October 31, 2017
October 30, 2017
October 29, 2017
October 28, 2017
October 27, 2017
I’m writing this entry from a hotel bed in Springfield, Massachusetts. My wife is asleep beside me, and my two children are across the room asleep on the foldout couch. We’re here because my eldest is riding in a horse show tomorrow, so we thought we’d make it more of an event for her and stay the night before.
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| Happy Halloween! |
I think my favorite moment of today, this Halloween Itself, was in the morning, not in the evening. I walked my eldest to school because she needed help carrying in a project. She'd created a diorama based on the story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which Lindsey and I admittedly cajoled her into reading. But her diorama is pretty cool. I think it will be a permanent fixture in the house.
Walking onto the school property took me back thirty years. Or to the most recent Disney Channel Halloween Movie I'd watched. It was a crisp morning, the property was framed by trees in autumn hues. Brown leavings scudded across the parking lot and under the tires of yellow buses. Costumed students lined up ready for the first bell. This was Halloween morning at school, every child itching in anticipation of the night's door-to-door candy ritual.
At lunch time, I tried to escape work to hit up the local Barnes and Noble to see if my book, Death and Douglas, was indeed on the shelves on this, its official street date. I couldn't free up the time, though. Still, me, my agent, my publisher, and many of you guys helped make a big deal of it on the socials (so thanks!).
But that evening's adventure was cool, too. My youngest went trick-or-treating as Belle from Beauty and the Beast. She's way into dresses, the more ornate, the better. She'd wear hoop skirts every day if we let her. And she's basically been wearing her Belle costume for a month and a half. My eldest went as a pirate. It was her third costume this year. She started with a werewolf costume, then by the time her first Halloween party rolled around, she'd changed to a witch costume. And then she become obsessed with being a pirate, which is what she went as tonight. I ended up wearing her old werewolf mask.
Honestly, trick-or-treating tonight felt weird, more like a test run for Halloween trick-or-treating in the future. It was our first season in this new neighborhood, and we didn't join up with any other families. It was just the four of us in new neighborhoods where the houses are more spread out and the trick-or-treaters sparser than we're used to. But we put in a solid hour filling up those plastic pumpkins, until Belle was too tired to walk and too scared of the dark. By the time we'd returned, our neighbors had basically cordoned off the cul-de-sac by dragging out a fire table, and hanging out while giving candy to kids so that they wouldn't have to trudge through the whole neighborhood to fill their sacks.
We hung out with them for a bit and then came home to light our decorations one last time and watch It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Once they were abed, Lindsey and I realized we had no cordials to send off the season, so I made a quick run to the liquor store. That's when I realized Halloween was over, despite the black cat ears on the cashier. I bought martini fixins. Basic, dirty martinis. I mean, sure, I could have bought caramel apple martini fixins. Or something pumpkiny. But I went with a basic drink.
The Halloween Season is just over for me after trick-or-treating is done. Even back when we had no kids, the second there was no more tiny monsters coming to our door, it seemed over. The magic run out. Sometimes we tried to keep the Jack-O's lit by watching something spooky paired with some Halloween comestible, but it never really works like we want it to. Feels forced. The last trick-or-treater more often than not just seems to be the end of the Halloween Season for us.
And we'll never have the 2017 Halloween Season ever again. Makes me wish I'd kept a diary. Happy Halloween, boils and ghouls.
October 30, 2017
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| Wish I'd seen these witches weather the storm. Must've looked terrifying. |
As presumed based on the storm last night, we did awake to some serious devastation in my state, my neighborhood, and my yard...in that order of severity.
In my state, hundreds of thousands of people awoke without power, schools were closed for the day, and there were downed trees everywhere.
In my neighborhood, the biggest victim was the house two doors down from ours, who had a large tree fall directly on their house. They seem to be okay, though. The tree is gone now, leaving smashed gutters, a broken roof line, and a front yard that will never be the same, but they might have been lucky overall as far as the damage (considering they were first really unlucky).
In my yard, it was my Halloween decorations that took the brunt. The big spider web fell down, the witches were reduces to a melted pile of black cloth, mums were toppled, skeletons fell, jack-o-lanterns were moldy and sunken-in, and foam tombstones were strewn across the yard, in addition to a forest's worth of falling branches.
This is the third Halloween season out of ten for me in New England that have ended in storms. There was the Great Oct-snow-ber of 2011 were it snowed bad enough that they pushed off trick-or-treat for a week. No kids came by my door that strange November night. And then there was the fabled Hallowcane/Frankenstorm of 2012, which was relatively minor for all the names it had, but that just might be my memory smoothing things out.
Ending a Halloween Season on a storm seems right. As long as there is enough calm for trick-or-treating, as seems to be the case this year.
We headed out to Target after work to pick up some snacks for our eldest's school Halloween party tomorrow, as well as snacks for ourselves on this Halloween eve. Target had a surprising amount of Halloween still out, although you could see the Christmas creeping. While we were checking out, I saw a woman walk in with a God's-honest Christmas T-shirt on. She immediately squealed and ran to the dollar bins at the front of the store, which were packed with Christmas gewgaws. It made me nostalgic for August 31.
Back home, we ate pizza with the kids and watched the new SpongeBob Halloween special ("The Legend of Boo-kini Bottom"), which had a delightfully throwback vibe with its puppetry and stop motion, and then we sent them off to bed and watched The Babysitter on Netflix, which was pretty good, but would probably have been great had it been directed by anybody except McG. Then we went an episode deeper into Stranger Things 2, where still not much is happening in any direction, but we're having a good time.
As much as I want Halloween tomorrow, I don't want Halloween Eve to end.
October 29, 2017
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| Jerk took up three spaces. |
It's almost midnight as I write this, and through the open window behind me, I can hear a terrible storm. Hear, hell, I can feel it through that window: pouring rain and roaring wind. I've even heard multiple trees fall in the surrounding forest. Might wake up tomorrow to some serious devastation. Of course, waking up means I'd have to go to bed at some point tonight, and I hate doing that.
Most of the day here was steady wet, but nothing too apocalyptic. And that was fine. We had indoor plans, anyway. We headed to the multi-haunt Fright Kingdom, which I've written about here on OTIS before, but this time it was for its Hardly Haunted event, which is basically a Halloween party for kids with trick-or-treating through a slightly de-scarified subset of its haunted houses. I'm going to write about the experience tomorrow. It'll be my last full OTIS Halloween post, not counting the final wrap up.
