Door number 42

There is a line in the movie Julie/Julia where, the Meryl Streep character of Julia Child talks about the years she put into the cookbook as possibly being something to do just to have something to do. This of course is right before she gets it published and is just feeling defeated and slightly depressed.

I have to confess, not that it will be much of a shock, that I've been filling my days with stuff to do, just to have stuff to do. My hobbies, projects etc. are filler. Nothing more nothing less.  I turn 42 next month. When I was asked what I regret not having done in my life, the usual came to mind. Not having had the chance to be married obviously at the top of the list, not having a kid, which is a massive shocker to even me given I hate kids, and not having traveled. The career failures didn't really hit the scale at all.

I think the big pressure is that this year is the tenth anniversary of the car accident. Sept 1st will be ten years. I had never seen anything beyond age 32. Literally, I knew I would die at age 32. And I did, for 90 seconds on the operating table the day of the car accident.

Well, now I think I look pretty great for a corpse.

My writing may never be seen beyond the handful of regular readers -you my lovely Spudguns!- who read my blogs, and I've gotten to the point I'm okay with that. The husband must have gotten on the wrong boat/spaceship/pack mule from wherever, and I've gotten to the point I'm almost okay with that, and well turning 42 with only a handful of useful childbearing years left and I've gotten to the point I'm okay with that.
Not having a few fabulous stories to tell around the kitchen table to my younger cousins, that's not cool, that's not fun game, that's not buddies.

I've played it safe for the last ten years, time for an adventure.

Mercury 2016 Retrograde

Spudguns! giving you a heads up, sort of.  We start the new year with a bang or fizzle depending on your point of view. 
You've heard me say ...er seen me type, that we get on normal, 3 times a year Mercury retrograde, well this year we are having 4. And we jump right into the first one tomorrow. That would be January 5th and it lasts until the 25th. 
The impact of the retro motion of mercury is as always: issues with travel, issues with electronics, issues with missed messages, more accidents, communications mishaps of all sorts, forgetfulness, money issues. You must be careful of injuries to the hands, arms and nerves as well.
So, Mercury Retrogrades in 2016: Jan 5th-25th, April 28th-May 22nd, Aug 30th-Sept 22nd and Dec 19th-Jan 8th (2017)

And it seems Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Pluto, Neptune and Uranus are all having retrogrades this year as well. I will have to do some research into what they affect. I know Saturn affects lessons/rewards, but that's about all I know for sure.

I can tell you Jupiter goes retrograde on Jan 7th-May 9th. Which will overlap with Mercury and both a lunar and solar eclipse this year. Both in March.

There was a time I knew all this stuff, but sadly my interest has dwindled and I've gotten lazy with doing research.

kiss kiss noise

2016 and now what?

Spudguns!  We're two days into the new year and you know what, I'm already exhausted.

I finished reading that Supernatural book. Yay me. And started looking around at other fan's journal projects, and they are all replicas. Replicas.  Didn't really see any original stuff from them. Then I just got cocky and was all like "dude, I am totally going to rock this."  And this would be the part where you laugh nearly choking on your coffee.  I ended up not going with the typical style journal that they used for the props in the show, or that other fans had been using. You know, the three ring day-planner style. The kind that was everywhere back in the 1990's. 
I ended up just going with a plain hardcovered journal.  Which now I'm sort of regretting because, it's not as practical.  I've managed some filler pages, mostly notes on the show and have two small paragraphs of story idea in point form notes.

And that's as far as I've gotten.  I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to come up with an original idea for this, with original characters. I keep reminding myself this is a prop that is part of a larger prop that apart from a few photos for this blog, no one will really see.  And that sort of stumps me. Way to create my own writer's block.

So there is only one thing to do. Take a step back, work on another part of the vampire hunter's kit prop, and start over with the journal part of the prop in a few weeks.

In the meantime, if you've been reading my movie blog, you know that I've decided to bring back the all vampire movie club on that blog this year. When I tried doing it few years ago, it was once a week. Which sort of got bit much. So this time, I've toned it down to once a month, with the bonus of an all vampire book club.  Currently, the month of January, the book/movie selection is the new version of Twilight.
I've got a few other bloggers joining in. And someone asked me why I picked this book?  Honestly, it was new. It's on the front of people's awareness, it's available everywhere and that was a failing I had with my last book club. The last time I did a book club, people complained I never picked new releases.

I know, I've got vampires on the brain this year. Even more so than normal.   The props and story are coming...just not as fast as I had hoped.

Trick or Tree

I mentioned earlier in the month about the Hallowe'en tree. Well, my lovely little Spudguns! here it is. In all it's horror. And I mean that in the sense that I have no business trying to decorate anything.
Just one of those cheap little foot and a half things, bought at the dollar store. 

For someone who collects a lot of dren to do with Hallowe'en and vampires, I actually didn't have enough items to do the tree. I ended up having to raid my scrapbooking kits for some do dads and ribbon.
  
The fangs and spider web are glow in the dark, and the tree topper...which was the hardest to figure out, is a broach.
I actually tried to "make" some ornaments by printing out a couple of shots of the Addams Family and Dracula and gluing them onto some wooden bat cut outs. Only, they didn't work out as well as planned, so I only did two.

And now I know why my family would wait to do the tree when I was asleep or at school; I am missing the Martha Stewart gene. 

