And who better to host than a fuzzy-headed monster like me?
Greetings, time to dredge up the Spooky Sounds album, er CD, um MP3, ah Pono? --and peel a few grapes for the bowl of cold spaghetti we set out every year for our guests up at the castle. Being a webby old castle it's full of dark, dank corners where our escaped experiments reach for you with their stiff, mouldering hands. Actually, those things never seem to go bad-- we've been trying to get them to moulder for years now. We've been looking for something with an admirable tendency toward mouldering to help our subjects get the idea, but so far all we've come up with is mold. Frankly, mold is much too moist to moulder. Especially in those dark, dank corners the mold is moist and tender and anything but flaky or mouldering.
At any rate, we're always on the lookout for new and exciting playthings for Lycanthropia Labs. Did you bring a Petri dish to pass?
If any old Prophets should find they've taken a wrong turn and ended up at the shadowed end of the street well, watch the moat and come right on up to the door-- yes, we'll leave the drawbridge down tonight. I've got a couple of old-fashioned treats to hand out. Hmm, lemme just brush some of the lint off of them...
A handful of Billeh's own, home-made, candy corn.
A Satanic sweet taste of blue.
Or, if you've no time for such recent archaeological treats perhaps you'd enjoy some well-aged scotch? 1786 was a very good year.
Or if you're already too jittery to hit the links you can stumble over the ginger hairball I left on the doorstep and have a bleary-eyed peek at the decorations...
Here's an old favorite that we keep hanging up over the staircase every year. It reminds us that there were years when the crop outnumbered the children.
Sadly, this year, we had to resort to trick photography to present the illusion that the lads were smaller than the harvest:
Not a bumper year for pumpkins, a bumper year for boys though. Another year of growth at this rate and the NBA scouts will be storming the castle. We'll distract them with pumpkins-- tell 'em they're giant basketballs. 'Course if the pumpkins continue to lose proportionate ground to my sons we'll just have to hope that the NBA scouts will be equally fascinated by golf balls. Blaze orange for deer season of course. Those deer hunters will shoot at anything, absolutely anything that's not orange.
Where was I?
Oh yes, pumpkins. I enjoy carving them.
This year I wasn't terribly ambitious with my carving, but I tried out a bit of decorative groove gouging:
Some friends stopped by over the weekend and we carved pumpkins together. Unfortunately, with our meager crop they brought their own to carve. It has been fun to watch the Halloween traditions of costume parties and carving gourds become adopted by the Czechs. And the friends who joined us not only brought their own pumpkins, they grew them. Here are a couple pictures of our creative carving:
One of these years I'd like to try to carve a portrait. Maybe next year the slugs will leave me a few more pumpkins to practice on.