Sorry about the radio silence, but I’m building Halloween.  Let this rockin’ little dance number salve your grieving soul in my absence.

I’ve had a few brushes with living nature the last week or so.  Nothing as severe as baboons flinging poop at me from the roof-line or anything… think a little more suburban.

Was talking on the phone and wandering around the house as I did so, out of a lack of anything better to do with myself, and stopped to peek out of my back patio door… to see a possum (an “opossum”, to be accurate) the size of a pug doing a slow balancing act as he walked along the top of the wooden fence between my yard and my neighbors.  This was a big boy!  This also explains why I occasionally find little dug-out spots in the yard and in the garden — no growing plants were harmed, but they were a little dug out around the roots — as something was foraging for insects and worms.

I stood and watched, entranced, as he climbed down a tree trunk and into the yard.  The spell was broken however when he started nosing around our newly acquired baby banana-tree plant, which was still in it’s original nursery pot and not very stable or able to be dug in without possible damage.  The second I opened the door, he quickly scurried off.

Last week, we watched a hawk hunt the doves that live in the trees in our back yard, scissoring through the branches and causing a huge ruckus among its prey.  More power to him, as the doves are obnoxious pains in the ass, and dumber than a sack of hammers.

I also had the startling pleasure a few months back, while exiting the parking garage where I work, of rounding a corner in time to watch a hawk take off from the concrete in front of me with a pigeon in its talons… again, I wish him much future success as the pigeons that live in the parking garage do nothing but scratch up the roofs of cars with their claws, and leave a pleasant layer of shit over everything.  Between the hawk and the cat, I can only hope the population dwindles rapidly.

Yeah, I know, I’m practically Doctor Dolittle.

Not the retarded Eddie Murphy version, though.

In an apparent continuation of pimping webcomics I enjoy, here’s another: Least I Could Do.

Chronicling the day-to-day life story of Rayne Summers, the primary theme of the strip is sexuality… especially the promiscuity of the primary character.  It’s snort-out-loud funny at times, and quite touching (figuratively and literally) at others.

While always written by Ryan Sohmer, the comic has been drawn by three artists through the years… the most current being Lar deSouza– and in my opinion he’s the best… the meld of visual and writing comedy just gelled when they teamed up.  The comic is updated seven days a week.  The duo of Ryan and Lar also publish a second webcomic — Looking for Group, a fantasy based strip that is updated twice weekly.

I suggest, if you’re interested in reading the back-archives to catch up, starting HERE.  That marks the beginning of Lar’s takeover of drawing the comic.

… hooray for taco night!  Take my advice, add diced mushrooms and grated carrots to your simmering ground meat.  Trust me on this.

Martin Whitmore — my obnoxiously talented friend and illustrator — has been developing a d20 zombie apocalypse game for about a year now.  The official title is “Against the Dead”.  I know, I’m excited too. *glee*

He’s already amassed 70+ original illustrations for the book, and is looking to “flesh it out” with some more zombie-massacre (and flesh-eating) action shots.  In order to generate some capital to offset the costs of putting the book together, he’s offering — for a  nominal fee — to put a custom illustration of YOU in the book… as either a survivor or one of the unholy walking dead:

In both cases you can make requests as to the details of the drawing, which I will fill to the best of my ability with respect to what we still need in the book. Feel free to suggest weapons, equipment — whatever would make you happy. If I can make it suit the book, I will. Depending on how many people are interested, I may put multiple subjects into a single illustration – we do need some action shots of survivors killing zombies, and vice-versa!

$20 to be a zombie, $30 to be a survivor.  Your donation gets you into the pages of Against the Dead, as well as a signed print of your illustration.

Go HERE for more details, and to get your ugly mug into the book.

We are hosting Halloween this year.  It’s the first Halloween part I’ve thrown since 2004.  I’m very excited.

