Halloween Party

 First of all, Lucy is NOT cool with the time change. She has been standing there alternately staring at her food bowl and me for the last fifteen minutes. We usually feed her at five, and I am determined to hold out at least until four, and then shift gradually over the next couple of weeks.

Content warning: Mild drunken debauchery. Skip if that's not your thing. 

As I mentioned, our friends Janet and Dave always have a Halloween party the Saturday before Halloween. It's potluck for food, they usually make some kind of yummy drink and there is a penalty drink for anyone who doesn't wear a costume. The implication is that the penalty drink will be unpalatable, but I don't recall anyone ever having to drink the penalty drink. 

The party begins the same - we arrive, admire everyone's costumes, catch up with anyone we haven't seen for a while - but, unsurprisingly, it doesn't always end the same, and the vibe is variable. Some years we go hard until 4 a.m. and I walk home, and have to walk over to retrieve my vehicle and whatever is left of my dignity. Some years we end up watching a bunch of music videos and arguing about the best guitar players and impugning everyone else's taste in music. Some years it's mellow and we just sit around and talk.

Human disco ball. She threw really cool lights on the ceiling.

 

Ghostbuster. There were no ghosts at the party, well done Dave

Viking

Other viking. Dog.

Disco ball, Yukon Cornelius from Rudolph, Laura Ingalls, K-Pop Demon Hunter

This year Caitlin - Janet and Dave's daughter - brought out her homemade Chutes and Ladders drinking game, which I maintain should have an upper age limit if you're actually drinking alcohol, because it was acceptable to play and just drink Coke or water.

I have also mentioned that most of our kids who still live locally inexplicable choose to hang out with us, and then some of their friends end up also hanging out with us, and sometimes I wonder if it all might become the slightest bit...

unseemly?...

All consenting adults!

Honestly, when I first read 'baby birding' I was worried we'd have to spit the shot in someone's mouth, so this was kind of a relief. 

Arm wrestle

Staring contest

Jacob having to do jumping jacks until Melanie took a shot. She took her time. 

I was relying on Rachel's girlfriend Alina to help me find my playing piece and move it the appropriate number of spaces and then read whatever was on the space, not because I was too drunk to read, but because my eyes were too old and I didn't have my reading glasses. So I should not have been surprised when Collette later revealed that the younger set started conspiring to have Michael land on all the spaces with embarrassing stuff. This worked out fine because Michael is a good sport, and is probably the only one that would have been able to wear Rachel's costume easily when they had to trade.

Rachel looked kind of fire in his costume also, so win-win?

Na Na Hey Hey Blo Your Blues Away (or Something)

First of all, apologies for falling behind on commenting - I got a lovely new chromebook with a much better keyboard for typing, but it would not hold an internet connection for more than thirty seconds, which was driving me slowly mad. Matt got home from California and took five minutes to decide that unplugging the wi-fi booster might do it. And it did.

I believe I usually milk the Halloween thing for at least one or two days of NaBloPoMo, which I shall continue today. A couple of people commented on our Louvre Robbery costumes as 'timely', to which I replied "yes, almost as if we didn't have a single costume idea before that, he he *nervous chuckle*). Our friends Janet and Dave have a Halloween party on the Saturday before Halloween every single year, so I have zero excuses for being caught costume-less two days before the party, and yet I went to the craft show and for lunch with my friends Pam (HI PAM) on Thursday and confessed that I was completely costume-blocked. She blithely said "just pick something from the news. How about the Louvre Robbery?"(YOU'RE SO SMART PAM) and my jaw dropped because I had been looking at a sparkly top in my closet that very morning wondering if I could spin something out of it. We looked at a couple of articles and I ordered a neon harness and toy ladder for Matt and when I got home I dug out a toy crown.

This made me think about how it's kind of weird that some years I know exactly what I'm going to be months ahead of time, some years I am hopelessly muddled until the day of, and some years it's kind of in between. We've bought costumes a couple of times, but my preference is to make something out of household stuff and clothes we own (not by sewing, which I cannot do)- costumes are ridiculously expensive, although some of them look really good.

So for the last decade or so:

The fairly-well-thought out entries

2014 - Voodoo doll
2024 - Bumblebee and Molecular Formula for Honey
2022 - present (I don't recommend it - turns out gift bags don't breathe at all)
Matt was out of the country so I had to pose for my picture with Tony Scissorhands

The scrabbled-together-the-day-of contenders:

2017 - Rhythm and Blues
2019 - Deviled Egg and This is Your Brain on Drugs
2021 - Regular Comma and Oxford Comma
I thought this might be the year I had to go costume-less and drink the penalty drink. Then I found this 'God's time is NOW' pamphlet in the mailbox in the morning and riffed on it.

The unabashedly slutty years

2015 - Easy Reader

A friend lent me a "Dark Alice in Wonderland" costume, which turned out to be a French maid costume with the Cheshire cat on the apron. I said "I look like a stripper". Eve said "No y.... well.... oh it's fine, let's just go." My rack was fantastic, I have zero regrets.