Category Archives: confessions

things I’ve told myself recently

Posted on by

This is also known as my “some day list”, because most of the time when these things pop into my head they’re prefaced by the phrase, “SOME DAY when I’m (rich / famous / in better shape / truly run out of fucks to give / drunk off my ass / fill in the blank)”.

  • Some day I’m going to hire a maid to come in two days a week and clean my house.  I wouldn’t ask her to do gross stuff like clean my husband’s hairballs out of the bathtub drain or exorcise the science projects out of the back of my fridge, but everything else would be fair game. The problem with this plan is that Junior The Dog would lose his sweet tiny ever-loving mind from stranger danger if someone he didn’t know came to the house while we were gone. Or even while we were here. So basically, if I ever want a maid for real, I’m going to have to figure out how to take my dog to work for a half day twice a week (not happening – last time he went to work with me he shit in my boss’s office), or I’m going to have to start tranquilizing him twice a week (probably also not happening. Probably.)

 

  • Some day I’m going to own a house of my own rather than renting, and I’m going to paint the rooms whatever weird-ass colors I want. To be fair, our landlord is pretty easy-going and he probably wouldn’t balk if I wanted to paint walls weird colors in our apartment – the last tenants had blood-red walls in their bedroom, in fact. When we came to look at the place, everything looked totally normal and chill until we got to the bedroom and then it was like, instant bordello. But not in a good way. If you see what I mean. Anyway, I want my own house for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is usually my desire to have things like a lime green bathroom and blue living room walls and stuff.

 

  • Some day I’m going to live somewhere where the driveway is not an icy death trap of doom every winter. This one is pretty much wishful thinking in New England, honestly – even the nicest, most well-maintained driveways end up with a layer of frozen slush and hate caked to them at some point in the winter here. Unless I want to cough up beaucoup bucks for one of those crazy heated-driveway setups, I’m destined to always be disappointed on this front.

 

  • Some day I’m going to develop good habits, like washing my face before bed, writing every day, not automatically adding “fuck” to every other sentence when I’m speaking aloud, cleaning up after myself as I cook rather than just piling all the dirty dishes in the sink and pretending I don’t seem them for the next three days, exercising on a consistent basis, not drinking as much…they all sound good in theory but none of them are very fun in practice so I’m basically doomed to never achieve any of them.

 

  • Some day I’m going to hang up a coat rack so that we stop just dumping our coats and sweatshirts and other outer-wear paraphernalia on the kitchen chairs when we come inside. This one is probably the most do-able of the whole list, to be fair.

 

  • Some day I’m going to go through all my dishware and silverware, take an inventory, figure out what pieces I’m missing and buy them. I literally have three soup bowls to my name, only two of which match, and one of which is structurally unsound and will some day crumble and dump boiling hot soup all over me. Also, another example of how bad it is: my mom actually bought butter knives and put them in my Christmas stocking this year because when my folks were over for Thanksgiving and mom was setting the table she could only find two butter knives. I replied that yes, we only have two, and she just couldn’t wrap her mind around why we didn’t have a full set of them. I explained that, you know, sometimes things need to be pried out of other things and butter knives get bent and then they have to be thrown away. Or like, sometimes you REALLY need to chip the ice off your windshield and you can’t find your scraper and you’re already late for work and the butter knife is the first thing you think of and then you forget to take it back inside. Stuff happens, and butter knives sometimes pay the price.

 

eye

Some day I’m going to remember to shut the bedroom door before I do my eyeliner so that things like this don’t happen when the dog starts barking at a squirrel out of nowhere, making me jump and stab myself in the eye. And worse, screw up my eyeliner.

roll on, 2016

Posted on by

Christmas is over. Time to breathe the collective sigh of relief.

sigh-of-relief

This is not me, and I didn’t take this picture. Just so we’re clear.

It’s not that I dislike Christmas, even. In fact, I’m one of those sappy assholes who really DOES think that Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year.