Sweets and I wanted the invitations to be very special, so we set out to design our own — simple, stylish and attention getting.  A black outer card with an orange inner card, the invitation printed in Gothic script and a jack-o-lantern face hand cut from the facing page.  The invitation was sheathed in a black envelope and sealed with burgundy wax using a Celtic knot-work imprinted stamp.  The invite was then tethered by rough twine fashioned into a noose to a miniature pumpkin inscribed with “A Summoning…”

We also wanted to  arrange a special delivery for our friends in town, so we took one evening after work and drove from house to house.  Sweets would sneak up and deposit the envelope with the pumpkin resting atop it on the doorstep, then we zoomed off.  Once clear of the delivery zone we texted: “You may want to check your doorstep, we saw some shady characters about, just a minute ago!” Only two of our marks were baffled enough to respond with confusion… admittedly, they weren’t home a the time.

The best part, we managed to have 100% success making the deliveries undetected — with he exception of the one person who we didn’t trust leaving the invite on her apartment doorstep, so we hand delivered that one to her at work.

A fine start to the Halloween season, I’d say.

It’s October, and October means two things… Halloween and Ren Faire — not necessarily in that order.  We’ve pulled the boxes of Halloween decorations down from the attic and started rummaging through them.  The living room is a glorious mess.

Since the storm 4+ years ago I haven’t had the same manic motivation for Halloween that I have always had.  Maybe it was knocked out of me by depression, maybe my brain was too busy operating in life-support mode to devote the neural energies toward it.  Maybe seeing those containers of useless Halloween decorations stacked on the lawn of my shattered house — my shattered life — perfectly intact next to the ruins of the rest of my possessions, the things that I would have happily traded every Halloween for the previous decade to have back, evidence of a lifetime of living… maybe that banished Halloween from my soul.

Lady said it best at the time:

I wanted to set those containers of Christmas and Halloween decorations on fire, seeing them sitting there on the lawn while we dredged through the ruined remains of the house.  Fat load of good they were to us, and a reminder of all the useful things we lost.

But regardless, we took them with us.  They were still reminders of good times gone by, every bit as useful in that regard as the photographs we lost.  How can you not go through your Christmas decorations and not remember when you got an ornament, or who gave you that star for the tree?

Two years ago I took part in staging Halloween with my friends who were hosting a party at their place.  I summoned the energy and as much enthusiasm as I could muster and built lots of great props and things, but I was still underwhelmed regardless.  The enthusiasm was more for the creative outlet than for Halloween, but it didn’t quite gel for me.  I felt out of sync with the occasion.  It felt like I had doused the flame further, rather than rekindling it.

Last year was the first year I actually took the decorations down from the attic and put a few out, but nothing like years past.  For some reason those containers of decorations seemed so large, and yet so full of stuff that I couldn’t be bothered to put out for the holiday, to make my home festive for the time of tear I looked forward to more than any other.  So many cheap and cheesy baubles, almost embarrassing for a guy pushing 40 to have around.  So many lights that would be more of a hassle to hang and take down, than to enjoy while they were up.  And what for?  No party of my own to decorate for… no constant stream of people coming around on the weekends during the month of October to enjoy it with me, to share my juvenile enthusiasm.

Last year I was a passive participant in the Halloween party, dressing up and showing up but not contributing.  The energy still wasn’t there.  It was just another day.

But I saw a glimmer, somewhere deep down in the darkness.  There was something there, it was weak and faint — but it was there.

This year, I feel like someone recovering from an illness: the will to move and act is there, but the body is still run down… yet gaining strength every day.  My head is getting into the right space — I can feel the tumblers clicking into place.  A little over a year ago my inner 8-year-old was given cotton candy and an espresso — by the cutest and most wonderful enabler ever to cross the Atlantic — and he’s been set loose to recharge my soul with his manic energy.

My soul has been running on fumes for too long — 4+ years to be specific.

I’m getting my juvenile enthusiasm back.  Who cares if a guy pushing 40 decorates his house with purple lights, skulls and crappy polyester cobwebs for one month out of every year?  Who cares if he dresses up like a tard for a party and has a marvelous time hanging out with others who dress just as mentally deranged?  Who cares if he gets covered in pumpkin guts carving jack-o-lanterns into the wee hours?

He cares.

