Halloween photos are up on Doc’s Flickr account! Yay!

We had a great time at our Halloween party last Saturday. The turnout was smaller than usual, due to people being out of town or having already made other plans ( :( sniffle) but I really enjoyed it. 

Brett won the apple bobbing contest in an amazing 4 seconds.

Ooh, ooh! Mr. Kotter!

Mary Ann forgot her pie.

Opie and Andy had a rather interesting relationship not shown in the TV show.

Putting lipstick on the pig.

Creepy  little Wednesday Addams.

Racer X ponders the mysteries of the “Magic Nose Goblin” drink.

Kolchak, the Night Stalker

Hot Lips Houlihan

Racer X, Speed Racer, and Trixie

There’s only so much you can do with makeup when you just don’t look a damn thing like the woman in the first place, but I gave it a shot.

Things I learned at this year’s Halloween party:

• False eyelashes are itchy (and come off if you laugh so hard you cry) but not having to wear mascara kind of rocks
• Skin-colored latex works great for making little patches to cover your real eyebrows
• A costume consisting of polyester clothing covered in baby powder that’s set with hairspray and a plastic wig is really quite flammable
• Doc is a fantastic sculptor
• Sure, Leslie likes mayonnaise, but not THAT much
• Ben brought some of the best salsa I’ve ever tasted
• I love olive dip
• You people didn’t eat nearly enough candy
• All the costumes this year: fantastic!! Not a lame one in the bunch. Even the “Best Costume Clearly Thrown Together At 6:30 This Evening” was quite good!
• White Elephant costume contest prize selection was a fun method
• I probably flew my Geek Flag a little too proudly when I recited the whole “Holy Hand Grenade” speech to Arthur, King of the Britons (Mark)

tragically…

the CF card upon which all our halloween photos were taken….

got munched.

the only photo that came through unscathed is this one. if only one of them is going to survive, i guess this is a pretty good one. after all, how often do you get to see a nun drinking a rum and coke talking to joey ramone??

we voted early last weekend. not that it matters one way or the other, seeing as how we live in a giant red state. however, something interesting has been happening: i’ve been seeing pro-bush, anti-kerry ads on tv. here. in texas.

why?

you’d think that if they thought they had the state wrapped up, they wouldn’t bother spending the money on unnecessary ads.

unless they’re not unnecessary.

ha-HA!

oh, hell, i know it’s a pipe dream. but i can dream, can’t i??

in other news…
chris hamilton, a friend who is a photographer, came over and took a bunch of pictures of our cats for a business he’s starting. they turned out great! i don’t think that i can really post any in a public forum (they are his pictures, after all). our halloween party is this coming saturday. on friday, in our new building at work, we are having little preschool kids coming through to trick-or-treat. our office’s theme is “black and white” (even though we just moved and are still settling in, and have had no time to think of holiday decor, the whole building is apparently expecting great things from “the creative group,” so we brainstormed the other day and came up with something). anyway, i’m going to wear my black and white stripey stockings and my short black supermodel wig. man, any excuse to wear alternate hair!!

the moon eclipsed tonight. we saw it for a few minutes through a break in the clouds. it was pretty cool; it turned this nice rusty red color. actually it’s still going on, but it’s awfully cloudy outside. in fact, the weather has just been horrible lately: incredibly sticky and very very warm. i want my cool dry crips autumn days, goddammit!

Team America: World Police is freakin’ hilarious!! I highly recommend it, as long as you are over the age of 16 or so. America, FUCK YEAH!

jon stewart was on crossfire last week, i think — the lesson learned here is, do not fuck with jon stewart; he will make you look like an idiot. he called that bowtied freak tucker carlson a dick! my favorite line, when carlson was poking at him about the quality of the questions he asked john kerry during his daily show appearance: “wait a minute, you are on CNN. you know what show leads into mine? puppets making crank phone calls.”

Some fun links…
Give Bush a Brain!
iFilm political short films & clips (freakin’ awesome site!)
the U2 iPod

Halloween pictures are posted!

