad. Maybe I'll get to it someday.

Next, it's another big deal guy in Marvel who is perfect for Halloween.

That's my Ghost Rider. I got him around Christmastime one year, because they'd put things onto massive discount right around Black Friday on Amazon. I was keeping a close eye on the stuff that I wanted, and Ghost Rider went down to something like 75% off. I jumped on that so fast, even though I was basically buying myself a Christmas present. I went ahead with it anyway.

Ghost Rider is in a bevy of Halloween stuff. Right next to him is a ghost room alarm that I got from the dollar store a few years back. Luckily, the battery has run out on that thing. It could get pretty annoying back when it still worked. There's a foam pumpkin on the shelf just below Ghost Rider and a plastic jack o'lantern that lights up just above him.

Lastly, there's a set of three Little People figures that I got at Marshall's once. They were all dressed up to be Dia de los Muertos toys. I couldn't resist them. Aren't they so cute? Just darling!

Okay, next is a character much further down the list of Marvel's roster. This woman is called Hallow's Eve.

She's got that great orange and black color scheme, and came with Halloween masks. I looked her up, because I'd never heard of her before, and apparently, she has magic masks, and when she puts them on, she gets the powers of those things. Kind of a cool idea, I think. If she weren't a villain, I would say they should start making annual holiday specials a la Werewolf by Night, where each year she has to use a different mask to achieve her aim. Doesn't work as well if she's a bad guy though. Maybe she could be the werewolf's enemy in a holiday special.

Here we go, back to more heavy hitter characters. Here's the zombie versions of Iron Man, Captain America, and the Scarlet Witch.

These are from the What If... cartoon. It was okay, but I wasn't a huge fan of it. I am, however, a huge fan of these figures. I love them. I never expected that we'd get the Iron Man and Scarlet Witch figures years later, but I sure am glad we did. I'd love to see zombie versions of all the Avengers. I'd love to assemble that.

I did show you the Pennywise and Stay-Puft guys I had, but in this wider picture, you can also see the werewolf Captain America that I have. I love that there was actually a time where Captain America was having a problem with turning into a werewolf in the actual comics...and it wasn't even back in the fifties or something either, but in the nineties!

On the other side of the picture is the new Jack O'Lantern figure that I got this year. This guy is pretty good. He's the first appearance Jack O'Lantern, and it's a nice figure. I did a post about him back when I got it. I have a second Jack O'Lantern that's up as well, but I already talked about that one in an earlier post, so I'll spare you the replay. If you want to see it, you can click the link and look there.

And that's that. Okay, folks. There's probably only one or two more of these posts, and then you've seen it all. Of course, by then, it'll be Christmastime, and I'll have a whole new series of posts to share with you. I've really overdone it with all of this crap, so I've got fodder for dozens of posts on here.

A Free Picture

On Friday morning, when we were camping at the Frio River last weekend, we got up and started making breakfast. Our campsite neighbor came walking over.

"Excuse me," she said, "Sorry to be weird, but I was wondering if you guys wanted this picture I took of you."

She took a picture of us? That's kind of weird and creepy. Especially when you're out camping and you don't even have walls to put between you and your stalker. What was this all about?

"What?" we asked.

"Oh, last night, I was taking pictures of the Northern Lights, and I got one that had your family in it. I thought you guys might like to have it."

She held up her phone, and showed us a really neat picture. Both me and my wife filled with regret. The Northern Lights were visible last night? Here? Crap! We knew that they were supposed to be visible in a lot of the states they normally never visit. My wife had been glued to her phone for our entire five-hour drive over from Houston. One of the things she'd seen was a story about that.

"The Northern Lights are going to be visible in most of the lower United States tonight," she'd blurted out at one point during the ride. "I bet I know what state they won't be seen in."

With that, we'd all forgotten about the possibility at all. The Northern Lights were right above us, and we hadn't even looked up. I haven't seen the Northern Lights since I visited my then-girlfriend now-wife-of-25-years in Edmonton in January of 1998. They were right there above my head, in friggin' Texas no less, and I didn't even think to look.

"Oh, this picture is great. Thank you," we said.

She airdropped the picture to my phone, and I have it to show to y'all.

So great. You can even see Cassiopeia up there. My phone could never manage a picture that nice. One of downfalls of buying a phone about two years or more after its been released so that I don't have to pay $1,000 for the pleasure of owning one. Usually, I don't mind, but when I see a picture like this, I feel it a little.

The good news is that I just heard that there should be more instances of the Northern Lights making excursions down south over the next several months. Maybe I can manage to see them with my own eyes again, instead of just getting a picture of myself with the lights that I never looked up at.