I’m just always really glad when it’s over.

Christmas is like the pot of water that gets heated up so slowly that the frog in the pot (that’s me…ribbit) doesn’t realize it’s slowly being cooked alive until it’s just a little bit too late.

It starts with Thanksgiving and my mom asking us for our Christmas lists. Then people start posting pictures of their Christmas trees on Facebook and Instagram and I start itching to get a tree. When I finally get a tree, I spend a weekend decking the halls. Then there’s the holiday party for work. Then, Christmas shopping…and wrapping…and cooking…and planning for family holiday get-togethers…and GOING to family get-togethers, and giving gifts and sending cards and receiving cards and OMG so much mail and trying to finish gifts that I inevitably (and often wrongly) think I can get knitted / stitched / constructed by Christmas, and drinking, and eating so so many cookies and worrying if this will be another year where all I get for a bonus from work is a Jelly of the Month Club subscription and more wrapping and last-minute shopping and super panicked knitting of doom and then YAY CHRISTMAS OH MY GOURD LET’S OPEN PRESENTS AND EAT TOO MUCH FOOD HOORAY…

…and then it’s over. Just like that. What was weeks of cheerful glow is now just a quickly-fading after-image and I am left feeling…bereft.

Which, granted, feeling mildly bereft is pretty much my standard mode of operation because chronic depression is a fucking barrel of monkeys like that, but still. It’s especially noticeable directly after Christmas. Like someone has yanked the rug out from under me or something. Like emotional whiplash.

And then, just as I’m starting to get my feet back under me after all that, the “New Year, New You” bullshit starts. Ads for home exercise equipment nobody will actually use. Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, NutriSystem, Shakeology, every local and national gym and fitness center smugly implying that you are not a good enough version of you the way that you are, and pointing out that January 1st would be the most opportune time to change that for the low, low price of $49.99 a month. Asshats on Facebook making grand lists of completely fucking pretentious resolutions like, ‘be more positive’, ‘live my truth’ and ‘judge less, love more’. I hate shit like this not least of all because it implies that you only have one chance a year to change. I also detest the implication that in order for your changes to actually count, you have to announce them to the whole fucking world on social media. If I want to change, I’ll fucking change whenever I feel like it and it’s nobody’s god damned business. If I want to stay the same, that’s my prerogative and ALSO nobody’s god damned business.

So roll on, 2016. Let’s hurry up and get past this brief self-bettering phase. There’s Valentine’s Day chocolate waiting for us on the other side.

klutz life

Posted on by
slip-and-fall

I didn’t choose the klutz life, the klutz life chose me.

I’ve always been a klutz. In addition to being a fat-ass (it’s ok, I’m at peace with it. Plus, it’s literally true), I’m also fairly tall at 5’10”. I have long legs and big feet, and both seem to like to get tangled up in things.

I hadn’t done anything particularly klutzy in quite a while before today. I had mostly managed to remain upright at the appropriate times and kept all my body parts largely intact. The worst I could come up with were a few burns from a particularly hate-filled cookie sheet last week. No biggie, comparatively speaking.

But, all good things must come to an end, as they say.

This afternoon as I was walking back to my apartment from the car, I stepped up onto the concrete slab of the breezeway that separates our place from the neighbor’s, and promptly careened forward in violent fashion.

Here seems a good place to note that one of the downsides of being tall is that it seems like it takes longer to hit the ground when you’re falling, so you have more time to consider your impending doom. You also have slightly more time to try and enact mid-course corrections, but let’s be honest, those very rarely pan out once rapid descent has begun.

This was one of those times where I was sort of slow-motion falling, so my brain was trying to compensate for the misstep and help me catch my footing again…but it was way too late. As a result, I took what amounted to three giant beyond-full-stride steps across the breezeway in ever-increasingly out of balance fashion, and then went down like a ton of shit three inches from the front door of the apartment across from ours.

