first, here are our costumes from the party we went to on friday night, where i ate and drank too much.  mom took this picture of kevin and me, and here i’m telling her how to take the picture.  she figured it out without me bossing her around.

kevin, mom and me before we left mom and dad’s house for the party.  i felt like it was a little lame to wear a cowboy costume but i didn’t want to have to get into all my makeup and everything for my real costume.  but when we got to the party i felt horribly overdressed because most of the people there weren’t wearing any costumes at all, and some of the ones who were just had rabbit ears or something not very halloweeny.

but that was all friday night…

saturday…things were going ok, pretty much on schedule, but then i was going to nap for a few minutes before getting ready – that lasted for 12 minutes, and then i decided i really didn’t have time for napping.  janice, gerrick and janice’s son jeremy were coming over at 5:30 to help us set up, but i told kevin to call and tell them to come at six, because that would give us plenty of time.

so at 5:30 i was in the kitchen putting bacon-wrapped dates in the oven, and they all showed up because  they didn’t get kevin’s message.  i had planned to put my makeup and costume on at 4, but that hadn’t happened somehow.

i kept running back and forth from the kitchen to the bathroom, trying to tell everybody what needed to be done, and then going back and adding more makeup.

janice was busily doing lots of stuff in the kitchen, when i heard her yell for garrick.  uh oh – janice isn’t the kind of person to be yelling like that.  kevin was also putting on his makeup, and he dashed out of the bathroom and i heard lots of exclaiming and all kinds of noise.

“oh boy,” i thought, “now what?”  i thought maybe janice had dropped the pan of date-stuffed bacon, and hot grease had spilled on the floor.  but there was a whole lot of commotion in there.

finally i ran into the kitchen.  i had missed all the excitement – janice had looked over at the dining room table, where the first batch of bacon/dates was sitting in a glass bowl sitting inside a silver chafing dish that had been dad’s.  i had gone to a lot of trouble to polish it all up and it looked dazzling.  kevin had filled the little burner underneath with lighter fluid and we’d tested it and it seemed to work great.

but when janice looked at the dish, the flames were LEAPING UP the sides of the thing.  it was a towering inferno of fire.  when she yelled for gerrick, he rushed over and…blew on it.

doesn’t it seem that blowing on it might make it worse? it did.

and then, when kevin rushed in, he also…blew on it.

kevin was a boy scout; he rose high in the boy scout ranks.  he surely had lots of emergency training as a cop.  gerrick was in the military police, served in iraq, did many dangerous things, had to do all kinds of risky stuff…and yet they both felt the best way to put out the fire was to blow on it.

gerrick then grabbed a towel and got it wet, was gonna throw it over the fire, but by that time kevin found the fire extinguisher and sprayed a couple of bursts onto the flames which were now leaping even higher because of the blowing on them.

so when i came into the room the fire was out, the sizzling glass bowl filled with dates was in the sink, and the table full of clean halloween dishes was covered with fire extinguisher stuff.

oops.

i looked at the dates sitting in the glass bowl, which had broken in two because of the extreme temperature.  the bowl was lined with paper towel, so my question was, could the dates be eaten?  there weren’t that many dates, and i explained that they were very, very delicious.  “gotta throw them out,” said gerrick.  “yes, throw them all out,” said kevin.

i further explained the extreme deliciousness of the dates, and all of a sudden gerrick popped one in his mouth.  “they seem ok to me,” he said.  i picked them over a little, to see if i could see any shards.  nope.  we discussed our options for a bit, and then we agreed to set them aside and make a decision about them later.  janice said we could drink a lot and then serve them if we wanted to later on.

finally, gerrick inspected the glass bowl and declared that the break was clean, that there was no risk of shards.  it was getting later and later and i still had lots of work to do on my costume, so i went back into the bathroom to keep getting ready.

this morning i took pictures of it so you can see.  the handles on both sides snapped off, and one side was covered with black.

the yellowish dust is the fire extinguisher stuff.

here’s the glass bowl.

