Brandon Notices

This decorative snail-on-a-pedestal was in the half-off clearance area at Wight's. I tried to convince Kevin to buy it and display it proudly on his mantle, but he wasn't very interested in the idea. I would like to spray paint it gold and award it as a trophy, perhaps to the slowest competitor in a footrace.

I just enjoyed a lunch of fish and chips at the Ivar's restaurant here in Lynnwood. I was excited to see how much Christmas decoration they had put up around the restaurant. Twinkling Christmas lights bordered the roof and ran along the front counter. Big, shiny Christmas present boxes were arranged on the counter and between booths. Thick, red ribbons spiraled up the structural columns, reminiscent of candy canes. And, here in this picture, you can see the ribbons tied in a similar manner on the ceiling lamps, complete with big red bows.

I'm impressed not only that Ivar's has tremendous Christmas spirit, but I'm also impressed with the amount of work they went though to achieve this decoration. Those lamps are high. And there are at least a dozen of them these lights in the restaurant. The employees must have visited each lamp with a ladder. I applaud Ivar's for going to such lengths to make their restaurant warm, inviting, and festive for Christmas.

Christmas tree + diffraction grating + boredom

Look what I made!



It is a scene of Linus, Lucy, Sally, Snoopy, and Woodstock gathering around a Christmas tree. Lucy wants to put the star on the tree, but Woodstock is already sitting on top. It looks like Linus wants to hand Woodstock a Christmas card.


The pages are laid out, not even taped together yet.

The poster is made of thirty sheets of paper, taped together to fit the size of my window, which is about 34″ × 59″. There is a reason why the picture looks off-center: the frame between the sashes blocks part of the picture. If I had centered the picture in the window, the tree and Woodstock would be blocked behind it. This would look bad.

The hard part was coloring. I could have printed the pages in color, but I decided to go with the coloring book style because I was worried that color ink would run if it touched condensation on the window. Crayons are small, and I had a lot to color, but I think it'll be safer this way.

With the lights on inside, the poster is illuminated for outdoor viewers. In the daytime, I hope the sunlight will pass through the poster so that the image can be seen from inside.

I got the picture design from a paper Christmas decoration I found in a Christmas decoration bin. I scanned the picture so that I could use it as my desktop wallpaper.


The original decoration, about a foot wide.


Here is the poster, seen from inside my room.

This year's garbage ghost is up! We did the same thing last year, and we've done it before.

 

Jesse and I made the ghost yesterday. We used two garbage bags this year, taping them together to make a much larger ghost. We stuffed the head with plastic shopping bags, using just a little paper to cover the Safeway logo so that it wouldn't show through. Jesse drew the face on with a Sharpie. I am impressed by how generic he drew the face. I was afraid he might draw a stupid-looking half-scary face. The moaning ghost look is very appropriate. We stopped working on the ghost to rescue his cat, who was stuck meowing on his roof.

Hanging the ghost is very tricky. (I want to mention that the fishing line is attached to the top of the ghost's head—it is not tied around the neck.) Jesse plays a lot of sports, so he is a much better thrower than I. He tied the fishing line to a rock and threw it over the street light. Once we got it over, but before we pulled the ghost up, I messed things up. I stepped in a loop of the fishing line and got it tangled around my foot. I don't know what Jesse was thinking, but he cut the line around my leg, and this messed up this hanging.

I could tell that Jesse was getting tired, and when his mom asked if he wanted to go with her to pick up his sister, he went with her. Patrick and Jeanina had come outside to watch, but I realized that none of the three of us would have an easy time throwing a rock over the light in just the right place. I got out my Foxtail, tied the string to the tail, and flung it up and over the light. Unfortunately, I forgot to have someone hold onto the other end of the string (not attached to the ghost), and it got pulled up by the Foxtail's weight, so I had to do it again—I got it on the third try. I pulled the ghost up and anchored the string to the bushes underneath.

The ghost is really cool! With breezes, it spins slowly around, and its tail floats behind it.



It seems like the ghost is alive (or undead, at least), looking around the cul-de-sac. I hope this ghost stays up through Halloween.

I found a bulletin board in the garage, and I had a little spare time today, so I decided to put a bunch of fun junk on it to snazz up my room. Mostly, it's Far Side comics from the daily calendar I had last year, but there's a few other comics up there, along with other stuff. When I find something funny, I'll just staple it onto the board, over the stuff that's already there.


You can click the picture for a closeup. I'm going to add a few keychains, too.

