7 posts tagged “halloween”

Via Boing Boing through Organic Armor. Oh yeah. If I had a poochie I would submit them to this. :)

A friend sent these along. Some of them you may have seen elsewhere, and I have no clue where that elsewhere may be, but here are some really clever pumpkins for your viewing pleasure:

So Joe and I went down to the Boston Common yesterday where they were working to break Keene, NH's record for

the most jack-o-lanterns (previously 29,000). You can't imagine how many pumpkins we saw. And all the little kids in halloween costumes to boot. It was a lot of fun...I'm really glad we went down to check it out.

The contest was sponsored by Life is good to raise money for the Sunshine Camp, a retreat for children with life-threatening illnesses. We were down during the day at first and they had pumpkins all over the place. They

were setting them out in little fields in diferent parts of the Common. In the middle of everything was a huge tower full of carved pumpkins. They had a fun little pumpkin maze set up for kids, where you had to find your way through a path of carved pumpkins. There was face-painting, a costume contest and all the usual stuff for the little ones, but what was really amazing were the pumpkins.

You could either bring your carved pumpkins down with you or they were carving pumpkins on site

there. In some of the pictures you can tell...the faces were made from punched holes. At the end, it was a real rush...we overheard one worker at 6:30 saying that they needed 1400 more pumpkins to beat the record, but that they had 3,000 on the way. And sure enough, we passed a truck with pallets of pumpkins being unloaded. Once it was dark they started lighting the fields of pumpkins. You've never seen so many lighted pumpkins! There were thousands and thousands of them all over the place. It was really beautiful to see. Normally we hate huge mobs of people and tons of screaming kids but it was great.

What I really loved most of all was how happy all these silly vegetables made people. Everyone seemed so jubilant and pleased to see all the lighted pumpkins. Sure, you had the occasional screaming child but they were just tired of being dragged around all over, especially after they had been racing through the pumpkin fields. It was a really great evening, and in the end, Boston took the fire out of Keene's attempt, with an overwhelming 30,128 pumpkins lighting up the Common.

Follow that with a really great dinner at Eastern Standard and you have an awesome October evening.

I was in Canada all week and will blog about that later!

So we're going to a party this year...but I've nothing to wear! I went as a devil last year and Joe went as a zombie but now we're fresh out of clever ideas for this year!

Any advice for costumes? Something clever or cute would be great. Nothing too crazy or obnoxious.

And no slot machines. ;-)

Nothing like public display to keep these things top of mind, is there?

1. Write the query letter for my non-fiction book so I can find an agent (which I have been procrastinating on
   

   The Mark of Insanity
   FOREVER. For some reason it scares the holy living shit out of me).
   
2. Get thee to the gym! 5x-6x a week, no excuses  (I've been averaging 4x a week and need to step it up).
   
3. Create the loose outline for my NANOWRIMO novel so come November, I can just sit down and write it. I've also just realized that I need to get my new NANO shirt...the 2006 ones are out now!
4. Work with Greg on the backlog of Plum Ruby Review submissions. We've been on hiatus and with Angela giving us a gorgeous new design we should be ready in mid-Nov for a Fall 2006 issue!
   
5. Write three more mobile marketing articles. (This is really a work goal, but I don't want this to slip into November). It's pretty sad when you know that whatever I write in that area will go into print but I still can't manage to churn it out.
   

Should be a packed month with all of that and the fact that we've got Jon Stewart coming up next week, two parties--one going away and one Halloween (any ideas for a costume???) and I think we're going to have to drag friends to King Richard's Faire for some good cheesy medieval fun. Oh, and I have to go to Canada for work somewhere in the midst of all that...

The coolest thing about my list of goals is that 4 out of 5 are directly related to my true passion--writing. Very fucking cool.   

Since I know that far too many of my friends catch up on my life primarily through my blog, here is the latest:

1. I acquired a shiny new one of these this weekend:

My 20g is nearly two years old now and it started skipping and cutting off songs and making a loud clicking noise. Hard drive dying, sigh. I use it pretty much every day for several hours (at the gym and also while I'm at work to drown out cube noise and to help when I'm writing), so I guess it was about time.