Halloween: Bay View Style

Happy Halloween!  It's been over for us for days, but I hope everyone else out there who has fun with it on the actual day has a good time.

Aden the Armadillo

Aden really likes being a kangaroo.  Up until a couple of weeks before Halloween she thought she would just be a kangaroo again this year.  But her sister in particular couldn't believe she'd pass up the chance to be something else, especially since she could always still just be a kangaroo if she changed her mind.

So at the last minute she decided to be an armadillo.

By last minute I mean about a week ago I had a couple of hours to sew together a basic jumpsuit and tack on a couple of ears, and then Aden was supposed to do the rest.  She really wanted to make all of it soft so she could lounge around in it, and she had ideas, but wasn't sure how to execute them and kept putting it off.  We wound up the day before the Halloween Dance staying up late and getting the last of it done.

After some trial and error we ended up with a fleece armor-shell filled with batting and the outside layer folded with nine pleats (for a 9-banded armadillo).  I stitched it to the body and attached the tail to the underside of it.  And I added a small snout like a bill to her hood.


All the lighter color details Aden did herself with paint, plus she added claws to a pair of gloves.

It's not as flashy as her siblings' costumes this year, but she's very happy being an armadillo.

And she seems to be past her worries about being too old to Trick-or-Treat, which I'm glad about.  There are so many adults who dress up in our neighborhood she doesn't look out of place, and it's just a big welcoming event here, regardless of how old or young the kids are.








At school next week she's just going to be a cowgirl because her school is already warm, and changing in and out of a heavy costume for gym sounds annoying, but at home she plans to hang out in armadillo mode often.  She loves being an armadillo.  (And I love her.)

Quinn the Lion Fish

This is officially the most labor intensive costume I've been asked to do yet.  But I think it came out looking good!

When I asked Quinn a few months ago what he wanted to be for Halloween there was a deceptive pause in his answer that gave me hope for a simple costume this year.  He said, "I want to be a lion... fish."  A lion would have been easy.  My mind went to a couple of elements I could use to make it cool and knew I could knock it out in about a day.  But then the word "fish" came into the picture and I realized, no, this was going to be a challenge.

I guess the best of Dorothy Parker isn't good enough.

Our car gets broken into about every six weeks.

For the most part our neighborhood is fairly safe.  I'm not nervous walking our dog at night.  Our street dead ends into the railroad tracks a block away from our house so there isn't a lot of through traffic that direction.  We have nice neighbors.  I don't feel scared in or around our house.  (Although there was a carjacking on our corner a few months ago, but I'm still more nervous about running into a skunk than a criminal.)

Our garage only holds one car, so we tend to park the minivan inside, and the sedan in the driveway by the alley.  We can't keep a garage door opener in the sedan because then someone could use that to break into the whole garage and they might take, I don't know, our kites or a rake or something.  We tend to keep the doors to the car unlocked simply because I'd rather deal with people rifling through everything than a smashed window, but it's still annoying.

I don't know if it's the same person or group who does a regular round of rummaging through cars on our block, or if it varies, but they always go through it the same way.  We come out in the morning to find all the compartments wide open and everything a more jumbled mess than usual.  I mostly get pissed off if they leave a door open enough to keep the dome light on which runs down the battery.  Our last car they used to steal the radio out of over and over, but that hasn't happened in years (probably because there's not much of a market for them anymore).  Lately nothing gets taken that we've noticed.  They leave the change on the floor, they don't want pens or the car owner's manual, and last week they even rejected our GPS which we'd accidentally left in the bin between the front seats and they dumped it on the floor mat.

There is not much of value in our car, but when it's rifled through, there is one thing we always check for.

Did Something Eat Something Else?*

(*George Carlin)

Some pictures only a blogger would take.  And some situations become less annoying if they could make a good post.

So with that as explanation, here are some pictures of empty food containers as I found them in their natural habitat:

I know this is not unique to our home, but come on!  Why, children, why?

Mona the Ostrich

Mona is amazing.  And she makes amazing costumes.

I have really enjoyed making costumes for Mona, but a few years ago she decided to have a hand in her costume creation and did the head to her tapajera outfit without my help.  Then the following year she did most of her griffin outfit herself.  Last year she didn't need me at all and did her scorpion costume completely on her own.  (She still wears it and was a hit at Bug Day at the nature center recently.)

This year she outdid herself with an ostrich costume.

She was so excited about her ideas for it that it's already finished well in advance of Halloween.  It was fascinating to watch her work out how it would all go together.

Enough and Done

Yesterday morning I woke up to the news of what is now being called the largest mass shooting in our nation's history.  The story was on the radio as I made breakfast.  It was on my Facebook feed as I checked on it at work.  It was on the radio again as I cooked dinner.  Discussion of it was absent at my evening rehearsal, but then I was confronted with it again from multiple sources when I went back to work to finish a few things before finally returning home to crawl in bed.

I was not surprised this shooting happened.  In all the coverage I heard in and around Las Vegas, nobody sounded surprised.

You know what did surprise me a little?  I had no tears for this event.  None.  I am fatigued.  I was distressed in the abstract.  I was sad for the victims and their families in a general way.