ALL HALLOW'S EVE IS CLOSING IN ON US



This weekend was full of frightening Hallowwen spookies! Friday night the kids carved their pumpkins and they turned out so cool. We turned on the spooky music and cleaned and carved. I tried to roast the pumpkin seeds again this year but still had no luck with how they turned out. You'd think that roasting seeds,
a somewhat dautingly simple task that combines disengaging their weeded being from the orange pulp, rinsing, drying and tossing with oil and salt before sending them into the oven to roast would be simple enough, right? Well, apparently not, and I'm no novice in the kitchen. They again came out really woody and weird, kind of like when I have the dream that my mouth is full of sand and I am trying like crazy to spit it all out, just hard to chew but today as I checked out our newly renovated/remodeled Tom Thumb supermarket I found they had a a nut bar so I stopped by for a little taste of their roasted pumpkin seeds. I found that they were also a bit chewy and somewhat woodsy and took a bit of time to chew though they were just a tad bit quicker through the whole process so I am betting that roasted pumpkin seeds just aren't what I remember them being as a kid. That seems to be the way it is with a lot of things that I remember as a child - they were just so much better when I was a kid. Oh well, I tried some pumpkin kernels and they turned out to be really awesome so in celebration of the fall and pumpkin carving, I picked some up so I could make my own little trail mix to take to the movie. Love me some SAW!

Yesterday Taryn had a Halloween party to go to. She is our little social butterfly, normally with a more active social schedule than we keep. I think she is ready to head to the runway of New York, or maybe Milan. And the horns, perfect complement to her costume. I just wish we could have found her some cool pink platforms she could wear.

This evening we celebrated by having a little family Halloween party of our own. We all got dressed up in our costumes for the festivities. We had a candelabra of bleeding candles and many more Halloween candles to add to the ambiance and I made some ghoulishly stomach-churning food. We had infected broken fingers (tiny pigs in a blanket with cheese oozing out), vomit (spicy corn & roasted pepper soup), upset stomach (baked potatoes with all the fixings), mucus and dried boogers (chips and queso) and to wash it all down we drank blood (Jones soda Lemon Drop Dead (a special Halloween flavor) and grenadine - I tell you, I love Jones soda, no high fructose corn syrup in that stuff!). For dessert we had muddy graveyard sludge (a Pampered Chef recipe for Silky Mint Tort in their new Season's Best recipe booklet). It was really fun and all the food was great.

Today when I was at the newly renovated/remodeled Tom Thumb the Starbucks in-store was sampling the new Holiday drink flavors. I think we will be frequenting that place way more than we do right now. I absolutely love egg nog and they have an egg nog Frappuccino that is so smooth and creamy I had a hard time containing my excitement for the upcoming Holidays. The mocha egg nog Frappuccino was really yummy with a strong coffee base also. The egg nog with steamed milk (sorry, I cannot recall the exact name of this stuff)left me waiting for Santa on Christmas Eve until I was quickly shocked back to reality when the manager came over the intercom with the request for "more checkers to the front". The new flavors will be available on Thursday, November 1st so I know where I will be taking myself to for a treat on Thursday.

Eric and I are also going to go see Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas in 3-D sometime this week. It is back in theaters for a limited 3-week engagement in 3-D. The first showings of the day are the cheapest and since I've never seen this movie (no, I have no explanation as to why) I am dying to go see it in 3-D.

And so it goes, another week on the table with oodles of things to take care of. As Jigsaw says, "Let the games begin".