Two things came to my attention this morning:
1. I have readers who are not related to me, and
2. There are other folks out there (adults) who are just as enthusiastic as me about Halloween.
So for all of you out there (relatives and non-relatives) who are glueing, sewing, painting, last-minute-craft-supply-shopping and figuring out how to wire your wigs into just the right shapes, I want you to know that I'm here for you, and we can have a virtual brag-fest right here. Send your pictures to me at gennyland(AT)yahoo.com and I will post them. In the meantime, here's some inspiration. Celebrity Halloween Costumes.
10/30/09
10/29/09
Halloween is for Grown-Ups
I am dismayed by the lack of enthusiasm around Halloween these days.
My friends are all in their thirties and forties. I understand that life is busy, dignity has to be maintained, and children complicate things. I understand all that but yet I still can’t figure out why nobody can match my enthusiasm when it comes to Halloween because it is seriously my favorite holiday of the year (sorry Christmas, you’re stressful).
This year I am most disappointed by the fact that even though Halloween falls on a Saturday, I’m still having a hard time drumming up enthusiasm for my Halloween party. Not to sound like a whiney 12-year-old, but really? For once you get to dress in disguise and drink all evening, not have to work the next day, and you’re choosing to stay home? Maybe I need to re-think my lifestyle choices but that sounds like a load of fun to me.
Also for the first time, we’re having a party that may not be for the kiddies. I am going out of my way to make things truly disturbing – blood in the bathtub, gory art on the walls, creepy lighting, boozy punch, décor that hints at recent not-exactly-professional surgical operations, etc. I can’t wait to decorate. So far in my social world I’ve made a real effort to incorporate my friends’ kids into our gatherings, but this time, not so much. I’ve bought a spray bottle of fake blood and will use it liberally. I’ve made frozen hearts out of fruit juice, to use as ice cubes in my bloody punch. I’ve gathered ‘creepy’ fruits (there are a lot of creepy fruits, as it turns out).
This year I get to develop two costumes: since I work in the Visual Arts section at work, we have collectively decided that everyone, all 17 of us, will dress as a famous work of art. They actually organize a Halloween parade at our work, so at 11:30, up to 50 trick-or-treaters will weave up and down the hallways collecting candies, and judges will dole out prizes to the best costumes and best-decorated section. We’re going for gold this year; five of my colleagues are going as ‘dogs playing poker’, one’s going as Van Gogh, a few of them are going minimalist – a Mondrian, a Malevich, and a Magritte, two are teaming up to do ‘American Gothic’, the CanCon will be Emily Carr, we have a token Mona Lisa, and I will be Frida Kahlo, which has been a hoot to (re)create.
For the party Saturday night, I’m going to be a terrifying zombie, plain and simple. Halloween is meant to be scary, in my book. That leaves the door open, as one can be a zombie anything (except a zombie vampire, which my neighbor Dawn argues is entirely possible “what if you were bitten by a vampire AND had your brains eaten by a zombie?” she asked in all seriousness). First Rosie goes to the kennel, because she lost her mind last weekend when I put on my Frida Kahlo wig and I don’t really think she’ll be able to hack a costume, let alone a room full of costumes. Then I’ll decorate, and then will get the trick-or-treaters out of the way, and then I’ll get into my costume. I am so excited. Only two more big sleeps!
I PROMISE I’ll post pictures next week.
My friends are all in their thirties and forties. I understand that life is busy, dignity has to be maintained, and children complicate things. I understand all that but yet I still can’t figure out why nobody can match my enthusiasm when it comes to Halloween because it is seriously my favorite holiday of the year (sorry Christmas, you’re stressful).
This year I am most disappointed by the fact that even though Halloween falls on a Saturday, I’m still having a hard time drumming up enthusiasm for my Halloween party. Not to sound like a whiney 12-year-old, but really? For once you get to dress in disguise and drink all evening, not have to work the next day, and you’re choosing to stay home? Maybe I need to re-think my lifestyle choices but that sounds like a load of fun to me.
Also for the first time, we’re having a party that may not be for the kiddies. I am going out of my way to make things truly disturbing – blood in the bathtub, gory art on the walls, creepy lighting, boozy punch, décor that hints at recent not-exactly-professional surgical operations, etc. I can’t wait to decorate. So far in my social world I’ve made a real effort to incorporate my friends’ kids into our gatherings, but this time, not so much. I’ve bought a spray bottle of fake blood and will use it liberally. I’ve made frozen hearts out of fruit juice, to use as ice cubes in my bloody punch. I’ve gathered ‘creepy’ fruits (there are a lot of creepy fruits, as it turns out).
