25 October 1999

Hallowe'en Week, baby! Hallowe'en is my second favorite holiday, and probably the only reason it doesn't actually beat Midwinter (Christmas) is because the Hallowe'en festivities are pretty much confined to October 31 and the preceding weekend, while Midwinter festivities encompass the better part of a month. (Also, because Hallowe'en decorations feature spiders, which is worth negative points in my scale.)

Ah, but wearing costumes, carving pumpkins, and eating candy all make up for it!

Matt and I are throwing a Hallowe'en party on Saturday. The only slight problem I can think of is that, since Hallowe'en itself falls on a Sunday, it's possible that the neighborhood kids will be trick-or-treating on Saturday. (Ah, the joys of living in a highly conservative state...) I don't know for sure, but if that's true, then Matt and I will need to be pretty much ready to go by 4:30 on Saturday, instead of having until the 7:00 we told everyone. Oh, well. At least, with the party starting at 7, most of the kids will be done by the time the party is in full swing.

I started putting up the decorations yesterday, and still have a few things that will wait until just before the party to put up. We bought the makings for some of the treats I'm going to make - cheesecake brownies and meringue kisses - and I'll need to start working on those on Friday.

Can you tell I'm excited?

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We made our jack-o-lanterns yesterday. We bought our pumpkins from the grocery store, since we were there anyway, and they had a nice selection. They don't usually leave very much stem on the pumpkins, but these had beautiful twisted-vine tops on them. Mine weighed in at just a little under 20 pounds, and Matt's was so huge that it took the cashier three tries before the scale would actually register the weight - just a hair less than thirty! That's almost fifty pounds of pumpkin!

I'd spent the morning surfing the web for carving patterns. I found several good sites, plus one site with a lot of links and pictures.

I decided on one of the patterns from HalloweenCarvingKit.Com. This site requires you to register before they give you their free patterns, but the patterns were just fantastic! The one I picked was called "Sleeping Sun" and I thought it was just intricate enough to look really great, but not so hard that I'd give up in frustration after hours of effort!

After carving the pumpkins, I sorted through all the gunk from the insides and roasted the seeds. Yum! There's just something about fresh-roasted pumpkin seeds, still hot from the oven...

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It was a weekend for pictures. We got very silly at the game Saturday night, and took a ton of pictures. I posted most of them in the photo album - go look!

It was a good weekend. I'm anticipating a good week. (I'm going to dress up - sortof - for work on Friday!) Next weekend will be even better! (If for no other reason than that I'll finally get to open the three five-pound bags of candy we got!)

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Afternoon Update! The interview KT and I did for Metajournals is up! Check it out! I'll probably spend some time in the next day or so filling in the bits that didn't get sent to Metajournals, and answering the same questions I asked KT. And if you got here from the Metajournals interview, HI!