First of all, THANK FUCK the tenant in that apartment had recently moved out and so wasn’t around to see my slow-motion descent into pain and suffering; or worse, the subsequent peeling of myself up off the cold concrete slab while swearing a blue streak and trying not to cry. Second of all, thank fuck AGAIN for the fact that I fell where I did because if I had been just a few inches closer to the door I’d be at the ER having broken glass picked out of my previously-cute face right now.

Once I got myself up off the concrete (with no small amount of Bambi-on-ice-type machinations), I turned to look back and see what it was I had tripped on. The only thing I could find was a small stone, about a half inch long and quarter inch thick, sitting innocently enough near the edge of the step.

Whether it was that bastarding little thing that sent me into my very painful sprawl, I have no way of knowing…but I think I’m going to blame it, just out of spite.

fruitcake chronicles: in the beginning

Posted on by

In the beginning, there was booze.

Two kinds of booze, to be precise.

IMG_20151129_122808237

The much-coveted Screech was on sale. IT WAS A SIGN!

There was also an ass-load of dried fruit, but that’s nowhere near as exciting as the booze. Also, ignore that random onion in the background. I don’t know. This is why I’m not a famous food blogger. I can’t control what’s going on in the background of my pictures. Or my life.

Anyway.

I made fruitcake on Sunday and also managed to get pretty well schnockered in the process. It wasn’t my intent to get wasted while baking AT ALL, but that Screech, man. It’s so good. And so smooth. And I just kept sipping it..and sipping it…and mixing it with apple cider and sipping THAT…

…and about an hour later I realized, quite to my surprise, that I was fucking LIT.

I feel like I kept things pretty well under control, though:

  • I didn’t burn the fruitcake (or the potholders or the walls or anything else).
  • I didn’t cut myself AT ALL even while handling multiple knives (none of which are especially sharp, to be fair. Kind of like me).
  • I even managed to construct a truth be told quite magnificent turkey pot pie after the fruitcake, all without maiming anyone, poisoning anyone or blowing anything up.

However, I DO wish that I had taken before and after shots of my kitchen cabinets. I went to grab the potato starch tonight while making dinner and basically had to take everything out of the baking cabinet to find it. Similarly, the kosher salt was buried all the way at the back of the bottom shelf when it’s usually front and center. The bag of sugar was precariously balanced on top of a leaning tower of plastic containers partially full of various dried fruits, and there was a box of currants leaning at a 45 degree angle on some of the shorter jars of spices. My cabinets aren’t organized to an anal degree or anything, but I try to kind of keep sections – dry goods section, spice section, oils and vinegars section, canned goods section. You know…just sort of a basic semblance of order so that I’m not, for instance, swearing and throwing shit left and right in the middle of making gravy, trying to find the stupid fucking potato starch at the last second.

Also, valuable lessons about day drinking were re-learned on Sunday… chief among them, the reason why I don’t usually day drink. You see, when you drink yourself stupid at night, you can just go crash on your comfy wonderful bed, close your eyes and fall blissfully into a deep and dreamless stupor. You awaken the next morning, if not refreshed, then at least usually with a modicum of functionality. The drunkenness becomes a thing of the past and you move on with life.

When you day-drink, you’re fully conscious and aware of the sobering up. At least, unless you’ve REALLY gone overboard, in which case you may have bigger problems. Point is, being awake and aware of slowly becoming less drunk is basically no fun at all. It’s like the polar opposite of all the fun you had getting drunk, but with added ennui, guilt, and quite possibly shame. Being aware of moving back up through those layers of suckitude on the way back to sobriety is pretty depressing.

That’s how it seems to work for me anyway. It’s quite possible that there are plenty of people who handle day liquor better than I do. I decided on Sunday that I didn’t really want to learn that skill, though.

I’ll just stick to evening drinking and going to bed at relatively appropriate times to sleep it off, thanks.

fuck Kokomo

Posted on by
When I was in elementary school, music class was basically my everything. Some kids live for recess…I LIVED for music class.

