weekend round-up

Can I still do a weekend round-up on a Wednesday?? Darn right you can when you're just coming off a 5 day weekend! Wuh-hoo!!Things started off as both a blessing and a curse. The curse part? The weekend was planned fully around the much-anticipated visit of my cousin Kaili and her family but unfortunately they all fell victim to the flu and had to cancel last minute!!!! HUGE curse to the weekend as I think we were both counting the seconds until the visit. The blessing part? That did leave me with a whole Friday off of work during which I really didn't do a whole lot. Well, that's not true really -- I ran some errands, spent some time hanging out at my fave coffee joint with pals, made a yummy Indian dinner and took Sadie on a really lovely and yet rainy afternoon hike. Here's some pretty pics of the greenbelt that runs behind my house about a block away.Well this is obviously super cute Sadie enjoying the mud.

Like honestly, as if this is so close to my house downtown

One of my favourite fall things in my 'hood - when the leaves are so thick you can't tell the lawn from the road.

Later on Friday we headed over to Cosmic Dave's Vinyl Emporium for the Ox CD release party. They've got a new EP coming out called Burnout and they're heading out on tour so out into the rain we went in support!!

Saturday brought Halloween fun! First though, out early in the morning for a bush hike before the rains came and a trip to the Farmer's Market to pick out some pumpkins! Then home for warm coffee and breakfast and then -- elbow deep in pumpkin insides!!! Me, I love carving pumpkins and I think Marc has been sucked into the fun along with me.

Here's my pic - idea courtesy of Martha Stewart of course. Stupidly easy, bigtime cool factor.

And here's Marc's pumpkin -- much more labour intensive but all worth it for the after-effect. The kids were in love with it.

And here's more Sadie - having a hard time picking her fave. I was just happy she didn't eat all my rubber rats...

We spent the rest of the day cooking (slow-cooked beef stew served over gooey parmigiana polenta - perfect rainy day food) and setting up the rest of the decorations and then watched cheesy horror movies and handed out candy. My fave costumes of the night had to be the group of teens dressed as Pac-man, Ms Pacman and the little ghosts who told me they were "bringin' back the 80's" and then the wee little toddler dressed as a crocodile who, once he saw Sadie, just stood in the doorway staring at her not saying a word. His dad had to come and get him. 100% adorable...

Sunday, not too much of anything else outside of another great bush hike on a new trail with some friends and some new doggy friends for Sadie. Came home with a dog that was soaking wet, muddy, smelling like bog and full of burrs. Basically we came home with the happiest dog ever....

All Pink and Ghouly...

I wish I threw Halloween parties just so I could use this set-up spotted over at Jamie Anne's.

Halloween 2007 -- that's it??

Well last night was pretty much a Halloween bust. At 8:45 Marc declared that Halloween was officially over. It rained almost all night with the rain starting almost exactly after work. I felt so bad for the kids that did manage to make it out -- their candy-gettin' pillowcases were soaked through and their little hands were like ice. The result -- way too much candy leftovers. It doesn't even really look like we gave any away. But kudos to the kids that did make it out and thanks for all the compliments on our pumpkins. We did manage to score a dinner invitation from some friends who dropped by with their wee one for her first Halloween. Yay for first-time Halloweeners! Can't wait to do it all again next year!

Boo- tastic!

Happy spook day to all!! This morning on my way to work I was happy to see that someone had taken the time to decorate the underpass I walk through with chunks of pumpkin from one end to the other. I got to walk on a carpet of pumpkin seeds. So thanks to whoever did that.

On a happier note, during my lunch I loaded up on cheap Halloween decorations (yay for shopping on the day of!) and am all set for the kiddies. I live by an elementary school so this morning I was watching all the parents walking their costumed kids into school -- little girls tripping over their princess costumes and little boys trying to manage both their lightsabres and their backpacks -- so cute it my uterus hurt a wee bit.

This year is the first in a long time that we didn't go out -- we opted for mushy couple time instead. Normally we do it up right and here's a pic from me last year. Our friend Ben is an amazing filmmaker with stop-motion animation and puppetry so he let me raid his special effects supplies and I fashioned myself a pretty sweet gaping neck wound (thanks Bust magazine for the how-to) and threw in some gashed wrists for good measure. I even had gross stringy things dangling out of neck wound and all night people came up to me completely grossed out. I wore my creepy morbid schoolgirl dress (small black and white gingham with a full skirt, white lace collar and eyelet hemline -- thanks strange vintage store from high school)and also made a sad face to help bring it all home. I admit, I done good.

I confess, I think it's cute...

Humiliating as it is, I admit that sometimes dogs in costume are pretty damn funny. Take the Barmitzvah Dogs. Religiously inappropriate? Perhaps. But the fact remains that a Daschund in a little yammukah makes me smile.

"The Weimeraner would actually make a fantastic Dog Rabbi: Stoic, serious, and born with the love of God in his heart. But that little Dachsund! Looks like someone was up all night studying the Torah. In other news, by my calculations, a dog would have to be 1 year and 10 months old to be properly Bar Mitzvah’d into a Man-Dog"

Weekend round-up

Well, I'm not really sure what to say about this weekend cuz not a whole lot happened and yet it still managed to be outstanding. This weekend was one of those weekends that can be rare in the life of a married couple. Sometimes you just have so much crap to do and general life stuff to manage and while that can still be fun, it's not always quality time. Also, the harder you sometimes plan for "this weekend is going to be quality time," the less likely it is to be the case. This weekend was one of those weekends where nothing was really planned except errand running and expectations were pretty generic. It turned out to be the exact opposite. The weekend was super couple-y and honestly one of the best "married couple" weekends we've had in awhile. And so much better cuz it was so unexpected. We rented some more episodes of "Dexter" after discovering our love for them last weekend, set up camp in fuzzy blankets on the couch to hide from the miserable Halloweeney weather, drank mojitos and ate guacamole, made 2 delicious dinners, drank a bottle of wine, Marc made a fire and we carved our pumpkins in front of it (I know, we actually did that -- it was like being in a Norman Rockwell painting), tidied up the yard and got the gardens ready for winter and just generally acted like mushy newlyweds all corny and mushy. It was probably a good thing nobody was really around cuz it was most likely pretty nauseating. A great mixture of weekend loafing and productivity actually. What a rare combo...