On our watch list for the day, we saw Michael Jackson's Halloween special with the kids (and about which I have no idea what to say), continued our way through the second episode of Stranger Things 2 (so far nothing's happened except lots of 80s references and updates on all the characters, but, man, it's so good to be back in that world), and we also randomly watched a show on Point Pleasant's Mothman called Myth or Monster on the Travel Channel (we live in a bizarre time where the Mothman is, like, really mainstream somehow).
And that leaves two more days of this, the Halloween Die-ary. I'm not going to know what to do with the commentary running through my head every night when I stop doing this.
October 28, 2017
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| Without a doubt, 2017 was the year of the clown. |
Today was my eldest's first horse show. She's been riding for, I don't know, half a year or so maybe? Not long. But they thought it would be good experience for her. It was certainly a brand new experience for me, this world was, but I've learned that I do love walking down aisles of earthy giant creatures with deadly clubs at the end of each foot.
Even better, many of the stables at this competition decorated their area of the massive barn (it was at the Big E in Springfield, MA, the site of the largest agricultural fair on the East Coast--even has life-sized replicas of every state house in New England's six states). I posted on Twitter some of the decorations from my kid's stable, but above is one from a different stable. Clown-themed. And look, they went old-school IT for that clown at the bottom. For a sport dominated by tween girls, this is really, really impressive.
Anyway, it was a great time and Esme won a few ribbons. From there, we split the family again. Lindsey stuck around with Esme for a bunch of post-show activities (including a Halloween party where her entire stable was dressing as zombie pirates), while I headed home with my youngest, since I'd have more luck carting nitroglycerin around that fray while roller skating than making my youngest hang out during all those activities.
On the way home, her and I stopped at Springfield Cemetery, which I've never been to. Mostly, I stopped to see the grave of board game pioneer Milton Bradley, but the cemetery itself was a great one, especially at this time of year.
Anyway, after catching some more Hocus Pocus with my youngest, I put her to bed and then it was decision time again: Screw around and watch some horror flicks or do something productive writing wise. Strangely, I chose the latter. To me writing about spooky stuff is just as much of a seasonal activity as watching it. Which is why we'll have a new OTIS Halloween Season post up tomorrow.
October 27, 2017
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| Halloween party in my hotel room! |
I’m writing this entry from a hotel bed in Springfield, Massachusetts. My wife is asleep beside me, and my two children are across the room asleep on the foldout couch. We’re here because my eldest is riding in a horse show tomorrow, so we thought we’d make it more of an event for her and stay the night before.
Because of work and driving the two and a half trafficky
hours to Springfield (home of the new Dr. Seuss Museum and the not-new Dr.Seuss sculpture garden, by the way), I actually thought it was going to be a
non-Halloween day. But then I walked into the hotel room to find bags of candy
corn and mellowcreme pumpkins awaiting me. My family had come down earlier
in the day, and my father had driven up from Maryland for the show, and he’d
brought the candy for me/the girls.
Not only did that make this day an official Halloween day,
it saved me from having my first ever candy cornless Halloween Season. I don’t
know why. We just never bought a bag of it this year. Like, I can live without the
taste of the candy, but I can’t live without the sight of it. I usually need
bowls of it surrounding me throughout September and October that I can run my fingers through like it's Leprechaun treasure. I mean, look at
today. A couple of bags of them kept my Halloween spirit going strong and were
a great accompaniment to us starting Stranger Things 2 on a laptop on the hotel
bed. Halloween doesn’t care where you are.
I was going to spend the rest of the night polishing up a Halloween Season article for posting, but realized I left some of the photos I needed on a computer back home, so nothing’s going on the main page today. That’s fine, though, I guess. More time to eat candy corn and watch horror movies on my laptop.
I was going to spend the rest of the night polishing up a Halloween Season article for posting, but realized I left some of the photos I needed on a computer back home, so nothing’s going on the main page today. That’s fine, though, I guess. More time to eat candy corn and watch horror movies on my laptop.
October 26, 2017
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| Not pictured: Tube of orange and black "Fall Gummy Worms." |
Another day of complete morning-to-night rain. And I spent most of this day behind a set of window wipers, driving around the dark grayness and listening to the first four (of seven) episodes of the "Inside The Exorcist" podcast. This is from Mark Ramsey and the folks at Wondery, who did the mindbogglingly great "Inside Psycho." These short-run podcasts aren't just self-taught movie critics in a room talking casually about movies at random. These podcasts are tightly written, produced, and performed one-man radio plays that tell the stories of both the inspirations for and the making of these extremely complex and legendary movies. It's, I don't know how to describe it, very adult, I guess, for a genre for whose commentary is mostly fannish gabbling.
I returned home to find a nice gift from an OTIS reader: A box of Halloween candy and an Edgar Allan Poe-themed Halloween card. So thoughtful. I love that candy ax.
And then Lindsey and I finished up the last part of four of the Expedition Unknown: The Hunt for Extraterrestrials. Ended kind of cheesily, what with it pretending to break into Roswell rooms locked long ago and catching UFOs on camera, but despite the overdone drama, a really good show.
Tomorrow's the last weekend before Halloween. I'm not telling you anything you don't know there. I'm spending most of it at a horse show. That's something you didn't know. Unless it's the second time you're reading this entry.
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| I forgot to take any photos today, so I rushed out just now and snapped this pic. |
Man. Raiiiii-neeeeee day today. Like all day. And it's still going. I have the window behind my desk open, and it's just constant wet static in the dark. Really nice.
After work today, the family split in two. Lindsey took our seven-year-old to her riding lesson, and I took our three-year-old out on some errands. We stopped at Macy's...and it was completely decorated for Christmas. We stopped at Barnes & Noble...and it had all of its Christmas books out. We stopped at McDonald's...and it had no appropriately themed Happy Meal toy. Not even those modern equivalents of the McBoo Pail they've been handing out the past few years. If it weren't for the weather, I'd say Halloween must be over. But that can't be true. We still have six days. You can wreak a whole lotta Halloween havoc in six days. So back off, Santa.
