God, it’s a ghost town ‘round these parts.  This blog is filled with virtual tumbleweeds.  Thankfully, the dearth of content is inversely proportionate to the amount of good stuff going on in the real world, so it’s not like I’m sitting around pickin’ my toes in Poughkeepsie AND not writing anything.

However.  Between a job that requires me to actually spend my time working instead of ordering muffins and then slacking off for 5 hours until I kick off early, school, and the band, I don’t really get to hang out with people who aren’t directly involved in one of those endeavors.  Even worse: no one gets to see all the new skulls & whatnot at my house.  I hardly decorate for other people- if I did, they’d all be massively disappointed- but I do like to revel in the décor with people who understand how much I love it, even if it ain’t their cuppa.  So: home blogging begins.  It’s Skulling Season, the time of year that I hit up every place I can think of that might have something skull- or Halloween-related, and buy as much crap as I can carry to be placed in my humble abode for my year-round pleasure.  I’m so excited about some of the stuff I’ve found this Skulling Season that I have to tell SOMEONE about it.

First: I’ve taken to purchasing flameless candles nearly whenever I come across them, which has started to become an expensive habit as they’re more ubiquitous now than when I started.  At the beginning, it was one or two at a time from Target.  Lately it’s more like an entire 20-piece set of them from Costco, and yesterday 9 of them that weren’t even particularly a bargain, but they were glittery, and that was more important than what Marshalls thought I should pay them for the privilege of owning them.  My intention was to cover the top of our piano with them, and unless I remove the other things to make more room, I do believe I’ve achieved said goal:

Not to worry, though.  I haven’t gone entirely fire-free.  I still have a good collection of real candles for surfaces not shared with feathers and various flammable knickknacks.  Here’s our organ with some of the good finds from this year.  It’s looking much like an Altar of Rock in this photo, which kind of inspires me to put a bunch of big metal crosses up on the wall above it.  Upside down ones, naturally.  Everybody worship satan!

A closeup of the unlit menagerie:

Here’s the greatest thing that’s come of the season so far.  We moved our dining room table into the living room so we’d use it more, and put the band stuff in the dining room instead since we only use that a couple times a week.  It’s been great, and it turns out that if the tangled mess of cables are relegated to a room where I don’t have to look at them and step over them all the time, my OCD isn’t activated, sending me into a cable-coiling rage.  Success in modern living.  Anyway, the table was begging for a herd of candles, and it just so happens that Target has a shitload of bleeding skull candles in different colors this year.  But put them directly onto the runner?  Nay, of course not.  Instead, I used the last of the wood from my old bed- certified “Don’t Throw That Away- It’s Good Wood!” if ever I saw it, and which also comprises my old raised garden bed enclosure as well as a breakfast nook bench (do I win the Reclaim Queen title?)- and fashioned it into a candle riser.  This has the dual purpose of keeping the wax from dripping onto the table runner as well as giving me a place to store my consistently large collection of half-read magazines while still leaving room to, you know, dine.  It’s a bit tall, but who wants to see who’s sitting across from you at the table anyhow?  If you liked the person at all, you’d sit next to them, not across from them.

Note also the cup of skull toothpicks, skull placemats, and skull napkins.

Some cheapo, unexpected awesome from Fred Meyer: look at the shadows these candle holders make.  I’m glad I happened to place them up against the wall or I might not have ever thought about the possibility of this happening.

Here’s my bowl o’skulls, the repository for all skulls and bones that don’t have a final resting place, AKA McMayhem’s Home For Wayward Skulls:

I want to macrame a holder for it so I can hang it from the ceiling.

You would be forgiven for considering this skull thing has perhaps gotten a bit out of hand…it is a kind of all-consuming at this point.