Just Expressive

This year I’m seeing a lot of hate float around the internets about Halloween. I’m sure it was probably always there, it’s just that I am in more places online now, connected with more people, so I can more easily see differing opinions. I don’t really understand anyone disliking Halloween, given that it’s my favorite holiday, but I can barely tolerate Christmas, so obviously I understand the sentiment. What I don’t understand is people deciding that something about it is “wrong” or “weird”.

As I recently just carved my own pumpkin (above), I was excited to see the fancily carved pumpkins on DesignSponge until I read the part in the article where it says that dressing up to walk around the neighborhood at 28 is weird. I wonder what the hell it is at 35? I realize that at my age I’m entering the “appropriate vs not appropriate at her age” battlefield and I’m sure that some would speculate I entered it when I turned thirty but Halloween is about fantasy. It’s about FUN and being child-like. It’s a night of being able to cut loose and be whoever you want to be for that one night. It’s about flexing your imagination and I look forward to my costumes every year. Sometimes we have someplace to go (this year we will be at a wedding during the day) and sometimes we just go trick-or-treating with the nephews (used to be Sprog but he’s way too old for that, now) but I ALWAYS dress up.

Of course, I am some weird Rennie (dresses up in costume for Ren Fest) too, so I guess it’s just par for the weird course around here. Instead of being a crazy cat lady, I’ll be a crazy costume lady.

We are in the final stretch for the wedding of our friends D & Rob, which is taking place this Sunday (yes, Halloween) so this past weekend were the bachelor and bachelorette parties. Friday night was the bachelorette party, although I’m not really sure if it qualifies as a party if only three people make it and two of the three are me and the bachelorette. *sigh* Anyway, we did a murder mystery dinner on a boat in Kemah. It takes two hours, includes dinner and takes you on a tour of the bay. Pretty cool and a totally different thing to do. I got selected to be a person to act but I informed our waiter that D was the bachelorette while she was in the bathroom so they changed that for me, apparently Wes (our waiter) really took care of things because she ended up being the killer.

Us with the Captain at the end of the evening

D as Crystal saying her lines after she has revealed herself to be the killer

D, Crystal, with her husband Neil Diamond

D and Wes our manservant

Saturday night was the bachelor party and the boys had a mighty good time which required me to fetch them at after 3 am and not get home until near 4 am. I didn’t go to bed until 6 that morning because I drank coffee to be awake enough to drive. Needless to say Sunday was ROUGH but we finally figured out our costumes and have most of the pieces. There are just a couple more things I need to grab today, hopefully, and then work on tweaking what I already have. It is TOP SECRET, so no one will know what we are until the day of the wedding and y’all will get to see pics Monday after Halloween!

Shop news: First ring has been listed and three necklaces were posted yesterday, two of which have already sold!

Style Lush: Today’s post is pretty geeky, it goes up this afternoon, be sure to check it out.

I might have a small addiction to Costco. Like, I treat it as if it’s a regular grocery store, small addiction. In my defense, I am raising a growing teenage boy that has shot up 6 inches over the past however long and is still growing, so food is very important in our house. We recently were gifted a chest freezer which has helped immensely in my Costco shopping excursions, it’s freaking hard to fit bulk sized freezer items into a side by side freezer space but the other problem is the pantry.

When we bought this house I sacrificed A LOT in terms of space. I had a HUGE walk in pantry in my rent house, a pantry of dreams. A pantry I could tear up about, I miss it that much. In this house, I have barely a coat closet sized pantry, it’s pathetic, it’s also not conducive to bulk shopping or frankly shopping at the Indi-pak (Indian Pakistani market where I get all my spices and such for the huge amount of Indian cooking I have started doing). So the back half of my kitchen, also known as the breakfast nook, has turned into cluttered horrible looking storage. It’s been a nightmare and it’s been driving me nutso. Having a cluttered house has a none so good effect on my person but we haven’t had the funds to get what I really want to put along the back wall for storage so it’s just been a compounding problem. Over the weekend we just decided to suck it up and buy an interim solution, a rack shelving system, it’s not pretty but at least it would be functional, or so we thought.