Anyway, my kid and I took our fast food back home and watched the new Disney show Vampirina. It's one of those plastic-looking CGI cartoons that they do a lot of for kids shows, but it's basically an Addams Family type of story. We never get bored of the spooky but well-meaning family who doesn't fit in trope. And here's hoping we never do.
My night was overall a bit too G-rated for my taste with its Happy Meals and vampire kid shows and children's books section full of Elf on the Shelfs, so I finished the night in a very R place...with Brian Yuzna's 1989 flick Society. Not exactly the type of movie that you're supposed to pair with a rainstorm, but, to its credit, it's kind of an unpairable movie.
October 24, 2017
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| I forgot my presentation remote control and had to stay behind the podium, else I would have paced the stage like it was a TED Talk. |
Holy crow, I don't think we could have had better Halloween weather than today. Like Skid Row, I woke up to the sound of pouring rain. Then that stopped, and the day grew gusty, like "hear it whistle around the house" gusty. Like "shaking yellow and red leaves off the trees in constant showers of autumn" gusty. Like "making my 12-foot-tall inflatable ghoul flow eerily in the wind" gusty. Once night fell, we had a full-on torrential downpour, one which eventually found me in the car driving home from my presentation, my eyes trying to make sense of the road through the rain and the dark and the wipers, while listening to an episode of the Ghosts in the 'Burbs podcast.
The event went well, I think. The Lowell National Historic Park Theater was a great facility, purpose-built for this kind of talk, small and cozy, but somehow fitting in two-level theater-style seating, a large screen, and a stage. Had about 45 people in attendance, including some OTIS readers! One reader who found OTIS through that episode of New Hampshire Chronicle that I was on came up to me afterward and told me that after reading about the Westford Edgar Allan Poe memorial in The New England Grimpendium, he went out to find it one night, only to be questioned by the police as he sat in his car on the side of the swiping through the photos he had just taken of it."Basically," he finished, "my last encounter with police was your fault."
When I got home, I watched the second half of The Blair Witch.
Feels weird that we live in a world with three of those movies.
October 23, 2017
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| I think the problem with the concept is that I hate my face. |
One of those days. Bad day at work. Bad evening with the kids. Tried to avoid it all by taking photos of my Ray Bradbury artifacts for the day's OTIS Halloween Season Blog post. In line with the theme of the day, my original concept for the photos didn't work out well at all. They were supposed to be spontaneous-looking selfies with the items exactly where they sit in my study or (in the case of the above photo) out among the Halloween decorations to show them in their usual spots. Couldn't get the photos to look right, though, and I didn't want to spend seven years on them, so I just moved the items to a better spot outside on the porch and took more composed photos of the objects themselves. Not as interesting of a concept, but the photos look better, so I went with those.
After the kids finally dissolved into bed, I spent most of my time working on my presentation for my talk in Lowell, Massachusetts, tomorrow evening while Lindsey worked on editing some of her photography projects. By the time I came up for air at around 11 pm, she was asleep and the house was dark, so I ended the day by watching half of The Blair Witch.
Feels weird that we live in a world with three of those movies.
October 22, 2017
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| Pumpkin family portrait. |
Today, I might have done one of the cooler Halloween things I've done in many, many Halloweens: The day-time walk-through of Haunted Overload. It's in Lee, New Hampshire, and it's a pretty famous haunt. I did the haunt many, many years ago. But during some of the days, they open the maze up sans actors, and let you just walk through and marvel at it all. Which I've never done. But it is a marvel. I mean, it's a haunt attraction that holds up to the light of day and with zero haunters in it, you know? We got some extremely cool photos, and I'll do a write-up this week. I have to do it this week.
Once we got home, we carved the pumpkins that we got last weekend. Lindsey carved Pipkin's pumpkin from The Halloween Tree, even down to the freckles (which you can't see in this photo--it's the one on the table). The horse pumpkin is Esme's. She obsessed with those beasties. Mine is on the rocking chair, and little Hazel's is with the skeleton. She basically scribbled all over her pumpkin and I looked for a face in all the markings to carve for her. Pumpkin carving by paradoilia.
And then we topped it all of with The Simpsons' new "Treehouse of Horror" special. Because you have to. Even if you're numb to everything about The Simpsons just by dint of it being on so long.
October 21, 2017
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| The most interesting thing about this shot to me isn't the crowd, but the lack of costumes. |
Today, I did Salem the worst I've ever done Salem. First, my timing. It's near the end of October and there's only one more weekend to go. This is Salem at peak crowd. I'm talking 2.5-hour waits at restaurants, streets so packed it was hard to walk two steps without hitting a wall of backs, the whole deal. I also went right smack in the afternoon and didn't ask for any parking favors from anyone I knew in town. It took me 45 minutes just to get into a 700-spot parking garage (I think it was at capacity and they were only letting cars in as cars left).
But...I had a great time. I didn't have my kids with me, so that stress wasn't there, and the whole point of my visit wasn't really Salem, it was to meet up with some friends and take in some ambiance. And that mission was accomplished. With ciders.
And I kept my unbroken streak of Salems in October alive. I'm at 11.
October 20, 2017
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| When your neighbor's Herman Munster, weird stuff's gonna happen. |
Originally, we planned to carve the pumpkins we got last weekend, but at the last second we veered into a lazier plan of relaxing and movie watching. I think that was because we locked our Saturday and Sunday plans right before, and they've got activity aplenty for us. Saturday, Lindsey has a photography gig, and I'm heading to Salem to meet up with some friends, and the girls have a Halloween party to go to. Sunday, it's looking like we're all going to do a daytime tour of Haunted Overload, one of the more famous haunts in the area. We'll probably also carve some pumpkins up that night.
I'm looking forward to Salem. I actually wasn't planning on going to Salem this month for the first year in a while. I think us going in September sort of scratched the itch. After all, these days, the only real difference between September and October in Salem are the crowds and the Haunted Happenings banners. But I've got a friend coming in from out-of-town, and it's a good opportunity to, you know, hang there.