He cares very much to decorate, dress silly, and murder pumpkins for his own enjoyment — anyone who doesn’t approve can just take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.

I have always nurtured my inner-child… spoiled him to the point of being a brat.  He stopped coming around for a while, but has been visiting with increasing frequency the last two years.  I’ve missed him so much.

Now if you don’t mind, there is an 8-year-old in my head who is giggling at fart jokes, and he needs to have his espresso topped off.

Well, to keep up the blogging streak I seem to have stumbled into, I’m going to continue to talk about gardening.

For just a bit.

Our seedlings are doing well, with one exception… the onions.  We’re on our third try of germinating seeds and starting seedlings as a result of very few seedlings surviving from the first two batches.  They germinate perfectly, lovely little green shoots pop up, and a few weeks later they sort of rot away.  At first I thought it was a result of too much water, but honestly once the seeds germinate and I get shoots, I mist them daily and give them a light dose of water (in the well drained seedling bags we make) a few times a week.  The other seedling varieties are thriving where these are dying.

After a little homework, I think I have the solution.  Light.  Lacking a greenhouse, we have to raise all our seedlings inside, and the best place is near the west-facing windows of our dining room where we get the most light during the day.  It’s not as much light as I’d like, but we’ve had decent success there.  Doing some poking around online, it seems a lot of folks who start onions from seed use grow lights to get them to the point where they can be transplanted outside… depending on the “season” your onions are (long or short), it can be up to 12 – 14 hours a day.  We don’t get anywhere near that much light, and with the glorious rain we’ve been having the sky is more often than not overcast these days.  I think the poor little guys are just dying off from light starvation.

So, I’ll be setting up an inexpensive grow-light system in the next few days that will hopefully let me generate strong onion seedlings, and will more than likely give a good healthy boost to the tomato, broccoli and Brussels sprouts seedlings.  Stick it on a timer, and there’ll be nothing to monitor except growth.

There, that wasn’t so bad, now was it?

So, yeah, apparently I can’t stop talking about my garden.  Suck it up, this is my blog and I’ll talk about my dry elbow skin if I feel the desire to.

I’ve been moisturizing… so there.

Anyway, I had the presence of mind to bring out the camera this morning while the pumpkin blossoms were still open and looking beautiful.  They are the most shocking shade of yellow-gold contrasting against the greens and browns of the surrounding yard, and they are HUGE.

Also, our seedlings are doing very well.  The broccoli and Brussels sprouts are growing like weeds.  Meanwhile the tomatoes are filling out nicely and growing more true leaves.  Another few weeks, and they’ll be ready to plant outside.

My constant, obnoxious companion while I work in the yard is the neighbor’s dog — a pitbull mix — named “Noisy Bitch” (ok, more like I named her that, but it has stuck).  From the moment she hears me open the patio door she starts barking incessantly.  I’ve tried making friends with her, to no avail.  She will stop barking as long as I bribe her with homemade treats — which she will happily and gently take from me through the fence — only to have her start yapping again shortly thereafter.

She has had some training as I can, most of the time, get her to sit on command in exchange for treats.  When she does sit, or otherwise obey a command, it’s like I’m using some sort of mind control to forcibly make her obey… the look on her face speaks volumes, as if to say “I’m sitting, but I’m doing so against my will, and I’m getting no pleasure from this humiliation at all… now give me the goddamn treat.”

I have on occasion used negative reinforcement on her when she barks or lunges, such as a quick shot of water from a spray bottle while I said “no” in a stern alpha voice.  Oh, she REALLY doesn’t like that, but she backs off and barks, growls, snarls and looks for all the world like she’s gonna jump the fence and go for my throat.  It got to the point where all I needed to do was show her the bottle and she’d back away noisily.  Now, I’ve abandoned the bottle, and when she won’t obey a command or barks viciously at me, I toss the treats earmarked for her over to Killer (again, our nickname for her), the other neighbor dog that went from barking at us from a distance, to practically hopping the fence to have us pet her.

I don’t think I’ll ever gain her confidence and make peace, but we’ll see.  For now, here’s a picture of that loving, gentle creature known as Noisy Bitch.