Halloween is tied with Christmas for my favourite holiday, though i must admit it has lost a little something since i can't go trick or treating anymore. god i miss that candy.
i don't know what it is about it, but i have always loved it. i was very excited this year because i thought i would have ample time to enjoy the festivities, but somehow, i am nearly constantly busy despite my lack of any real employment.
i still haven't watched the nightmare before christmas, and i have done that every halloween and christmas since it came out. i must do that before i go to europe. thats the other thing. i decided to book a trip to europe in the second week of october, and will be leaving on tuesday. i went to vermont for a few days in the beginning, then connecticut, and am going back to connecticut tomorrow. every other day has been filled with some non-halloween activity. it was out of control. and so very wrong
so i decided this need to be remedied. all of my halloween fun was to happen in one day. with my friends sarah and ramon. they are married. they are just two of my married friends. i say this because they dont like being classified as my married friends, but yet i continue to do it.
anyway, we had planned out a super day of apple picking, pumpkin picking, pumpkin soup making, pumpkin carving, and possibly movie watching and board game playing. it was to be a thing of greatness. and it was. it really was. but it wouldnt be a day out with me unless something odd happened.
we get to eastmont orchards, where i have picked apples ever since i was young, at 10:15 am. i was so excited because the website said they were picking pippin apples from mid-october to the end of the season. i love pippin apples. and i have never found them elsewhere. we tried to rationalize why the parking lot was so empty. 'oh its a weekday' 'yeah and it's early in the morning' ' and its cold' 'right!' ' yeah!' 'this is going to be so great!'
we walk up to the people who hand you bags, take two and venture towards the trees. we walk around a bit, trying to stay optimistic, but slowly coming to the realization that there was not one single apple on a tree. not one. all i wanted was to pick one apple. off of a tree. not the ground.
it seemed they were picking 'drop apples' at a discounted price. ahem. yes. ground apples. apples that have fallen to the ground. a fruitarian's dream. but i am not a fruitarian. nor is sarah. or ramon. but what's this? a nice looking pippin apple on the ground! well..maybe if i just pick up the one.. BAH IT S MUSHY! and then i proceed to do my ew this is gross dance, very much like the one i do after i find out a bug was on me.
we soon decide that this stinks. and these apples stink. and WHY oh WHY could they not hold on for a nother week? WHY APPLES???? the carnage of dead apples was unbelievable. we also found a large poop from some unknown animal i can't even begin to guess. we moved on to the pumpkins.
we discuss our pumpkins and when i say i don't know what i am carving, sarah tells me "sometimes you have to let the pumpkin decide for you." so poetic. but then i saw it. it was a leaner. it had personality. it was mine. i decided it looked scared, like someone had just jumped out at it and it leaned back to get away. one thing led to another and i wound up buying two; another leaner to be the scary pumpkin.
so after the failure of the apples i suggest we go to delicious orchards to purchase apples and get some hot cider. which we did. we also made a breakfast of all the delicious samples they have out. crazy hippies we are.
we get back and make some delicious pumpkin soup, as well as come cous cous with great veggies. true hippies. then we set into the pumpkins.
as ramon plans out his Death Star (!!! you need to see it to believe it) and i start tracing out my scared face, i notice sarah struggling a bit. i feel like something must be wrong, pumpkins are not this hard to cut. so i try to poke a hole in it with little poker and it feels like going into wood. sarah tries to use her poker. it bends at a 90 degree angle. she abandons her steak knife for a futile attempt at using the little carving kit saw. which breaks off. in the pumpkin.
eventually she muscles through it like the champ she is and she breaks off the top. we gather around to see what kind of freakish insides it has, and we notice there is a thick white layer right underneath the orange skin that i have never seen before. how do these things happen? it was the strangest pumpkin of steel i have ever encountered.
our halloween day certainly had its tricks and treats, but it seems like it is always something wierd with us. i don't know,. maybe it's because we are weird. maybe its because the universe wants us to have stories to tell. maybe its so i can waste all of your lives by writing long posts and never editing anything. this may not even make sense. maybe i didnt even write it.....
mwahahahahaha.
happy halloween
31.10.08
Technology
In four years i have had three laptops.
And i almost lost another one today.
Let me tell you how it all began.
I went off to college and spent a miserable freshman year, writing 25 papers in one semester and wanting to die more and more every day. I even became a 'that girl'.