while i got ready, janice busily washed each and every dish on the table, plus she cleaned the fire extinguisher stuff off the table.  janice was very very helpful and if she hadn’t been there it’d have been me shrieking for kevin, plus of course there’s no way i could have cleaned everything up and gotten ready in time.  because i only heard about the whole deal, though, it all just struck me as being really funny in an absurd kind of way.  who could have ever guessed that the reason things were crazy before the party was because we had a fire?

people started showing up a little before seven, and the costumes were, as usual, really good.  here are lenore, sandy, and becky, the three witches we had at the party.

linda and her daughter jessica.  linda ordered the incredibly creepy contacts online – they’re prescription.  she tried to have a couple of sincere conversations with me during the night, but i just couldn’t take her seriously.

here are their complete outfits.  i’m pretty sure jessica has been at our parties every year; she didn’t dress up at all at the first couple, and she went into our bedroom and napped through them.  she then started wearing a cowboy hat, and this is the first year she went all-out.

our neighbor chris and his beautiful girlfriend, sig. i love her shimmery mask.

donna, and the only other neighbor of ours to show up, mary.  donna’s costume was pretty great – she kept saying she was “lady merlot.”  mary was a baker of some kind of norwegian cookie or something called lefses.  i think she must be holding a cheesy spider, but it looks like a mouse.

mary ann and nan.

cathy and russell.

mollie had an outstanding time, but kevin says at about ten or so she had to go take a quick nap in the bedroom to rest up for her second round of eating many many treats.  we have to get her a new halloween costume next year, although of course she would be happy to just wear this one every year.

shayla was a mail-order bride, and i wish i had a photo that showed off her top – she wrapped saran wrap tightly around herself, over a mailing label.  with her is gary and annie, who were hysterically funny.  gary is wearing the blonde wig and the goofy mask.

aren’t those eyes fabulous?  they told me they bought the mask somewhere…i can’t remember where…it was for some theater troupe, i think, and…they told me a story all about how it was made, but i think i was busy drinking and didn’t pay enough attention.  maybe they’ll write to me and tell me what they said.  gary had other little cards that he’d hold up, and they were all funny.

annie was a dirty old man, and she cracked me up.

i can’t remember when kevin took this picture of me, or why i had that sad look on my face.  i think i was trying to look dramatic.

he’s not really wearing that pumpkin on his head – he told me he was going to be a mime, and he stood right next to me in the bathroom, shaving off his beard, and i frantically tried to hurry up and put on my makeup.  i didn’t notice that he didn’t have a beard.  i still didn’t even notice this morning, so he finally gave up and told me.  i decided to be the bride of frankenstein when i found the wig, but the picture on the package looked much better than the real thing.  amy helped me style it into something better.

at least we were both black and white, but i think it’d be fun to have some kind of complementary costumes some time.

i should have made shayla stand up so i could get the full effect of the costume.

larry and lori ann, the pump boy and the dinette.   very cute.

this is the only picture i have of gerrick and janice together; hopefully somebody else took a good one.  here they’re accepting their “cutest couple” award.  they’re edith and archie bunker, but clearly they’ve both gone a little crazy with the cleavers.  somebody said they thought that gerrick was mrs. doubtfire.  damn, i hope somebody has a better picture than this.  for once, i was having too much fun to worry about taking lots of good pictures.

here’s janice’s son ramsey, who was very helpful throughout the night.  he was billie joe armstrong, the lead singer of green day.  when ramsey told me he was gonna be billie joe, i didn’t know who that was of course, so i had to read all about green day online and they’ve been around since the 80’s.  last year, ramsey was…kurt cobain?  but i could be totally wrong about that.  ramsey is really into bands and guitars and he says that most people at his school think green day have sold out but he doesn’t care because he likes them anyway.

there are many, many more photos, but i have a whole bunch of things to do right now even though i’d just like to go to sleep.  tomorrow i have to go to a seminar so there will be no new photos all day long, so you’ll just have to wait till tomorrow night or even sometime on tuesday.

patience is a virtue.

try not to set anything on fire this week.  that is my own personal goal.

at some point during somebody put out all the dates which had been flamed, and luckily nobody complained of being cut by any shards of glass.  whew.

ok then,

sunday halloween grace.