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trick or treat // 2005-10-31

there's nothing like the prospect of your neighbors coming to your door with their little ones on halloween to get you motivated to actually make your house look lived in. at least, make the front entry look lived in. so c and finally took the mattresses out of the hallway and i cleaned up the clutter and put up pictures and candles and swept all the dust and dirt away. we have a lovely built in bookcase in the entry, which has been empty this whole time because we've been meaning to repaint it and redo the knobs and stuff. so i opened up a box of books and filled the part that might be visible from the front door with books, and then when i stepped back to look at the effect, it made me feel all warm and good inside, like, oh wow, this is what a home should look like. maybe we should do this with the rest of the house?

and since our living room is still filled with boxes and furniture, c and i came up with a plan where he would block one side of the door and i would stand in the other so that no one could actually see into the living room from the porch. the whole effect was very professional. we carved our pumpkins this afternoon and put them up on our porch, and filled the candy bowl and waited hoping that trick-or-treaters would come...

... and they did! so many more than i had imagined! we live in what might be the prime trick-or-treating neighborhood in seattle. fun! so far we've seen a couple of harry potters, a spider man, two dinosaurs, a zombie baseball player, a kid in a very elaborate top pot donuts coffee cup costume (who was cute but didn't look happy being a walking advertisement for halloween), a santa, a baseball card, a pumpkin, and... well, a lot more. and they're still coming (though we're now down to only 4 pieces of candy... uh oh).

c carved this one. i'm way into the teeth.

and this one was mine. surprise!

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gah! we just ran out of candy and had to turn a couple of trick-or-treaters away. i really hope we don't get tricked. c ran out to the store to get some more candy, after i convinced him that it's kind of uncool to take the bowl of candy the neighbors left out on their porch and pass it off as our own. we also opened the door a couple of minutes ago to find a cat on our porch looking up at us with what i interpreted as longing. alas, we had no cat treats for it, but that would have been awesome if we did.

before // after