Happy Halloween

We had a beautiful sunny and warm day today..... no trick-or-treating kids out here in the hills, but it's Halloween just the same.  So Boo! to all of you.

Our Halloween party was last night.... friends from the community here came in costumes.... a fabric-wrapped mummy (who spent the night unraveling), a fortune teller, a lei-covered Hawaiian tourist, an IRS agent (the scariest one of all), a white-faced French mime, and two friends who switched identities for the night (am I you? are you me?).  My husband was a very handsome Phantom of The Opera, and I was a City-Minnie Mouse (very little country girl in this chick).  Other friends came dressed in Halloween colors.

We played Charades after dinner, and after the costume prizes were given out. Charades is always the great equalizer at a party..... and no matter how good you are at Charades, or how bad you are, the fun is just there in the middle of it all, and we end up just laughing at every little gesture and guess.

As we all sat down to dinner, one of our friends took a moment to remember the tradegy of the hurricane along the east coast, and everyone gave an "Amen" to the people in the cities ravaged by that storm.  For the second year in a row, Halloween was wiped out by a freak weather system..... this year's hurricane worse than the blizzard of last year.

Since there are no trick-or-treaters here today, I spent the entire morning taking down all the Halloween decorations.  I piled everything up on the dining room table, then got out the storage boxes and started putting little pumpkins and black cats inside bigger pumpkins.  All of the costumes are back in the costume boxes...... every black cat and witch's hat has been packed away till next year. I'll give myself a decorating rest for a day or two, and then get out the Christmas boxes.  By the time Thanksgiving comes, everything in this big old house will be all Christmas-ed up and ready for Santa.

I've stopped watching the news reports about Hurricane Sandy..... the pictures are heart-breaking.... the damage is unbelievable...... and you just have to wonder how long it will take New York and New Jersey to pick themselves up and dust themselves off after those weather systems blasted through.

Busy, busy........

The days are flying by...... our Halloween party is this week and I've been getting ready for that..... baking and cooking and changing decorations around so the pumpkins and witches aren't in anyone's way during the party. Moving chairs, arranging tables, baking brownies and pumpkin bread and getting things ready for party-day so I won't be in the kitchen from dawn till dusk on the day of the party.

Everyone has always said that I make party-giving look so easy...... well, it is..... if you have a day-by-day to-do list that begins six days before the party.  Plus, you have to have all the decorations up before you send out the invitations three weeks before the party...... so with all of that done and organized, yes, party-giving is going to look very easy.

Miss C was here yesterday and the day before............. not something that's on my party to-do list, but she comes up when she has the time now, and we're always happy to see her smiling face here.  I put the to-do list aside and Miss C and I spent most of the day in town yesterday, walking around the shops, stopping at some yard sales, having lunch at a cafe, and just enjoying one another's company. Before she went back, we went up to J&J's property and searched for acorns............. Miss C has been collecting pecans and acorns and little Autumn-y things to put in a big glass bowl for a seasonal centerpiece.  So there we were...  Miss C, me, and J.......... searching the ground for acorns, and not watching out for snakes and spiders and heaven-only-knows what could have been up in those trees.

My cousins in NY have been keeping me posted on the storm that's heading up that way.... cold blasts on the way from Canada, hurricane winds on their way from the Atlantic Ocean............ if both systems collide, they're going to have a blizzard and a hurricane (a blizzarcane?).  I've been listening to the TV weather wizards and some of them are actually smiling as they're reporting on this "super-storm" that could break all weather records.  They seemed happy to be a part of this historical weather pattern. Give me a blessed break.

The kids up in the northeast barely got to celebrate Halloween last year... it was cancelled in some states because of a freakish snowstorm that pounded parts of the tri-state area last October.  And now they're in the path of two storms, not just one. Say good-bye to another Halloween up there.  I'm hoping that the Great Pumpkin steps in and re-directs those storm systems, sending them both out into the ocean instead of having them hit Long Island.

Send in the clowns.......

I don't usually like clowns but I found one in the thrift store today and just had to rescue it, poor thing.  First of all, it's a happy clown, not one of those sad-faced clowns that make you wonder what's really going on behind that upside-down grin.

This particular clown-doll caught my eye because I knew it was old..... hand painted porcelain face, porcelain arms and legs, and a tightly stuffed body, not a doll that you can bend into a sitting position.  He was wearing a Halloween costume, which is why I noticed him at all.  Even though I keep saying I don't need one more Halloween decoration in this house, that silly little 14-inch clown was just calling out my name.

