"Took me, like, three hours to finish the shading on your upper lip...it's probably the best pumpkin I've ever done"

Man...LATE start today. Must be the rain or something, 'cause after waking up at about 6AM, I went back to bed and slept and slept and slept...and slept.

Then I woke up and had to call my doctor about my appointment tomorrow and NO VOICE CAME OUT. I didn't realize it would be that way until I tried to speak. That's fun. You try talking to the nurse about your disability forms when sounding like some sort of prank-calling squeaky chipmunk.

I can't believe that after almost two full weeks of catching the motherfucking cold on my motherfucking birthday, I STILL HAVE NO VOICE! This is ridiculous. Do the cold and flu gods not realize that I kinda depend on that attribute? Is this some sort of forced Zen moment to see if I can get by...alone...with my thoughts...

Screw that people! I'll just learn to squeak VERY LOUDLY so you can understand me. Yeah, THAT won't be annoying. (P.S. I wouldn't call me today, or you're gonna be doing a whole lot of "WHAT?")

I think I might have gotten worse sitting out in the drizzle yesterday, carving my pumpkin. (Go ahead, say it.) But I HAD to go. I'm starting to get the reputation among my friends of being just a teeny tiny bit flaky. You know it's bad when you go to someone's birthday dinner and the first thing everyone says when they walk into the restaurant is, "Oh my god...Brooke's here! Hey did you see? Brooke's here!".

And that's not just 'cause they miss me. It's truly in amazement. We've already discussed the "I'm always sick for everything" lament, so I won't bore you further, but I consequently had to go carve pumpkins in the rain to PROVE A POINT.

And that's so surprising because I'm not usually in the least bit stubborn.

But the party was a lot of fun, even though Mr. Blogger and I only knew two of the people there...hey, we're social animals, we can get by.

Some people had used really intricate patterns to carve their pumpkins and I just did my usual triangle eyes, nose and buck teeth. MB did Angry Pumpkin With the Evil Eyebrows. (They're kind of next to each other in the pic above, in front of the one with the giant round eyes. They make a nice couple, don't you think?)

One guy was sitting out there for hours with all kinds of delicate pumpkin-carving tools, a template he had downloaded off the internet and more patience than I could ever muster up over a damn pumpkin.

And NONE of us could tell what the hell it was. Various guesses were a sea horse, a ghost, a witch...an atlas. Nope. He started to get tired and annoyed and finally said, "Oh forget it. It's done."

Then, since it was getting dark, we could finally light them all with candles and see the group's final results. The hostess suddenly shouted, "Oh my god! It's Napoleon!". The candle had done what none of us could...make sense out of all those itty bitty carvings.

The pictures don't even really do it justice, since they're a bit blurry and at the wrong angle. But we all must have stood there and stared at it for a good half hour. Others in the apartment complex would happen to walk by and then, without fail, would shout, "Oh my god! It's Napoleon!".

So the hostess' roommate did what any good "ND" fan would do, run upstairs and come out fully dressed as the man himself. OK, maybe it wasn't the rain that did me in. It was the "I (heart) Tater Tots" t-shirt.




Did I mention Mr. Master Carver happened to be this guy? I have seriously been working at the wrong banks.