Tag: Halloween

Boo……..Halloween fun

November 1, 2010

I’ve started to make a bit of a tradition out of Halloween pumpkin carving w/ kiddo. A review of last year’s Halloween post showed we had more pumpkins, and I took a more of a leading role in the carving. This year, kiddo did them all….I just cleaned out the insides and roasted the seeds.

We only had three carved ones this year. Kiddo did one “freestyle”, the others following a pattern. Must say he’s getting the hang of things.  Only one type of pumpkins seeds this year – the more savory with a touch of garlic olive oil, garlic salt, hint of pepper. These came out quite well.  My kitchen tho, did not fare as well. Apparently, I attacked the scraping out the insides with a fury. Bits of pumpkin flew everywhere. Must have needed to work out some aggression or something…dunno.

Admit to in addition to slacking a bit on the pumpkin carving, didn’t really go all out on the outdoor decor. Used all the fun motion sensitive stuff, the scary music, fog machine,  new talking face in the tree, but no spider webs, not a bunch of lights. Few pieces out in the garden, under the watchful eye of Kutya the wonder dog. (which reminds me, I never put his costume on either…what was I thinking???)

This year we did stop by a party for a bit. Kiddo even got second in the costume contest for his “when the Brewers slaughter the Cardinals” costume. Found the food names a great touch – shredded rat sandwiches (pork), moldy fruit pizza, maggots (a great coconut and banana rice pudding), vampire bat wings (homemade tortillas shaped like pumpkins and bats. WOW), blood soaked deviled eggs, bat guano, mummy wraps, witches fingers. 
Looking back at last year’s post, made me realize another Halloween weekend tradition….tackling the leaves. The job was somewhat helped by last week’s wind storm, moving a good part of the masses of leaves covering our lawn into the woods. The rest were piled around the driveway farm pots, my potting shed. Hubby and son pile the leaves onto a tarp, and drag them to our woods. Kutya supervises all outdoor activity. In the woods, Mt. Leaverest is about 4 feet high by 12 feet in diameter, and growing. Should have a good bit of leaf mold for the garden in a year or so.
While checking out the pile had a thought….maybe we could make a little bit of singletrack through the woods. Kiddo and I had been practicing riding over rocks and logs last week in the yard…. may have to add this to our yard skills area 😉

Reflections on Halloween 2009

November 1, 2009

First off an observation……This blogger in training needs to do a better job of documenting things from start to finish. Sad to realize I didn’t take any in-process photos yesterday…the counter covered in newspaper, 5 pumpkins in varying states of being carved, piles of raw seeds, the patterns, carving tools, carved out chunks of pumpkin, my son and I covered in pumpkin gunk. Good times. Instead just have the final outcome of Halloween 2009 at our house.

We ended up with 6 carved pumpkins, one carved the day before at day care, the rest carved on Halloween morning at home. Final tally, I’d only carved 2, son did rest. I was responsible for all the pumpkin cleaning, pulling out the slimy guts, separating the seeds from the fleshy, gooey threads that connect them to the actual fruit. And boy, did we have seeds.

Son mentioned at the day care, they’d roasted the seeds two ways, with salt and then with cinnamon sugar. Then voted on favorite, where he voted “BOTH”. I’ve only ever done salt – somewhat evolving that to a savory garlic and herb version. Ended up splitting the seeds to to pans – on the right is the normal salt version, left is with a small bit of butter, brown sugar and common pumpkin pie spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger). Would have to agree and vote “both”!

Trick or Treat in our town was from 5-7:30. My 10yo son had a friend spending the night, both going as versions of Star Wars clones. This was going to be the first year he trick or treated without parents, so I was a little worried, but we’d laid out the ground rules, they knew which streets they couldn’t cross, where they could go. A bit after 5pm, armed with flashlights, glow sticks and candy bags they set off. The boys were back well before 7:30 – first to grab additional coats, and later cuz they were tired of walking.


I donned my Cruella costume and the dog put on his Robin costume. We had maybe 40 trick-or-treaters. Lots of comments about the pumpkins from the parents, a few little ones nervous by the talking decorations and spooky music, but overall a good time. No dalmatians tho’, which would have been kinda fun!

Today it’s more or less back to normal, Halloween decorations packed away, pumpkins remain, and now time to tackle the masses and masses of leaves in the yard!

They say Karma’s a bitch……

October 25, 2009

Or payback is hell.