We went through a few music teachers during my years in school (which, after a brief stint of thinking I wanted to be a music teacher myself and spending a very small amount of time in a classroom with a bunch of howling banshees…I mean, children…I can totally understand why). My favorite by far was an exotic (for late ’80’s rural Vermont, anyway) Latina woman named Maricel.

I’m not sure how old Maricel was when she was teaching us, but looking back on some of the songs she taught us, I have to figure she was probably fairly young. She taught us some traditional Spanish-language songs, but her main thing was pop music. For instance, for the spring concert circa 1989 or 1990, she had the 8th grade class learn and sing Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. I was a lowly 4th grader at that point and I was so impressed because geez, that song was like, EDGY. To a ten year old, anyway.

Maricel’s song selection for MY class that year was “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys. I was kind of obsessed with the Beach Boys at the time (mostly their older catalog – I was snob even back then), so “Kokomo” was right up my alley.

Or so I thought.

Part of the problem was that even as a young kid, I had a good ear for music. I could usually sing a melody back accurately after hearing it just once or twice. If you’ve ever heard “Kokomo”, you know it’s a very simple melody with a ton of repetition. So basically, I learned to sing “Kokomo” in one 45-minute class period.

Enter the second part of the problem: I was (and still am) very, VERY impatient. I didn’t understand why we had to keep beating the “Kokomo” horse after the third or fourth class because it was very clearly dead to me at that point. The horse, I mean. I are phrase good.

Anyway – you can probably guess how it went. Because we were performing the song at the big spring concert, it had to be PERFECT, so we rehearsed it SUPER EXTRA A LOT TIMES A MILLIONTY…and I got really fucking bored, really fucking quickly.

A bored Shelby is not generally a disruptive Shelby – I wasn’t the kid who would start singing a different song or take off running around the room or something. I’d just kind of slip off into la-la land and do my own thing inside my head until something more shiny and interesting came along. The thing about daydreaming though, is that you often absorb bits of what’s going on around you in real life even though you’re essentially off with the fairies. So the whole time I was standing there going through the motions in class while secretly planning out my unicorn ranch, my brain was still being subjected to the song “Kokomo” being repeated over and over…and over…

…and over…

…and 25(ish) years later? I CANNOT FUCKING STAND THAT SONG. It annoys me to an irrational degree. All I have to hear is that first breathy phrase, “Aaaa-ruba, Jamaica…”, and I’m scrambling to switch the station. Gah, it made me twitch even just hearing it in my head when I typed it just then!

By the way, did I mention that my co-worker listens exclusively to the Margaritaville XM Radio station at work? EXCLUSIVELY. Not on headphones, either. Margaritaville refers, of course, to the Jimmy Buffett song of the same name, and the station’s playlist is comprised of similar beachy, laid-back, Caribbean-feeling tunes.

Like, for instance, “Kokomo” by the Beach Boys…

minion

#Iwokeuplikethis

how about…no

Posted on by
nope

again with the bears!

 

You may have noticed that I lasted all of A WEEK AND A HALF using the NaBloPoMo writing prompts.

First of, ADD motherfuckers. I warned you.

Second of all, you can’t blame me, really, when this week’s prompts sound like a bunch of fucking Miss America pageant interview questions:

Monday, November 16 – Pretending you have the expertise to make the product a reality, what do you wish you could invent?

Answer: I’d invent a life-sized doll of your mom. 

Tuesday, November 17 – What is one place you need to see to feel like your life is complete?

Answer: I need to see…your mom.

Wednesday, November 18 – What do you hope people remember about you after you’re gone?

Answer:  My razor sharp wit. I know your mom will.

Thursday, November 19 – Where would you want to retire if money wasn’t an issue?

Answer: Your mom’s house.

Friday, November 20 – What do you hope happens by the end of this year?

Answer: I hope that rash your mom has clears up so she can hang out again.