This year I get to develop two costumes: since I work in the Visual Arts section at work, we have collectively decided that everyone, all 17 of us, will dress as a famous work of art. They actually organize a Halloween parade at our work, so at 11:30, up to 50 trick-or-treaters will weave up and down the hallways collecting candies, and judges will dole out prizes to the best costumes and best-decorated section. We’re going for gold this year; five of my colleagues are going as ‘dogs playing poker’, one’s going as Van Gogh, a few of them are going minimalist – a Mondrian, a Malevich, and a Magritte, two are teaming up to do ‘American Gothic’, the CanCon will be Emily Carr, we have a token Mona Lisa, and I will be Frida Kahlo, which has been a hoot to (re)create.
For the party Saturday night, I’m going to be a terrifying zombie, plain and simple. Halloween is meant to be scary, in my book. That leaves the door open, as one can be a zombie anything (except a zombie vampire, which my neighbor Dawn argues is entirely possible “what if you were bitten by a vampire AND had your brains eaten by a zombie?” she asked in all seriousness). First Rosie goes to the kennel, because she lost her mind last weekend when I put on my Frida Kahlo wig and I don’t really think she’ll be able to hack a costume, let alone a room full of costumes. Then I’ll decorate, and then will get the trick-or-treaters out of the way, and then I’ll get into my costume. I am so excited. Only two more big sleeps!
I PROMISE I’ll post pictures next week.
10/15/09
Pizza Night!
So evidently my mother now feels that she needs to make my lunch before I go to work and/or drive in to give it to me, to make sure that I get a healthy balanced meal every day and don’t waste my money. Sorry Mom, I didn’t mean to make you concerned. And today’s Moroccan vegetable soup and strip of baguette is delicious so please don’t start delivery just yet.
Tonight is pizza night. We are creatures of habit, my hubby and I, and so every Thursday night since approximately 1999 we have had pizza for dinner. We’re flexible on this of course – sometimes we go out for dinner, as we did last week (it was Thai). Sometimes pizza doesn’t make sense, either because there’s something else that absolutely has to be eaten before it turns green or we’re out of the ingredients. Yes that’s right, ingredients – our pizza is homemade. We have an amazing pizzeria in our small town (we have almost no delivery food in our region except pizza, and we have about four pizza options) but it’s for special occasions only because it’s a bit expensive. It’s so good that our German and Austrian visitors annually request Luigi’s at at least one point during their stay. But I digress.
I make my pizza dough in the breadmaker, once every three weeks (theoretically). I put it on the ‘dough’ setting and take it out when it’s a large fluffy warm blob, I divide it into three portions, I roll/shape them into pizza shapes (not exactly round) and then I half-bake them. They go into the freezer after that, to be pulled out one by one every Thursday night as soon as we get home from work. It’s all very well-orchestrated: Rosie goes to daycare Thursdays so we go and pick her up first, and then when we get home, she doesn’t really need a full walk because she’s been running around all day. Hubby gets a crust out of the freezer and I start chopping. Our Thursday pizza usually has the same toppings each week, with some room for variety: sauce, pepperoni, red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives, mozzarella and feta cheese. I am so confident in this combination that I am able to buy the vats of sun-dried tomatoes at Costco. Hubby grates the cheese and the pizza goes into the oven for a few minutes, to be ready at approximately 8 pm when our t.v. shows start. We eat it on the couch in front of the television and Rosie’s (hopefully) so zonked that she doesn’t harass us too badly, and falls asleep soon after. We proceed to watch two hours of fine comedic television programming. Ah Thursdays.
NBC is the pizza network at our house. We find NBC on the dial at about 7:54 and stay with it until 10 p.m., until we switch to the CBC for the national news. These days we get to enjoy the weird Saturday Night Live Weekend Update not-so-Saturday special, Parks and Recreation (which is really getting its legs these days), The Office (Jim and Pam’s wedding last week made me cry), and then Community, a new addition to our roster that we’re 75% enthusiastic about.
I’m not sure what’s going to happen tonight, however, because tonight is special: it’s the season’s premiere of our all-time favourite, 30 Rock. 30 Rock is the jewel of Thursday’s crown and takes precedence over everything else so I’m pretty sure that the weird SNL show has to go, and the schedule will shift back, making room for the three real shows (The Office, P+R, Community) before 30 Rock, which usually has to be on at 9:30 p.m. due I’m sure to its fairly-mature content. We’ll see. I am a super big ladynerd when it comes to Thursday night television so I just checked NBC’s website and indeed: Community, Parks + Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock. Only 6.5 hours to go.
Tonight is pizza night. We are creatures of habit, my hubby and I, and so every Thursday night since approximately 1999 we have had pizza for dinner. We’re flexible on this of course – sometimes we go out for dinner, as we did last week (it was Thai). Sometimes pizza doesn’t make sense, either because there’s something else that absolutely has to be eaten before it turns green or we’re out of the ingredients. Yes that’s right, ingredients – our pizza is homemade. We have an amazing pizzeria in our small town (we have almost no delivery food in our region except pizza, and we have about four pizza options) but it’s for special occasions only because it’s a bit expensive. It’s so good that our German and Austrian visitors annually request Luigi’s at at least one point during their stay. But I digress.