But the brilliant thing is that the flip side to bad karma coming back and biting you in the ass is that sometimes getting what you deserve or earned is a good thing. And that appears to have happened to my son and I this weekend.

Last December armed with our first ever Disney annual passes, my son and I had a 5 day pre-Christmas trip to Disney World planned. This grown-up but kid at heart Disney fanatic has always wanted to see the parks and the resorts in their Christmas finery. Each day was well planned with dining reservations, carefully researched park plans to avoid the “extra magic hour” crowds, not to mention a list of shows and resorts to visit. And then the great snow of December 19th hit Milwaukee. Closing the airport. And for the next 2 1/2 days my very patient 9 year old son and I were in airport stand-by hell. Somehow our Friday 6am direct flight turned into a 7pm Saturday connecting flight through Atlanta. We tried to stand by on every flight in between. No luck. And then of course, our flight to Atlanta was delayed and we found ourselves stuck in Atlanta, a city we never planned to visit for the night. Sunday morning brought more stand by flights, and a melt down and tears from the grown-up, and continued brave face from the 9 year old. Finally at 2pm Sunday, 62 hours later we were in Disney.

And I swore I would make it up to my son. (OK, yeah, me too) Upon returning home, using frequent flier miles, timeshare points and of course knowing we had annual passes, I booked a Halloween trip back to Disney.

From start to finish this trip was a dream. Flights going and coming were on time. Car rental no line, no problem. Sure a 6am flight made an awfully early start, but we managed – and boy, did we manage getting all the highlights done.

Some of the highlights: While the parks were fairly crowded, it was primarily Food & Wine Festival attendees and folks with young children. Which meant lines for the attractions requiring folks to be over 40″ tall were not bad, not bad at all. So much so, we hit all our favorite rides, most with literally no wait. On rides like Everest Expedition, Test Track, and Rock-n-Roller Coaster we employed single rider strategy. If you aren’t familiar with this, some rides have a third line in addition to the normal line and the fastpass line. You will not be sitting with your party as they use the singles to fill in the odd numbered groups. However in most every instance we were in the same “car” or train or whatever that is called. Others, such as Tower of Terror (my #1 fav ride) simply had no waits. You could ride them as fast as it took to walk through the queue. All said in our three days, the final tally was Everest Expedition 6 times (son did 7), Tower of Terror and Big Thunder Mountain 5 times, Test track 4 times, Splash Mountain, Kali River Ride, andStar Tours 2 times plus a trip on the Great Movie Ride, The Backlot tour, Soarin’, Maelstrom, Mission Space, Haunted Mansion, Pirates……Oh, and I got to be one of the “actors” in the Pearl Harbor scene on the Backlot tour!

Of course, I had to get my fireworks fix. The first day we were worn out from our 6am plane flight and considered skipping fireworks. Instead we headed to Beaches and Cream for burgers and ice cream. Remarkably we had no wait for a table, and finished dinner just in time to walk in the back entrance of EPCOT and snag a great view at a spot between USA and Japan. The park was crowded but somehow, just as the announcer blew out the fires, there was a two person opening along the fence. The next night was Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween party where we enjoyed Halloween Wishes from our fav spot front and center of the castle. Finally the third night, son wanted to repeat the Beaches and Cream / Illumination plan. This time we scored a spot between China and Germany with a perfect view of Illuminations but also a goo view of Wishes just to the left of Spaceship Earth – huge bonus for this fireworks lover.

One of my favorite memories was the morning after Mickey’s Halloween party, when my son in all seriousness asked, “Mom, did you feel like a kid again last night?” I replied, “What do you mean?”. “well, you were wearing a costume and went trick or treating”. And, yes, he was right, I did feel like a kid again, and both he and I thought that was pretty darn cool.

Finally, in keeping with family tradition of documenting our accommodations. Shots from the 1 bedroom unit at Wyndham Vacation Resort at Bonnet Creek. I own a decent amount of points in the Wyndham timeshare system (all purchased on eBay, which is a whole other story). Their new resorts are quite nice, and the point system allows me to book 3-4 night long weekends. (Like the one in November to Wyndham Glacier Canyon at the Wisconsin Dells or the December weekend at Wyndham Grand Desert Las Vegas – which will include doing the Rock-n-Roll Half Marathon. The location of this resort is pretty incredible – within the World, next to the Caribbean Beach Resort, very close to EPCOT, the Boardwalk and Hollywood Studios. Will return to this one!