I think I'm going crazy. I spent a lot of time obsessing about stacking up presents on the table behind the couch. It's difficult work—you can't put heavy presents on top of presents that are light and flimsy, and you can't put anything on top of a present that has a bow on top (lest you would crush a bow). And now I have spent fifteen minutes taking a picture, editing that picture, typing this description, uploading the picture, and posting it for you to read here. Also, it's two in the morning.

This isn't the first snow of the season (it snowed a little while earlier this week), but this is the first time the snow is sticking to the ground, so the neighbor kids asked me to come outside to help them make a snowman. Of course, any time I tried to do anything to the snowman, they told me to stop it because I would ruin the snowman. Of course, they themselves knocked the thing over three times while trying to build it. Jesse, Jeanina, and Patrick kept arguing over what to do about the snowman, and every time they began to disagree, one of them would hit the snowman and knock out a big chunk of it or tip the whole thing over.

An argument over whether to use tree needles as hair resulted in the snowman wearing a baseball cap. He has a baby carrot for a nose because nobody has any regular carrots, and he has rocks for eyes because Jeanina didn't feel like running inside to get buttons. I suggested we use tree branches for arms, but Jesse declared that to be a stupid idea, so he ran and got some thin wooden slats, which I personally think look hilariously out of place. He has a twig for a mouth, and instead of having a corncob pipe, he is... sucking on a straw? I'm not sure what the straw is there for.

On a separate note, I'm not sure that my rain gauge will work very well for measuring how much snowfall we get.

We got the Christmas tree up this weekend, and with it, a plethora of Christmas tree ornaments. I think I'll fill you in on some of the coolest ornaments hanging out on the tree this year.

This is Mr. S'moresman. It's like a snowman, except he is made out of marshmallows. Note also the chocolate and the graham cracker he is standing on. This is without a doubt the sweetest-looking of all the ornaments on the tree this year. I feel like drowning him in a hot cup of cocoa. I found it at the University Book Store, but I think I've seen it and others like it somewhere else.

I got this ornament last December at Cost Plus. (There's nothing I like there except for their Jelly Belly selection.) It expresses my love for Jelly Belly's jelly beans. I also got three other colors as Christmas presents. Each came with a package of jelly beans of the same color. I didn't see any Jelly Belly ornaments at Cost Plus this year, but they have Christmas jelly bean mix 10% cheaper than anywhere else I've seen them.

While I was taking pictures, Garth decided to walk over and start meowing. Garth likes it when we have the tree up. We don't have the tree skirt out of the garage yet, but he likes to lie down on it, under the tree, out of our reach. In this picture, I think he is trying to pick his nose with the tree.

Here's two ornaments that I like a lot. On the left, we've got the apple. Actually, this is one of about a dozen apples that populate the tree. I don't know why I like them, but I wouldn't have a Christmas tree without them.

On the right, we have Snoopy dressed up as a charity Santa. This was actually designed as a clip-on bag decoration or something, but I thought it would look good on the tree. It came in a set including other figures like Charlie, Lucy, Linus, and Franklin, as well as little props like Charlie's loserly Christmas tree. (Oddly, the set came with Schroeder's piano, but no Schroeder.)

Stephanie got this one last year, I believe. It's Santa, and he's covered in sparkly glitter! This one looks really good on the tree because he's sparkly and glittery.

Okay, that's all the ornaments I feel like typing about.

I thought I would take some time to point out more Halloween decorations I've put up around the house.

This is a ghost I found at Value Village for the very affordable price of $5. The fabric ghosts hangs freely from the rusty-looking structure, and it blows in the wind, which is totally awesome. What's kinda sucky is that the ghost sometimes loops over the top and gets stuck, so I regularly have to unravel it.

Speaking of ghosts, I noticed a few days ago that the garbage bag ghost the neighbors and I put up has fallen down. It looks like the string ripped itself from the bag. This probably happened during a wind storm we had. I took the ghost and hid it in my yard so that hooligans don't run off with it.

This is something new I made this year. I got the idea online, and I have dubbed these cut-up garbage bags "Spooky Streamers". (I want to point out that I have a habit of using the word "spooky" as an adjective to describe things having to do with Halloween, such as Spooky Cat. I think I use "spooky" like this because the Halloween items in one of my favorite video games, Animal Crossing, were prefixed with "spooky".) The Spooky Streamers look really good when a fan blows on them, or when someone passes by them, because they swoosh around, and the light glimmers on them.

And what have we got here? Spooky Lights. Last year, we had three strings of Halloween lights: one in orange, one in green, and one in purple. We had them taped up in three different windows, which looked great from outside, but I decided to do something different this year. I pulled all the bulbs from the strings, and combined them into three strings each with all three colors in a pattern. It's very colorful, and for some reason, this color combination reminds me of candy. I've strung these strings around the living room. This is in lieu of a Spooky Chain, which is what I made last year. The Spooky Chain was a chain made by stapling orange and black construction paper links together.

