pumpkin carving

Over the weekend, I had a pumpkin carving party at my house. The pumpkins turned out quite well, and were more creative than I had expected.

Here's my pumpkin (I'm thinking of wearing a Hawaiian outfit for Halloween, so it goes with the theme):


Here are the rest of the pumpkins:


From left to right, you can see Bowser, a haunted castle, a pirate ship, a scared face, my tropical island, another scared face, and a Pikachu.

For dinner, in honor of Halloween and our overachieving apple tree, we had pumpkin cake, apple & almond salad, apple pork chops, pumpkin bread pudding, and hot apple cider. Mmm, I love holiday food.

watch out, trick-or-treaters

I guess they weren't kidding about inspecting your Halloween candy for drugs.

My favorite:

LARGE ELECTRONIC CAPACITORS CONTAINING HEROIN IN PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA

Can't even trust the geeks.

pumpkin time

I'm going to a pumpkin-carving party tonight; it'll be the first time in three years that I've carved a pumpkin.

Last night, in preparation, I went to Safeway to buy a pumpkin. On the way there, I remembered that it was lunar eclipse night, so after I parked my car I looked around for the moon. It was about 8pm, which was perfect timing; it was just after it had started to get really dark, and before the eclipse started to wane at all.

So, for about 10 minutes, I had a very good view of a large brown moon. Honestly, I was less than totally impressed. I've seen some solar eclipses, and those have been much more spectacular.

Others have been calling the color "blood red" and remarking on the eclipse's coincidence with Halloween. I guess it would have been cool if the eclipse had actually happened on Halloween night, and I'd been young enough to be out trick-or-treating.

halloween 2003

It's Halloween! It's funny that you're allowed to celebrate Halloween as a kid, and then there's this gap of about 5 years where people look at you funny if you dress up, and then when you're an "adult" you're allowed to dress up again.

Some of the best costumes I saw today at our party:
- Lumbergh, the boss from Office Space
- the "Can you hear me now?" guy
- Owen Pochman uniform complete with knife through head
- a couple bloody Siegfried and Roys (that one is a little mean)
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (somehow it's better when Snow White is a 6ft+ man)
- a "multi-threaded bug" (yes we are geeks here)
- a Powerpuff girl costume

This year we're not going to a Halloween party, but we are going to play poker at a friend's and eat, I mean give out, candy. Mmm...