Happy Halloween! I took an extra couple of days off since as far as I'm concerned Halloween should be a week-long holiday for everyone. We started the festivities with some pumpkin carving- I did a Cylon Centurion (new style, with a bit of help from this guy who did an oldskool one) and Michelle carved her first pumpkin ever! Then we added some vomitous pumpkin guts because that automatically makes pretty much any jack-o-lantern better. Hers was a big hit, but only one guy (a dad) recognized the Cylon.



And of course the highlight was dressing Pallas up in her costume. Not being crafty or anything we just ordered one off the internet. She was an elephant! We went trick or treating just on our block, got some candy for me. She's too little so I get them all! Hahaha my evil plan has finally come to fruition.



Yay for Halloween! Here are some spooky eyes before we say good-bye to the best day of the year. Plus I made a Flickr set out of the day. But don't forget tomorrow is Day of the Dead!

Here's my annual Halloween poem, kind of inspired by the huge spiders we had living on our veranda all summer. We had an uneasy truce with them.

The spiders on the porch are banging on the door
I know better than to answer but what can I do?
I open the door
Ugh! They're even bigger than before
Listen you guys, you know the deal
you can weave your webs and eat whatever you catch out there
but you leave us alone in here
Those clusters of eyes stare at me
and those mouthpieces
drumming and drooling
disgusting
"Hungry!" they cry in those dessicated arachnovoices
Too bad. You know the deal
"We change the deal! Hungry!"
Sigh
Fine
Wait here
I stomp downstairs and turn on the lights
manage to grab two goblins before the rest scurry away
"Where are you taking them? My babies!"
The spiders are hungry. Sorry
"But we had a deal!"
Yeah well
Deals change

It was time to do up the front yard for Halloween. I dug out last year's stuff, and set it up and it was a little underwhelming. So a quick trip to the store and now it;s a little better:

Some of my deviantArt acquaintances have been doing zombie Star Wars art for Halloween, the full gallery has been posted at Star Wars' Official Flickr page. My favorite is Grant Gould's, who posts more about it at his own blog.
As for us, we are going on a Halloweenish date tonight, to see Marty Chan's The Bone House.

I had a miserable day last week when I went to work sick. I woke up with a mild cough and thought it was just from coal dust. But by 9:00 I was feeling all kinds of rotten. I even thought about going home but I was just running shovel 6 which doesn't require much more than not falling asleep. Plus it was the last day before days off so I toughed it out. Then I wound up staying in Hinton an extra night and sleeping for 13 hours.
Anyways, I was sick for a few days. Now they say that 99.9% of the people who are getting sick right now are getting H1N1. So the odds are I had it. Therefore I don't need to get the vaccine. The tricky part comes in figuring out what to do with the youngling. I strongly believe the seriousness of the Swine Flu is being exaggerated by the media (quite unusual for them, since they certainly didn't get carried away over the Y2K bug or Michael Jackson's death or little boys and their balloons).
I also am a little leery of believing all the things you here about vaccines. I've noticed that the same people talking about autism and adjuvants tend to be the same people that, when you follow their agendas back, are anti-evolution and anti-science. NOT the people I want informing me about decisions I make regarding my daughter's health. On the other hand, the people saying we should all go get the vaccine early and often aren't exactly agenda-free themselves. Just how much money are the pharmaceutical companies making on the vaccine, anyways? You know those guys would never bias data to cover up side-effects.
So. What to do. Maybe my daughter will get H1N1 and need to be hopsitalized. But maybe she's already fought it off and won, assuming she was exposed to it through me. Maybe if we get the vaccine her immune system will react and she will have to be hospitalized. All these maybes. Might as well roll the dice.
Here's something that's not a maybe or a myth, though- the vaccine contains thimerosol which is a mercury compound. This is used as a preservative to prevent micro-organisms from growing in the vaccine (presumably it works because it is poisonous to microbes). Thimerosol has been discontinued in the US in children's vaccines except in multi-dose flu vaccines such as the H1N1 and the seasonal flu shot. Do I really want to give my 9-month-old daughter a shot of mercury, regardless of how little there might be per dose? It's free!
Ummm . . .

Seven years of Pooing in the Woods!

In the history of cinema, can you believe that there have only ever been two films titled The Crab? The first came out in 1917 and not much is really known about it, at least on IMDB. The other is in post-production and will hopefully come out soon to an arthouse near you. And doubly hopefully to an arthouse near me because my good friend Jonathan Wilde is in it. I can use his whole name because the official Crab movie website does. Jon plays the nice guy, so it will be cool to see him have to actually do some acting!
Congratulations Jon! I hope the movie comes out soon but on the other hand, I hope it takes a while so that a movie theater can be built in Hinton so they can show it in time!