I make my pizza dough in the breadmaker, once every three weeks (theoretically). I put it on the ‘dough’ setting and take it out when it’s a large fluffy warm blob, I divide it into three portions, I roll/shape them into pizza shapes (not exactly round) and then I half-bake them. They go into the freezer after that, to be pulled out one by one every Thursday night as soon as we get home from work. It’s all very well-orchestrated: Rosie goes to daycare Thursdays so we go and pick her up first, and then when we get home, she doesn’t really need a full walk because she’s been running around all day. Hubby gets a crust out of the freezer and I start chopping. Our Thursday pizza usually has the same toppings each week, with some room for variety: sauce, pepperoni, red peppers, sun-dried tomatoes, kalamata olives, mozzarella and feta cheese. I am so confident in this combination that I am able to buy the vats of sun-dried tomatoes at Costco. Hubby grates the cheese and the pizza goes into the oven for a few minutes, to be ready at approximately 8 pm when our t.v. shows start. We eat it on the couch in front of the television and Rosie’s (hopefully) so zonked that she doesn’t harass us too badly, and falls asleep soon after. We proceed to watch two hours of fine comedic television programming. Ah Thursdays.
NBC is the pizza network at our house. We find NBC on the dial at about 7:54 and stay with it until 10 p.m., until we switch to the CBC for the national news. These days we get to enjoy the weird Saturday Night Live Weekend Update not-so-Saturday special, Parks and Recreation (which is really getting its legs these days), The Office (Jim and Pam’s wedding last week made me cry), and then Community, a new addition to our roster that we’re 75% enthusiastic about.
I’m not sure what’s going to happen tonight, however, because tonight is special: it’s the season’s premiere of our all-time favourite, 30 Rock. 30 Rock is the jewel of Thursday’s crown and takes precedence over everything else so I’m pretty sure that the weird SNL show has to go, and the schedule will shift back, making room for the three real shows (The Office, P+R, Community) before 30 Rock, which usually has to be on at 9:30 p.m. due I’m sure to its fairly-mature content. We’ll see. I am a super big ladynerd when it comes to Thursday night television so I just checked NBC’s website and indeed: Community, Parks + Recreation, The Office, and 30 Rock. Only 6.5 hours to go.
10/14/09
I buy food.
My husband and I have a somewhat unorthodox way of managing household expenses. More traditional folks have looked at our system and wondered why we go through all the trouble and not just do it their way, but for us, it works. What we do is, we save all receipts for things that are shared expenses; this category includes things like groceries (I buy most of them), gas (hubby buys most of it), bills (I pay them) and other incidental things like furniture or goo-gaws from garage sales or the occasional “hey I have no money in my wallet can I borrow 20 bucks?” Half of all of these amounts are written down into two columns – what I pay and what hubby pays – and every two weeks we ‘tally’ these two columns up, or balance them against each other. Since I have paid more things (mortgage, bills, etc) whatever he has paid for is put against this to come up with the amount that he owes me. Then he pays up through our shared account, which is really just a ‘bounce’ account.
This is good for a few reasons: we can itemize all the things we spend money on and figure out what our household expenses generally are, we can track trends and major projects, and it’s an easy way for me to pay the bills but for each of us to still have our own accounts, so we don’t bicker over the small stuff (like shoes I might buy at Winners, or the fishing stuff he buys constantly). Nobody feels slighted, and we have never once fought about money. So far, so good.
Adding it all up and looking at it over a number of months, I figure that our household expenses – everything from groceries and gas to mortgage to phone bill and hydro and insurance – usually averages between $1800 and $2400 a month. This doesn’t include personal expenses, like entertainment or clothes or the hairdresser or those shoes I was talking about earlier. Since we make considerably more than that in a month, I often get to wondering where I’m spending all that extra money. Sure I have investments, and other accounts with little pockets of money here and there, but something is eating up a large part of my budget and I needed to get to the bottom of it.
And then I held that thought and went downstairs to get something to eat and realized: I buy food.
I’m not an enormous person - I’m a healthy size, pretty tall for a girl, medium active – but man can I pack it away. Here’s today’s menu: coffee from home, a breakfast sandwich (no bacon – this means English muffin, egg, cheese) from the shop downstairs, a Caesar salad from the salad place downstairs, and no doubt I will head down around 3 or 3:30 for a coffee and a cookie because salad never fills me up and I have yet to really internalize that lesson. That list doesn’t even include dinner or wine or after-school snacks – in fact, our dinners are so economical, my lunch costs about twice what my dinner costs, on average. The breakfast sandwich is $2.60, the salad was $7.55, and the coffee and cookie will be about $3.00. Add that up! That’s $13 bucks per workday down my gullet! I am an idiot!