Here, we have the leaf garlands. Garth is playing in them! He kept trying to eat the plastic coiled stems. These decorations are unique because they also stay out through November—they match the Thanksgiving decorations too. For the longest time, these decorations seemed to be lost in the garage, but I finally found them. They were in an unmarked paper grocery bag, shoved in with the sports equipment. I chanced upon them by accident this afternoon, which is really annoying, because I must have spent more than an hour determinedly searching for them earlier this month.

In celebration of the Halloween spirit, a spider has set up a new web site outside the window near the back porch. Not that I'm really afraid of spiders, but I don't think I would ever have gotten this close to a spider without a pane of glass between us.

I noticed today that my digital cable's Music Choice channel, Sounds of the Seasons, has finally begun playing Halloween music. Up until recently, they've been playing Oktoberfest music, which is a real letdown when what you really want is Halloween tunes. Last year, Music Choice made the decision of ending the Halloween music at the unfortunate time of 9:30 PM on Halloween (it was 12:30 AM the next day on the East Coast, where Music Choice is based). It was a little aggravating to suddenly hear the Jackson 5 sing Santa Claus is Coming to Town—it ruined the Halloween spirit. Seriously, do they expect people to crank up the Christmas music at 12:30 AM on November 1st? I hope Music Choice heeds the advice I gave them and holds off on the Christmas music for a few hours more.

Can you believe that Lowe's already has Christmas stuff out? I guess it's not that surprising, but some of the decorations they had there were pretty odd.

What have we got here? A barking Christmas dog? He is singing Up on the House Top, except he is ruining the song by barking through half the lyrics, making the whole thing nonsensical. But still, it's practically adorable, especially with him flapping his ears with every little bark.

Oh, and what's this? A lovely Christmas tree that creepily extends and contracts its height and sings Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree. This one freaks me out a little bit.

I didn't buy the dog or the tree. But there were a few decorations that called out to me, and I had no choice but to buy them. (Warning, the volume of this clip is a tad louder than the previous ones.)

It's Charlie Brown and Snoopy! Actually, this is one of two Snoopys that were available at Lowe's, but this one had a better-looking outfit. They also had Woodstock available, but why would anybody waste their money on Woodstock? Snoopy plays Jingle Bells, and Charlie plays Jolly Old St. Nicholas. I really like the riff in the background. It's similar to the one in Linus and Lucy. I think that during the off-season (any time but December), they'll be staying in my room instead of heading out to the garage.

His smile still lets through a hint of bleakness, but the fact that he's willing himself to smile warms my heart. It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown airs on the 28th on ABC. Mark your calendars!

I stepped outside today to check the mailbox. There were a bunch of neighbors outside, and one of them suggested that we make a ghost, like we've done in the past. Years ago, we would craft a ghost out of a white trash bag (it's waterproof) and hang it with fishing line from the street light in the cul-de-sac. A bunch of the neighbor kids wanted to help make it. I got some supplies out, and Jesse, Jeanina, Patrick, and I started to make a ghost. We made a ball of paper and stuffed it in the bag to make the head. I went inside to find some fishing line to hang the ghost up with, and when I came back outside, they had already finished the ghost, including tying the neck and drawing the face in permanent marker.

The hard part has always been getting the fishing line over the street light. I tied one end of the fishing line to the ghost, and Jesse tied the other end to a rock. Jesse had to throw several times to get the rock over the light. Every time he missed, the line got tangled up in the big, prickly bushes underneath the light, and every time, it was a hassle to untangle it. And we had to do that half a dozen times. When Jesse finally got the rock over, we pulled to get the ghost up, and Jesse and Jeanina tied the ghost to the basketball hoop underneath.

After we got the ghost up, I went inside. Not too long after that, they came to the porch, rang the bell, and said, "Trick or Treat!" when I opened the door. They had remembered a promise I made to them last year. They could come to the door in costume once a day during October and claim some candy. The candy is hardly ever anything very special, so I'm usually pretty lenient as to what counts as a costume.

Today, I gave them Baskin-Robbins hard candy flavored like mint chocolate chip ice cream. Then they came back a little later in different costumes to get more candy. I had to tell them that the candy is a once-a-day deal, but they got really aggressive about it. Jesse would keep his foot in the door so I couldn't close it, and they would try to push themselves past me to reach the candy dish located on the nearby table. I acquiesced, offering them a few jelly beans. A few jalapeño jelly beans! But they weren't satisfied with that. They kept pushing. Jesse reached in and stole a lollipop, and then Jeanina started crying because she didn't get as much candy as Jesse. So I had to give everyone a lollipop. Wish me better luck tomorrow.