So we played it low-key. We caught anther accidental few minutes of Hocus Pocus, and then we settled in for real for Pet Sematary. The film always reminds me of the pleasant day I spent visiting all of the Maine filming sites in it for The New England Grimpendium. My wife hadn't seen it before, and her first comment was when the Creeds were moving into the house in the blaring sun to an audio track thick with bug droning, "This takes place in the summer?" And then about 20 minutes in, we see a paper jack-o-lantern in the window, and she really settled in, and then two seconds later it was taken down for a paper turkey. Ha.
At the end, the credits rolled and The Ramones' Pet Sematary came on and all was right because I need to hear that song every season.
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| I know, I know. I need to dust those lower shelves. |
Today was my day in Cambridge, so I didn't get home until 7:30 pm or so. Still, some cool stuff happened today. Like my guest spot on the Beyond the Darkness podcast was released. And Lindsey and I watched episode three of Expedition Unknown: Hunt for Extraterrestrials. And I saw my first snippet of Hocus Pocus. I always joke that I watch it every year, but only in small pieces here and there and out of order because the movie is always on in October. Freeform is even running a 12-hour marathon of it on Halloween. We've arrived at that stage of Hocus Pocus fandom.
My big news today is that my author copies for Death and Douglas arrived today. They're in that box up there in the photo, and they are things of beauty. I mean, they're no human skull, but only human skulls are that. I'll post a photo of the book tomorrow. Much different than the advanced reader copies. These are hardback, with dust jackets, and a more designed wrap-around cover with a different arrangement on the front to give top billing to Jay Asher's wonderful blurb about the book.
By the way, I think their arrival also means that those of you who pre-ordered will also get your copy early.
October 18, 2017
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| It was a pleasure to make its acquaintance. |
So tonight I held a human skull for the first time. I think. I'm pretty sure I've never held one before. But I've been around a lot of skeletons in my life of oddity, so I can't be Bible-definite about that. I didn't know the night was going in that direction. We just had some dinner plans on the docket. We were going to hang out with the parents of one of Esme's school friends. We'd all seen each other here and there, but had never officially gotten together for dinner, so we went over to their house for some burgers.
At some point in the night the conversation got on the topic of "dead things," which is inevitably a place I go with people with whom I'm trying to be friends--actually, just with anybody--and I was told, "If you like dead things, you'll love what I have in the basement." And he was right. He'd gotten the ancient cranium from Ryan Cohn, that suit-goth guy with the mad skeleton articulation skills who used to be on that Oddities show on the Discovery Channel.
After that we came home, I practiced my talk for my upcoming appearance and then I guested on the Beyond the Darkness podcast. I'll let you know when that show is live, but right now that means I've been talking for two straight hours and my throat feels like what I assume Tom Waits's feels like after a particularly guttural concert.
I held a skull, guys. A real highlight of the season.
October 17, 2017
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| A mummy and a colonel. |
Last night, we didn't sit down to unwind until pretty late. Too late to really get into a movie, honestly, and plus I wasn't really feeling anything too involved since I'd listened to three different spooky podcasts on the drive home. We just wanted something quick and easy and atmospheric. We found ourselves in our Amazon Prime account, where we hadn't been for a while, and, holy crow, was that filled with spooky stuff.
We found all kinds of random and obscure bite-sized shows like the Christopher Lee-hosted 100 Years of Horror documentary series, The Nightmare World of H.G. Wells, Mystery Files, and Patrick Macnee's Ghost Stories.
We settled on the "Colonel Stonesteel and the Desperate Empties" episode from Season 5 of the Ray Bradbury Theater. In it, an old man and a young buy build a mummy in an attic and trick the town into thinking it's real just to liven the place up. It was a very, very Ray Bradbury story. We followed that up with the first Roseanne Halloween episode. It's a very, very Roseanne episode.
Then I finished the night prepping my talk for next Tuesday at the Lowell National Historic Park Theater.
Honestly, last night felt a little like we were winding down the Halloween Season. Which is not true, of course. Just felt weird in contrast to what most people are feeling this time of year. That's a great thing about the long Halloween Season, though. Plenty of time to take a breath, gather your energy, and burst out from around the corner with a loud "BOO!".
October 16, 2017
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| To me, "Ghosts Turn Mile Green!" is as equally acceptable a seasonal greeting as "Happy Halloween!" or "Trick-or-Treat!" |
I don't know which of these two moments today were the most Halloween-y. Walking the trash down to the curb in the dark to turn around and see my house glowing all purple and orange for Halloween (the season's transformative magic at its finest, turning even the act of taking out the garbage into a transcendent moment) or, while watching a scene in a movie about a serial killer in which he's talking to a severed head on his coffee table, Lindsey leans over to me and says, "I bought Halloween Crunch at the store today." You decide. I'll take 'em both.
I did have one bummer of a moment. After dinner, we all sat down to watch The Halloween Tree. This is a sacred special for me, as is the book it's based on. And both my kids and my wife got bored and wandered away before it was over. The three-year-old, that's expected of her. My wife? She has a hard time watching cartoons. But my (almost) eight-year-old has sat through just about everything with me. I don't remember the last time she quit Team Couch early. I mean, they don't need to like the special (and I don't need them to like it...I'm not that kind of parent), but I actually thought the special was good enough to hold their attention. Next time I watch it, it will be from that perspective.
Oh, and the serial killer flick was the 2014 Ryan Reynolds black comedy, The Voices. Watchable for Reynolds and a general WTF-ness to the movie. Turrrrible ending.
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| Hay monsters of a different sort. |
Today we chased our pumpkins. We usually have a specific place we got to every year called Mack's, but this time we steered to another farm because they had a giant hay monster out front (I know that should be the photo, but I'm saving it for a later post). We dropped by in the late afternoon, which meant it was a mad dash for pumpkins, with people swarming all over the piles and dodging the epic collisions of pumpkin wagons. Like somebody had dropped money from a helicopter, and we were all scrambling for it.
But we suffered only minor bruises in finding our four pumpkins, wheeled them back to the car, and, right when we were about to take off, saw the corn maze sign...and we were right back in it. The best things about corn mazes with kids is that you just follow them as they frantically try to figure it out on their own. It's a lot of fun. My youngest hadn't ever really walked a corn maze before (maybe we carried her through one or two in the past), and she seemed to have a blast, walking through with her arms outstretched, slapping stalk leaves on both sides of the path.
