Pumpkin Love

I love love LOVE Halloween. Love. (Love.)

 
 

Since I’m a costumer, most people assume that costumes are my favorite part. But even though my costume always rocks – I live near a college campus.

 
 

 
 

(I didn’t even bother with them because they look like crap in real life anyway. Why perfectly beautiful girls stoop to this level on the best nighttime holiday ever, I’ll never understand! In case you’re wondering, from left to right: cop, faerie princess, Dallas Cowboy. Taken from real life experience, unfortunately… it’s an image I’ll never get out of my head.)

 
 

Just… NO.
 
 

What I love most about Halloween are the pumpkins! Pumpkins combine everything that’s awesome about Halloween into one event: they’re creative, scary/goofy/punny/ironic, they’re the quintessential fall fruit, and they look awesome in the dark. Plus? They’re super cheap! I’ve carved pumpkins every year since I was like ten months old (woah – best horror film ever: babies holding carving knives).

 
 

It’s just not Halloween without pumpkins.

 
 

So this year, my best friend, Martha, my mom, and I got up super early (like 8am, zomg) on Saturday morning and went out to the best pumpkin patch in town, Melton’s Orchard.
Now, usually I go for a nice, moderately sized pumpkin: big enough to be epic, but small enough to be adorbz. However this year, as we stood at the edge of the patch examining the selection, I fell in love.

 
 

 
 

It was HUGE (giggity); the perfect shade of orange, with nice, unscarred sides, just wide and squat enough to be cartoonish, with a thick, curved stalk. Add to that its ridiculous ribbley ridges, and I was sold. There were so many ways I could go with this pumpkin! Was it Cinderella’s carriage? A hormone pumped chicken? Pumpkin Bunion?  Infinite.

 
 

I screamed delight, claimed my prize, and began to trip my way through the patch to my beloved.

 
 

The closer I got, the more I realized just how freaking huge it was. Finally I was standing right in front of the most ridiculously oversized pumpkin I’d ever seen.

 
 

But I couldn’t go back now – I NEEDED that pumpkin. Plus my mom gave me that look. The child-you’re-amusing-me-with-your-naïveté look with a bit of the don’t-even-think-of-asking-me-for-help look thrown in.

 
 

So I took a deep breath, spit like a man, and kneeled in front of my orange beauty. Then I wiggled it back and forth, sliding it around until it was tipped on its side. Then I flipped it back upright onto my knees, grabbed hold with all my might, and stood up.

 
 

Sorta.

 
 

 
 

In this fashion I hobbled my way to the parking lot, up the stairs, and into the store. I was so friggin proud of my Hulk strength that I flopped my pumpkin smugly up onto the counter. The cashier praised my selection and let out a laugh, and at that moment I realized I still had to get it in the car.

 
 

LONG STORY SHORT, I eventually got the monster home. A few days later, when it was warm enough we wouldn’t get frostbite, Martha and I gutted, stabbed, and carved our darlings.

 
 

I must say, they turned out wonderfully.

 
 

 
 

My monster’s on the right… >:]

 
 

HAPPY HALLOWEEN EVERYONE!!! I’d love to see your pumpkin pictures as well!

 
 
 
 

Parentheses and Capitals

Hello world!!!

 

This is my first non-illustrated and non-hillarious post and I am super sorry, but I didn’t want you all to think I’d been abducted by zombie aliens or eaten by sparkly werewolves (conflation is the word of the semester). The good news is that my absence is due to awesome life adventures at school this fall, the bad news being that I may not be around for a little while longer (I’ve been planning a super amazing HALLOWEEN POST since I started this blog in February, though, so do stay tuned for that!). I’m always super busy, but lately I’ve been super busy and then trying to use my breaks to balance a newborn nephew, think tanks, my first ever campaign of dnd, starting THREE clubs (ONE OF THEM IS AN OFFICIAL IU QUIDDITCH TEAM ZOMG), and napping. My two day necessary timeline for creating P.O.R.N. just doesn’t fit in right now (*sob*). The other good news is that I’m begging for a Lenovo Thinkpad for Christmas/MyBirthday (group gift from the whole fam) and if that happens the timeline should shorten drastically (touchscreens make drawing much less hellish) and I might be able to do more than just the Halloween post before Christmas break! YAY!

 

Long story short, I miss you all terribly. I’ll try to sneak on every now and then and come visit you guys, but I can’t promise posts of my own during this crazy period of social and academic activity. Shooting for a 4.0 gpa while putting together a Quidditch team, sewing for the homeless, and being Vice Princess President of the Brony Brigades is just ridic, y’all.

 

So please get out and enjoy this beautiful fall weather, and I’ll see you in two weeks for All Hallow’s Eve!

 

PS: I lied. I can’t have a post without a picture! Allow me to introduce you to the Midnight Snipes of Indiana University…

 

 

Ooh… have you guys ever been snipe hunting? … >:]

 

Things You Shouldn’t Joke About

I’m visiting my nun this week!

 
 

I figured that she might be the one thing more important than blogging, and I also figured you’d understand.

 
 

If you don’t understand, then you’re going to Hell.

 
 

Just kidding! P.O.R.N. withdrawal is something I probably shouldn’t joke about (maybe Hell too). I wouldn’t wish those symptoms on anyone, so I went ahead and drew you a picture.