We decorated the living room for Christmas yesterday and today. We moved the sofas into more an an "enclosing" arrangement to allow access to the fireplace.



I was totally in charge of assembling the artificial tree and hanging ornaments, but the tree is very much the same as it's looked in previous years, except there are more lights (there's 300 bulbs). I love my new Jelly Belly tree ornament. I found it at Cost Plus--they happen to have a lot of Jelly Belly stuff there.

I also created the construction paper chain that lines most of the room. It took me several hours to complete. I made most of it watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I found the secret to making the chains look good is to use only two colors and to make thick, tight chain links.

In yesterday's blog, I said that the picture of Velma searching for her glasses was the coolest thing in the school.

I apologize. It was a lie. This is still the coolest thing in the school:



Okay. Now that I've gotten that off my chest, I have some more pictures to show you! This afternoon during lunch, I was in the Great Hall, so I decided to take pictures of each class's big poster hanging from the ceiling.

Once again, I apologize. This time, I'm apologizing for the blurriness of pictures again. People notice when you fill the room with a flash. They look over. Several people might ask, "Why are you taking pictures of the posters?" It's a little embarrassing to say, "It's for my blog."



Here's my class's poster, the Ninja Turtles one. It's pretty cool, ain't it? The picture of the maverick, our school mascot, on the manhole cover is an interesting choice. After looking at the poster for a minute, I'm afraid I'm rather concerned for poor Donatello's health. His left arm is so skinny near the wrist! Why, his bo staff is just as thick, if not thicker!



This is the freshmen's poster. I forget what that big poofy monster is called, but he looks like that guy from the car tires commercials, so I'll call him Michelin. By the way, the people at the bottom of the picture above aren't drawings of people running away from Michelin. They're people on the stage.



Here's the sophomores' poster, starring Mario & Friends! This time, they remembered to put the M on his cap! If you're wondering what Mario's holding, I have to admit that I was wondering the same thing. I asked Nick, and he told me that he's holding some goat cheese. You see, Goat Cheese is the class name of the sophomores.

Please don't ask me why Peach doesn't have any legs. I like the Paratroopa in the corner. The messy blue writing under the word "Super" says "Sophomores". I had to ask my sister about that one.



By far my most beloved of all the posters, the juniors' Scooby-Doo poster is perfect in almost every way. I noticed a few flaws: Shaggy doesn't have the fuzz on his face, and Velma's arm looks like a drumstick. I didn't notice the background on this poster when I took this picture, but it's by far the best background on any of the four posters.

After looking at the posters, I realized that I hadn't been to the freshmen's hallway. So I ran over there as fast as my fat little legs could carry me. I was mildly impressed.



At first, I thought it was a little lacking, but then I thought back to what our hallway looks like, and I realized this: Our senior hallway looks like crap! The freshmen's hallway is bright blue, and I like the city lights touch. There are little ghosts hanging from the ceiling that I didn't immediately notice. They're cool.



Fingerpainting? Geez, freshmen, grow up.

On my way back to class, I noticed what had happened to the directional posters located in the school:



Looks like we have some class competition! This sign points to where the E200's are. Some people have changed the 200 into 2006 or 2008 or whatever. I don't know, I thought this was at least a little interesting. Other directional posters have similar drawings on them. I like the poster that has the arrow switched around, pointing the wrong way. That made me chuckle.

Yessirree, it's Homecoming Week at school! The school's theme this year is Heroes and Villains, and each class has its own theme. The hallways have meticulously been decorated by the ASB to reflect each class's theme. My class's theme this year is Ninja Turtles, and coincidentally, the hallway where I hang out before school is the seniors' Ninja Turtles decorated area. I brought my digital camera to take pictures!



I profusely apologize for the extreme blurriness of this picture. It's a little embarrassing and awkward to use a flash because everyone looks over at you to see what's going on. Besides, if I had used the flash, you wouldn't be able to see the awesome green glow. They had set up overhead projectors with green butcher paper over them to cause the entire hallway to glow green! This did not last very long at all.

The place was supposed to be decorated like the sewers, but the idea was executed poorly. Solid-colored brown butcher paper was tacked onto the walls with graffiti spray-painted on the walls.



At first, it wasn't apparent to me why 06 was scratched out by Michaelangelo (because we're the class of '06) until it hit me that Oh Six is the freshmen name. Oh, I knew this would come back to bite us in the butt. Oh, another thing, the Turtles wouldn't spray paint graffiti all over the place, especially after all those PSAs they did back in the '90s.



