Blessed Samhain, all. :)
And for those not celebrating that particular part of the holiday, Happy Halloween.
I'm playing the part of Quiet Urban Pagan today. One of my coworkers who knows me quite well took a look at me and asked "So where's your bling for the day?" She saw me in non-descript autumn clothes. The only trace of my Witchy side is my knotwork pentacle pendant around my neck.
But that's who I am.
Over the years, I've found myself distancing from the over-the-top gaudiness that I used to covet in Salem. Sure, it's fun to dress up and "Go Witch" every once in a while. But for the past three years or so, I've moved into a quieter, contemplative type of faith. It started when I stared down at the garnet-jeweled pentacle that I always wore around my neck and wondered exactly what I believed. Was all of my practice just an act to hide who I was? Had I really grown as a person in my faith? Where was my Path going? Did I even belong on a Pagan path anymore?
The answer to the last question was answered for me- a deciding yes. I also discovered, though, that I was resistant to truly digging down in my beliefs and challenging them. It's harder than one might think- but I needed to do it.
I took my pentacle off. I've possibly worn one a handful of times since- and today, I felt I needed to. It feels strange and heavy around my neck. I keep fiddling with it, rubbing the pentacle medallion as if it's charged with something (even though I know that it's not).
I plan to sit for ritual tonight, and see where these quiet thoughts are leading. I don't expect to get answers-- but hopefully I'll get a nudge in the right direction.
31 October 2006
30 October 2006
Monthly Stitching Goals
October has been a productive stitching month for me-- made possible by the fact that all of our spare spending money was spent at King Richard's Faire. :)
Here's my monthly goals recap... I think it's safe to determine my progress for the month at this point. I won't be stitching tomorrow night.
For October, I wanted to...
1) Grid and ship my Floral RR to the first person Done!
2) Finish Home is Where the Cat Is Nope- didn't touch
3) Work 20 hours on UFO RR for Jenni Done!
4) Work at least 10 hours on Apache Done!
5) Complete my portion for Autumn's flower RR Nope- Doing that next weekend...
6) Update my stash organizer Nope- postponing until Yule
So... for November, I want to..
1) Complete my portion for Autumn's flower RR
2) Finish Home is Where the Cat Is
3) Complete 20 hours on Goldie's UFO RR piece
4) Work 10 hours on Apache
5) Cook a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner and enjoy the day with family and friends. :)
Here's my monthly goals recap... I think it's safe to determine my progress for the month at this point. I won't be stitching tomorrow night.
For October, I wanted to...
1) Grid and ship my Floral RR to the first person Done!
2) Finish Home is Where the Cat Is Nope- didn't touch
3) Work 20 hours on UFO RR for Jenni Done!
4) Work at least 10 hours on Apache Done!
5) Complete my portion for Autumn's flower RR Nope- Doing that next weekend...
6) Update my stash organizer Nope- postponing until Yule
So... for November, I want to..
1) Complete my portion for Autumn's flower RR
2) Finish Home is Where the Cat Is
3) Complete 20 hours on Goldie's UFO RR piece
4) Work 10 hours on Apache
5) Cook a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner and enjoy the day with family and friends. :)
26 October 2006
Halloween prep
For those coming to visit my Thursday Thirteen-- welcome! Just scroll one entry down. (but I hope you'll read more!)
It's been a crazy, frustrating week here. I'm muddling through okay and hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel to arrive shortly... but yeah. *sigh* It's involved some 'ritas and yummy food at the Texas Roadhouse and some serious half-talking, half-crying to Erich so I can get my thought settled. (please note: The issues are NOT about our relationship at all- we're doing fantastic).
On brighter, happier things... we did a ton of Halloween decoration shopping last night. After last year's crazy turnout for trick-or-treaters (and confirming it with the neighbors), it seems that ours is THE neighborhood with candy. I've dreamed for years of being able to really have fun with the whole neighborhood Halloween thing. I grew up in a great neighborhood for it too, and despite the changing times... I'll hang onto the illusion that kids still go out for candy on October 31st.