We bought it at Target it, with its 350 lbs of support claims and it’s black powder coated finish to mimic the cabinets that are opposite so at least it wouldn’t be as heinous. Putting it together was a disaster, none of the support cups are straight, I am pretty sure none of the poles are straight so you can imagine they wouldn’t slide together properly which meant that “gentle tapping with a mallet” didn’t get the shelves to settle, proper tapping with a mallet meant bending…so much for that 350lbs. Instead of returning the cursed thing we opted to muscle through and just deal with the bends, the chips and the craptasticness of it all so we would at least have something to get the shit up off the floor and out of our way and then when we can afford something nicer, that piece of shit is going out to the curb. We have a similar system out in the garage but it’s a proper heavy duty system from a restaurant supply and there really is no substitute.

For now, I am ignoring all the flaws, the fact that it looks very college dorm-esque and reveling in my free from clutter floors, my open traffic path, my ORGANIZATION. OH HAPPY DAY.

I’d like this crow mobile from Pottery Barn Kids. Isn’t it divine?

As promised, even though I am on death’s door of sickness, I finished some Halloween goodies for the shop

A skull headband

Cauldron barrette

Spooky tree pin

and you can’t have Halloween without a jack-o-lantern

Jack-O-Lantern pin

I’m alive, though at the moment I resemble something closer to a zombie what functions on no sleep and Starbucks instead of brains. Sorry for the disappearing act around here I have lots to say just not lots to say if you get me.

In the interest of not disappearing completely from your consciousness here are some pics from the weekend. We met up with Candy and Connor at the pumpkin patch

The smile in that picture (from Sprog) was forced by pinching him during the picture, right in the delicate ticklish bit of his side which is why my hand is mysteriously absent. You also probably wouldn’t guess that we had just been embroiled in a huge screaming match not thirty minutes prior but oh, we were. Parenting a teenager is such a shitty, shitty job and man, some days I feel not up to the task. It’s not just him either, it’s the school (the counselor thinks a D is not a big deal, gee no wonder he doesn’t!) his teacher (I ACTUALLY CARE! ANSWER MY FUCKING E-MAIL) it’s trying to co-parent and parent with three disparate mindsets. I’m feeling so frayed at my edges.

Anyway…hopefully I’ll post tomorrow about adventures in shitty shelving systems and cleaning out some clutter (oooh, excitement!) and maybe have some new product to show off (NECKLACES! HALLOWEEN PINS! PONY TAIL HOLDERS!)

Today’s post on Style Lush is about Fall Wreaths and there are some totally awesome wreaths to drool over (and make for yourself!) go check it out.

So we got Sprog’s report card over the weekend. Can we just say, not pretty?

I don’t know how to deal with this shit y’all. I am all out of ideas. No amount of reward or punishment seems to work. Every grading period is a new battle ground and I am so fucking tired. He is a brilliant child, not in a blowing smoke, sunshine and rainbows up your ass kind of way, but truly he’s brilliant and yet, he’s the laziest-least motivated kid I have ever met in my life. He wants to go into animation, he WANTS to be an animator, work on video games, develop them and such? HE’S FAILING ANIMATION.

The mind, it fucking boggles, you know? What do you do with that? What do you do with a kid who fails at the thing he WANTS TO DO? It doesn’t have any home work, so it’s ALL AT SCHOOL! He has a F in WORLD HISTORY! WORLD HISTORY! The one taught by coaches and is nothing but fucking worksheets. It’s a joke. Yet, there he goes. And yet, geometry? B! Chemistry? High C! English II? A! WHAT THE FUCK? The hard shit? Passing with no problem. The easy shit or the shit that he supposedly actually cares about? Failure of epic proportions.

Sorry for all the cussing…I just am so frustrated I could scream. You know he can’t get his learner’s permit until he passes. He has been 15 since last school year and still not a full passing report card. Can you believe it? I can’t.

I want to cry.