From there, we went home and hung out, eventually ending the day with some spooky TV. We continued Stranger Things with my oldest. Then we watched Practical Magic after the kids went to bed. It had been a long time since I'd seen that flick. I liked the idea of it, but the story structure was really bad. It was almost a clip show for the first 45 minutes, and then the two aunts take off so that their nieces can figure a way out of their own mess and then return at the exact moment the mess needs cleaning up.
We finished the night with a Travel Channel show called Haunted U.S.A. because it was running a Salem episode. I thought it'd be more about the city, but it was basically a "highly produced" ghost catching show that couldn't find enough ghosts in Salem, so it headed two hours south to Fall River to fill out the episode with an overnight at Lizzie Borden's.
But that was our day. Half of it wandering around in fresh farm air, the other half hunkered on couch cushions with homemade brownies. I like a balanced life.
October 14, 2017
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| Like quaintly quaint. |
Good time today. Our main event was my book talk at Dorset Village Library in Dorset, Vermont (at the tip of the Green Mountains in the southwest corner of the state). But we decided to make a bigger road trip out of it, take the long way, see a few sites on the way. I kind of messed up the planning, though, left a little to late, made a bad call about which route to take, but we still saw some cool stuff and had a great little fall road trip.
We stopped by Jaffrey, New Hampshire, which every year has a big scarecrow event where people go downtown and make scarecrows en masse. They then leave them up around town for people to come see, you know, on their fall road trips. I've written about it before. Then we dropped by the Madame Sherri ruins. It's probably been eight or so years since we'd been to that dramatic set of forest ruins. Back then, we had it all to ourselves, but this time, there were about a dozen people there. The big arch in the staircase seems to have started to fall, but that didn't stop people from clambering up the stairs. Certainly stopped me, though.
From there we wended through Green Mountain National Forest, thrilling at all the fall festivals and pumpkin stands and ended up in Dorset a little early, so we checkout the local quarry, which, with its giant stone blocks, water, and surrounding foliage, is a pretty perfect thing to see in the fall.
It was my first time in Dorset that I can remember, and we found it ridiculously quaint. Like a set from a Lifetime movie about an ex-Manahattanite corporate executive who loses her job and buys a struggling pumpkin farm that comes with a handsome widowed farmhand with a daughter and they all live happily ever after--after a couple minor misunderstandings. I'm pretty sure that's an actual plot from one of those movies.
The library itself is inside a 19th century meeting house and tavern. It was like walking through a small, book-lined mansion. In the basement, they were in the process of making a haunted house for Halloween. Paper jack-o's and bats dangling from the ceiling on the main floor. A mouse named Booker running a hamster wheel in a cage on the shelf. The librarian's pug wandered the floors looking for crumbs from the Halloween cookies and popcorn that were set out. Pretty awesome place.
My next and last appearance for the season is going to be a little more urban. It's in Lowell, Massachusetts on Tuesday night, October 24. I can't promise pugs and Halloween cookies, but it'll be a good time. You should come.
October 13, 2017
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| Caramel is my ambrosia. |
We don't always get a Friday the 13th in October. But this year we did. And us spooky-folk can do two things about it. One, we can go out and plan an over-the-top activity with the other masses of people celebrating an October Friday the 13th or we can hide from those crowds and celebrate it quietly at home. Me and mine did the latter.
As soon as the work day was over, we headed over to the grocery store and bought supplies. Those supplies were 100% for making caramel apples. Now, here's the thing about making caramel apples in my experience. Kraft caramels are the best for it. Best taste. Best consistency. Just the best. But you only see Kraft caramels when you're not looking for them. I've seen bags of Kraft caramels on every shopping trip in the past six months. But, tonight, when we were looking for bags of Kraft caramels, we couldn't find them at all. And that happens every year to us.
So we settled for Brachs. They don't even put caramel apple sticks in their bags.
But the caramel apples we made were fine, and our kids aren't old enough yet to have any basis of comparison around their caramel apples, and we all had a good time making them.
Then we showed my eldest the first episode of Stranger Things. Lindsey and I wanted to rewatch it in preparation for Season 2 on October 27, and we thought Esme might like to join in on this jag. She seemed to dig it, but I'm not sure if she got it. I mean, the Dungeons and Dragons sequence went right over her head, of course, but various parts were spooky enough for her to hide her eyes. Mostly she asked us about Dustin's lack of teeth and dived under the covers any time there was a kissing scene.
After that, the kids went to bed, we poured ourselves a couple glasses of port, and I introduced Lindsey to Evil Dead II. She's never seen a single Evil Dead film. But that's the one that my Twitter and Facebook page followers wanted her to see over Phantasm and Dead Alive. Tomorrow, I'll interview her about her impressions and then write 'em up for you guys.
Because tomorrow, we'll be on the road for hours. We're doing southern Vermont all day, and ending up at a library in Dorset, Vermont, for a book talk at 6 pm. Hope to see you there.
October 12, 2017
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| I turned this on in my living room just long enough to take a photo. That's how not-Halloween today was. |
Today was a no-Halloween day. At least for me. Like not a glimpsed changing leaf. Not a half-watched horror movie. Not even a few pages in Paperbacks from Hell. Just a long day at the office and then a dinner afterward. I came home with just enough time to have a cider from yesterday's box, take care of a few practical things that needed doin', and hit the pillow.
But that's okay. Because this marks the end of Thursday, and that means the weekend is practically here. A a Friday the 13th weekend! Plans include subjecting Lindsey to Evil Dead 2 (thanks to you guys), heading out on a road trip to Vermont, giving a presentation on creepy oddities at a library, going out to get pumpkins, and who knows what all else.
Really looking forward to it all, though.
October 11, 2017
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| Time for a game of cider roulette. |
Tonight was a night of small, glorious things. Like realizing as I'm walking around the house that I'm cold and heading upstairs to grab a sweater. Like Lindsey coming home from the grocery store with a box of different kinds of cider so that we can play cider roulette. Like watching Garfield's Halloween Adventure on YouTube and my older kid asking me why the cat never moves his mouth when he talks and my younger covering her ears when it gets spooky toward the end. Not her eyes. Her ears. Like after the special, YouTube spinning up Michael Jackson's Thriller to keep us watching. Like going outside in the dusk to photograph the house decorations that we put so much time into. Small, glorious things.
