"I like to kill somebody in my free time."

The past week has been dominated by a series of various vaguely Halloween related activities. They've been far more amusing than authentic, but whatever. It's pretty neat to see people so far from America getting excited about our most bizarre of holidays. Excluding, perhaps, Groundhog Day. We'll see how they deal with that one come February 2. Anyway, I kicked the whole thing off by judging another school's Halloween competition on Saturday morning. It was very long and drawn out, and by the time I'd been there for four hours, I really wished I'd grabbed some breakfast first, but it was nice just the same. There were some particularly interesting performances, the highlight of which was definitely a zombie séance set to some weird spooky new age music. The zombies gathered in a circle around a silver coffin and a pile of flowers, the latter of which soon birthed a nun carrying a giant cross. She used this to bless each of the zombies, ending by waving it at the coffin and saying something like "Jesus is loving you!" What happened next you ask? Why a flowery zombie Jesus erupted from the coffin, of course! And what did the other zombies do? Why they lifted him onto their shoulders from where he emitted perfectly timed spirit fingers in a most demonstrative way. And how did he bring this all to an appropriate close? BY LEADING THEM ALL IN A SLOW MOTION NEW AGE ZOMBIE MACARENA! As the MC said afterwards, it was truly terrible (the title of this post is another hilarious construction made during the performance). I felt like I was on some kind of hallucinogen. Bob took a video. Hopefully I'll get it up here at some point.

On Halloween proper, Geoff and I taught a special holiday lesson to our ACCESS class (the one from which last post's picture comes), and then we watched The Nightmare Before Christmas in the film club, which everyone loved (how could they not?). That was about it. Also, I ate lots of chocolate chip pumpkin cookies (see below), which I made with the canned pumpkin my mummuh sent me and with mummuh's famous recipe. They turned out amazingly well. It was almost like I was home. Almost.


The last event in the Halloween festival came on Tuesday when we celebrated it at my school. The party was pretty haphazardly thrown together, but it managed to be a success just the same. Almost entirely as a result of bobbing-for-apples, most likely. When people asked me what games Americans play on Halloween, that's the one that jumped immediately to mind. Funny thing is, I'd never played it before that night. But thanks to all sorts of blindfolding and hand-tying and other trickery, the kids loved it (see pic below of Aagii and I fighting for the only apple in a big ole bucket).

In other news, next week we have a one-week vacation to mark the end of the first quarter. I wish I could go west to see Kaede, but apparently there's some work to be done around here, and anyway I'm gonna see her the next weekend! The week after Thanksgiving we have Inter-Service Training (IST), which is when we get to choose a counterpart to bring into UB (no easy matter, which is the understatement of the year... ask me directly for more details on THAT fiasco) for a seminar on English teaching methodology and grant work, but Kaede and I both are going in a week early for other work-related reasons. That means we get two weeks together! Needless to say, I'm very excited.

I hope you all had a Happy Halloween back stateside, and that the election results haven't spooked you too badly. Bwahahahaha...