 

I don’t want to sound like I’m directly bashing the BlogHer people who came up with the list because I get it, it’s not easy.  Shit, I do a thing called the Friday Five on a knitting forum, where I come up with five usually at least tenuously themed questions to ask everyone once a week and even THAT gets really hard sometimes.  Like, to the point where I start avoiding the internet some Fridays so that I can claim I was sick and didn’t, uhh, internet at all that day, and that’s why I didn’t do the Friday Five.  *shifty look*

Basically, I’m cool with the writing prompts until they start getting  DEEP…and making me have to like, THINK.  Or worse, FEEL.  I feel more than enough on a day to day basis already, believe you me.  I feel shit that isn’t even appropriate or, in some cases, applicable.

Examples:

Happy commercial with a cute puppy?  I FEEL OVERWHELMING SADNESS THAT THE PUPPY WILL SOME DAY GROW OLD AND DIE, JUST LIKE THE REST OF US.  LIFE IS SO POINTLESS.

Fun pop song on the radio? ANGER BECAUSE THIS SONG CLEARLY STEALS PARTS FROM TWO OTHER, BETTER SONGS, AND KIDS CALL THIS MUSIC.  WTF, ALL THE GOOD MUSIC HAS ALREADY BEEN MADE.  THERE IS NO POINT IN LISTENING TO THE RADIO ANYMORE.

Friend tells me exciting news?  I will not only be happy and excited for them but I will then proceed to WELL UP WITH TEARS BECAUSE LIFE IS SO BEAUTIFUL I JUST CAN’T HANDLE IT.

Sooo, yeah.  Sorry BlogHer writing prompts, but I feel enough feels that I can’t turn the volume down on to begin with.  Trying to expound upon how I’d invent a way to feed the world…

…or how I don’t think I’ll ever feel like my life is complete because there’s so much to see and do that it’s overwhelming and makes me really sad that I’m going to miss a whole lot of it no matter how hard I try…

…or that I’m afraid that no one will remember me for ANYTHING after I die because no one will have really known me…

…or that I can’t fathom picking a place to retire because I can’t fucking fathom retiring at all…

…or that my only hope for the end of every single year ever is that people will somehow come to their senses and stop fucking HATING AND KILLING each other…

…just isn’t something that I’ve got the emotional stamina to handle.

At least, not on the average weekday, where it’s “inappropriate” to start drinking at 10am.

 

 

 

 

 

 

the personal assistant of my dreams

Posted on by

Today’s prompt is asking me which tasks I would assign to a personal assistant who would do my most dreaded tasks.

Now, THIS is a subject I can warm to!

This is what I look like on the inside.

This is what I look like on the inside.

First and foremost, my personal assistant would need to address the laundro-bed situation, because gods know I’M not addressing it.

Once they got done sorting out and putting away clean laundry, I’d need for them to clean the fridge. It’s not particularly manky or anything. I just figure if I’ve got the chance to have someone else do it, I’m sure as hell not wasting it!

I would need the personal assistant to hang around at work with me and answer the phone whenever it rings, because I detest talking on the phone. There’s this thing called email, people. WHY CAN’T YOU EMAIL? ARE YOUR FINGERS BROKEN? I DON’T THINK THEY ARE!

If I could also get the personal assistant to do the legwork involved with getting my name off the mailing lists for all the bazillions of credit card solicitations we get in the mail, that would be wonderful. And, it wouldn’t be entirely selfish, because we’d be saving trees!

Personal assistant should also be available for dog-walking during inclement weather (mostly during the hot and muggy months and also the cold and snowy months. Since we live in Vermont, that’s basically…every month bar May and October, and even those are iffy, frankly).

Personal assistant may also be called upon for these and other to-be-determined as-needed duties:

– explaining to my father how the Internet works (as often as necessary)

– relocating and/or dispatching of various insect life forms (saves my husband the trouble. See? Again with the not being selfish!)

