Ewwwww...

My son and I went to the pumpkin farm on Saturday, and we carved out the pumpkin we got there on Sunday.

We put it on the front porch with a little LED candle in it that cycled through colors as it lit up the inside of the jack-o-lantern.

It's been outside for one day now...a day and a half I guess. I was replacing the light bulb above our front door, and when I stepped down off the ladder, I totally stepped on it. I ruined that pumpkin, breaking it in several places, but that's not at all the thing that sticks in my mind from the experience. My son's going to be sad that it's broken, but much, much worse and more indelible in my mind is the cloud of flies that lifted off the thing when I bumped it. You can kind of see them in this picture, but rest assured that this picture only shows a small portion of them...

Out west, where I grew up, there wasn't enough moisture to foster so many frigging insects. You could leave a pumpkin outside for weeks before it ever started to rot and attract bugs. Not one day. Is this one day outside and it's a bug mess thing the common experience around the country and the world? I'd like to know. Please comment and tell me if it's me that's weird here or not.

And if it is the norm, then how did making jack-o-lanterns ever become a thing? They're gross!

Sketching It Out

Rish wrote up another fun sketch about folks telling scary stories around a campfire, and we performed it over on the Dunesteef. Check it out.

(EDIT: Now that the feed is gone, the only way to hear the show is over on the Dunesteef Podcast YouTube page, which I am embedding below).

Drug Dealers

I went to my diabetes doctor this past week for my quarterly appointment. Afterwards, I stopped in at the desk to make my next appointment, and was greeted by these:

Bowls full of Halloween candy for the friggin diabetics to further destroy themselves with. I guess that's one way to ensure that people are always coming back again and again. Keep that money rolling in, health system. Complicit all the way down to the bottom level it seems.

It Has Begun

I've been trying to change my eating habits since last December. I've had a lot of really bad habits that eventually led to me acquiring type II diabetes. Not all of it was my fault, I'm glad to admit. I've recently learned just how utterly wrong all the dietary guidelines our governments, and subsequently pretty much everyone else, have been advising us with, but not even the their wrongheaded guidelines ever said that sugar was good for us. They just distracted us from what we should be worrying about by telling us that the good guy was also a bad guy.

All these dozens of years of doing it the wrong way...

Have left me with a lot of hang-ups. There's a lot of things out there that are really bad for me that, nevertheless, I love...LOVE. I'm trying to avoid them, but sometimes it can be difficult. And now, another one of them has reared its ugly head to get me. Behold:

Yes, I love...LOVE egg nog. There have been years where I guzzled my way through gallons upon gallons of the stuff.

The most positive part of egg nog showing up in the stores...already...is that the rest of the year, it's not around. I'm glad that, at the very least, it's a seasonal item that I don't have to battle year round.

The negative part is that it is part of the hardest part of the year. Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are holidays that revolve around food, are almost solely about food, and my diabetes doctor once said that everyone gets their worst A1C score of the year on their appointment after December. Egg nog in the coolers means that all the other things are coming too, peppermint ice cream, caramel apples, strawberry rhubarb pie, and so on. There's going to be food at work to avoid over and over and over again.

It's going to be rough, but I'm determined. I started Keto in December of last year, and I swear that December will be my best time this year too.

Iron Skull

I couldn't help myself. I had to take it further. I mentioned in my earlier post how I was able to spooky up my bookshelf a little more by adding little plastic skulls that we'd picked up at the dollar store to my 12 inch...or as the (not) cool kids say it 1/6 scale...Captain America.

Well, I had several more skulls...

And a fair number of large figures with removable heads. So...behold, Iron Skull:

Hmmm...that picture kind of sucks. Too much light from the computer screen in the background. Sorry. Here we go. Here he is on the shelf.

There is a real Iron Skull from Marvel, in a storyline where Red Skull got a hold of Iron Man's armor and arc reactor.

But that guy's got nothing on my awesome customization. Amiright?

I couldn't quit there, though. I had some more 12" guys.

I couldn't come up with a good name for this guy like I did with Captain Americorpse and Iron Skull though.

Any suggestions? At least I've got one figure that really displays well with all these annoying spider webs that I put up for Halloween.

Wasn't all done yet. I had a Hulkbuster that I could turn into a Skullbuster:

This guy isn't even a 12 inch figure. He's supposed to be in six inch scale, but the Hulkbuster is so big that he's almost twelve inches tall when in six inch scale. After all, Iron Man is supposed to be inside of that suit, so he obviously can't be the same size as him.

I guess since I'm at it I ought to include this guy that I picked up as well. I happened to be at a Walgreens, and saw that they had an old Pumpkin King figure. It's pretty good. Looks really nice. Also, they had these posable skeletons at Big Lots, and they were already on sale for something like 30% off.

It's gonna be pretty sad to take all this stuff down in a few weeks, but it will be all the sweeter next year when I pull it all back out.

Horning In

My wife brought home some cereal for the kids this week, and it kind of surprised me. Has this been a thing before this year?

We did an episode of That Gets My Goat way back when where we tried all of the famous Halloween cereals like Count Chocula, Boo Berry, and Franken Berry. Those cereals are made by General Mills, and have been ruling the roost as far as Halloween themed cereals go for decades. But this limited edition of Froot Loops with Spooky Marshmallows is made by Kellogg's. Looks like they've been seeing all that sweet, sweet Halloween cash going to the shop across the street instead of to them, and they've decided to try to find a way to get their share.

They're going with the purple and orange color scheme, which a lot of places have decided are the official colors of Halloween or something, similar to how red and green seem to be that for Christmas. Don't know how purple pushed black out. I always thought it was black and orange until now. And the marshmallows are ghosts, bats, and Frankenstein's Monster heads.

Well, my kids are now chowing down on this crap for breakfast each day. I'll make sure that they don't get too much more of it, so that they don't end up diabetic like their dad.

Oh, and I did already get them a box of Count Chocula earlier this month. So, I haven't gone traitor on General Mills and the original stuff or anything.

I'm Coming

I was at the Halloween displays in Target with my six-year-old, and he found this phone thing and tried it out.

If you trade the phone for a baby monitor, and you trade the word "you" for "your son" then you have the premise of one of my very first stories I wrote back in 2003 or so. I couldn't not share it.