Happy Halloween!

Halloween is one time of the year I really, really miss home, mostly because you Calgary-based folk are so bloody good with the parties and the dressing up, whereas people here don't get that excited.

Last year, I didn't even get to dress up, though we did have a good time wandering Whitechapel at night looking for Jack the Ripper.

This year, however, I got to dress up. We headed out to Leila and Dan's parent's house near Salisbury, in a town called Pitton. They live in a very cool converted barn.

My costume was thrown together in about twenty minutes from pound stores, so I ended up dressed as a witch, as there weren't a lot of options. While it paled in comparison to previous years, it worked out pretty well, as I found a wicked-cool hat, painted my nails black (which they remain at the moment due to a lack of nail polish remover) and put blue streaks in my hair:

If I really were a witch, I'd use my
magic to not look fat in this photo!

Dan had a wicked-awesome skeleton costume, which his mom made for his dad twenty years ago. One guy, Amir, dressed as this green monster thing, but looked more like the Jolly Green Giant of frozen vegetable fame. Tom... I don't know what Tom was supposed to be. But he was scary. And funny, especially when one of his Bleeding Face Sores fell off and was later found on his plate of food.
And one couple, who are rumoured to have a very good costume collection, pretty well wore a compilation: random hats, splattered blood, weird accessories... it was like a joke shop exploded. Very cool.

Leila and her mom decorated the whole barn-house really well. Their mom is a retired school teacher who wrote books on how to make cool crafts and shit, so she's pretty good at it. And, for dinner, Leila cooked a pumpkin stuffed with rice and veggies. Really weird, but so tasty.

Another high point of the party were the fireworks, which are amusingly legal here. Someone bought a huge pile, which were set off in the large back yard, scaring the cats. One didn't do quite as it was suppsoed to. Rather than lift off into the sky and explode well above our heads, it rose about three feet, hovered for a moment, and then fell to the ground... before exploding. Um, oops.

Pictures are here: http://njkobie.dotphoto.com/CPViewAlbum.asp?AID=2975822

The next day, we went for a nice lunch in a proper small-village pub. And then Dan and I wandered through local muddy fields looking for ponies. Which we found. And I was happy. The end.