Meeting myself

Most of you know that I am not artistic at all. I never have been. This week I put my ugly art skills to work.

My ward had an activity where we decorated bears to donate to charity. My mom had donated some fabric to use, and some of it had flowers on it, which made it very easy to make a Care Bear-like toy. It was easy, and I figured I'd mess it up if I tried to do anything fancier.

The next day, my niece invited me to her mutual activity. (In my mind I like to call it "M.I.A." since I work with Mormon history.) The mutual activity was cupcake wars, where we had to create cupcakes based on a scriptural theme. Our theme was "Stripling Warriors." (When we presented, I pointed out that the scriptures don't actually say "stripling warriors" but "stripling soldiers." Look it up.) That may have been the most difficult theme. And since we had a hard theme and no artistic ability, we created the ugliest cupcakes imaginable. (And when I say they're ugly, I'm not fishing for compliments or trying to be humble. They really were ugly. And fortunately I have proof.)

Other groups did scenes, but we tried to do a lot of individual things connected with the story. So we put "2000" at the top (which let us win "most recognizable," which was the same as "also ran"). On the left we put flowers and a book, representing their mothers teaching them. We put some pretzel sticks in holes on the cupcakes to represent the buried weapons of their parents. And since they were injured but no one died, we did some bloody wounds, with a crossed-out gumdrop cemetery. I was terribly embarrassed with how ugly these were.




Saturday I went down to Orem to see the musical of The Addams Family. When I went to pick up my tickets, they seemed to have a hard time finding them. Then a stranger came up behind me and asked, "Are you Mark Melville?" I said yes and didn't know why he was shaking my hand. Then he introduced himself as Mark Melville! They had given him my tickets, and he was trying to figure out why he had extra tickets. I've Googled my name and found other Utahns with my name, but this was the first time I met one. I would have talked to him more if it had been a better situation, but we were in a crowded hallway.

(It bugs me when people call us "Utahans." I've lived in Utah my whole life. We're Utahns, not Utahans. And Blogger's spellcheck keeps telling me "Utahn" is wrong but "Utahan" is right.)

I own (and have watched) the complete 1960s Addams Family series, and (nowadays) I fully acknowledge that by no means is it a great show, especially the first season. But it has an interesting premise, which lends itself to decent remakes. The musical is about a grown-up Wednesday falling in love with a normal boy. It was better than I expected--cheesy, but sometimes witty. I think they opted to go for the Addams family of the movies (which I don't watch), making the play inconsistent with the TV show. In the series, Fester is Morticia's uncle, not Gomez's brother, and Wednesday is younger than Pugsley (and they're elementary-school age). The original series had Thing as a mysterious creature, an arm that could come out of boxes (and other things) and travel from box to box throughout the house. The musical opted to go with the dismembered hand--which I think was a poor decision, because it was just a dumb fake hand, and Thing in a box seems to be perfect for a play--you just put someone under a table with a tablecloth.

While other people are listening to Christmas music now (won't you be tired of it by the time Christmas gets here?), I listen to Thanksgiving music. Admittedly my Thanksgiving playlist isn't that great. I'm now more interested in quality than in quantity, but that hasn't always been the case. Some of my better Thanksgiving songs are the music from A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, including "Linus and Lucy with the Band." The Thanksgiving version of "Linus and Lucy" is the best of all versions, but only the first part of it is on the special. I acquired it on a CD entitled The Charlie Brown Suite and Other Favorites. This afternoon, our cat was standing in the doorway, trying to decide whether she wanted to go out, and I could hear the Thanksgiving version playing, but it was the second half, the part only available on that one album. I wondered if my phone had randomly started playing my Thanksgiving playlist, but it was our next-door neighbors, whom we barely know! I've been trying to figure out why they would have been playing it, since it's pretty obscure. I have heard it on Pandora, but that's because I have a Vince Guaraldi station.

This blog took me way longer to write than it should have.

***

Pumpkin season is winding down, so Pumpkinundation Roundup is getting sparser.

 Village Inn sells these pumpkin pancakes. They're OK. They do actually taste like pumpkin.

 This Arctic Circle Pumpkin Oreo shake is my second Arctic Circle pumpkin shake this year (the other being plain). I like pumpkin shakes, and I like Oreo shakes, so this was a great combination.

 I wanted to make candied yams, so I made them with pumpkin spice marshmallows (reviewed a few weeks ago), but you couldn't really tell a difference. (I know the picture looks like vomit.)

Then at a party I had a "bite-size" pumpkin chocolate chip cookie. This one tasted a bit more like a regular chocolate chip cookie than most pumpkin cookies; I don't know if it was the recipe or the cookie-to-chocolate ratio. (Also, do you like my new orange Chucks?)