My wife and I  have a basement full of

Halloween decorations. In the past we hosted

pumpkin carving parties, however the last few

years we have not done much, so I thought it was

time to sacrifice a pumpkin and fight with a few

strings of lights.

( I lost only the spiders are lighting up )

The squirrels have gone crazy for the pumpkin

seeds, the jays are unimpressed.

Also since I am a huge fan of H. P. Lovecraft and have

way too many Arkham House books, Cthulhu toys etc.

I thought in this spooky season nothing would be more

appropriate than a quote from the old gentleman

himself. From the story "A Picture in the House"

an over wrought story but a great opening. 

"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs

of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They

climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black

cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia.

The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they

linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true

epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is

the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient,

lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements

of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the

perfection of the hideous.

      Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses

remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp,

grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock.

Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there,

while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread.

They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and

guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still

stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards

off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things."

The Picture in the House

H.P. Lovecraft