So last week I was going to have a post, a morose post, about how Sprog was settling and how upset I was about it. He’s been really secretive about his phone lately, hiding it every time he gets or responds to a text and the thing goes off CONSTANTLY, so mom radar was pinging all over the place. One night he was being particularly sullen and refusing to go on our nightly do walk with us and his phone was just laying there, face down, on his floor and I grabbed it and ran. Yes I did. He caught up with me without too much issue, stupid furniture! Unfortunately for him, he is not yet able to overpower his momma and I was able to keep my hands on that phone through a bunch of wrestling. I even broke away from him twice and made it outside to the porch where Willy took over and ran with the phone down the street. HAHA! Don’t you wish we were your parents?

Anyway, we gave it back after that (he never did catch Willy) and went on our dog walk without incident but I made him come with me to the grocery store to pick up my prescription afterward and proceeded to talk to him about secrecy vs. privacy and why it makes us concerned, the things we might be concerned about and why it’s our job to make sure he’s safe. He denied anything was wrong, of course, and I let it drop after I spoke my peace. Later at the grocery store he stopped me by the frozen foods and told me he had something to confess. Oh boy.

It turns out that it was nothing that major…he had been talking to his ex-girlfriend again. The one that freaked out when he very rationally told her 15 was too young for a long-distance relationship. The one that caused a scene at school. The one that told him she cheated on him. The one that sent some guy to threaten him. So yeah, nothing major.

Oh christ. As my eyebrows met my hairline in concern I rattled off all this information and he proceeded to say that he thought she might have changed…that she was acting different. I wish I could have caught on tape my bitter, bitter laugh at that little comment, friends. Poor child. So I told him that of course she would act that way, how else would crazy get him back into her clutches? Once again I dropped it but anyone that knows me should know by now that wasn’t the end of it for me. I waited about a day or two and then brought up all her other winning traits he had forgotten about…the incessant neediness, the constant thinking she was fat, the constant texting and if he didn’t immediately respond the demands of what he was doing and where he was, the flaking out on plans at the last minute, the drama of trying to pick her up and her not even being home, etc. Once I made my point, I dropped it again.

Y’all, I am happy to report that he told her they would not be getting back together upon her return this Friday as she was expecting. The requisite freak-out occurred as expected and he laughed about it. He also told me that it had nothing to do with anything I said, but I’m fine with that. I’m fine with him still being unable to admit he listens to me, so long as he does it.

This month the is the one year anniversary of Style Lush and being as I am super proud of our site and they are so kind as to help me advertise my little Etsy shop, I offered to toss in a couple of items for a giveaway. So, if you are interested, you could win one of my pins or barrettes!

And, I just spent ALL DAY yesterday sewing in preparation, there are a bunch of new things in the shop today and everything!

So click here for details and to enter. Good luck!

It’s not done yet, but here are the pics y’all requested

Morgue sign on the front door

Left side of the cemetery with the new dungeon sconces, pirate skeleton, wire and rope spider web (hard to see) and skeleton greeter by the door.

Close-up of the pirate and one of the sconces

The reaper that watches over the right side of the cemetery

The other giant spider web

I am starting to work on the inside. Still don’t know how it’s going to work out since there is hardly room for all of my inside stuff this year…but hopefully there will be inside stuff soon. Today we launched FOOD LUSH which I am really excited about so be sure to check that out. I’ll have a post up today about Vegetable Pot Pie and another on Thursday about Pantry Staples (this will be an ongoing series, I am starting with vinegars). I am still writing for Style Lush, as well, so remember to check there tomorrow!

The single best month of the year!

I have spent the morning decorating the outside of my house. The cemetery is up. The grim reaper, the pirate skeleton, the skeleton door greeter, the morgue sign on the door, all there. Two giant wire and rope spider webs are also out as well as some creepy dudes hanging in my trees, skeletons in the cemetery and a black pumpkin that says ‘wicked’ on it.

The boys need to add lights and spider webbing and then it will be complete.

I haven’t tackled the inside of the house yet, my Etsy shop has taken over the dining room, the PS3 has taken over most of the top of the entertainment center and I have been storing stuff in the open space above my cabinets. I have a feeling decorating inside is going to be complex this year.