"oh.. stacey? is she that girl who showered at 3 in the morning?"
yes children, that was me. I was a hard worker. And so my computer was forced to be as well. But it was not my computer, rather my brother's old laptop from college, now it its 5th year.
The screen wouldn't stay up, so i kept it closed and used a docking station so that i could connect it to a desktop monitor. not sure why i didn't just use a regular desktop pc then...
But anyway, after a year of hard work, i moped home from class one day before finals season truly began only to find that my computer had taken its own life.
Yes you read that correctly. It just couldn't handle it anymore. It had been five years and just when it was ready to retire and relax, i forced it to churn out papers and to constantly hold onto long rambling away messages on aim. It just couldn't take it anymore. And so it was gone. And all i had left of it was a blue screen of death.
I called my brother because i don't know how to do anything with computers. He made me hold some button down. I am alone in my room with the door closed trying to fix something i don't even understand in the first place. I press this button. A shrill, terrifying beeping alarm begins! "AGGGGHHHHHHH!!!" i scream "WHAT IS HAPPENING?! oh my god. is this going to explode? did i hit the red button you aren't supposed to touch? what do i do? what is wrong? how do i fix this? i am so scared..." And Scott just laughs at me, as friends from 3 doors down the hall come running to my room to see if i am ok.
i was ok. but my computer would never be the same. it seemed the hard drive crashed . and the motherboard broke. and the men at the store said we could pay 500 dollars for them to attempt to retrieve information. I wrote all my final papers on some crazy archaic program that ran off a CD. i felt like i was in Ghostwriter. It seems a blur now. But that computer and i had been through a lot. And frankly, i was a little upset that it took the easy way out and i couldn't.
Sophomore year. My parents decide to get me my own laptop. So i get a Dell Inspiron full of hopes and dreams. It was so lovely having a laptop that i could actually use on top of my lap.
But this charade would not last long.
One day my computer screen stopped coming back up after the black screensaver came up. i hit the moush, the keys, closed and opened it. nothing. i had to restart. I could not figure out why this was happening, but i tried to deal with it. And it was rare. i could handle it.
Then one day, I was just sitting in my dorm room in Loyola talking about something ridiculous with Caroline when it happened.
what 'it' is is hard to explain. i used to have a video of 'it', but i think that has since been lost with the computer. I will try to make you understand... the screen all of the sudden had turned into tiny rectangles of alternating color, all piled on each other. a little like the bricks in Mac Brick Out from 4th grade (if you played that too). But this mosaic of messed up junk was not happy just showing up...no....it then proceeded to have a seizure of some sort for an infinite amount of time. they just shook, and slid past one another, until i restarted it.
It was the most absurd thing i had heard of happening to a computer. Scott agreed. He had never seen it before, which is why i had to take a video of it for him to understand. all in all, it was a freakish occurrence that probably has only ever happened to me and the 5 other people in the world who have ridiculous experiences nonstop.
This is when Scott spent many many hours on the phone with India. we sent my laptop to them. they sent it back. it flipped out again. they asked us to send it back. scott said no thank you. they said ok, we will send you a new one.
Which brings us to this computer on which i lovingly type. This computer is a little over two years old. It has been to London with me. It has recorded countless blogs and photos there. IT is has been to more websites than you can imagine, and has acquainted itself with facebook and youtube like no other computer you know.
But it was sick.
Really sick. In fact, we thought it was the end today. It has been showing signs of weakness. Like the fact that the battery will only last 8 minutes, and has been this way since the middle of senior year, so i must always have an outlet. It went through a rough patch over thanksgiving last year, but we worked through it. and it was the reason i don't really let anyone touch my computer anymore. after never having viruses the whole time, i suddenly had a trojan back door virus (hehe) and 20 others. but that is neither here nor there.
So scott set to work on this, as we had established it would either be a hard drive problem or a windows problem. I was upstairs checking my mail on one of the home computers ( there are two in the cellar. i dont really know what they do), when all of the sudden it begins to sound a little like the end of the world. I high pitched beeping was sounding. A slightly musical, yet terrifying alarm rang. Then the home phone rang. And the little white dog started barking. All we needed was for our washing machine to unbalance, and for me to start chanting 'the system is down' and you would have the best techno song the world has ever heard. the music video would include shots of the system check that kept coming up FAIL! in bright red. it would be sweet.
have no fear, loyal reader (and you must be quite loyal to be this far down this drivel), for this laptop story has a different ending. a happy one. for now at least.