PS - The saddest part is that I sat out there for another hour after everyone else went to bed getting in my 1,000 words on "Lazerfist Saves Christmas" and still never looked up in all that time. That bright light that you see around us had been turned off, and there was nothing to hinder my sight, but I still never looked up.

More Stickers

I got all worked up yesterday about being able to do things that I couldn't do before, and I forgot to mention that I further added to my crazy collection of window stickers. I got a Frio River sticker and put it just above the big sticker for The Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park sticker. 

Sadly, I effed it up. It was a sticker with just the words "Frio River" on it. So, basically it was nine separate letter stickers. They were held in place by a clear film that you put on your window, then peel away, and the stickers stay in their proper place.

When I went to put the stickers on, though, I misjudged the shape of my window. I didn't account for the curve in the corner, and the F in Frio went up onto the rubber edge. When I tried to back out of it and pull the stickers back off, it didn't work. The film came away, but the letter stickers remained. There was no way to get it off without totally effing it up.

It's not terrible, so I guess I'm going to leave it, but I did get a razor blade when I got home and cut the corner that was folded up off. Having that curled up onto the rubber looked bad. I had to at least remove that. So, now it looks like this:

It's alright, but it won't take much to convince me to remove it and get something else to put in its place, that's for sure.

A Trip To The Hill Country

This past weekend, we took a trip out to Garner State Park along the banks of the Frio River in the Texas Hill Country west of San Antonio. We went here once before back in 2021, and the family liked it so much that they requested a return trip.

We did pretty much the same things as we did last time, though I did have my daughter who was off at college last time we went here with us this time, so it was all new to her. We camped in the same area.

We tubed down the river from the same spot.

The only real difference is that I am willing to actually let a picture of me in my swimsuit be seen by anyone. 

I've managed to get in decent shape and stay that way for more than a year. That's a first for me. I'm still nowhere close to being all the way there. I'm even thirty pounds heavier than I was back in May, and I'm trying to get back down to that level, but I'm doing okay, and I'm going to act like it for once. 

Not only did I get a couple of pictures of me in a swimsuit, I even went on the rope swings that my kids went on. I think the last time I went on a rope swing, it was still the twentieth century, which was about the last time I weighed what I do now. So, there might be a little correlation there.

I was sitting in my tube, and using my phone to record the kids swinging on the rope, and when they finally figured they were ready to move on, I suddenly thought, "Why the hell am I just watching? That rope swing is nothing dangerous. I may be almost fifty years old, but that doesn't mean a damn thing in this case. I can swing on that as easily as anyone else."

I paddled over to the shore, climbed off, grabbed the rope and took a shot.

It was nothing crazy, but it was fun, and I think I did a good job. I took another shot using the other rope. I didn't do quite as well with that one.

I should have tried to get my knees up and wrapped around the knot so I could hold on better. My arms weren't enough to counteract the centrifugal force trying to fling me off, so I just plummeted when it got too strong. That's not the point, though. The point is that I tried it at all. I tried it, and I was just fine. Life is better because of what I've been doing for the past few years. I'm healthier and stronger, and I won't quit improving. No matter how much I feel like life could be a lot easier if I just did all the same BS that the average American does. I'm not going to.

Sorry, I was just going to talk about going on a fun trip, and it turned into some rant about why I gotta keep doing my own thing and give the middle finger to the world that wants me to quit. I didn't mean to go there. I guess it was just on my mind.

Hope your day was fun, and you're having a happy life. Carry on.

Who Is The Soap For?

My wife got this stuff for the bathroom, not to use, but to be used as a decoration. You know, on the shelf, there's some nice looking, pretty soap. It's the kind of thing that I imagine appeals to girls...or at least to some girls, my wife being one of those.

I can't help but chuckle every time I see it, though. Yes, I know that there's an island called Crete, and this is what you call something from Crete. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that the word it makes me think of is actually spelled cretin. That's still all I can think of. It seems like you wouldn't want to be in possession of cretin soap, because that would imply that you are a cretin, right?

Well, guess what, I am the proud owner of Cretan soap. I haven't started using it yet, though. I'll probably need to soon, I suspect though. We'll run out of the soft soap, and this cretin will have to break into the Cretan soap to wash up with it. You can count on that.

Abomination

I never thought I'd look at a package of bacon and turn up my nose, but what the hell is this monstrosity?!?!

It's like on the movies, where they take a great hero, and then they torture him and torture him until he breaks, and then he fights for evil. It's just wrong. Somebody should rescue that bacon and get the damn Cinnamon Toast Crunch Cinnadust off to see if it's salvageable...or is it just better to put it out of its misery?

Carnivore & Alternate Day Fasting | Another Hard Week, But Things Are Looking Up | Week 71 Roundup

This week was kind of a carbon copy of last week, but a little more so. The weekend involved a big camping trip, which meant I couldn't eat my normal stuff. Did it throw me for a loop? Or did I come out of it with a new attitude altogether?

