October

welcome to my house
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Annie came over yesterday and helped me decorate the house for Halloween. This is the first year that I've really decorated this house, since last year I had only just moved in mid October and all I could manage was the bat flag and the skeleton creature with too many legs. Oh, and the giant, light up, moving spider on the back porch, who has stayed right there, dark and unmoving, since last year. So I was psyched to open my Halloween bins and pull out assorted skulls and flags and Frankenstein, who sings when you knock on the door, infuriating the entire neighborhood and the poor old ghost, who used to move and moan so happily up and down his rope but now is arthritic and old and can only get halfway across, creakily. I didn't take him out this year. Annie was a great help; I wouldn't have thought of sticking the skulls on the sunflower stalks without her and they look fantastic, as does the finished scarecrow, who is so actually scary that I'm a little concerned for the kids across the street. Bwah ha ha ha! Look, Halloween is my major religious holiday. I like to go all out.

In the spirit of Halloween, my house or my brain or something has been inhabited by goblins: I'm missing an entire chuck roast and a pack of cigarettes. Stands to reason that I would be haunted by carnivorous chain smoking poltergeists. I mean, I know I bought a roast on Saturday. I even have the receipt and, because I was irritated with my own failure to cook it yesterday, I was actually, in a rare display of housewifelyness, going to put it in the crockpot this morning despite the googling and resultant awful recipes (I don't know about you, but I'd be deeply ashamed to put a recipe on the internet that said: beef roast, Liptons' onion soup mix, cream of mushroom soup, put all in crock pot for a while, yum. I mean, come on. Add a fucking onion. Make up a measurement or something. Have some recipe pride.) Anyway, well, when I went to pull it out of the fridge I discovered that it was gone. Perhaps it never existed. Maybe I've slipped over from an alternate dimension again - why, oh why, can I never end up in the one where I'm married to Johnny Depp and just won the lottery? No, I have to keep landing in the dimension where everything is mundanely awful and the most interesting part of my weekend involves a missing chuck roast that I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I would eat anyway. Ah well. It will be an eternal mystery, since it's not in the car, either; maybe I left it at Ingles.

And then there are the cigarettes: did I indeed buy two packs at BJs on Friday night after I left the Admiral? Then did I smoke two and a half packs in what remained of Friday night? I grant you I smoke a lot but that seems extreme even for me. However, I don't really know, which is why the smart goblins move into houses like mine and not houses that belong to super organized people who know where their meat is at all times. All hail Eris. She's living in my basement again.