Oh, and I'm deep into Paperbacks from Hell and am loving it as much as I thought I would.
And Lindsey and I finished The Harvest and didn't like it so much. But it had an interesting concept. And a fall setting. And Michael Shannon.
Just an average October evening of small, glorious things.
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| Yeah, I just dropped the books on the floor and snapped a pic. |
Today I finished Norman Partridge’s Dark Harvest. Came out
in 2006. One of those stories of small
towns with dark, violent secrets. This one involves a living scarecrow with a
jack-o-lantern head. It was fine. A really brisk read. More like a horror movie
than a book, almost. Big flaw was that it left its one big question
completely unanswered. I don’t mean left it vague. Just ignored it. I’m really
excited about starting Grady Hendrix’s new book Paperbacks from Hell next. I’ve
heard amazing things about it, but I didn’t need to. Just one look at the cover
is enough.
So we kind of live at the bottom of a wooded ravine. Our neighbors
behind us through the forest are about thirty feet more elevated than us.
Sometimes they have bon fires, and tonight was one of those nights. Because of
their height and distance away from us, the big fire looks like its floating high
up in the forest. We can see it out our window as we watch TV.
And tonight, while that fire was blazing in the dark air, we
started watching a 2013 movie called The Harvest (you can see I’m a sucker for that
word in my stories). I’d never heard of it before. But its title plus its
orange cover art plus the fact that it stars Michael Shannon was all we needed
to hit play. It’s not a horror movie, but it is set in the fall, complete with
cornstalks and ravens and dead leaves. I don’t want to write too much about it
because we still have about half an hour to go. Saved the end for another
night. I will say that everybody in the cast has a really strong sweater game.
Sometimes that’s all I need out of a fall movie.
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| My decorations will never again be complete without a stabbed pumpkin. |
It poured all day today. Which I love. Except that I had no idea what to do about my exterior Halloween decorations. Leave them out? Take them all down? Throw tarps over everything? I'm kind of a nube at all this and, honestly, if the answer involved effort, I wasn't going to do it anyway. So we ended up letting them weather the storm on their own. I'll assess the damage tomorrow. Meanwhile, it has gotten hot and muggy this evening like New Hampshire is a Gulf State swamp instead of the New England tundra it's supposed to be. I don't get this unseasonably hot October. I'm still wearing my sweaters, mind you, but I'm sweating in them.
I spent some of my evening fixing up a Halloween decoration my artist friend from a few entries back had given me. It's above-pictured. And awesome, right? It's a fountain that dribbles water (ostensibly colored red) down a lighted pumpkin. It worked when I got it, but the waterproof bulb casing was broken, and I didn't want my obituary to read, "electrocuted himself with a jack-o-lantern." I don't know why, though, that's an awesome obituary.
The water feature is subtle (you can kind of see it running down the eye holes in the photo), but I'm having trouble getting it to look like blood with the paltry food coloring I have at hand. In the pool at the bottom, it totally looks like blood, but while it's dribbling down the Jack-o's face, it still looks like clear water. I'll Google it at some point. I'm sure the answer's there. Blood fountains must be pretty common. Honestly, though, I like its glow the most, and that's enough to set this guy out as part of our decorations.
We also watched the Mystery at the Museum vampires special tonight on the Travel Channel. Instead of just hosting on a set far away from the action like he usually does, the producers let Don Wildman out in the field Josh Gates-style to run through Transylvanian castles and graveyards. He's never seemed to me the type to thrill at original editions of Bram Stoker's Dracula and ancient skeletons as much as they've kind of positioned him as such for his shows, but he did go to some really cool sites for the special.
October 8, 2017
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| If your downtown doesn't look like this you should probably move. |
Today was just one of those autumn days that no entry in any die-ary will be up to the task of capturing, even were I to be suddenly possessed by the ghost of Ray Bradbury.
We spent most of it in Kinderhook, New York, searching out The Legend of Sleepy Hollow sites (not to be confused with Sleepy Hollow, New York, which is two hours further south down the Hudson Valley). We toured the house of a president who hosted Washington Irving, saw the grave of the same president, hit up a one-room schoolhouse with a connection to Washington Irving, and explored a Dutch-style house that may have inspired Irving's depiction of the Van Tassel residence in his story.
Downtown, Kinderhook was absolutely haunted with ghosts. Small, homemade ghosts of cloth and straw, each one with a face obviously scrawled on by a child, were hung from every tree in the town center. Fantastic. Wanted to move there immediately.
Then we headed to a nice tavern across the state line in Massachusetts, where I had my first pumpkintini of the season. Meanwhile, out in the parking lot, somebody sideswiped our car and was picked up by the police for bad levels of bad substances in their system. It was even the perfect day for that incident, since we're turning in that car tomorrow for a token amount toward a brand new family car. Don't worry. I still have the Civic. I want to see if I can reach 250,000 miles on that guy before turning him in for, obviously, another Civic.
Anyway, it was about six hours in that car on our last road trip together. And possibly my favorite moment in a day full of favorite moments was stopping at a CVS for some snacks for the kids (and me). They just asked for candy, and any time of year I'd of handed them something boring and merely good-tasting. This time of year, I was able to surprise them with Halloween PEZ dispensers. The magic of the season.
Lindsey and I finished the night with Gerald's Game on Netflix. It was pretty intense and tightly told for the first 85 minutes, but then after that, it feels like the movie makers stopped caring about the movie. Like it went from every flicker in the screen mattered to clumsy collages of scenes and Band-aid narration, and really pounding the moral of the story into the ground.
But whatever. We capped off an amazing day with a new Stephen King movie adaption. Yee-haw!
October 7, 2017
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| Find me the designer who made this sign, stat! |
So the "cool trip" to the Hudson Valley that I teased in the last entry is happening tomorrow. Lindsey was too sick to sit in a car for six hours. Which means I should probably get to bed early tonight. Which means absolutely nothing to me. I'll still find myself somehow up on the computer writing a Halloween Season post or watching a horror movie at 2 am when I need to wake up at 6 am. Going to bed is one of my top ten terrors. I don't like days ending.