I’m finally getting off my butt and writing some more stories. I’ve been so tired lately, and I haven’t felt like doing much of anything. I’m glad that I was productive last week and sold some paintings. I think that I’m going to try to donate some paintings or other “artistic goods” to charities for fund raisers or raffles or what have you. That would allow me my selfish “me-time” to continue my creative pursuits, but would also allow me to do something for my community at the same time. I’d like to volunteer, but it’s just a question of giving up the time that I could be spending doing something creative.

I don’t even know if places would want a donation like that. I guess I’ll have to look into it.

I promise that I will post the Halloween party pictures sooooooon! It’s a lot of work to go through all the photos, throw out the bad ones, crop and color correct the good ones, and get them all online. There’s well over 200 photos, so please be patient!

I’m coloring my hair, so I have to get up in about 15 minutes to check it and rinse out the smelly goop. Maybe I’ll see next time if Andrew can cut me a deal and color it for me. I’m pretty proficient at it, but it might be nice to have a professional do it once in a while.

Here’s a story from more recent days than the stories I’ve been telling lately — probably from about three years ago:

We were living in the rent house on Ridgelea Street by Love Field. This house was built in 1946, and nothing at all was standard size (windows for miniblinds, shower head threads, doorframes, etc.). The kitchen cabinets went all the way to the ceiling, and the top shelf was waaaaay up high so that even I, at 5 feet 11 inches, had trouble reaching it.

Anyway, I was making dinner and reached up to this tippy top shelf to get the spare blade for my food processor, and I lost my grip. The blade fell off the shelf and was headed straight for my head, and my natural reaction was to grab for it to keep it away from my face. Well, it being a BLADE and all, this didn’t turn out so well. It sliced into the fleshy pad of my left thumb, nice and deep.

I ran into the bathroom to try to stop the bleeding, and was running my thumb under the cold water faucet when I made the mistake of looking at the wound. It was deep, allright, and spouting blood everywhere. So I fainted. Luckily, my dear sweet Doc was standing next to me and caught me before I fell all the way to the floor. I came to within seconds, and he sat me down on the toilet seat lid next to the sink, and had me hold my hand over the sink but NOT LOOK, so he could try to bandage it up or determine if I needed stitches.

He was trying to get the bleeding stopped, and I was trying to relax, so I leaned back a little and took some deep breaths, but I had forgotten about the lit candle on the back of the toilet seat — and my hair caught fire.

It didn’t burn too much before we noticed my head crackling and smoking, and luckily a few whacks with my hand were all it took to put it out.

So when I tell this story, I call it The Day I Sliced Open My Thumb, Passed Out, and Set My Hair On Fire, All Within Five Minutes. You think YOU had a bad day?!

Last week was one of the busiest weeks that I think I’ve had in a long time. Arushi and Shyamal moved on Thursday. Right now they are somewhere in Colorado, enjoying the sub-freezing weather (while it’s still HOT here in Dallas – mid 80s in November). I am having a hard time believing that they are actually gone. I guess that distances aren’t really so far anymore, what with e-mail and IM and free long distance on cell phones… but still. We had a farewell brunch for them at Rachel’s house last Sunday, and then dinner with them and Kim on Tuesday.

The rest of the week was spent preparing for Friday’s Halloween party. We had some great decorations (and lots of decorating help) and I think that the yard and the downstairs of the house looked awesome. I’m not sure that we can compete with John and Melanie’s decorations (neither of us have built a real life web slinger, for instance), but I think ours were cool in their own way. The party was fantastic. Tons of people came, and we got some really fabulous photos. I’m going to post them to their own page so people can look and download them, but here are a couple of my favorites: [Photo 1] [Photo 2]. The last guests left some time between 2:30 and 3 in the morning. I’ll write more about the party later

I sold five paintings at my art show yesterday!! That was just beyond my wildest dreams. Two young couples each bought two paintings, and Joel bought one. Turns out that the first guy is a cousin to someone that I went to college with. Small world! I wasn’t sure that I was going to sell two of the paintings, but I felt good about the people who were buying them, so I decided that I could let them go to good homes. I’m glad Joel has one because I can go and visit it. :)