Halloween Decorations Post #6

Okay, here's a quick one. Maybe I should have included this in the post I did about toys that came from movies, but for some reason, I figured it needed its own post.

So, here are the few decorations that I have from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

We can start with this guy. He's a stuffed Jack Skellington that Rish sent out to me once among the various things he'd grabbed for me at the thrift store.

He has a bit of a wire frame inside of it, though, so you can pose him...but only a little bit. I was able to manage to get him to sit, but that's the best I could do.

Don't worry, there's more Jack Skellington to be had. Here he is again with his cute little doggy, Zero.

This is the Disney Toybox version of Jack. I had to get him one of the times I went by the Disney Store looking for something else. That's also the Loyal Subjects Mumm-Ra from Thundercats there next to him. I left that guy up, because he really fits for the Halloween season too.

Here's another version of Jack Skellington, but the emphasis is on another version here. This is the Jack Skellington from the very start of the movie as they sing the "This Is Halloween" song. Jack comes out with a pumpkin on his head and dressed like a scarecrow. He dances around for a while, lights himself on fire, and then jumps into the well, and comes out looking like the pumpkin king we know and love. Here he is:

I have him a few skeleton backup dancers there as well. Mostly because the Pumpkin King figure is so tall that he needed to be in a large spot to fit, but it looked totally empty if he's the only thing there. The skeletons I got from Big Lots one year. They had them for super cheap, and once it got relatively close to Halloween, they put them on clearance, so I didn't even have to pay the super cheap full price for them. The only trouble is that they have a really hard time remaining standing. The damn things fall constantly. The one on the right in the picture has already fallen and is leaning on Jack's hand to stay up.

Okay, here's the last one:

On the upper shelf there is some figurines that I got at the dollar store. We have Jack, Sally, and Zero in that picture. I actually really like those ones. I love them even more, because they also had a Jack Skellington dressed as Santa figurine on sale at the dollar store as well. I grabbed that one, and come November, I will switch out the Skeleton Jack for the Santa Jack, and leave the rest up. Jack was right. It's fun to mix the holidays sometimes.

Oh, and since I won't be reshowing the same picture in a later post, on the main shelf in that picture is a Mego headless horseman figure I found at Walmart one time. I couldn't pass it up. I don't love Mego figures, but that headless horseman is pretty rad. He doesn't hold a candle to the Figura Obscura Headless Horseman they did a while back, but at $120 versus $8, I can deal with a little bit less quality.

Little Friend

I don't really like our new cat, Freya. She's a lot like our old cat, Juno, who died about a year ago in December. Juno hated me, was afraid of me, and ran from me whenever she saw me. The older she got, the more pronounced it became. She was like that racist uncle you had who was mostly fine until their mind started to go and those private thoughts started coming out all the time instead very infrequently. She had no reason to hate or fear me, but she did nonetheless.

The new cat is the same thing. From the day we got her, she was super skittish and nervous. She spent her first day at our house hiding under our bed and never coming out for anything. My daughter spent an exorbitant amount of time coaxing her out and gaining her confidence...but she's a kid that has little responsibilities, so she could. I did not, and the cat has never taken to me. It's not just because of that, though, because she likes my wife, who is also busy and doesn't waste tons of time soothing a skittish cat.

My kids and my wife say that it's probably because I'm louder than everybody else in the house, so she's just nervous of being around me. I don't know. I tried to take a picture of her for this blog post, this was the best I could get:

She was looking at me as I came up with my phone, and it would have been a good picture, but by the time I had the photo app open and the shot set, she was running away from me. After all, I was near her...that's extreme danger, right?

Anyway, despite being a little turd that treats me like I'm a monster despite never giving her a reason, she can do funny and cute things sometimes. That's why I'm writing this post. This was a super long-winded lead in to tell you about her little friend.

This is a coonskin cap that my son wanted to buy the last time we went to the Alamo. he should have saved his money, because, of course, he never uses it. He had it in his closet for more than a year, but then recently, we found it downstairs. We made Little take it back up and put it away, but the next thing you know, it was out and down again.

Turns out, Freya really likes it. She was getting into his closet and pulling it out, carrying it around in her mouth and taking it with her wherever she wanted to go. She would lay with it in corner of the room or on the window seat. My daughters even said they once caught her grooming the thing, licking its fur presumably to clean it off like it would do for itself or like some cats do to each other when they are particularly well bonded.

I guess the Davy Crockett hat is her little friend. It makes me shrug. She wouldn't have to do that if she wasn't so intent on hiding under the couch whenever I'm around. I'd be her friend, but I guess the hat is quieter. It rough to be a rambunctious male in today's society. It's just not built to accommodate us any longer. Sit still and be quiet, or you aren't welcome. Even our pets have taken that to heart.