Since we didn't go on that road trip, we focused on finishing our exterior decorations. Spider webs still needed to be applied to bushes. Lights needed to be strung. Complicated out-of-code wiring schemes had to be implemented. And that meant a trip to Home Depot for a timer, some extension chords, and--just in case--some new smoke detectors.
People have posted a lot on the socials about how awesome Home Depot's Halloween section has been this year. And they are totally right, even if all that Halloween is displayed on ugly metal shelves in a giant warehouse. At least Home Depot's brand color is orange. But it's the small touches throughout the Home Depot near me like the one pictured above that really just melts by gummy heart. It's enough to make me redo my kitchen for no reason. Or for a very good reason: "No, no. You don't understand. I want the look of my new kitchen to be inspired by that sign. Find me the designer who made that!"
Anyway, the outside decorations are completely done now. As soon as we take some photos, I'll post them as an OTIS article. And then I expect you all to come by and sing Halloween carols out front.
Anyway, the outside decorations are completely done now. As soon as we take some photos, I'll post them as an OTIS article. And then I expect you all to come by and sing Halloween carols out front.
October 6, 2017
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| I have the feeling the card maker had no idea how serious someone like me would take this "cute" concept. |
I've been in a car more this week for work than I have been in the past three months. It's like I don't even work from home anymore. This morning found me driving to Ipswich, Massachusetts, one of the cooler named towns on the state's North Shore. To me, this is the most interesting area of the state. It's where Salem is. Gloucester. Just a salty section of Massachusetts with a deep history.
It was a little over an hour drive for me, and I chose a route that avoided highways. Man, what a fantastic drive. It was overcast, with smatterings of rain here and there. Old New England homes lining the roads, farm stands boiling over with orange spheres, decorations in every town park. I even saw my first official tree color and a banner advertising The Addams Family play. You know fall is magic when it can transform a meager commute into a refreshing foray. I'll probably edit those two words tomorrow when I re-read this.
To fill my hours in the car this week, I've been listening to a podcast that Lindsey turned me onto called Ghosts in the Burbs. It's created by a woman named Liz Sower. It's a fictional podcast where she plays a librarian in the real-life town of Wellesley, Massachusetts (which is just west of Boston) who advertises on a community board that she wants to hear people's ghost stories, so each episode is her recounting a personal ghost story that a local resident has told her. The stories themselves are pretty strong individually, but what really makes this podcast special is that Sower is, story-by-story, creating a mythology for the town, both in the way she meets these people and in the details of the ghost story itself. In fact, I started listening to it thinking it was a nonfiction podcast, and it took me three episodes to realize it wasn't. That's how kind of detailed and layered it is. But realizing it was fiction didn't hurt the concept at all for me. Made it better, in fact.
Lindsey's still sick, so our Halloween evening has again been downplayed. I took the opportunity to play catch up on some tasks. I went to Target to pick up a few things, but spent most of the time in the Halloween aisle. I worked on the presentation for my talk next Saturday at the Dorset Village Library in Dorset, Vermont (come if you're near). And I also signed and addressed a bunch of Halloween cards, as shown above. They're for the top two tiers of the OTIS Club. So if you're one of those members expect that in the mail soon.
Depending on how Lindsey feels, we've got a really cool trip planned for either tomorrow or Sunday. Six hours roundtrip to a part of New York's Hudson Valley that I've never visited, and which I have a very specific reason for doing so. Stay tuned.
October 5, 2017
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| I get a distinct Christmas carolers vibe from this photo for some reason. |
Tonight we took my eldest daughter to her horse-riding lesson. A horse farm is kind of a great place to be during the fall. The smell of hay, the red barns, the clop of horses looking for headless riders. But this horse farm upped their autumn ante. They lined the winding dirt road to the barn with inflatable monsters. Besides the above, there were multiple dragons, the Grim Reaper astride a horse, a giant spider.
Honestly, after all these years, I still don't know exactly where I stand on inflatable Halloween decorations. Part of me loves them to death and part of me thinks they're the worst thing to happen to holiday home decor. And, full disclosure, I actually have a Halloween inflatable on my lawn this year for the first time ever. And I like it. But I still don't know where I stand on it.
After the lesson, we kept things quiet. Lindsey's still sick, so we're lolling on the couch a lot. We ended up watching the first hour of the new Expedition Unknown: Hunt for Extraterrestrials special. I like that Josh Gates guy. And, yes, I fully believe aliens are Halloween-y. I mean, E.T. trick-or-treated. The Rocky Horror only happened because of aliens. And then there's Spaced Invaders. Some even opine, quite convincingly, that the Great Pumpkin itself is an alien. Just kidding. Wait, you're already Googling. Come back. I'm not being sincere.
Seriously, though, any kid that wears a big-eyed Gray costume to my door will get mad handfuls of candy. It doesn't matter if it's on Halloween or not.
Seriously, though, any kid that wears a big-eyed Gray costume to my door will get mad handfuls of candy. It doesn't matter if it's on Halloween or not.
October 4, 2017
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| I thought this was cool enough to break my "horizontal photos only" rule for the Die-ary. |
Today was a busy day for me work-wise. It's 11:30 pm, and I actually just got back from Boston and a last-minute client dinner. It was a semi-upscale place, but for some reason, the men's bathroom was Iron Maiden-themed. Upstairs, flowers and gold and white deer heads; downstairs '80s heavy metal albums painted onto the wall tiles. I didn't even have time to post today's OTIS Halloween Season article...but I sacrificed some sleep for this Die-ary, I did.
Anyway, although my day wasn't too Halloween-y, Lindsey's apparently was. Despite being sick, she's apparently been hard at work on our exterior decorations (decorations, mind you, that I thought were finished). I pulled into the driveway to see that the front yard had sprouted a small Styrofoam graveyard full of headfoams and skeletons, and judging by everything I tripped over in the front hallway, she's not even close to done yet.
I did have one great Halloween moment, when I went to a friend's house around lunchtime. He's an artist, and he loves to make his own Halloween decorations. He's pretty amazing. He can buy the cheesiest, cheapest thing from Spirit and distress it, build it out, add to it and turn it into one-of-a-kind Halloween art. Like the above ghost. Cheesecloth,a hanger, spray starch and a $3.00 plastic skull. It might not look it in the photo, but this thing is big enough to wear as a costume.