– trips to WalMart and/or other large stores and shopping malls where many people congregate

– cleaning the dust off the weird squiggly curvy part of the bottom and sides of the toilet

– washing windows

I could probably think of more things, but the ones I came up with are already kind of horrifying me in terms of how truly lazy I could really be if given the chance. Now I feel like I should go load the dishwasher and clean the stove-top as some sort of penance for even THINKING about being so slovenly.

Ahh, good ol’ Puritan guilt…

tactical error

Posted on by

Last night on the way home from Carnage we stopped at the Long Trail Brewery for dinner and drinks with friends.  I really like Long Trail’s pumpkin ale, which is one of their specialties this time of year, but when I tried to order one the waitress informed me they were out.  Sadface.  Then she mentioned that they did have plenty of the Imperial Pumpkin and asked if I wanted to try that instead.  It sounded good to me so I said sure, and off she went to get me one.

It’s worth mentioning here that “Imperial”, when it comes to American-made beers at least, usually means that the alcohol content is higher than normal beer – generally somewhere between 8-12%, which is double what normal beer usually runs.

Long story short, I ended up drinking two glasses of the Imperial Pumpkin, plus about half a pint of my husband’s hard cider, by the time all was said and done. WHEEE!  By the time we were ready to leave I had decided that I really needed a growler of the Imperial Pumpkin to take home.  We bought the growler plus a bottle of a fancy stout that my husband wanted to try, and then headed home.

When I got home, I started reading the printed info on the back of the growler bottle at home, I noticed that it said it should be consumed within 72 hours of bottling…and within 24 hours of opening.

A growler, for the record, is 64 ounces. 64 ounces of beer is a LOT. I was definitely thinking this bottle of beer was going to last me the better part of a week, not A DAY. There’s no way I can drink it all tonight, certainly…especially given that I have to work tomorrow.  I’m just going to have to hope that it keeps ok for another couple days.

Moral of the story: don’t go beer shopping when you’re already drunk.

View this post on Instagram

Legit.

A post shared by Rhubarb Swank (@ealachan) on

what price good hair?

Posted on by
The last few days, my hair has been feeling kind of…crispy…but not like, dry crispy.  More like…sticky-crispy?  Like when you’ve been swimming in salt water and then you let your hair dry without washing the salt out, sort of.  The first day I noticed it, I was totally blaming it on the fact that my bastard-ass plumbing was on the fritz and I had really poor water pressure in the shower, the logical conclusion of which was that my shampoo wasn’t rinsing out of my hair entirely.  Last night I managed to semi-fix the water pressure issue in the shower though, and this morning it felt like all the shampoo definitely rinsed out fine.  And yet, here I sit with sticky-crisp hair once again.  I’m forced at this point to suspect the culprit may be the new shampoo I bought on Saturday.

Buying new shampoo is one of the quickest ways I can think of to send myself into analysis paralysis.  There are all these boxes to check: must be sulfate-free, must smell nice but not too strong, must not cost a crap-ton, must not make my scalp itch, must not make my hair look terrible.  Some of those are pretty easy – I can read the bottle to find out if it has sulfates in it.  I can sniff it to see if I like the smell.  But how do I know if it’s going to make my scalp itch or make my hair look terrible?  I don’t until I buy it and try it.  That’s the part I super DUPER fucking hate – the not knowing or even being able to make an educated guess.  It’s a total crap shoot.  I detest crap shoots.

But anyway, back to my current hair issue.

The real mind-boggler is that my hair actually looks pretty good despite feeling super weird.  It makes no sense.  My hair is very fine so it gets weighed down by product residue or oils ridiculously quickly.  Usually if I have enough gunk in my hair to cause it to actually FEEL gunked up, then it will LOOK gunked up too…but that’s currently not the case.  It looks fuller and thicker than usual (which is great since this formula I bought claimed to be thickening. Score one for truth in advertising), and it’s fairly shiny.  Things seem pretty good until I touch it, then the facade crumbles and I am left wondering why I can’t run my fingers through my hair and why my roots feel…well…sticky-crisp.

