Halloween hauls
I had a super awesome weekend! Will’s mum came up and we went shopping for Halloween decorations. I actually spent surprisingly little money, helped by the fact that in The Range, TK Maxx,Β and Tesco, they didn’t really have a lot of Halloween stuff. It was a bit of a bummer, but I still found plenty of nice things.
The Range
The first thing of interest that I spotted in The Range was actually a piece of Hamsa art! It’s not every day that you see an important Jewish symbol just sitting there in a shop, so I had to nab it.
I got a new oven tray to help with baking cookies next week. Some plates for holding candles (I got two of the silvery one in the picture), red stringlights, pumpkin straws, skull-shaped shot glasses (hopefully we will actually do shots at the party now!) and a sparkly stag head. This was probably intended for Christmas, as there was a lot of Christmas stuff out already, but it’s fitting for Halloween too.
We did go over to the TK Maxx, and I hadn’t been there before, but unfortunately they had no Halloween stuff of interest in. There was a blue leopard print skull that took my fancy as a general house decoration (I’ve got a bit of a soft spot for blue leopard print, blue camo, and skulls too actually), but it was Β£10 and I couldn’t really justify it.
So we moved on to . . .
Tesco
There wasn’t too much there either, but I managed to grab a cooling rack for cookies, some honeycomb ghosts, and some glow in the dark window clings that look like spoopy eyes. I only bought the one, and my mother-in-law bought the second pack for us.
Things my mother-in-law brought up for us
The best things weren’t even from the shops at all! Will’s mum brought up some lovely autumnal garlands with hedgehogs on them, a pumpkin tealight holder I am totally in love with, chocolate, light-up balloons, flashing skulls, and a purple scarf with skulls on it!
The skulls have a crow and a bat on them. The crow kind of resembles a doofy toucan, with it’s beak taking up the whole width of its face. The bat is right on the line between OK and tacky, but it’s walrus-like teeth are strangely endearing. Bats have some real cute faces in real life, it shouldn’t be hard to make good decorations based on them. But anyway, I certainly like the skulls and their different colour flashes.
The red stringlights are super lovely and we’ve put them on the stairs. I put spare baubles from the broken cat lights onto some of them.
I kind of want to leave the lights up all year because it was a real pain wrapping them around the banister. Red is an OK colour for Christmas too.
In other recent news:
I have a little rehabilitative pedal exerciser machine thingy, basically a super gentle version of an exercise bike that just sits on the floor in front of your chair. I can’t remember if I mentioned it before in a previous post. I thought it might be good for making my legs actually move, and to send blood back up for POTS reasons. I haven’t found my compression tights since moving, and they hurt to wear anyway.
Well, guess what I went and did on this little, meant-for-injury-rehab machine? I dislocated my knee.
“Well that’s not very unusual, Letti,” you might say. And you’d be right. I dislocate and subluxate things all day long. That’s part of having my illness.
But some dislocations are worse than others; some seriously injure the tissues around the bones, instead of just stretching them out of place. That’s what happened this time. My knee itself, not just the cap, slid so violently to the side. I am bruised and in a lot of pain, still. It hurt so much and made me feel so ill that I had to put one of my big bulky braces on.
I changed it to a soft brace in the nighttime, and now I’m trying to go without support because it’s been about 5 days. The skin is still really tender to the touch and I don’t like moving my leg unnecessarily, I think a bone might still be a bit in the wrong place, but I should be on the mend. I had a few hand bones in and out just putting baubles on the string lights.
In what I suppose is a related note, I treated myself to some compression gloves recently.
They’re surprisingly effective for hand pain, and they make things a bit warmer.
In warmer parts of the year, the problem with EDS tends to be constant tissue and muscle pain. As soon as it starts getting autumnal however, bone pain really comes into play. Hands are especially vulnerable to it as they tend not to be covered up.
The 3rd set of string lights work, also π