Two months and counting

The instantaneous autumn weather we've had this week has turned my thoughts to Halloween - specifically, my friend Emily's second annual party for which I plan to make decorations and weird foods. Last year my contributions included:

• Blueberry-buttermilk-cardamom panna cotta in the shape of Frankenstein hands, which my friends promptly re-carved so that one of the hands was giving the finger. It was still pretty delicious though
  
• Realistic jello shot eyeballs (the round ice cube trays I used are currently missing, and I am freaking out - they were extremely well received and fun to make. I painted the iris, pupil, and bloodshot veins on with food coloring)
• Two bats made out of wire hangers and duct tape
• An entirely black flower arrangement
• Purchased light strings (orange, purple and eyeball shaped)
• Enough grey, loose-weave "creepy cloth" from Oriental Trading's online store to cover Emily's entire futon couch
• A big cheap plastic skull wall hanging from the Five Below
  
• A sheet cake dribbled with jello eyeballs, plastic flies and maraschino cherry liquid which no one touched

Here's my brainstorming for this year's additions:

• Thai/Vietnamese basil seed drink; the floating basil seeds look like tiny eggs or something equally gross, but they taste like watermelon (not that I expect anyone but me to drink it)
• "Thousand-year-old eggs" (for looks - see above; I think they're interesting, flavor-wise, but the whites are purplish black and the yolk is green)
• Bone-shaped meringue cookies
• 44 assorted vital organ gummies, already purchased
• If I can find or make one, a tacky life-size jointed cardboard witch, preferably 1950s style
  
• We didn't have enough ghost imagery last year; either cutouts or fabric sculpture
• My ribcage chandelier design from art class in 2005 needs some more play; maybe in 3-D?? (Wire wrapped with something and spray-painted glow-in-the-dark?)
• BLACK LIGHT
• A recipe I found online for "alien autopsy shots" (bloody grenadine on the bottom, with bailey's half-suspended in mountain dew above to look just basically gross)
  
• I have this book of vintage monster images I have to remember to blow up at Kinko's; maybe I can make a banner or garland

OMG, right?

Ho hum

I'm officially kind of bored with embroidery, which is a shame, since I decided to undertake a larger project this week - a set of decorated cocktail napkins for an old friend who's getting married in October. So I find myself duty-bound to finish the little mushrooms and deers and molecule diagrams and cartoon characters I've already traced onto the linen. At least my supply of Star Trek: The Next Generation has been refreshed a la an Amazon shipment yesterday; that should smooth things over a bit. (I'm on season five, but I skipped season two.)

In personal news, my friends Tom and Alyse from Oberlin College have more or less relocated to New York, which is a bummer because they're kind of my go-to people; they're the only friends besides my sister who were living less than ten minutes from me. Alyse has been in NY for the past month, stage-managing a play about Emily Dickinson, but until yesterday she returned every weekend to visit Tom, who was doing some kind of unpaid Philadelphia internship with a nonprofit that had to do with the train system. Now Tom has finagled an unpaid lighting tech gig on the aforementioned play, so I probably won't see them for at least a month unless I drag my butt, crutch and all, up to NYC for opening night. That may or may not happen, so it looks like I have to commute to other apartments if I don't want to be a total embroidery/Star Trek loner for the rest of September. Undecided.

Otherwise, my sister's new job seems to be going tolerably well, although she is planning to vamoose out of there as soon as she finds another one. She's doing what I was doing a year ago - assistant preschool teaching - but it turns out she went to high school with two of her co-workers, one of which was also a complete horror show mean girl to her in middle school. So, not the greatest situation. I have to find a job too. I'm burning through my savings with Star Trek and restaurants (not to mention cigarettes.)