News From The Cul-De-Sac: Vol. 1

It currently feels kind of sad here.

There is a very obvious lack of it being the Halloween season.

Oh, there are pumpkins on porches, but even those are kind of minimum.

example of sparse display of pumpkin on porch decoration

No purple or orange light displays, no blow-ups, no 16-foot skeletons (thankfully), no other fun (non-scary) stuff.

Is everyone here a Jehovah's Witness?

Meanwhile, my Halloween stuff is sitting in a box in the garage because we are unsure if we'll be considered the heathen new neighbors if we decorate beyond the copious amount of pumpkins I've already put out around our property.  

Our new neighborhood could be considered upscale. Do upscale neighborhoods forego Halloween decorations? Is it considered gauche or classe inférieure?  Should I care*?

I needed answers/validation to this so I checked with JP's boss, who is very wealthy and lives in a very wealthy area. I doubted that he would put out blowups on the gazillion dollar lawn of his gazillion dollar mansion in his gazillion dollar neighborhood but I asked him anyway and he said, unsurprisingly, that he just pays people to put up lights and stuff, but no blowups and the like.  I told him about the lack of decorations here and he said, in essence, that if he had a bunch of blowups he'd put them out at his house and not care one bit what anyone thought (that's the nice version of what he actually said which was, to paraphrase, "who gives a !&*#$ what anyone thinks" - he's fun like that).  

For the record, we have one single blowup and it's completely not cheap or cheesy. It's fun and happy and unscary I love it very much.

This is a video of our Halloween decorations at our old not-very-upscale house in the not-very-upscale neighborhood we used to live in:

I'm putting it up today. 

Chances are, I'll even have a bunch of candy at the ready on Halloween just in case my tree blowup acts as a beacon that day for happy little trick or treaters.   

* no.

Journal - 10.1.24

North Carolina ♥

I can't stop thinking about western North Carolina - I've got a whole bunch of memories from that area since I spent half my childhood at my father's house in Pilot Mountain, an hour or so east of there.

There was one day that always stands out.

We went to Boone and Blowing Rock and every other place all around there.

We drove and drove and talked and talked - just me and my dad - and ate the pimento cheese sandwiches (my dad's favorite) we brought with us along the way.

We stopped at Mystery Hill - this really strange place where there's a gravitational pull that makes you stand crooked.

We went to Grandfather Mountain and I sat on the edge of a boulder, where I didn't realize at first that my feet were dangling over a God knows how many feet drop because the view of those mountains is so freakin' amazing it makes you lose your senses.

A million memories in that one day.

Anyway, sometimes a memory is even better when you can share it. These are some pictures of me from that day.

Pray for North Carolina

Mystery Hill