Recently, my mom bought one of these witchy little gals:

In case you can’t tell from the picture, this is a little witch outfit you can put on a wine bottle. How did I never realize that wine bottles can also be dolls? As a kid, I had dolls which could say many ridiculous things, sleep, cry and wet themselves, but as an adult apparently I can have a doll which makes ME do all those things! Genius. Anyway, all my wine bottles were immediately jealous and wanted Halloween costumes of their own. But I have not yet been able to reverse engineer the witch, so I went with something simpler.

Once again, I started with stuff I already had around the house. In this case, a decorative wine stopper (I never use these anymore, ever since Adam bought us the fancy vacuum-seal kind that actually keeps your wine fresh), some pillow stuffing, a rubber band and some white fabric. If my camera were better, you would be able to see that the fabric has white flowers on it, which is not so spooky but will hopefully not be too noticeable during a dinner. Also, I’m using a hair rubber band, because I am completely unable to hang onto real rubber bands for some reason. Apparently I can keep extra pillow stuffing lying around until the end of time, but do not ask me to store a tiny band of elastic.

Push your stuffing into a fold of fabric, put the wine stopper under it, kind of shoved up into the stuffing, and wrap the rubber band around the decorative part of the stopper (leaving the cork free). I was initially planning to sew this instead of using a rubber band, but luckily I remembered in time that I didn’t feel like it.

Take a sharpie. Draw some creepy elongated shapes for eyes and a mouth.

Put your cork in a wine bottle to see how it looks. Figure out where you want your ghost skirt to end and cut it off raggedly.

Voila! Scary ghost doll full of the demon juice that makes us do we know not what:

I could have sewn the edges shut, but I decided to leave them loose so that you can see what you’re drinking:

And that is my craft for the day. I hope it was not too BOOring.

This is random, but I found this lady’s video of her home birth online today. As someone who has considered having kids someday, I found it incredibly comforting. Because it’s really, really boring. No one swears or yells at anyone, nothing is loud, and she’s very calm. And that’s impressive, considering a) she is birthin’, and 2) her husband spends the whole time sponging little dribbles of water over her back, which I’m sure she is into but which would send me deep into the screaming crazies. So thanks to this video, I now know it is possible to calmly give birth, and also possible not to lose my sane whenever my husband does something slightly annoying. (Which so far is NEVER, of course, but you never know what habits your spouse may develop in later years.)

Anyway, obviously not everyone will be so cool with seeing this, but as a potential Future Mother of America, I’m grateful to see a birth that doesn’t involve screaming. (Which I guess is because it’s also a birth that doesn’t take place on a TV show, the only place I’ve seen births up until now.)

If there is one thing I miss the most about San Francisco, it’s living  three blocks away from the 22 line. The 22 line, as of course you know, takes you from the Castro to Fort Mason. And Fort Mason, as you also know, is where the annual SF Library Book Sale is held.

Now, is it a giant nuisance to lug books on the bus and then pack them home from the bus stop to your apartment? Sure. But oh how I miss that feeling of waking up on Book Sale Friday, say, with no immediate deadlines looming, and thinking at around 2:00 “I believe I’ll wander over to Fort Mason and check on the books.” It was so lovely to hop on the bus any time I felt like it and pop over to the sale for a casual half hour of browsing.

Mind you, last year I drove my own car to the sale and was able to get several massive hardback coffee table books, the kind I was never able to buy when I was carrying everything on my back and trying to store everything in our apartment. So there are compensations, too.

Anyhoo, if you have gathered from this post that the sale is approaching, you would be right. It begins Wednesday and runs through Sunday (discount day!). You may see my body around at a few other places this weekend, but I think you know where my brain will be.