10-28-2000

At some point a few weeks ago, Richard and I were joking around and I think it was me who said that I was just a delicate flower. After we both recovered from sniggering about that comment, we tried it out on both sets of parents, and all available siblings. My older sister's response was 'Richard, we have to talk'. Both my mom and his mom raised eyebrows and gave us a look. Delicate flower I'm not, but it gave me a great Halloween costume idea.

We went to Old Sacramento last night, primarily to search for costume parts, since Richard had remembered seeing a hat in one shop that might work if he was to be a leprechaun, and I was still floundering for ideas because even though I had that whole flower thing going, I still wasn't sure, and where the heck was I going to find green tights anyway. We ended up wandering through all three floors of this marvelous store that's got all the tacky and bizarre stuff you can ever want (including a small but nevertheless impressive selection of gargoyles).

Today we ran around getting all the rest of the things we needed for the Halloween party we were throwing this evening. We slept in as late as the cats would let us - although I have to grumble about the fact that I'm still the one the cats prefer. Don't get me wrong. I find it endearing when they're looking for a lap to sit on, but when I'm huddled on one side of the bed, mummified by at least three cats and sometimes twice as many, and he's got an entire half of the bed that's cat-free, I'm not finding it quite so charming. I have faith though that one of these days he'll be the one to wake up unable to move because he's feline-pinned, and I'll be the one giggling sleepily into my pillow. (I can dream, can't I?)

It was pouring down rain, so by the time we'd found all the rest of the costume pieces, and purchased all the food items, including all the ingredients for the jello mold we bought last night (it was a brain. How could we pass it up?), and rooted around in a huge box of little pumpkins without any umbrellas, we were both more than a bit soggy. So much for the plans of outside games for the party, or for making the tombstones to put on the yard. Then we scurried around the house, tidying up with no regard for cat comfort this time, putting costumes together, making the punch (I love dry ice!), dragging out chairs. And then we sat and waited. And waited. An hour passed and I started to get annoyed, no matter how hard I tried not to be. I don't expect people to be exactly on time, but I get antsy when people are really late. We even went so far as to start talking about going to see a movie if no one had shown by a certain time. But finally people started to trickle in.

The brain mold came out beautifully gray and disgusting (and yet quite tasty). I managed to figure out not only how to pin construction paper flower petals to my head so that they stayed, but also how to keep the flower pot on my foot so that when I stood still with both feet together, I was actually inside it. The game that Richard and I came up with a few weeks ago, and didn't have a chance to actually finalize til this morning, went over extremely well (although I do now have to wonder about my older sister and another of our friends, who came up with a plot to take over the world with genetically mutated, flesh-eating, yodeling cows). We never did end up carving pumpkins, but as I recall, we didn't get around to doing that last year either, so perhaps I should have learned by now.

Everyone is gone now, leaving behind a plastic bag of cookies that look like fingers, half a grey jiggly jello brain, and the remainder of the punch, dry ice all melted and no longer capable of producing fog when stirred. The party didn't go quite as I expected it to, but then perhaps it never does, and despite everything, it was fun.