 
 

 
 

Isn’t my nun adorable? I can’t wait to write a whole post about her.

 
 
 
 

Vacation: Part Two

So apparently our cottage in Cape Cod was so cheap for a reason. And that reason was sand flea season.

 
 

They started out just being an annoyance on the beach, but once they realized there was fresh meat just yards away from the tide, they made their way into our cottage. By the middle of the week, they were interrupting my sleep. I’d wake up to tiny attacks on my bare legs under the covers and flail my legs around like crazy til they slowed down on their feasting.

 
 

But Friday night became an all out war. I’d just closed my eyes when a full on coordinated attack began.

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 
It continued all night long, so by 3am I couldn’t stand it one moment longer. I threw back my covers, ready to scratch them all to smitherines, only to discover that it was not the sand fleas keeping me awake at all.

 
 

 
 
Now, I rather adore crickets, but not when they’re in my bed jumping around on my legs. So I scooped him up and sat him outside the window faster than you can say “Jiminy.”

 
 
With the issue resolved, I was finally able to get some sleep.

 
 
Saturday night was our last night, so we packed up everything but the linens and went to bed early. Yet again, I tossed and turned because every little nerve twitch I felt was definitely a whole family of crickets tickling my legs and laughing manically. But in order to maintain sanity and not go totally paranoid, I wouldn’t let myself keep lifting the covers to scan every nook and cranny. I told myself to ignore the feeling in my legs and sleep for goodness’ sake because we had twelve hours of driving to do the next day.

 
 
And eventually I did get my sleep, but the next morning my legs looked like a family of crickets had indeed been tormenting them. Regardless, I grabbed the towels from the bathroom while my mom stripped the beds, and once we’d mopped and swept, we were on our way from our favorite little cottage on the beach.
 
 

During breakfast at Dunkin Donuts, my mom suppressed a cackle and asked me how I’d slept. Thinking she was about to tease me about the cricket again, I gave her my signature look and went on eating.

 
 

She burst out laughing for a good while.

 
 

Once she controlled herself, she informed me that when she had stripped my sheets that morning, she’d found Jiminy’s friend:

 
 

 
 
 
 

Vacation: Part One

It was the Summer of 2007. (Can’t you just hear the ominous music in the background?!) I had just received my driver’s license, so for the first time, I’d be able to help my mom drive on our annual road trip out East. (I’m sure you can hear it now.) In honor of the occasion, we set off on a more elaborate trip than usual, stopping at colleges and detouring for large balls of yarn and billboards turned cow-gods.

 
 

 
 

After one such detour to the Ben & Jerry’s Factory, we called ahead to a hotel we found in the AAA book and made reservations for the evening. It was only a couple hours up the highway, so my mom graciously handed over the wheel and took a nap. (The ominous music is blaring now, just in case you were wondering.)

 
 

A few hours later, after expending every ounce of my energy trying to keep the car on the highway that just happened to lack reflective lane markers, my mother woke up and realized we’d waaay missed our exit. Not only that, but the two opposite lanes of traffic were separated by the dense Vermont forest, so we would have to go to the next exit to turn back around.

 
 

Of course, humans don’t exist in Vermont, so it was another hour before we came across the next exit. At which point I finally look down at the dash.

 
 

 
 

The empty light screamed at me like I was an idiot. “No big deal,” my mom says. Right.

 
 

We decide we might as well keep going and take the left fork jutting off from the exit. My mom pulls out the map to locate ourselves. Sure enough, neither our handy little exit nor our current road through the moonlit forest makes an appearance on the map.

 
 

Better yet, when my mom decides to call someone back home to look our location up online or call the hotel for directions or alert 911 that we’re dying or something, we discover that we’re out of cell range.

 
 

BEST yet?

 
 

The left fork dead ends.

 
 

 
 

In an abandoned factory complex.

 
 

Guillermo del Toro would have so much fun with this story.

 
 

We turn the car around, double checking that the doors are locked, and go back up the road to where it had forked.

 
 

This type of what-can-you-do scenario has odd effects on my mother and myself, so we found ourselves cycling through bouts of manic panic (this should SO be a phrase) and anxious hysterics. Unfortunately it was like listening to the radio with your windshield wipers on when the song’s tempo is slightly slower than the windshield wipers, so every couple measures they match up, but for the most part they are totally out of sync.

 
 

What my super-long analogy is trying to say is that more often than not, one of us would pee our pants from fright while the other peed their pants from laughter.

 
 

So we drive down the road cycling through emotional extremes and not encountering another living soul. The forest was exceedingly dark, blocking out even the moon and looking unbelievably terrifying.

 
 

Then, we saw this:

 
 

 
 

At which point my mother thinks it would be HILARIOUS to yell “Sasquatch.”

 
 

In my manic panic, I see this:

 
 

 
 

and scream bloody freaking murder.

 
 

Two minutes later my heart attempts to return to a normal speed and we continue down the road. You’ll be happy to know we sputtered right on into a small train junction town, complete with gas station, hotel and only a few scruffy creepers. So all in all, we survived the night without a physical scratch.

 
 

Mentally… that’s another story. I now have a ridiculous phobia of Sasquatch.  Thanks ever so much, Mom.