Tonight, for no real reason, I got a sudden urge to carve a pumpkin. I've never done it before in my life, except maybe a triangle-nosed abomination I've blocked from memory. Mostly I was inspired because Homestar Runner put up some pumpkin stencils and I wanted to see if I could do one. So I hopped on a how-to-carve-pumpkins site, busted out a tiny saw and tiny hole-poker from my toolbox and got to work while blasting music loudly in the living room.

I'll let you be the judge on how well it turned out:


Strong Bad pumpkin!


Strong Bad pumpkin in the dark! Ooooohhhhhspoooooky!

And, while I'm here, here are some new house pics. Our move in date may be as early as December 15. We're keeping our fingers crossed for an early Christmas present.


This is the view from the future living room looking toward the kitchen.


That's again the living room looking the other way toward the front of the house. My dad inspects the house to make sure we're not getting screwed.


That's the living room from the kitchen. Those two archways lead to the master bedroom on the left and the other bedrooms and guest bath on the right. Happy new homeowner walkin' through...


That's the bonus room upstairs and our future home office. Hope to do a lot of writing up there.


Back porch. Home to future barbecues.


Bit of a steep roof there, I know. We're trying to cut down on potential cat burglars.


Our house. It's coming along.

From Yahoo!:

Lucas to Receive AFI Lifetime Award -- Is there any way we could make it so that a lifetime achievement award only is awarded to you if you've been consistent? Can they maybe change it to the "AFI First Half of Your Life-time Achievement Because the Second Half, Frankly, Isn't Really Doing It For Us Award."

Which is all to say, the AFI sucks. As does Lucas, at least 21st-Century Lucas.

There's no new Space Monkeys! comic today, but I have a damn good excuse as to why that is. I would stock up on Funny because it seems that it's in short supply this week.

Li'l Floaty Omie Head talks briefly about life changes. No, not menopause. The other ones. The ones that make you feel like you're aging very, very quickly.

I don't even know what to think about last night's debate. I watched the first half at home and listened to the second half while driving to San Antonio. Then NPR brought on their panel of experts who were all way in Kerry's corner so they all said variations of, "Bush was uncomfortable. He looked terrible." And I actually thought he was better and clearer in this one than in the last two. But then I was only hearing most of it on the radio, so maybe I missed some weird facial tics and expressions. But I agree with Rob that despite my being in total agreement with each of the candidates on specific issues, there was a lot of dick wagging and, "Well, my opponent is just wrong." The most interesting moments to me were when the candidates were actually being nice to each other, talking about their wives, or their faith or agreeing that some things in this country are still pretty fucked up. I know it's too much to ask that they could be classy all the time.

In any case -- I'm Joe Neutral here. I don't want to get fired talking about politics here.

Wednesdays are usually my down day, the day when because I worked till 1 or 2 a.m. the night before, not much gets done and I shuffle off from work early in the afternoon.

Last night we got out a lot earlier thanks to everyone's hard work and I actually got a decent night's sleep. So now I'm a little restless at work because we're not at a point where a lot needs editing, but I've got all this energy and my English-to-Spanish clarity ratio is higher than normal. Come on, people, throw something at me. You need a verb conjugated? Want me to bust out with some vosotros forms? Can a brother get a couple of diacritical marks up in hee-yah?

New Smallville recap is up:

Surg-Protector -- Lois Lane tries to expose a scary mom who does plastic surgery on her daughter to give her a killer senior year. Clark joins the football team. Lana Lang worries that she's not perfect. Lex, though already perfect, is largely absent from this mostly sucky episode.

Also, about that RSS/Atom thing on the left-hand rail there. I don't pretend to know how those things work, but for those of you that do, go ahead and try it out. If the links are funky or it doesn't work, shoot me an e-mail and let me know. Thanks, geek community!

Li'l Floaty Omie Head talks about house building in the newest of Braunfels. I've got more photos I'll post tomorrow (the inside! Shingles!), but here are a few extra ones that didn't make it on the XL blog:

New comic up this morning. You want near-bloodshed? We got it!

Yes, I know. And yes, I'm very sad. I was mailing off my Smallville recap just as I heard the news. I wrote a short addendum to the end of the recap, but really I don't know that I can say anything about it that isn't already in your head if you're around my age. He loomed large in our childhoods and his death is the coda to those memories. We'll miss him, but I think we'll also miss the way he made us feel when he flew and how we knew we'd feel the day we all had filed in our mental datebook: The day we all knew he was going to get up from that wheelchair and walk again.