He also showed me a shrunken head that started as a chintzy plastic store-bought Halloween tchotchke that he transformed into a realistic shrunken head that he now displays under a glass dome like it's a priceless artifact. Its hair is made from a real human-hair toupee that he bought sometime back just because it disgusted/fascinated him and which he's had no use for since...until now. The "Ah-ha" moment in making it, he told me, was when he noticed the skin creases in photos of real shrunken heads. Usually, skin creases are dark, but in shrunken heads, they're often light, so he stole some powder from his wife's makeup and dusted it. If I had those skills, I would literally do nothing else in my life, even to the point of running out of money and my family leaving me. Check out the before and after.
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| Before. |
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| After. |
Now that I think about it, I should have just taken photos of everything he had and posted a photo essay on the main page.
All right. I've got to get up in six hours.
October 3, 2017
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| Holy cow, did I dig this movie. |
I was out in the world for work today, and didn't get home today until 7:30 pm, full dark in this part of the country at this time of the year. The great thing about that is I got to experience our exterior Halloween decorations the way they were meant to be seen. But I don't want to talk too much about that because I want to post some official photos once we do one or two more touches to them. But it was a welcome sight, especially after passing through so many dark neighborhoods without any Halloween lights up.
Well, there was one house, across the street, in fact. The people there had projected an upward rushing stream of vague orange shapes on the house facade. Made the house seem like the whole thing was being sucked up into the bright moon hanging over the house. Like it was the final scene in a haunted house movie or something. I liked the effect. I'd get a photo for you, but I don't think I could do it justice with a camera lens. Plus, it would entail me standing in their front yard at night. I'm creepy, but not that kind of creepy.
So, suddenly, half my family is now sick, and they all went to bed early tonight. I still dutifully lit the inside decorations, though. Halloween must go on. And then I turned on Cult of Chucky, freshly released and freshly on Netflix.
And, man, what a movie. I used to kind of think that Chucky was only invited to all the '80s slasher movies photo ops out of pity. And because nobody wanted the Leprechaun there. But this movie was, I don't know, surprising in every way, from the plot to the cinematography to the basic imagery it used to tell its story. And it did it in a way that not only didn't slough any previous film efforts, but encompassed every movie in the franchise. I mean, sure, the concept has evolved over the years, but that really just means that Scream influenced the series during the 1990s and 2000s like it did every other horror movie during that time period.
But this was more than an evolution. It was, I don't know, an evolution to a more impressive beast. I don't think any other slasher film franchise has maintained its continuity while upping its quality, and that's probably 100% because the franchise's creator has written every single script and, more importantly, that creator-writer is Don Mancini. This movie, I think, was my favorite out of all seven Chucky movies, a series which, honestly, never really stuck with me until now. Cult of Chucky took place at a snow-covered asylum, the most opposite setting you'd think of with this franchise, and managed to be both intriguing in its concepts and beautiful in its execution, all while being pretty vicious. Oh, and while being about a doll. It was almost an art horror pic, starring Chucky.
Bravo, Manici. Don't ever put your toys away.
October 2, 2017
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| RIP, Dove chocolates. |
Our evening tonight was the opposite of yesterday. Sedate. Still. Our Halloween moment almost completely confined to the above Dove caramel-filled chocolates that Lindsey picked up. Inside each wrapper was a different saying that ranged from the cheesy to the cheesily poetic: "Chocolate cures the frights." "Relax for a spell." "For now, falling leaves. Soon, falling snow."
I ate almost the whole bag while we finished up Creepshow from the previous night. At one point, our three-year-old came downstairs. She's a little sick and her sleep schedule is all messed up, so she was wide awake at 8:30 pm. We hit pause fast (we were still making our way through The Crate episode), and she looked up at the elderly academic frozen on the screen and said, "This is my favorite movie. I'll watch it with you." And she started clambering onto the couch.
"No, no. This is scary. It has monsters," we replied.
"I like monsters," she said. And then she followed it up with about four dozen syllables that we couldn't really parse.
"Shhhh. You can watch as long as you are quiet."
She settled into the corner of the L-shaped couch, and we hit play. And three seconds later the sharp-toothed Baboon thing from the arctic expedition crate bit the neck of out of a man.
"Werewolf," she said. She calls any hairy creature a werewolf, up to and including me.
And then she regularly squeezed her eyes shut and placed her hands over her ears. But only during the build up scenes. Once the monster was on screen, she was back to watching delightfully.
Finally, she got up to go back upstairs and walked closer to the TV to get around the end of the couch. It was about that point that the monster burst from the crate again, and she took off like it was after her. Half a second after she left the room, she returned. "I keep watching it."
She eventually went to bed with sunglasses on so that the werewolf wouldn't eat her eyes. I don't know, either.
October 1, 2017
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| I had so many photos to choose from for today, that I could barely decide. So you're getting Potato Man. I'm pretty sure you'll see him again on OTIS. |
I have no idea how we packed so much autumnalness into today. There must have been more than 24 hours in today. We must, must, must have experienced some sort of mutant Daylight Savings Time. See, we got up and languidly started the day. I even read, for the first time in years, the morning paper. As in the physical-print-and-ink-at-the-end-of-your-driveway version. Although, admittedly, it was only for this. After that, we headed off to a fair. And not just a tiny fair in a high school parking lot that would take us thirty minutes to experience tops. This was the Deerfield Fair in New Hampshire. A massive fair. An almost century-and-a-half-old fair. That's where we met Potato Man.
That should have been enough to knock us out the rest of the day. But it didn't. Somehow we found the time and the energy to decorate the outside of our house. Like, I'm talking ladders and questionable electric practices and possibly piss off the neighbors decorated it.
And even with all that, two events that each by themselves would have been enough to count the day a Halloween win, we still found the time to watch one of those Halloween-themed cooking contest shows as well as just over half of the George Romero-Stephen King classic Creepshow. It would have been all of that movie, but Lindsey fell asleep right after the first kill in The Crate episode. I don't think she meant anything by it.
Halloween is as much a time for miracles as Christmas is, and today was Exhibit A. The only thing that sucked about today is that tomorrow is Monday. And even that ain't that bad. After all, Monday is October 2. I'll take October 2 over most any day of the year.
September 30, 2017
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| This simple display completely charmed me. |