I can’t return the shampoo, so I’m stuck with it.  Do I just keep using it and hope that I eventually get used to it, or that it eventually makes my hair look so fabulous that I’m able to let go of the sticky-crisp issue?  Do I run, not walk, to the nearest store and go back to the previous brand that didn’t do much for me volume-wise but that smelled ok and didn’t make my hair feel weird?  Do I foist it off on some unsuspecting friend who quite possibly is more well-adjusted and has way less weird sensory issues than me?

It’s a conundrum, man.  I don’t know.
I want puffy alpaca hair. Is that so much to ask?

I want puffy alpaca hair. Is that so much to ask?

There is no “sam” in Samhain.

Posted on by

Halloween is my favorite.  I know, it’s basically everyone’s favorite, but still.  I love seeing the clever, creative and often ridiculously artistic things that people come up with for costumes.  Also, I think it’s nice that there’s at least one guaranteed day a year where everyone can let their freak flag fly if they want to without being judged.  Want to roll up to work made up like a mermaid with a shark eating your head and not have anyone even raise an eyebrow?  Halloween’s your day!

 

Halloween also marks something more important in my personal calendar, which is the festival of Samhain.  I won’t bore you with a history lesson on how most Christian holidays and a great many of their most sacred rituals were copied directly from or closely based on those of the pagan peoples that they then went on to subjugate, but there’s plenty of information available if it’s something you’re interested in reading up on.

Anyway.

Samhain was thought to be, at its earliest root, a festival to mark the bringing in of the cattle for the winter by the herdsmen of ancient Celtic tribes.  During this time of year the herdsmen slaughtered animals to feed their tribes through the winter. They were getting the last of the plant-based food gathered as well, and getting ready for the long, cold season ahead. It was considered the beginning of winter, of the dark and unproductive (crop-wise) time of the year.

The transition period between summer and winter, the light season and the dark season, was also thought to be a time when the world of the living and the world of the dead drew near to each other.  This is, of course, the origin of the “spooky” themes of our modern Halloween, but in ancient times this drawing closer of the two worlds was far more serious business. There were spirits that needed to be appeased in order for herds, food stores and families to make it through the winter, and dead kin who were thought to come back to re-visit their families for honoring and celebrating.

I am drawn to Celtic and Germanic pagan traditions in general, partially because that’s where my ancestry lies.  My family came to what was then still “the colonies” from the British Isles, Germany and France, and were subsistence farmers for many, many generations on both sides of the Atlantic.  I’m not a farmer myself and probably never will be, but that generations-deep synchronization with the seasons is something I still strongly feel and relate to.  It probably also helps that I live in a very rural area where these seasonal cycles are to a certain degree inescapable whether one bases their livelihood on them or not. It’s a lot harder to lose touch with the change in seasons and what those changes mean for both man and beast when one lives in farm country.

Samhain, in particular, is also important to me spiritually because it affords me an opportunity to feel closer to lost loved ones.  I’m not generally big into the “woo”.  I don’t believe that I can light a candle and ask my dead grandfather to step through the veil for a nice chat, for example (although if you think YOU can do it, I’m willing to invite you over to try because I think that would be AWESOME).  But, I do believe that this time of year, the spirits of the dead are closer to our own world and may have a better chance of hearing us if we speak to them.  And really, who doesn’t speak to a dead loved one now and then anyway?  It’s not actually that weird, if you think about it.

Whether you spend it getting your goats in from the summer pasture, passing out candy to trick-or-treaters, keeping an ear open for the voice of a loved one long passed, carving jack-o-lanterns, or even sitting inside with all the lights out pretending you’re not home, I hope your Samhain is happy and safe!

And for fuck’s sake, stop pronouncing it “sam-hane”, “sam-in” or SAM-anything. It’s saw-win. Or sow-in.