So here's my promise to myself...collect better dren so that come October, you can do a better tree for Hallowe'en/the holidays.

In my purse, next to the mojo bag

Spudguns!  you've heard me say before how Raymond T. McNally and Forrest J. Ackerman are heroes of mine, and you've heard me talking about how I'm making a prop vampire hunter's kit for my collection. Right.

I didn't realize I'd end up needing to make props for a prop.  But that seems to be what's happened. Which is totally fine, cause everyone needs a hobby right?  And unless you've got a few thousand dollars just lazing around to give a professional prop maker; you've got to but the leg work in yourself for a ...prop.
So what started off as a small "weekend project" of making a "center piece" for my vampire collection, (this photo shows half my vampire book collection. Not even a tip of the iceberg of my whole vampire collection which include movies, soundtracks, posters etc. I'm literally going to have a wall of bookcases just for my vamp stuff before I'm done this project) has turned into a bunch of little projects. And you know that old saying  measure twice cut once...yeah totally remember to do that.  See, there was my first mistake.  I had wanted a prop that would sit on the top of my one bookcase in a corner I was decorating in a theme. Ends up, the tool kit I bought was too large. It's going to need a table all it's own. But I'm determined to have a vampire hunter's kit damn it!
Which is what got me on the Supernatural marathon binge I've been on the last month.  Most of those vampire hunter's kits you see in movies or online are designed to have been a few hundred years old; and that originally was my plan. To make it look ancient and beat up. But, the case I found is aluminum, shinny and very modern. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to destroy it. So, that led me to watching other vampire movies, that had "slayer kits" like how Buffy always uses just her purse/backpack, or the Frog brothers from Lost Boys, used water guns, or how Supernatural used the car as a portable hunter's kit.  See where I'm going with this.

So while I'm collecting bottles for "holy water" and salt and garlic bits, crosses, a mallet, and carving wooden stakes (which is a task in itself) I decided I wanted to add a hunter's journal/watcher's journal to the mix.
So I picked this up at the book store the other week. Which, if you're a fan of the show you know the "novel" is a tie-in to the main prop. I've just started reading it, and it ends up is more a prequel to the first few seasons then it really is a "guide" book.  And I have to say, for something that's listed as fiction, the novel is jammed with real items connected to hoodoo, shamanism, wicca, and the occult in general. It's actually got some better information on a few topics then some of the non-fiction witchcraft books I own.

As I said, it's a novel more so then a season by season guide book. (I just found out there is another picture book of the seasons monsters which is what I should have gotten as well) with a scattering of "pictures" to tie the whole thing together.
But it's what I'm basing my one prop on. Now, my ability to draw is better than stick figures, it's not on the level of graphic novels or anything, so I doubt I'll have many of those in the little book. I do plan to however, have snapshots of some of the other "props" so the hunter's journal ends up looking more like a scrapbook/diary then anything else.

Still with me...spiffy. I know long post today, hope you've had a coffee.

So here's a semi-half arse thought out plan. I'm going to create some "hunter's adventures" for the prop hunter's journal-that is for the prop vampire hunter's kit.  Follow. And I'm going to post some of them here. Like a bunch of chapters or something.

Told you it was only semi-thought out. 

Directions, thoughts and season two of Supernatural

October season was hectic. I threw myself into projects, some that worked, some that failed and some that just never got finished.
The year is winding down, which is being felt the most in the form of the cooking group I'm part of. (I'll come back at the end of next month with the actual list of blog post links for the year's recap of food posts I did for the group over on my movie blog.  As we have one more next month)
I bought a tree. A short, half foot high plastic wired thing at the dollar store, with the intentions of decorating it for Hallowe'en.  Yes, you read that right, not an x-mas tree. Well, it is an x-mas tree in theory because that's the only time they sell them. But it's going to be done in pure Addams Family fashion, and become my Hallowe'en tree. This will actually make it my second one. I had one that got thrown out during my move.

Rebuilding a life when you're at the crossroads of things...movies make it seem so easy. Dude, it's not. From little things like the holiday tree, to having to buy a few new coffee mugs because the old ones got chipped and broken, to just figuring out your place in the grande scheme of it all. Not easy.
I look around and see so many who have either gathered their dreams and made them physical, or who are just drifting through but yet still seem to have roots. You know what I mean?

And you're wondering at this point, what does the tv show Supernatural have to do with it all?  Well, besides the fact that I just got my hands on seasons one and two,  it is like the perfect metaphor for this, well life.  You've got these two guys who have just had their lives turned upside down, learning they are not as different from some people as they always thought, but yet not fitting in anywhere. Always finding the need to hide the core of their purpose, just...yeah this sounds like a stretch even for me with my gift for yammering.  Okay, so try again...two dudes one car all those crossroads.

Did I mention one of my projects is a vampire hunter's kit?  Dude, I'm working on a vampire hunter's kit, meant to be a center piece for my vampire collection. So doesn't fit on the table I bought it for. Too large. But, that's another post for another time.

Happy Hallowe'en

Just wanted to fly in here my little bat-droppings and wish everyone a happy Hallowe'en.

And if you've missed my 13 Days of Hallowe'en on my movie blog, I have been mixing up the treats with posts both that are Hallowe'en recipes and movies. Days 1-12 are up, with Day 13 coming tonight.  There's even pie.