1. October
Yep, the whole month makes me happy. It’s the one time of year where everybody else is as into spooky stuff as I am. I love Halloween. I love it more than any other holiday (even Christmas where, you know, I get presents). I love Halloween so much, we even celebrate “Spooky Christmas” in my house (which involves all manner of Halloween decorations transplanted into Christmas). I love horror movies, and ghost stories, and spooky nights. And I love it when everybody else loves it as much as I do. While fall is never my go-to for favourite time of year (summer is over, damnit), I love everybody else getting into the spirit of things as much as I am the rest of the year.
2. Pauly
There is this weird shop in a little shopping district not far from where I live – while the district used to be full of punks and music stores, it’s now (to my great dismay) gentrified quite a bit over the past 15 years. And while it’s no longer the street I used to bum around in high school, it does still hold little vestiges of its past. One of these is a store, up above another with next to no signage. Up there is a jumble of games, second hand clothing, and (my favourite section) taxidermy and skeleton bits. On Friday I came across Pauly – a weasel skull that I had to add to my collection. He’s very small, and he now lives with my other collection of bones that I’ve known to pick up at odd places (all pre-cleaned, I don’t have the stomach to do that part myself).
But the second part to what makes me happy about this, is the fellow that owns it takes special care to make sure anything he buys or sells is ethically sourced, by either being part of an old collection, or the animal died due to old age or misadventure. Of great sadness to me is people buying taxidermy bats, not realizing they’re being killed en masse in Asia for that purpose, decimating the population (I really, really like bats). So, in addition to Pauly this week, it makes me happy to know there’s an ethical dealer that I can purchase items from close to my neighbourhood.