Yeah!

I have the Halloween decorations up y'all, and they are awesome. The rest of the pictures are here. I am all happy and shit, because there is just something about decorating in a madly over the top tacky fashion for Halloween (and Christmas) that thrills me to the core. It's a sad Oedipal (Electral, actually, I guess) drama, really: it's what happens when a kid like me is raised by my mother who has perfect and infallible taste. That and it's the culmination of years of work - I've been slowly buying up clearance Halloween and Christmas stuff for years. Finally I have enough where my house is to the point where people slow down as they pass and say, "Well, whoa. Damn. Can you imagine what kind of freak goes to all that trouble?"

A is embarrassed; M will be embarrassed when he comes home. Bwah ha ha ha ha! Parenthood is such joy! They both used to be my cohorts in this, my decorating companions, my shopping buddies - and now they're all cool and horrified by the fact that god mom people are looking at our house why can't you just be normal? Eventually they will have houses of their own, which will be minimally and tastefully decorated, and then they will have children with a strange atavistic longing for the flashy, the tacky, the cheap, the OMG yes! It moves and blinks and lights up purple!

The only problem with my wonderful Halloween decorations is that every single damn thing makes noise, and every noise sets Jackson off into baying. Also, okay, I sympathize with my friend J, who hates my Frankenstein door knocker - that plays Men at Work Who Can It Be Now and then it yells Go Away! Isn't it great?! - with such a passion that she basically refuses to come to my house during the month of October. I called her up and said, "I unpacked your favorite Halloween decoration today!" and she said, "Oh my god. That horrible thing. I can't stand it." and I laughed evilly at some length. But even I must admit that Frankenstein singing, the traveling ghost moaning and the laughing pumpkin, my oldest decoration and the magical possessor of the AA batteries that lasted ten years , gets a bit cacophonous at times and so I have to turn it all off. Which is a pity. But the giant spider still crawls, the skull still glows, and I'm totally cheerful.

Also, I scared the pants off A when she came home from work. I was sitting on the porch and I knew she couldn't see me, so as she came up towards the door I stood up and did my best Dracula, arm to the chin and all, "Gooooood Eeeeeevening!" She screamed, even though I'm wearing a Hawaii T-shirt, combat pants and a plaid flannel. Ha!