Something Wicked This Way Comes

At last, we are starting to feel the first stirrings of Fall down here. (Our first cool snap is due tonight and we may see the 50's!!) It is more a change in photoperiod than temperature that is causing the stirrings in me but I will take what I can get! Please use the wheel on your mouse to scroll over the list of Halloween inspired tunes on the left, and click those you wish to hear while you read. Am I missing a good one, your favorite maybe? Let me know, I'll hunt for it to add to the list!

This is my absolute most favorite time of year! Perhaps it is because I was born in the Fall and associate the season with the excitement of my "big day", but I have a true fondness for the coolness, the color changes, and all things spooky at this time of year.
As a child, at the start of school up north, we would be issued these series of English/grammar/lit books at the start of school. They always opened with stories of autumn, raking leaves, pumpkins, smell of woodsmoke - you could burn leaves in the open back then. I particularly remember a story in one of my elementary english books of two children whose father helped them plant pumpkins in the summer to be carved for Halloween. They waited and cared for the vines all summer with diligence and much anticipation. Sadly EVERY single baby pumpkin died, withered or fell off by the big day. They were devastated.... until the kindly next door neighbor asked them when they would pick their pumpkin. Confused, they explained how all the fruit had died. The neighbor drew them into his yard where one lone tendril had found it's way under his fence and there before their eyes was a gorgeous, huge pumpkin!! That story always stuck with me obviously! What a treat. Even the books smelled "fall-ish". I used to open them and breathe deep. (Ha! Little did I know it was the moldy smell of being stored away in a cabinet all summer.) Magical.

My mother always added to the Halloween frenzy. My first real neighborhood of memory (we moved alot) was in Mt. Vernon, Virginia. We landed in a GREAT new neighborhood with lots of kids. The parents planned major Halloween parties with loads of group participation. It was a "moveable feast" from house to house through the woods using ropes strung from tree to tree with rotten tomatoes on them... teenagers dressed as ghosts in the distance warning us not to take our hands off the ropes! Down into a basement for rides on small trains, bobbing for apples and a *shivery scary* visit with "The Witch" for your fortune. The witch had the best, most realistic cackling laugh...and oddly she wore the same rings on her hands that my mother wore! Well, at least she had good taste.

I have always been a true horror movie fan as well, I still am, but some of today's movies are a bit much for me in my advancing age. I can remember the very first horror show I got to see on TV - Frankenstein and the Wolfman! My parents were out of town and we had a lady sitting for us. We had all fallen asleep in front of the tv and I woke up to "Shock Theater". I've been hooked ever since and spent many, many hours at Saturday matinees at the Beach or Bayne Theater in Virginia Beach - The Seven Skulls of Jonathan Drake, The Beast from the Haunted Cave, The Tingler and The Tell-Tale Heart....classics of B movie genre!

So in honor of the season, next weekend we will be dusting off "It's a Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" and "Garfield's Halloween Adventure" (thank you, Kimberly) which is an entirely underrated seasonal cartoon with Lou Rawls as Garfield's singing voice. Here's hoping for even cooler temps and looking for some of those chills up our spines -one of the channels is airing a week of classic scary movies. Eeee! Pass the popcorn please!

The Saga of "The Door" - Ta Da!

Many of you have been following along with the sad tale of "THE DOOR".

For those not in the know, we have been trying to replace our front door ever since Hurricane Rita hit in Sept,2005. (Did you know that Rita was the 4th most intense Atlantic storm ever recorded? You would never know it from all the press that Katrina is still getting.)

Anyway we had many, many delays...lack of contractors, vendors disappearing, lost invoices, 4 separate doors ordered and sent back for wrong color, warped, cupped, inadequate installation...yada yada. I mean, really! It's just a door! Ok, it was custom and mahogany but still. We could have built an entire neighborhood of houses in the meantime. (Let it go, Cathie.)

We finally found a business in Houston (http://www.southernfront.com/ I highly recommend them) who custom makes doors, frames and glass inserts to your specifications and patterns. They had it done in less than 6 weeks, the center is twice as thick as the original pattern we had chosen, and the cost was almost half what the original local vendor asked. It is nice and heavy and is seated perfectly in the frame that came with it. Plus they were able to do a transom to match which none of the others could. It has an old world New Orleans feel to it. (Just what every colonial style house needs! ;-))

The overhanging portico on our front door was twisted in Rita, Ike bumped it a bit more and separated it slightly from the front of the house on one side. So we got new columns and re-aligned/attached the portico also.

So finally after 3 years! Don't you love a story with a happy ending?

Back to our Routine

School is officially back. I have to say it was not as chaotic as I expected. However my classes are down about one third from their original numbers. *Sigh* Very sad. I expect a few may come trickling back after dealing with FEMA, insurance agencies and contractors. The longer they stay away, the less likely they are to return.

The day of the mandatory evacuation was our magical "12th Day" of classes. 12th day is the day the state of Texas takes it's enrollment counts and awards your funding for the semester. We have been "sweating bullets" that they would take their counts on the day we returned when our numbers were abysmal. We are now doing the "Happy Dance". Texas took our counts from the last full day before the storm. Whoo hooo.... lucky, lucky.

The calm before a new storm

Well, it's back to school officially for the students tomorrow. We teachers returned last week. How different it will be. How do you cram 7 buildings worth of students and classes into one building for an indefinite length of time? VERY CAREFULLY!! and with alot of humor. We've been joking that for many of us teaching conditions will harken back to the 60's! *gasp* No technology! Shadow puppets anyone? ;-)

This should be interesting to say the least. But everyone, including me, is very ready to resume our lives and move on. We just want to salvage the semester for us all. It will also be interesting to see just how many of our students return and to hear their stories.

Wish us luck!