Goodbye Halloween...Hello November!

Halloween started out a little different this year--we got up early to put up the last coat of paint in our entryway. There's still some touching up to do, and the trim, but the major paint mess is over! Hooray!

After painting was done we headed up to Ogden for the pumpkin carving. This is something my family takes very seriously (for example, see Bruce the Pumpkin) so we knew we'd be devoting a pretty big chunk of our day. But we had a great time, and look how many pumpkins we came up with at the end!

As a kid I remember spending way too much time trying to decide what to be for Halloween. My insanely tolerant mother would then also spend way too much time in creating my costume--each and every one of them turning out to be incredible. Because my height (or the lack thereof) never ruled me out of Trick-or-Treating I voluntarily retired when I hit high school. My friends and I would still get together, but it never involved costumes.

For the last several years my friends have always thrown a Halloween dinner party complete with mystery menu, games, etc. It's a lot of fun to create the spooky dinner courses and just hang out for a while. But this year there were two words on the invitation that I did not see coming...

"Costume Party"

I'm sorry, what? We've never done that! Although, in retrospect, with a group of friends from show choir who are obsessed with Disneyland I really don't know how costumes didn't come up before now. Brian and I had never dressed up for Halloween together...what's the protocol for that? I hadn't even dressed up in recent history! To make matters worse, Brian found no excitement in the prospect of dressing up as anything but '3-hole punch Jim' from the Office.

Right.

So now we've got a problem. I'm chronically indecisive about 90% of life and Brian, the decision maker, has decided to be lame. Great. So we started with raiding his parent's house, coming up with a flapper dress and a Dorothy dress. No boy costumes. Then we went to my parents and found my poodle skirts. No boy costumes. Finally it occurred to me that my brother had some pretty serious bagpiper gear that (aside from the kilt) could probably pass as pirate-esque. Also my cousin is a little bit of a pirate fan, so she had the girl side. After calling in one more favor to find B a hat here's what we came up with...I don't think it turned out half bad! Picture isn't great, but the hats are excellent.

And with that, October is over! I can't believe how fast time goes when I'm not in school. Christmas seems so close when it isn't blocked by a bunch of tests!