In which look at the sadness that is one of our pumpkins, how terrible I am at playing Pokémon and start growing a moustache for Movember.

The Horribly Haunted Update

703 words about life — 16:47 · 3rd Nov 2013

So, Halloween came and went by pretty quickly. The real spiders and their webs were cleaned up—yeah, really—to give way to fake cobwebs, the pumpkins were carved into Jack-o’-lanterns using good tools as well as “unorthodox” tools and children guised as various nefarious creatures of Satan walked around asking for treats with threats of tricks.

The Horribly Haunted Update

Anyway. “What have you learned from this year’s experience?”, I pretend you ask. Always buy your pumpkin two days or so ahead of time because on the Eve of All Hallows’ you’ll be hard pressed to find pumpkins any more. At least attractive ones. I also learned that decorational pumpkin seeds taste awful and can’t really be used for anything remotely editable.

E decomposing pumpkin with a screwdriver driven through its fleshy head.
“Help me!”

And the final lesson. Carving a pumpkin with—apparently—dirty tools make them rot and mould really quickly as we had to throw out the Fist Punched Pumpkin yesterday.

This week’s cupcake experiment, retroactively named “Batch CGCCC-04”, ended up being Fudge Brownie Cupcakes with Dark Chocolate, Coconut Frosting and sprinkled Hazelnuts.

Closeup of the coconut frosting on the cupcakes.
Fudge Brownie Cupcakes with Dark Chocolate, Coconut Frosting and sprinkled Hazelnuts.

I’ve been getting more and more use from my tablet as well, finding things that were unconformable on my 4.3″ are now suddenly magically awesome on my 7″. Aside for the playing Pokémon FireRed, my Charizard “Assmouth” has become a Charmeleon and is by the way now level 24.

A Charmeleon.

I’m still not really sure how good that is and at the moment I’m stuck inside a fucking mountain called Mt. Moon and I have no idea how to get out of it so you know… that sucks. I might have to find myself a map online or something as I’m running out of points which means I’ll have to resort to my B-list Pokémons if Assmouth goes out of commission. My second in command is pathetic level 7 Rattata nicknamed “Rapeface” and I don’t imagine being able to last long with “Rapeface” at the helm.

I have also—finally I might add—actually started on the whole learning French endeavour that I’ve talked about for quite some time. Thanks to Andy who recommended that I check out Duolingo, gamified university-level language learning, I instantly knew this would work well for me and consequently signed up—back in June—and then forgot all about it.

Lying in bed with my Nexus tablet learning Duolingo.
Je suis un homme

7″ of magical pocket plastic to the rescue, again! Thanks to some—really not at all—gentle reminders I installed the Duolingo app on my tablet and have actually started using it more frequently. I expect to be fluent in La Franscai… Franschea… Merde… The French, by the end of the year. You say “unrealistic with delusions of grandeur”, I say “optimistic”.

And lastly, it’s November again and with that I won’t be shaving—much to the missus’ displeasure—my moustache until the end of November.  To raise awareness, you know, for cancer research and such. And unlike last year, you can actually donate this year because I’m a member of movember.com.

So go, donate now! Let’s kick cancer in the fucking face, in honour of Movember.

Here’s to Decembeaver!

16th Dec 2020: Embed removed. Goodbye Movember, Hello Decembeaver. Featuring author and comedian Sarah Cooper, before her Trump impressions and comedy special Everything is Fine.

You’ve just read The Horribly Haunted Update.

In which, 10 years ago, I wrote 703 words about life and I covered topics, such as: baking , cupcakes , languages , and the abominable weekly update .