October 31
[Taken 31 Oct 2006 | Pumpkins on the porch | Centerville, OH]
[Taken 31 Oct 2006 | Still life with seasonal pumpkin beer and cozy fleece blanket | Centerville, OH]
Happy Halloween!
Around here everyone seems to refer to this night of candy and costumes as "Begger's Night", which I find slightly confusing... isn't "Halloween" good enough? "Begger's Night" might be a bit more descriptive, but still...
The holiday certainly seemed to have devolved a lot since I was little... either it has gotten a lot wussier, or I am just remembering things as having been better then they actually were.
When I was younger I seem to remember trick-or-treating as starting at oh-dark-hundred, or as soon after sunset as my brothers and I could hustle ourselves into our costumes and facepaint. And the candy gathering lasted until people ran out of candy and turned out their porchlights, which could be as late as after 10pm. We covered huge swaths of our neighborhood, sometimes returning several times to houses that gave out especially good stuff. Huge gangs of kids roamed the night, and the only parents to be seen (other then those on door duty handing out the bountiful sweets) were those escorting the really little kids who weren't even in kindergarten yet.
Now? Well, around here "Begger's Night" officially lasts from 6-8pm. There were few kids ...though this can probably be attributed to the fact that as far as I can tell everyone on my street is retired, except for John and myself, and there are no sidewalks or streetlamps. Still... no roving gangs of kids, just small groups and every single group was escourted by multiple watchful parental figures.
Eh. I can't help but feel like it used to be better...
It is also cold and rainy tonight, but in MY day, we didn't let a little thing like the weather stop us. We were hardened troops, in pursuit of our primary objective: loads and loads of candy.
And just for the record, I never soaped any windows, egged any front porches, smashed any pumpkins, or TP'ed any houses.
October 26
[Taken 13 Oct 2006 | Katy and her troup | Centerville, OH]
Right now I am getting ready to go to my uncle's wedding tomorrow, and am working my way through my "to-do" checklist. It is interesting to note that five out of the nine items on the list specifically pertain to photography equipment, from "charge camera batteries" to "load darkslides".
Yes, that's right... I am bringing the Calumet with me. The plan is to use the 4x5 to take posed portraits... both of the happy couple as well as family groupings. Here is to hoping that they come out all right! However, I am still planning for redundancy in the form of the Canon 300D and 2+ G worth of flash card worth of memory.
This will be fun.
October 24
[Taken 13 Oct 2006 | Erica spinning fire | Centerville, OH]
She was using specially treated fuel (most likely containing copper) to turn the flame green.
I will be doing this myself in about two weeks. I have been taking poi (fire spinning) classes for a bit over a month now, and I have to say that it is loads of fun. With a goal of setting things on fire, what's not to like?
No, I don't practice with fire... while I have a set of fire poi (made of kevlar), I also have a nice, soft, fluffy set to practice with. The fluffy-ness is so that it hurts less when I make a mistake and wack myself in the face. The practice is so that I don't end up wacking myself in the face when I am doing it for real, with actual fire. Though, should something untoward happen when I doing my first "real" fire spin, there will be plenty of people standing around with fire retardant blankets and fire extinguishers to make sure that I don't accidently hurt myself.
October 18
[Taken 13 Oct 2006 | The Witches | Centerville, OH]
I don't even know why I haven't written anything lately… it isn't as though nothing has been happening.
Chalk it up to a combination of laziness and busyness.
Most recently, as in last Friday (Friday the 13th), there was a Halloween bash at the dance studio. This is what was taking up most of my non-work time the past couple of weeks. The informal theme of the party was "pirates", and a group of students in my class (myself included) put on a pirate-based performance. We got hold of an electronica remix of the theme song of Pirates of the Caribbean and based our choreography around that. Because the pirates in the movie were famous for turning into skeletons and decaying corpses under the light of the moon, and since Kira got aoms fancy new lights for the Oasis a couple of months ago that include blacklights, we took liberal advantage ofthe fact that ordinary yellow highlighter fluoresces brightly under black light, and yet tends to be nearly invisible on skin under more normal lighting. We drew skeletons in highlighter all over our bodies (using up several dozen highlighters over the course of rehersals and the actual performance). We did the first half of the performance in full lights, dressed as (more or less) pirates with Kira as Captain Jack Sparrow, and for the second half we stripped down to shorts and tank tops and turned all of the lights, except for the black lights, off.
(I had so much highlighter on that when I showered the next morning, the shower ran briefly day-glo yellow...)
I think that it was cool. It looked cool when we were doing dress rehersals, and by the audience response, they thought it was cool too.
Unfortunately, I have no actual photos of the performance, since I couldn't find anyone who was able to use my camera and who I could ask to take pictures. I can only hope that the video that Kira had her husband make of the performance turned out well.
[Taken 11 Oct 2006 | Jiffy the pirate skeleton | Centerville, OH]
October 8
[Taken 30 Sept 2006 | Art Glass | Hamilton, OH]
[Taken 30 Sept 2006 | Aster | Dayton, OH]
Work has really been grinding me down lately... been having a lot of long and late days lately. Man, am I glad that it is Friday afternoon.