Obviously I loved Slipknot but I was a little worried about how Michelle would react. She's absorbed a lot of knot by osmosis over the course of our marriage but still. Anyways she had a great time. It was cool to kind of watch it through her eyes. Corey Taylor was mesmerizing and full of love for his Edmonton family and Michelle was bouncing it back. (M: he's a class act. And who knew motherf**kers could be such an affectionate term?) Highlight- probably People = Shit for me. Orchestrated chaos. And seeing Chris Fehn and Sid Wilson and the Clown wandering around engaging in mayhem. For Michelle maybe it was when we all went down to our knees and jumped up on Corey's signal? Also the fact that she recognized Before I Forget.
Today I took Pallas for a walk, we went down to the little pond where the Canada geese have been massing. Michelle told me Pallas is mesmerized by them. Sure enough when we got there she was totally wide-eyed and amazed. Other than Hi! and dadadad (and sometimes HiDad) she doesn't really have any words yet so her wonder was expressed in a series of grunty gasps. "Ah!" and "Ooh!" and "Aaaaaaahhhh!" It was amazing to see it through her eyes. And yet geese-on-a-pond is a fairly low entry on the list of Awesome Things in the World. Just wait till I show her all the rest of them!

All the snow has kind of sucked some of the lifeblood out of the Halloween season, but that only gives it the chance to rise from the dead and be a vampire! So really, twice the hallogoodness.
Speaknig of which, MIchelle asked me how my day went and I said it was alright, but I was stuck running shovel 6 all day, the beast that refuses to die. Every time you think it's dead it comes back to life. Then I realized it was the zombie shovel! It even lurches when it walks. Only it eats rocks instead of brains. So that makes it better. A bit. Sort of.
Anyways, check out the Dedmonton site!

I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. What I'm really thankful for is my family.

Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful that two of my favorite things are together at last: Wes Anderson and Roald Dahl. Fantastic Mr. Fox!

Stay away from my M&Ms!
Also, you'd think you wouldn't have to be told, but stay out of the tiger enclosure!

Well I am off to work nights again, and I often have to remind myself why I do it. remember that Simpsons episode where Homer explains why there aren't any pictures of Maggie anywhere? "Don't forget you're here forever!"

By now you (if you care) have heard of Star Wars Uncut, a fan project to remake Star Wars scene for scene. Not quite done yet but the trailer is up.
Clone Wars Season 2 started up this weekend, but I am still a little behind on season 1 and so I won't be watching just yet. But Bossk is set to make an appearance this season which makes me all giddy.
And today we went to Chapters to take advantage of Teacher Appreciation Day and got a bunch of books. Too bad the Star Wars Legacy graphic album was one I already have!

Hopefully the new movie Whip It will usher in a new era of Roller Derby Enlightenment, paving the way for world peace. Or at the very least get a few more people out to Edmonton's own roller derby crew, E-Ville. You can even join if you want, they're recruiting! They were at WEM today doing some scrimmages and stuff, and since our good friend BB Sting is an E-Ville stalwart we had to go and check it out. Pallas was sporting her E-Ville onesie. And making her growling cheer noises.

Alright well here are a few lessons I've learned from coal mining, hopefully you will find this completely unedifying and inapplicable to your own lives. These are some things I learned the hard way:

-don't hide your hardhat in a contractor's truck so you can sneak home early for Christmas, otherwise you leave yourself open to being framed for stealing gas
-potheads are really big and heavy, so it's a good idea not to get snmashed in the face with one
-they also carry 7200 volts, so try not to disconnectode them till you get the "safe to work on the line" call
-even when they are disconnectoded, they can still carry a discharge so be careful about sticking your fingers in them. 7200 volts of static shock can clench all your muscles and render them sore for a few hours.
-no matter how many times they say they fixed shovel 6, they didn't fix shovel 6. Shovel 6 can not be fixed.
-you wouldn't think bananas can explode, but they can, and they make an awful mess of the rest of your lunch

When I got back from New Zealand and started up again at the mine after a 2 1/2 year layoff, I found an old counter in one of the trucks and took it home to count the number of four-shift rotations I did. This past week was the 200th. Pretty crazy. 800 (give or take, since sometimes I work less than the four shifts and very very occasionally I work more) 12 hour shifts and who knows how many loads of rock hauled or dug. I feel like I should write a list of Things I Learned From Coal Mining but like when Hobbes asked Calvin what he learned from the killer snowgoon fiasco, I prefer to learn lessons that have as little application to real life as possible. "Snow goons are bad news!"