Samhain or not, this Pagan enjoys the campier side of the holiday. :)
The thing I discovered last year is that our front door is crappy for Halloween. Our front steps go straight to the door with no landing. So in order to open the door, then open the storm/screen door, I had to have kids back up. And of course, I was also trying to keep cats *in* the house at the same time. It wasn't good. Frustrating, in fact.
So this year, we'll start using the mudroom, which is a secondary front entrance. It started as an outdoor porch- we know this because both the outer door to the mudroom porch AND the inner door into our pantry has a brass mail slot in it. We figure that when Anna (the previous owner) had the house resided with vinyl, they took the leftover amount and just closed in the porch completely to use it as an old-fashioned lean-to shed. There's no heat out there. It's used for mail collection and keepng things really cold in the winter. We have a few random boxes out there of stuff not yet sorted plus the spare styrofoam coolers for when they're needed for travel. We can prop the door permanently open for the evening for treaters while keeping the rest of the house shut. It's the perfect space.
So the plan is to put black tarping paper on all of the walls inside our mudroom porch, add some cobwebs in there, and then put a blacklight in the overhead socket so it looks a bit eerie (but not completely scary). We'll cobweb our box elder bushes. It'll be fun and easy-- and over the next few years, it'll probably go a bit over the top. But hey... it's Halloween. Why not? :)
Erich's taking the day off for a mental health day, so he'll start with the first rounds of treaters while I make my way home. Based on the traffic I saw last year, he might take the brunt of them. Traffic was hellish last year. Even with my train arriving at quarter to seven, I doubt I'll be home much before seven thirty.
But it'll be fun. I'll take photos as we put this together this weekend.
Oh... and because I forgot to post them on Sunday as promised, here are the answers to last week's Thursday Thirteen songs. I'm not surprised at the ones that were recognized (especially #3 and #8). I would have been shocked to see someone get #10 or #12- considering #10 was from an obscure album, and #12 is an even more obscure ELO song from Xanadu. I was surprised that no one got #5, but maybe it's just me from my generation who grew up watching American Bandstand on Saturday mornings... :)
1)A Kind of Magic – Queen
2) Make Love to You – Etta James
3) Cult of Personality – In Living Colour
4) Send Her My Love – Journey
5) Bandstand Boogie – Barry Manilow
6) Bad – U2
7) A Question of Time – Depeche Mode
8) Dreams – Fleetwood Mac
9) Runaway Train – Soul Asylum
10) The Earth Is – Air Supply
11) Mea Culpa – Enigma
12) The Fall - Electric Light Orchestra
13) Closer to Fine – Indigo Girls
It's been a crazy, frustrating week here. I'm muddling through okay and hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel to arrive shortly... but yeah. *sigh* It's involved some 'ritas and yummy food at the Texas Roadhouse and some serious half-talking, half-crying to Erich so I can get my thought settled. (please note: The issues are NOT about our relationship at all- we're doing fantastic).
On brighter, happier things... we did a ton of Halloween decoration shopping last night. After last year's crazy turnout for trick-or-treaters (and confirming it with the neighbors), it seems that ours is THE neighborhood with candy. I've dreamed for years of being able to really have fun with the whole neighborhood Halloween thing. I grew up in a great neighborhood for it too, and despite the changing times... I'll hang onto the illusion that kids still go out for candy on October 31st.
Samhain or not, this Pagan enjoys the campier side of the holiday. :)
The thing I discovered last year is that our front door is crappy for Halloween. Our front steps go straight to the door with no landing. So in order to open the door, then open the storm/screen door, I had to have kids back up. And of course, I was also trying to keep cats *in* the house at the same time. It wasn't good. Frustrating, in fact.
So this year, we'll start using the mudroom, which is a secondary front entrance. It started as an outdoor porch- we know this because both the outer door to the mudroom porch AND the inner door into our pantry has a brass mail slot in it. We figure that when Anna (the previous owner) had the house resided with vinyl, they took the leftover amount and just closed in the porch completely to use it as an old-fashioned lean-to shed. There's no heat out there. It's used for mail collection and keepng things really cold in the winter. We have a few random boxes out there of stuff not yet sorted plus the spare styrofoam coolers for when they're needed for travel. We can prop the door permanently open for the evening for treaters while keeping the rest of the house shut. It's the perfect space.