His black and orange outfit had been hand sewn, along with a cute little lace ruffle around his neck. Pom-poms down the front of his clown suit, and curly red-orange hair.... very happy, smiling with his red clown mouth and his blue eyes.  I think he was missing a hat, and his hair was coming unglued, but underneath his wig was a 'Made in Japan' label.  Bingo.  I knew he was old.  And for just three dollars, he came home with me.

I had good intentions on the ride home.... I figured I could sell him in the antique shop, being that I found him just in time for Halloween.  But of course, when you get these treasures home, sometimes you just can't part with them.  I dusted off his clothes, cleaned up the porcelain..... and then..... decided to fancy him up a little bit.

Out came the craft box..... and wonder of wonders, I had orange pom-poms in there....... he's now sporting those on the cuffs of his shirt and pants.  I re-glued the front of his hair so it would stay put, and then decided he needed a hat....... a large black button on top of his curly hair made him look like he was wearing a beret....  a French clown?  On top of the black button, I glued an orange pom-pom.............. he instantly turned into a French clown with panache. Magnifique!

My three dollar clown is now in the dining room, looking very Halloween-ish, very happily pom-pommed, and he's introducing himself to the witches and black cats in there.  My name is Pierre.... I was kidnapped and attacked with a glue gun....

As for my rule about one thing in, one thing out...... being that I kept the clown, I went through my Halloween stuff and took out all the feathered Mardi Gras masks that I'd saved through the  years.  The masks are already marked for the shop.......... one clown in, seven masks out. 

I hope that doesn't mean I'm going to find six more clowns.... I'm all out of orange pom-poms.

Thursday stuff.

As I type this, it's raining outside.  Haven't had a good rain in a while, and although this isn't exactly a really good rain, at least it's something wet falling out of the sky.  Last time I wrote in here, I was thinking that September was disappearing too quickly.... and here it is, nearly mid-October.  The weeks are flying by.

I've been busy with both Halloween and Christmas......... invitations have gone out for our Halloween party, which has to be on a week-night this year.  Not exactly the most convenient for everyone, but sometimes you just have to go with the flow.  I've found great prizes for the best (and possibly the worst) costumes...... that's always the best part of Halloween--- to see what costumes and crazy outfits our friends can put together.  I heard on the news last week that Halloween is 'growing in popularity' with adults around the country.  My guess is that the person who wrote those words has not been to Texas in late October.  Everyone is Halloween-crazy here, even the stores.  Employees go dressed in costumes on Halloween day, and every shop in probably every town is all decked-out with pumpkins, black cats, witches and scarecrows. So.... Boo to you!  (Or maybe that should be "Boo, Y'all!")

I've been wrapping up Christmas gifts for my cousins and their children..... what started out as a pile of holiday-wrapped presents is now a tall stack of brown-paper-wrapped packing boxes.  The gifts looked more festive in the holiday paper, but the post office needs the brown paper for mailing. Go with the flow.   I will start mailing out the Christmas packages right after Thanksgiving......... and my cousin T in Arizona will be the first one to call me, saying "Will you cut that out! You send Christmas gifts while we still have turkey leftovers in the house!"

The post office gets super-busy after Thanksgiving....... I figure the earlier I can get the packages in the mail, the less chance I have of anything getting lost in the process.  Last month, I sent a birthday package to one of my cousins, and when I checked the tracking number, the computer told me the package had been delivered in Beaumont, Texas.  Now how could that be?  It was addressed to NY.  Surely, there couldn't have been a Beaumont person with the same name and address as my cousin up north.  I called the post office here........ they looked into the problem......... they called Beaumont and they called the NY post office where it was supposed to go.... they all stood by their web-site, which confirmed that the package had been delivered in Beaumont.    Five days later, the package was delivered to my cousin in NY.  Mystery solved, but no one in the Texas post offices knows what happened...... and when I called the post office right here to tell them that the package had been received up in NY, they didn't believe me.  With that experience fresh in my mind, I'm getting the holiday packages to the post office.... you guessed it.... while there's still turkey leftovers in the fridge.

We're still waiting for the carpenter to come and finish the trim-work on the third floor. He was supposed to be here this past Monday.  No one showed up.... my husband was not a happy camper about that one, and neither was I.   When these people say they'll be here, we make sure to BE HERE also.......... don't they realize that?  So now we have another date... they're supposed to be here first thing tomorrow morning.  I'll believe it when I see their truck pulling into the driveway.   When we first started working on the third floor library, I joked with my husband that we'd be lucky to have the work done by Christmas, given the "if not today, it will get done tomorrow" code of Texas workers.  Christmas is just around the corner...... and with a little bit of luck, the library will be right around the other corner.  Jingle bells.....