The weekend was fairly relaxing. We spent more than a few hours watching the Halloween specials on the Travel channel, and learned that New Orleans is quite possibly the most haunted place on Earth. Just what we needed to hear two weeks before our trip there! We're still planning on checking out a boneyard or two, except we'll probably stick to the daylight hours ;)

Saturday was rather miserable and overcast, which had us both feeling quite glum. We drove 45 minutes to another place for cider and doughnuts, only to find the place was all closed up! That was disappointing, so we drove back home, stopping off at the supermarket on the way to pick up some cider and doughnuts from there instead ;)

While trying to work out the location of a nearby fast-food place for dinner, I remembered reading about Google SMS the other day. Even though it wasn't much help, it was still nifty to query Google via my phone and get results back less than a minute later. I can see this service coming in very handy :)

Later on we spontaneously decided to do some Halloween decorating, so we got the fog machine and black-light setup in the entryway, hung some spiderwebs and bats by the door, and prepared a treat table in the corner. On Sunday we finished the job with a light-up pumpkin on the deck and some luminaries by the garage door.

The trick-or-treating ran from 3pm until 7pm, and we had a decent turnout (about 55 kids), although not as much as we'd expected considering we live down the road from an Elementary school.

At some point we decided to string a sound-activated ghost between posts on the deck, which was rather amusing. The whole time we had spooky sounds and music playing in the bedroom nearest the deck to add to the atmosphere. I'm sure it was all rather tacky, but it was our first Halloween at our own house and we've been looking forward to doing this for years! In our old apartment Halloween was rather non-eventful, consisting of gorging on junk food while watching horror movies :) Not that we restrained ourselves much this year--we ordered pizza and garlic bread when the street started looking dead around 6:30.

Since we didn't get as many trick-or-treaters as expected, we now have a nice selection of chocolates and Halloween-themed popcorn to take care of. Soon it'll be time to get back to the weight-lifting and invest in a treadmill, methinks ;)

And so ends Halloween for another year... (somebody remind me not to be so enthusiastic with the fog machine next year!)

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There was no writing to speak of this weekend, other than a critique for the crit group. The itch is definitely there, though. I'm hoping I can cobble something together in the next week or so, since things will be much busier for the following two weeks. Time to look at my little black ideas book!