Flu and Pumpkins

I think the excitement of the car (or something of the sort) got the best of me with everything else going on, because I've spent the end of the week and most of the weekend down and out with the flu (not of the swine variety as far as I know). It was longer than one of those 24 hour bugs, too, where anything that required effort winded me (getting up my 4 flights of apartment stairs was an ordeal). I finally really started recovering last night though, just in time to carve pumpkins before Halloween!It is important to note that Ghostbusters is on in the background- a key point while carving pumpkins is to have some Halloween-related thing going on in the background, whether that be a movie (so many to choose from!) or a scary soundtrack (Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my favorites). Tyler helped out, especially with the whole carrying-the-pumpkins-up-the-stairs thing since I'm still recovering and would have passed out halfway up.We went hardcore this year, drawing patterns on in sharpie marker before cutting them out. Last year I did Jack Skellington, so I stuck with the Nightmare theme and did a pic of the Oogie Boogie Man's shadow on the moon, which I thought would look especially cool lit up from behind on a dark night!Tyler decided to get a little more elaborate, having a guy with slashes for eyes and a hanging mouth with lots of teeth that made it look like he should visit the dentist more often.
I was pretty impressed when he started to get into the details, going as far as carving the skin off the teeth to make them more visible during the day, and perhaps glow more at night!They turned out pretty sweet in the end, and will hopefully show off the Halloween spirit proudly from my balcony for the next couple of weeks!Knitting has been very very slow progress (close to nonexistant) between having the flu and never having time between class and work, but I've made a preliminary Christmas knit-list and it's long enough that I really have to start on some smaller stuff, not to mention pull the Dale out of the corner again. I thought about knitting while I was down and out, but the last thing I wanted was to get germs all over my gift knitting, so decided against it and did reading for class instead.
This week will be busy- midterm on Wednesday for my American Renaissance class, and I'm starting in hardcore on my research for my Critical Theory class paper to make up for all the time I lost last week, so not much room for breathing in there. Not to mention working on my Halloween costume... ;)
Off to do some studying, looking at the pretty fall colors outside my window with a cup of coffee warming my hands. My favorite type of fall morning.
PS- Apparently this is my 300th blog entry- woohoo!! Thanks for reading and checking in, faithful readers! :)