I have really good intentions. I bought a beautiful metal one-cup Bodum at a garage sale in Toronto in August, and have since failed to buy a supply of coffee, cream and sugar to go with it. It sits on my bookshelf looking terrific and virtuous but it’s pristine for a reason. We have a huge cupboard at home filled with plastic food storage containers of all kinds but I don’t have to worry about Bisphenol-A because I never fill them with anything. Even when I do prepare a nice little lunch the night before, I unfailingly forget it in the fridge.
I think the truth of it is that I like to buy food. Nothing makes me feel more at peace with the world than going to the market to buy vegetables, or hitting the Italian specialty shop for some nice cheese and ‘authentic’ pasta. This carries over into my work life, because let’s face it, food from home is boring. That and I don’t love sandwiches. I see colleagues walk by my office with plates of re-heated lasagna or salads brought from home and it doesn’t appeal to me at all. I have home food and then I have the entire world of work food and I like it that way. Every day at 11:45 I think ‘what will it be today? Indian? Thai? Salad? Sushi?’ and my life feels all the richer for it, even if my bank account is not. Sometimes it makes me feel stupid or dirty (last week I bought a pizza for $8.95 that turned out to be a SMALL pita bread with toppings. That’s a snack at my house), but mostly it keeps the line between work and home firmly drawn.
I have officially accounted for another $275 out of my monthly budget. Now I have to figure out where the rest of it goes.
This is good for a few reasons: we can itemize all the things we spend money on and figure out what our household expenses generally are, we can track trends and major projects, and it’s an easy way for me to pay the bills but for each of us to still have our own accounts, so we don’t bicker over the small stuff (like shoes I might buy at Winners, or the fishing stuff he buys constantly). Nobody feels slighted, and we have never once fought about money. So far, so good.
Adding it all up and looking at it over a number of months, I figure that our household expenses – everything from groceries and gas to mortgage to phone bill and hydro and insurance – usually averages between $1800 and $2400 a month. This doesn’t include personal expenses, like entertainment or clothes or the hairdresser or those shoes I was talking about earlier. Since we make considerably more than that in a month, I often get to wondering where I’m spending all that extra money. Sure I have investments, and other accounts with little pockets of money here and there, but something is eating up a large part of my budget and I needed to get to the bottom of it.
And then I held that thought and went downstairs to get something to eat and realized: I buy food.
I’m not an enormous person - I’m a healthy size, pretty tall for a girl, medium active – but man can I pack it away. Here’s today’s menu: coffee from home, a breakfast sandwich (no bacon – this means English muffin, egg, cheese) from the shop downstairs, a Caesar salad from the salad place downstairs, and no doubt I will head down around 3 or 3:30 for a coffee and a cookie because salad never fills me up and I have yet to really internalize that lesson. That list doesn’t even include dinner or wine or after-school snacks – in fact, our dinners are so economical, my lunch costs about twice what my dinner costs, on average. The breakfast sandwich is $2.60, the salad was $7.55, and the coffee and cookie will be about $3.00. Add that up! That’s $13 bucks per workday down my gullet! I am an idiot!
I have really good intentions. I bought a beautiful metal one-cup Bodum at a garage sale in Toronto in August, and have since failed to buy a supply of coffee, cream and sugar to go with it. It sits on my bookshelf looking terrific and virtuous but it’s pristine for a reason. We have a huge cupboard at home filled with plastic food storage containers of all kinds but I don’t have to worry about Bisphenol-A because I never fill them with anything. Even when I do prepare a nice little lunch the night before, I unfailingly forget it in the fridge.
I think the truth of it is that I like to buy food. Nothing makes me feel more at peace with the world than going to the market to buy vegetables, or hitting the Italian specialty shop for some nice cheese and ‘authentic’ pasta. This carries over into my work life, because let’s face it, food from home is boring. That and I don’t love sandwiches. I see colleagues walk by my office with plates of re-heated lasagna or salads brought from home and it doesn’t appeal to me at all. I have home food and then I have the entire world of work food and I like it that way. Every day at 11:45 I think ‘what will it be today? Indian? Thai? Salad? Sushi?’ and my life feels all the richer for it, even if my bank account is not. Sometimes it makes me feel stupid or dirty (last week I bought a pizza for $8.95 that turned out to be a SMALL pita bread with toppings. That’s a snack at my house), but mostly it keeps the line between work and home firmly drawn.
I have officially accounted for another $275 out of my monthly budget. Now I have to figure out where the rest of it goes.
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