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Night with Robert Frost: Autumn Bulletin Board

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I’ve also been acquainted with the night. 

People seem pretty eager to jump into the spirit of October this year, and my last bulletin board was looking kind of shabby, and I’m just completely focused at this moment, so I took 3 days this week (just under 6 hours total) to put up my October bulletin board, which is always my favorite one of the year.

I was thinking bats, because it’s practically the only trope I haven’t hit in the many years I’ve been doing this. Then I looked for a poem, and found “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost. You can read it in the link; I was working in the rain, so the lighting was terrible when I took this photo. But you get the gist. I decorated the calaveras with Sharpies; everyone in Tucson loves calaveras and I could envision them amidst the candles and piles of marigolds, although I wish I had more time to work on them, maybe make a couple more.

The poem is also in Sharpie. It’s not my best lettering; I’ve kind of been doing a lot of lettering lately and my hand just wasn’t in the game and I was feeling really rushed. The school is having a 60th anniversary party on Sunday and there’s more work to finish up the comic book: resizing the cover and editing the blog posts down to 400 words a piece.

When I wrote those words, it didn’t occur to me that they would exist off the internet. Hard copies seem to change everything.

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Pumpkin Is the Spice of Life

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Look, it's that time of year and I really felt like it needed to be said.

Look, it’s that time of year and I really felt like it needed to be said.

It may be an unpopular opinion, but it’s my opinion. I like pumpkin pie as much as the next person, and I can enjoy pumpkin (strictly in the months of October and November) in a variety of forms: soup, pie, perhaps in a savory dish like ravioli. I even enjoyed the unusual mashup of the Danish kringle with pumpkin yesterday. But, I have to draw the line. I don’t need my tea to taste like pumpkin spice, or my Oreos. Pumpkin spice, I believe, goes with actual pumpkin.

Anyway, I’m trying to get into the Halloween spirit. I need to find someone who wants to watch all the scary movies that have come out recently: The Babadook, Good Night, Mommy, The Visit. (No spoilers!) And The Man has acquired a pumpkin, which he promises to turn into a pie. Typically, I do the cooking around here, but I don’t have a lot of patience for fidgety things like pie crust, especially since I like mine gluten-free, which makes them twice as tricky. But the man is good at measuring things in a way that I am not. In fact, in his day job, he is a metrologist: a measurer of very, very small distances for very, very precise purposes. So he makes the crust. And since he’s making the crust, he can make the rest of it too while he’s at it.

So, while it seems obvious that the world disagrees with me on this, given the proliferation of weird pumpkin spice flavored things this season, and the fact that every year there are more of them in stores, I like to make a distinction. Pumpkin spice is for pumpkins, and you’ll never change my mind.