Scott gets it to start working, seemingly, and calls me in to sign in. A pesky little pop up comes from the bottom right hand corner " updates ready for installation". "Pssh stupid updates. i hate you," i say as i close the irritating window with no second thought.
"What are you doing?" scott asks. "why did you not update? "
"oh . i hate updates. i dont do it. and itunes tries to make me update every day. no ! i won't do it! no i say! down with the man!"
"you're stupid. you are so stupid. this update says (technological phrase) #3. i am pretty sure we are on #4 and you havent updated to three. you are so stupid. everytime there is a big probelm in microsoft word or a bug or virus, they send out and update. you update. and then you are ok. you. do not update. this may be the problem. stupid"
ahem. so. the moral of the story is:
stacey molski should never interact with technology.
ever.
even if she wants to.
but she did have the same phone for four years and it was great and never had a problem and she kept really good care of it. but then she got a new one. because society and her phone plan told her to. and sometimes it opens the music player by itself and starts playing morrissey. yup.
help.
And i almost lost another one today.
Let me tell you how it all began.
I went off to college and spent a miserable freshman year, writing 25 papers in one semester and wanting to die more and more every day. I even became a 'that girl'.
"oh.. stacey? is she that girl who showered at 3 in the morning?"
yes children, that was me. I was a hard worker. And so my computer was forced to be as well. But it was not my computer, rather my brother's old laptop from college, now it its 5th year.
The screen wouldn't stay up, so i kept it closed and used a docking station so that i could connect it to a desktop monitor. not sure why i didn't just use a regular desktop pc then...
But anyway, after a year of hard work, i moped home from class one day before finals season truly began only to find that my computer had taken its own life.
Yes you read that correctly. It just couldn't handle it anymore. It had been five years and just when it was ready to retire and relax, i forced it to churn out papers and to constantly hold onto long rambling away messages on aim. It just couldn't take it anymore. And so it was gone. And all i had left of it was a blue screen of death.
I called my brother because i don't know how to do anything with computers. He made me hold some button down. I am alone in my room with the door closed trying to fix something i don't even understand in the first place. I press this button. A shrill, terrifying beeping alarm begins! "AGGGGHHHHHHH!!!" i scream "WHAT IS HAPPENING?! oh my god. is this going to explode? did i hit the red button you aren't supposed to touch? what do i do? what is wrong? how do i fix this? i am so scared..." And Scott just laughs at me, as friends from 3 doors down the hall come running to my room to see if i am ok.
i was ok. but my computer would never be the same. it seemed the hard drive crashed . and the motherboard broke. and the men at the store said we could pay 500 dollars for them to attempt to retrieve information. I wrote all my final papers on some crazy archaic program that ran off a CD. i felt like i was in Ghostwriter. It seems a blur now. But that computer and i had been through a lot. And frankly, i was a little upset that it took the easy way out and i couldn't.
Sophomore year. My parents decide to get me my own laptop. So i get a Dell Inspiron full of hopes and dreams. It was so lovely having a laptop that i could actually use on top of my lap.
But this charade would not last long.
One day my computer screen stopped coming back up after the black screensaver came up. i hit the moush, the keys, closed and opened it. nothing. i had to restart. I could not figure out why this was happening, but i tried to deal with it. And it was rare. i could handle it.
Then one day, I was just sitting in my dorm room in Loyola talking about something ridiculous with Caroline when it happened.
what 'it' is is hard to explain. i used to have a video of 'it', but i think that has since been lost with the computer. I will try to make you understand... the screen all of the sudden had turned into tiny rectangles of alternating color, all piled on each other. a little like the bricks in Mac Brick Out from 4th grade (if you played that too). But this mosaic of messed up junk was not happy just showing up...no....it then proceeded to have a seizure of some sort for an infinite amount of time. they just shook, and slid past one another, until i restarted it.
It was the most absurd thing i had heard of happening to a computer. Scott agreed. He had never seen it before, which is why i had to take a video of it for him to understand. all in all, it was a freakish occurrence that probably has only ever happened to me and the 5 other people in the world who have ridiculous experiences nonstop.
This is when Scott spent many many hours on the phone with India. we sent my laptop to them. they sent it back. it flipped out again. they asked us to send it back. scott said no thank you. they said ok, we will send you a new one.
Which brings us to this computer on which i lovingly type. This computer is a little over two years old. It has been to London with me. It has recorded countless blogs and photos there. IT is has been to more websites than you can imagine, and has acquainted itself with facebook and youtube like no other computer you know.
But it was sick.