So the plan is to put black tarping paper on all of the walls inside our mudroom porch, add some cobwebs in there, and then put a blacklight in the overhead socket so it looks a bit eerie (but not completely scary). We'll cobweb our box elder bushes. It'll be fun and easy-- and over the next few years, it'll probably go a bit over the top. But hey... it's Halloween. Why not? :)
Erich's taking the day off for a mental health day, so he'll start with the first rounds of treaters while I make my way home. Based on the traffic I saw last year, he might take the brunt of them. Traffic was hellish last year. Even with my train arriving at quarter to seven, I doubt I'll be home much before seven thirty.
But it'll be fun. I'll take photos as we put this together this weekend.
Oh... and because I forgot to post them on Sunday as promised, here are the answers to last week's Thursday Thirteen songs. I'm not surprised at the ones that were recognized (especially #3 and #8). I would have been shocked to see someone get #10 or #12- considering #10 was from an obscure album, and #12 is an even more obscure ELO song from Xanadu. I was surprised that no one got #5, but maybe it's just me from my generation who grew up watching American Bandstand on Saturday mornings... :)
1)A Kind of Magic – Queen
2) Make Love to You – Etta James
3) Cult of Personality – In Living Colour
4) Send Her My Love – Journey
5) Bandstand Boogie – Barry Manilow
6) Bad – U2
7) A Question of Time – Depeche Mode
8) Dreams – Fleetwood Mac
9) Runaway Train – Soul Asylum
10) The Earth Is – Air Supply
11) Mea Culpa – Enigma
12) The Fall - Electric Light Orchestra
13) Closer to Fine – Indigo Girls
Thursday Thirteen #8: Halloween Purchases
 |
1. Fog machine 2. Juice for said fog machine 3. 100 feet of black tarp paper (to cover the walls of our mudroom) 4. two large packages of the stretchy spiderwebbing for the front bushes 5. glow in the dark "trick or treat" headstone 6. Black plastic cauldron to use as the candy bowl 7. Three large bags of candy- about 8-9 pounds in all (which we'll most likely use up) 8. Two blacklight bulbs 9. Three purple glow sticks 10. Three blue glow sticks 11. Three mini rubber duckies - a witch, a mummy, and frankenducky (I just had to... they were 75 cents each) 12. A fake jack-o-lantern carved with the outline of an arching cat 13. (this weekend) real pumpkins for carving/decorating Needless to say, I firmly believe in being the Cool House for trick-or-treating. :) Links to other Thursday Thirteens! 1. (leave your link in comments, I’ll add you here!) |
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20 October 2006
Friday morning musings...
I'll do my Friday Feast entry sometime this afternoon... I only have a few minutes before I need to dial into a tele-course to learn how to generate bar codes. (whee!)
Random thoughts today...
I was asked when I'll post the answers to the lyrics. I'll be doing that on Sunday. :)
It's one of those rainy, dreary transition weather days here in New England. We're supposed to get gale-force winds this afternoon. Which means that we'll have lots of raking to do this weekend. Thankfully Mother Nature was able to put on most of the peak color show before this year's big wind storm showed up.
Menstrual cramps + Indian food = lots of intenstinal ow.
After seeing an advertisement on TV a couple days ago (plus an email from Erich), I had a need to purchase the Sims 2: Pets expansion last night. I'm already highly amused. Some poor Sim is going to be taken over by a pile of animals, I think.
I have sooooo much stitching to do this weekend, it's not funny.
Back a bit later.
Random thoughts today...
I was asked when I'll post the answers to the lyrics. I'll be doing that on Sunday. :)
It's one of those rainy, dreary transition weather days here in New England. We're supposed to get gale-force winds this afternoon. Which means that we'll have lots of raking to do this weekend. Thankfully Mother Nature was able to put on most of the peak color show before this year's big wind storm showed up.
Menstrual cramps + Indian food = lots of intenstinal ow.
After seeing an advertisement on TV a couple days ago (plus an email from Erich), I had a need to purchase the Sims 2: Pets expansion last night. I'm already highly amused. Some poor Sim is going to be taken over by a pile of animals, I think.
I have sooooo much stitching to do this weekend, it's not funny.
Back a bit later.
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