andre and eleanor came over for a pumpkin-carving fest this weekend! we each let our pumpkin speak to us and ended up with:

jack skellington (tom)

a brain slug (eleanor)

homer (andre)

a ball of yarn (me)

BOO!

happy trick or treating

this toy may not have been one of my best cuddle up comfort toys, but it was a pretty cool toy!
it is the cutting-edge gaming system, the intellivision:

as you can see, my little sis instantly had her eyes on it!

however, it was for my birthday. see:

so she had to keep her hands off, at least for that day.

being the little nerd that i was, i mostly played the electric company’s “math fun”

although i was pretty good at lock n chase, too:

we saw mates of state tonight.

holy cow, they were fantastic.

we went to the infamous rhinebeck, ny sheep and wool festival on sunday.

seriously, words can not describe the huge amount of yarn that can be found at rhinebeck. it is actually overwhelming, and i found myself in a bit of a daze. so much in a daze, in fact, that i took no pictures of the yarn. i have to come up with a better plan of action for attending next year. yesterday it just washed over me, next year i will have to take control of it!

we met (but, again, did not photograph) knitting celebrities, such as stitchy mcyarnpants, ann and kay, and jess & casey of ravelry, who were so sweet and seemed genuinely happy to meet all of the people that they have sucked into the world of ravelry. we also walked right past yarn harlot, but decided to not bother her since she was heading toward the front of the tent where she would be speaking to the waiting audience. i did get to see the finished kauni sweater, as she slowly walked by me, and it is gorgeous.

in addition to the yarn and wool for spinning, there were other non-yarn activities.

we stopped by the festival of cheese:

i did not partake of the free cheese.

considered eating a deep fried pickle, but then decided to pass:

we missed the sheep-herding dogs, but we did see the pumpkin chuckin’ competition.

some of the chuckers:

loading:

launching:

the pumpkins flew too quickly to capture on camera, though i tried. the pumpkins made a fantastic sound when they hit the ground at that speed! we got to see one of the teams actually hit the target, that was a real crowd-pleaser. speaking of crowds, there were a ton of people at the festival, but even so, it was surprising to see the huge crowd for this event:

the people, they love the pumpkin chunkin’ enough to step away from the yarn. perhaps, like me, they just needed to take a breather.

we just got back from they might be giants at the calvin theatre tonight!

we saw them in may when they were doing a few shows to warm up before the new tour. that one was a small show, they made a few mistakes, joked around and weren’t totally polished, which was so much fun to see.

tonight’s show was so much fun for totally different reasons. it was a big, high energy show. they were polished, funny, played a fantastic group of songs and when the curtain opened, we saw this:

for reference see this video…(if you care)

they are currently touring with a horn section in addition to the regular band members. if you love their songs from the early-mid 90s, this is the tour to see. the horns have allowed them to do songs they almost never do live, from that era.

as usual they also had an interesting opening band. the band was oppenheimer. do you know them? we enjoyed them enough to plunk down some cash for their cd. they have a song about twin peaks, and performed an air horn solo. i mean really, how can you go wrong?

you’ve seen his special chair…now you get to meet the man himself!

here he is…my pop-pop:

(i am the cutie he is holding on the right)
he is my paternal grandfather, and i adored him. he had a deep, gruff voice, but was gentle and funny and loved us kids.

such a handsome guy, too:

he called oreo cookies, “huntzwhistles” so that we wouldn’t know that he was talking about those tasty treats. i suppose that only worked until we figured out that huntzwhistle = oreo, but he never stopped calling them that. and as a die-hard coke guy, he would probably be appalled that i now live in a die-hard pepsi household.