Really sick. In fact, we thought it was the end today. It has been showing signs of weakness. Like the fact that the battery will only last 8 minutes, and has been this way since the middle of senior year, so i must always have an outlet. It went through a rough patch over thanksgiving last year, but we worked through it. and it was the reason i don't really let anyone touch my computer anymore. after never having viruses the whole time, i suddenly had a trojan back door virus (hehe) and 20 others. but that is neither here nor there.
So scott set to work on this, as we had established it would either be a hard drive problem or a windows problem. I was upstairs checking my mail on one of the home computers ( there are two in the cellar. i dont really know what they do), when all of the sudden it begins to sound a little like the end of the world. I high pitched beeping was sounding. A slightly musical, yet terrifying alarm rang. Then the home phone rang. And the little white dog started barking. All we needed was for our washing machine to unbalance, and for me to start chanting 'the system is down' and you would have the best techno song the world has ever heard. the music video would include shots of the system check that kept coming up FAIL! in bright red. it would be sweet.
have no fear, loyal reader (and you must be quite loyal to be this far down this drivel), for this laptop story has a different ending. a happy one. for now at least.
Scott gets it to start working, seemingly, and calls me in to sign in. A pesky little pop up comes from the bottom right hand corner " updates ready for installation". "Pssh stupid updates. i hate you," i say as i close the irritating window with no second thought.
"What are you doing?" scott asks. "why did you not update? "
"oh . i hate updates. i dont do it. and itunes tries to make me update every day. no ! i won't do it! no i say! down with the man!"
"you're stupid. you are so stupid. this update says (technological phrase) #3. i am pretty sure we are on #4 and you havent updated to three. you are so stupid. everytime there is a big probelm in microsoft word or a bug or virus, they send out and update. you update. and then you are ok. you. do not update. this may be the problem. stupid"
ahem. so. the moral of the story is:
stacey molski should never interact with technology.
ever.
even if she wants to.
but she did have the same phone for four years and it was great and never had a problem and she kept really good care of it. but then she got a new one. because society and her phone plan told her to. and sometimes it opens the music player by itself and starts playing morrissey. yup.
help.
26.10.08
just a quick update
So there are a few things i would like to write about on here, but i am afraid i cannot allow myself any real extracurricular writing until i finish this article for this freelance job.
i just want to again reveal how creepy the 'bbc america reveals 'specials are.
i spoke of the one about men that lived and slept with 'real life dolls'.ahem. yeah. which made me want to shower forever and then die.
well now one just came on about "reborn" babies. terrifying lifelike babies that one can order and carry around like a real baby. you can have breathing mechanisms, warming pouches, etc etc. and you can push them around in a pram and get the attention a new mom gets whenever you like it.
no. sorry. this is worse than the man doll thing. if you want a baby so much that you are going to buy a sketchy doll and carry it around, maybe you should look into adopting a baby. maybe take care of the babies that need your help, instead of having one manufactured for you. or is that too much trouble? because real babies cry and poop and throw up and love. how can this doll be fulfilling?
actually, no, the people who buy these should not adopt a baby. because clearly they cannot handle the reality or responsibilty that comes with one.
and that's fine. neither can i right now. but i will not push around a doll just so people can come talk to me about my "baby". this makes me sad. isn't there another outlet for these people? go to a concert. read a book.
i don't understand the world. and i am wierd. good luck to you normal people out there.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/16/police-smash-car-win.html
i just want to again reveal how creepy the 'bbc america reveals 'specials are.
i spoke of the one about men that lived and slept with 'real life dolls'.ahem. yeah. which made me want to shower forever and then die.
well now one just came on about "reborn" babies. terrifying lifelike babies that one can order and carry around like a real baby. you can have breathing mechanisms, warming pouches, etc etc. and you can push them around in a pram and get the attention a new mom gets whenever you like it.
no. sorry. this is worse than the man doll thing. if you want a baby so much that you are going to buy a sketchy doll and carry it around, maybe you should look into adopting a baby. maybe take care of the babies that need your help, instead of having one manufactured for you. or is that too much trouble? because real babies cry and poop and throw up and love. how can this doll be fulfilling?
actually, no, the people who buy these should not adopt a baby. because clearly they cannot handle the reality or responsibilty that comes with one.
and that's fine. neither can i right now. but i will not push around a doll just so people can come talk to me about my "baby". this makes me sad. isn't there another outlet for these people? go to a concert. read a book.
