Halloween weekend was crazy! Sarah told me at the beginning of the week she didn't think she'd go trick-or-treating; she told me Thursday night she was. So I spent Friday running everywhere getting the components of her costume, which included buying pink netting at Hobby Lobby and making a tutu with Laura. She was having her friends over here, and I was going to drive them around Saturday night, so there was a lot of cleaning during the day. I also decided to make a cake and my mom wanted Halloween cookies, so in between cleaning, I also got to cook.

Oh yeah! And we carved pumpkins, too. (Click for full size.)



Guess who carved what for cash and prizes!



My amazing cake.



Sarah in the early stages of preparing. She had a moment where she could have chosen to go as a pretty, pretty princess or ballerina or something like that. Instead, she chose...



She's Old Gregg!



Yeah!



Sarah and her friends. That pirate outfit was crazy; she had pirate heads screwed into shoulder pads. Amazing.

And if you're unfamiliar with Old Gregg, as I might well imagine you are, here's a primer. I'd say he's Sarah's favorite non-regular TV character of all time; we've been hearing her say things in an Old Gregg voice for at least a year now. The show is The Mighty Boosh, arguably the strangest thing I've ever seen in my life.

Over the last two weeks, Laura and I made a Halloween village. You may have seen Halloween and, more commonly, Christmas village houses and other buildings available at crafts stores, WalMart and the like, and even some hardware stores; they're already painted and lit up and most now come with sound effects. There's all kinds of accessories you can buy, as well. Each building is anywhere from 25 to 50 dollars, and each individual accessory can run from a few bucks to 10 dollars. And that's not even getting into all the other things you need to set it up: ground cover, roads, lights, etc.

Needless to say, that's way too much money. Besides, there's a cheap, plastic look to these things that isn't very awesome. Last year, we made a Christmas village (pictures when we put that back up this year), and we thought that a Halloween village was necessary, too.

We bought the Christmas plaster houses, which come unpainted; chipped off the snow and painted them a little more gothic, a little darker, with bittersweet instead of holly. Then Laura took modeling clay and made her own pumpkins and scarecrow, and used plaster of Paris and wire to make fences, corn, a brick path and a stone road. We used twigs for trees and I made little ghosts to hang from the branches. Spanish moss for ground cover, and Laura cut up regular-sized fabric leaves to make scale leaves. The only thing we bought straight-up were the piles of skulls, which I think you will agree are awesome and too difficult to make ourselves.

Click on the thumbnails for full-size.



Here's the wide shot. Unfortunately, the flash robs the village of some of its creepiness and makes all the colors too bright, but when I took photos of the Christmas village last year without flash, you couldn't see a thing. Which is why you haven't seen the Christmas village yet. There are lights under the houses, btw.



Two regular houses, along with the stone road.



The barn, scarecrow, and don't miss the corn.



The church - which actually has a red light inside, though it's hard to tell here, and the iron fences in the back. A little brick path, and a pile of skulls (adorable creepy!).



The cemetery - all headstones made by Laura out of plaster. If you look really close, you can see hand-painted moss. It's awesome.

Happy Halloween!

I was going to upload some music, but I can't be arsed to hook up the router right now and I'm on the fam's computer, so. I'm pretty sure I don't actually have anything new, Halloween-wise, that I didn't have last year when I put up music, so it's probably a moo point anyway.

Seven hours until the Gogol Bordello concert! I have to drive up to Lawrence in our creaky old van, said drive undoubtedly testing the structural integrity of said van, pick up Laura, find parking (maybe; might walk, depends on temperature and crazy Lawrence atmosphere), then get in line, as Liberty Hall is kind of a free-for-all in terms of where one ends up. Laura really wants to be up front, I'd rather chill in the balcony and enjoy the show, so...we'll see. I'm taking stuff up to stay the night at her dorm if I'm not feeling like I want to drive home afterwards; it's only a 30-40 minute drive home, but I probably will not want to take one of two of the two-lane windy country highways home late at night, especially on Halloween, and I don't know if I feel like shelling out the toll to take I-70. Decisions, decisions. If I stay the night, the free parking next to her dorm ends at 7am, so I'd have to get up early to move the car. I don't know. Will decide when the time comes.

I kind of wish I had a costume for tonight - nothing too fancy or crazy, maybe like Catherine's emo girl costume - but didn't put anything together. I imagine that it's going to be pretty wild and crazy there, not even taking into account the types of people who listen to Gogol Bordello, what they'll be wearing on H'ween, and the theatrics of the band itself. I worry that I'll be out of place just wearing street clothes. Even a cheap wig would help, but I'm kind of lazy and I don't really feel like getting out today and buying anything. I also feel very whiny today, heh.

Updated foozes!

Played around with Photoshop for the first time in a long time. The banner comes from a desktop I made, which I was going to link to, but Laura and I can't figure out why it's not working. We are having some problems with our html-fu. We've spent, like, ten minutes sitting down here trying to make it work, and the computer just laughs at us. Or the internet. Or both.

This is going to be a great week. Sarah and I are going to see The Nightmare Before Christmas this weekend; I've never seen it on the big screen having missed the previous rereleases, and certainly never in 3D. Then on Halloween night, Laura and I are going to see Gogol Bordello in concert. On Halloween! What are the odds of all the places they could play in the whole world, they'd be playing Lawrence, Kansas on Halloween? I'm so excited! I'm so excited! (I'm so...scared.) Then, of course, H'ween itself, obviously. I think that I'll have time to hand out candy before I have to leave, but I probably won't be able to take Sarah around, which is okay, I guess. I don't even know if she's trick-or-treating; she doesn't have a costume yet, that's for sure. I'm going to try and convince her that a zombie costume is simple, cost-efficient, and quite scary.