My First Patreon Address Available Just This Once On The Regular Anklecast Feed

Okay, everybody, my first Patreon Address is now available to all...but just this once.

It's my first time doing a Patreon Address. Rish Outfield and Marshal Latham have been doing them for a while and I thought I ought to take their example and make a Patreon Address as well. In this, I talk about my goals for the year, month, and even day that I have set for myself, and how well I have achieved them. If that kind of stuff interests you, then check it out and see how it's going.

This one will be on the regular feed, because I want people who don't subscribe to Patreon will know that it exists, but from here on out, this will be a total Patreon exclusive. So, subscribe to the Patreon group and keep getting access to this podcast.

In the future, there will be more Patreon exclusive content. So, don't miss your chance to get it.

As always, thanks to Kevin McCleod at incompetech.com for the music.

So, you can find the episode on The Anklecast feed or you can download it by right-cllcking HERE. You could also just click the play button below. That'll work too.

So Much More Of Those People

I said in the end of my last post about this that it would certainly be something that got out of hand quickly. I, who had aspirations of filling my back windows with stickers of the places I'd visited in my life, was able now to make my own stickers at any time. What would I do? Well, go overboard of course.

The first thing I did was take scans of the stickers that Temu sent me in grossly over-exaggerated proportions. Then I asked my daughter to make versions of those in a normal size. So, I now have a normal-sized version of my Grand Canyon sticker along with my St. Augustine, Florida sticker.

That St. Augustine one, I think, is my favorite. I loved that freaking lighthouse, so I couldn't resist getting the sticker. I was so sad when it was way too bug, but now I get to use it after all.

My daughter also made me the Mesa Verde sticker that came too big. The normal-size one looks good.

But that certainly wasn't where I stopped. I could make my own freaking stickers if I wanted to! So, of course, I was going to do that. There was a spot on my window that was likely to remain empty unless I made a sticker that fit it perfectly. It had to be tall and skinny, which seemed like the right place for a tree-shaped sticker. I just did that with the Muir Woods sticker from my last post though, so I tried to come up with something else. I figured, a lighthouse would work. 

I love lighthouses. When I was in my early-twenties, my family took a trip to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and they had a lot of lighthouses there. We went to a few of them, including the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, and the lighthouse on Ocracoke Island. 

I asked the AI that I usually use to design my book covers with to make me a picture of the two lighthouses, and was surprised to find that the Ocracoke one looked pretty close to correct. So, I cropped it, and created this sticker.

I measured the spot on the window to make sure the sticker would fit, and my daughter printed it out for me. Now, that empty spot is filled in nicely.

While I was at it, I couldn't find a good sticker for the Bahamas, which I had visited on a cruise once back in the nineties on that same trip where we went to the Outer Banks, but also just this year in February. I'd ordered a sticker from Temu that I didn't really like that much, but now, I could make something much better.

I again had the AI make me a picture, this time of a white sand beach with palm trees. I sifted through the various options, and settled on this picture that I designed into a sticker.

We printed it out. We didn't even have to worry about making it fit in any little nook, so it could be a normal shape and size if we wanted. I like how it turned out.

There was one more place I thought I ought to put on my window. I had a sticker for Cancún, San Diego, San Francisco, Park City, and New York City—all cities that I've seen in the last ten to fifteen years or so. One big destination that I didn't have, though, was New Orleans. We visited that city for the first time not long after coming to Houston, and have been back a few times since. I love that place, despite the fact that I lost (or was pickpocketed) $100 out of my shorts pocket and also dropped my off-brand GoPro camera into the swamp while I was there.

I had looked for good NOLA stickers on Temu, and come up empty-handed. But I could make my own now, folks! I found a sticker that had a good bit of art, but had a crappy design. I cropped the crappy design elements out, and redesigned it for myself, coming up with this look:

If you're wondering, yes, that's the same font I use for Rish Outfield's name on all of his book covers. It's a good looking font. We printed out the sticker, and now, it's on my back window.

So, I added another six stickers to my window. This can't go on for much longer. This is what it looks like now.

Not a whole lot of space left. I can probably fill up both of the side windows, but the middle one needs to remain sticker-free. That's where the rear-view mirror looks. As much as I love covering my window with stickers, I need to be able to see what's going on behind me more.

There are still some places I'd like to do stickers of, though. One place I loved as a kid was in far Northern California called Lava Beds National Monument. It was a network of caves carved in prehistoric days by lava flow. It was so fun exploring our way through those caves. I'd like to do a sticker for that place. I'd have to make my own, though, because I can't find any place online that has one for sale. Maybe the AI can make me a cave that looks good enough. We'll see.