i don't understand the world. and i am wierd. good luck to you normal people out there.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/16/police-smash-car-win.html
7.10.08
my early literature
so i was looking through my old books from when i was little so that i could bring them to the 3 yr old i will be babysitting in vermont. (more on that later, wish me luck)...
and i found a box where 1/3 of the books dealt with halloween. because i love halloween and i guess i always have. i found it odd that i had so many halloween books in comparison to others. i also had some big TaleSpin books, which i want to go read.
but mainly, i considered my all time favorite book (which i got when i was 3, coincidentally) the book is 'the elephants child'. the author is rudyard kipling. he is a racist. and an imperialist. but i still like him.
it's also about an elephant that got spanked for asking too many questions, so he sets off on an adventure to find the crocodile because his relatives (who are all different sorts of animals and not just elephants, but that is another story) told him to go ask the crocodile. then he almost gets eaten by the crocodile, but a snake helps him pull and pull. so his nose gets long. and then the elephant has a trunk. and then he spanked his relatives. then all his relatives went to go get a trunk. then they all had long trunks and could pick things up and splash mud on themselves and kill flies and they were happy elephants.
really?
is this strange? because i am starting to think this is very strange. and i think this explains a lot. this does not sound like a normal book normal children would like.
although my other favorite book was the poky little puppy's winter day or something like that. it is about cute puppies who eat oatmeal and frolick through the snow having so much fun until they go home sooo tired and happy that the poky little puppy falls asleep before he can eat his shortcake.
oh dear. i just ruined the ending. i am so sorry. i should have written a spoiler alert.
but that book sounds like a normal kid book. i think this was my cover for when my friends asked. so i could look normal. it was not the book i forced my mother to read over and over and over. maybe i just liked making her try to consistently pronounce kipling's lengthy sentences. For example:
" Then the Bi-Colored-Python-Rock-Snake came down from the bank, and knotted himself in a double-clove-hitch round the Elephant Child's hind legs, and said, "Rash and inexperienced traveler, we will now seriously devote ourselves to a little high tension, because if we do not, it is my impression that yonder self-propelling man-of-war with the armor-plated upper deck" (and by this, O Best Beloved, he meant the Crocodile) "will permanently vitiate your future career." This is the way all Bi-Colored-Python-Rock-Snakes always talk. "
3. 3 years old. june 23rd 1989 to be exact. i still don't even know what 'vitiate' means.
i was never a normal child.
and i found a box where 1/3 of the books dealt with halloween. because i love halloween and i guess i always have. i found it odd that i had so many halloween books in comparison to others. i also had some big TaleSpin books, which i want to go read.
but mainly, i considered my all time favorite book (which i got when i was 3, coincidentally) the book is 'the elephants child'. the author is rudyard kipling. he is a racist. and an imperialist. but i still like him.
it's also about an elephant that got spanked for asking too many questions, so he sets off on an adventure to find the crocodile because his relatives (who are all different sorts of animals and not just elephants, but that is another story) told him to go ask the crocodile. then he almost gets eaten by the crocodile, but a snake helps him pull and pull. so his nose gets long. and then the elephant has a trunk. and then he spanked his relatives. then all his relatives went to go get a trunk. then they all had long trunks and could pick things up and splash mud on themselves and kill flies and they were happy elephants.
really?
is this strange? because i am starting to think this is very strange. and i think this explains a lot. this does not sound like a normal book normal children would like.
although my other favorite book was the poky little puppy's winter day or something like that. it is about cute puppies who eat oatmeal and frolick through the snow having so much fun until they go home sooo tired and happy that the poky little puppy falls asleep before he can eat his shortcake.
oh dear. i just ruined the ending. i am so sorry. i should have written a spoiler alert.
but that book sounds like a normal kid book. i think this was my cover for when my friends asked. so i could look normal. it was not the book i forced my mother to read over and over and over. maybe i just liked making her try to consistently pronounce kipling's lengthy sentences. For example:
" Then the Bi-Colored-Python-Rock-Snake came down from the bank, and knotted himself in a double-clove-hitch round the Elephant Child's hind legs, and said, "Rash and inexperienced traveler, we will now seriously devote ourselves to a little high tension, because if we do not, it is my impression that yonder self-propelling man-of-war with the armor-plated upper deck" (and by this, O Best Beloved, he meant the Crocodile) "will permanently vitiate your future career." This is the way all Bi-Colored-Python-Rock-Snakes always talk. "
3. 3 years old. june 23rd 1989 to be exact. i still don't even know what 'vitiate' means.
i was never a normal child.
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