The most awesome thing in the hallway was the Senior Pizza. Each of us got our own pepperoni! The names are handwritten—that must have taken a lot of work. Can you find my name?



There were several "questionable" decorations in the hallway, as well. For instance, look at the above picture. Can you figure out what that is? It's on the floor across the entire hallway. It took me a long time to realize what it is. It's supposed to be murky brown sewer water running down through the middle of the sewer. This brown paper was kicked up off of the floor by passing students by the end of 1st period.



Another decoration that wasn't instantly clear as to its purpose. It's supposed to be a pipe running through the sewer. I think it would probably have been better if the pipe had reached the ceiling. A pipe like this would spew sewer water all over the floor and you'd step in it.

The juniors' class theme is Scooby-Doo. Their names are on little tombstones stapled to the wall.



They made a really nice poster of the Scooby-Doo gang... we seniors didn't get any nice original artwork or paintings in our hallway. The poster is nice and colorful—don't ask me why Daphne or Fred have green mouths. Maybe they ate apple-flavored Tootsie Pops.



This is currently the coolest thing in the school, and I hope it never comes down. Velma dropped her glasses! She'll be crawling around for those glasses all week long!



Nice rendition of a Mario platform game for the sophomores. Their theme, of course, is "Mario & Friends". It's weird, I've never ever heard the game or characters referred to as "Mario & Friends", but I suppose it works. I don't understand the huge significance of the yellow ! switches in the poster above, but the vine was an excellent touch. It was a great addition.



This painting of Mario makes me giggly. He looks soooo excited! One extreme error is that Mario's mustache is supposed to be black, but it's not that bad. Even worse, however, is that MARIO'S HAT DOESN'T HAVE AN M ON IT. Bummer.

I haven't gotten around to seeing the freshmen's Ghostbusters decorations (I never go over to that hallway), but I'll go check them out tomorrow morning. If it's impressive at all, I might display pictures on here.

I won! We put up the big tree! Mom didn't really want it up, but I said she wouldn't have to do any of the work. So I had to put it together and string the lights on by myself, but it was worth it. We also ended up rearranging the whole living room. Luckily for me, Clean Sweep was on TLC, so I could pick what ornaments would go on the tree, and Mom was too distracted watching TV to tell me what ornaments she didn't want on the tree. However, I couldn't find the angel or the tree skirt in the boxes. It's really pretty. I took plenty of pictures. If you're a member of KPA, you can see them here. If you're not a member, it's because you aren't a relative of mine. Oh well. Nothing you can do about that. Except marry one of my relatives...

Tomorrow, we're going to a Seahawks game. Mom always buys me tickets to events I know I won't like. It's the same with the Aerosmith concert last year. I didn't want to go. Overall, I didn't enjoy the concert very much. We parked a long way from the stadium. It was loud, too. Even though I had earplugs, I still had a headache. The worst thing that Kid Rock was opening for Aerosmith. No, I didn't enjoy that very much.

I hope I'll have fun at the Seahawks game. Mom promised me nachos. I really don't care to go. Dad said that it would be faster to get to our seats by helicopter than by escalator, so I'm assuming we have bad seats.

Recently, Stephanie's been bugging me. She's been contradicting herself all the time. She'll say something like, "I want to play the game with you, but I don't really want to," or something like, "I'm really energetic, but tired." It's really disturbing me. It seems like she can't make up her mind.

I'm starting to get tired. Decorating a tree and rearranging the furniture in one night can be exhausting. Phew. Dad promised me that he would find the angel and the tree skirt tomorrow morning before the game. I think we are leaving at 10:00. I'd better get to bed soon, then.

When Mom and Stephanie get back from shopping, we're going to discuss the Christmas decorations. I want a big, festive tree like we always do, with big ornaments, lights, an angel on top, and maybe some tinsel this time, but Mom wants to get rid of our traditional decorations and use only a stupid little tree. We wouldn't be able to put big ornaments on it, just those pathetic tiny ones. A string of lights would be too big, and the beautiful angel she bought last year at JCPenney (I think) would not fit on the small tree.

Of course, the reason she wants to use a little tree is because the big one would block the view of the television from the treadmill. With a big tree, Mom wouldn't be able to watch TV. My suggestion is that she move the treadmill so the big tree can go where it's supposed to. Besides, the treadmill only makes other people in the room upset. It's loud and annoying. There's the sound of the motor, the belt rubbing against the thing below it, and the loud thumps of feet banging against it. And for some reason, the treadmill smells funny.