Halloween 2015

I apologize for the day late post. Life is incredibly busy at the moment and the days keep getting away from me. I cannot believe it is Friday again. We launched a new initiative at work this week which has made for some long workdays... topped off with evenings at the sewing machine trying to get through all the teddy bear orders. Definitely bit off more than I can chew with that side project this year. Thankful for all of my mom's help with keeping all the orders sorted out and making sure I don't miss anything.

Obviously last Saturday was Halloween. During the day, we had our typical Saturday afternoon. Work out, lay by the pool, maybe a nap, watch some college football... pretty standard. Honestly, I have no idea how/when Halloween got popular here. I'm starting to think maybe it was just because it was a Saturday. Last year, we didn't hear about anything for Halloween and just figured it's not a holiday celebrated much outside North America. This year there were three bars and two restaurants doing Halloween contests, a masquerade ball at a hotel, a rooftop dinner at a friend's place, and numerous house parties. What? So we definitely had our pick of the litter.

Problem is that anyone who knows me knows how seriously I take my Halloween costumes. I usually start thinking about them around August, especially if "much assembly is required". Unfortunately, we learned about most of these parties about a week in advance and given the lack of Target and Jo-Ann's in Ghana, I found myself hard pressed to find items for a costume. Dan has a standard fall-back costume of Clark Kent. He's a huge Superman fan and it really doesn't take a lot of work aside from having a Superman shirt, some glasses and dress clothes. All of which he has. Bonus: having a cowlick in the center of your forehead that can be moussed to curl. Numerous people have commented that he sort of looks like Christopher Reeve when he wears the costume.

Ok so Dan is done. What the heck do I do? With the new Star Wars movie coming out, we've been re-watching a lot of movies... ok, I confess, we watch them often regardless of a new film coming out. I started going through characters but realizing that I didn't have the wardrobe or the shopping outlets to pull it off. Then I landed on R2D2. Well I have an extra white pillowcase... and a metal mixing bowl. I could probably make that work. So one football Sunday was spent painting a pillow case and taping fabric pieces to a metal mixing bowl.

Here's a picture of our final products:

It's a far cry from some of our past work:

So Saturday evening we had Miriam and Joe over for dinner and then went to two different house parties. We really didn't know anyone at either place but it was fun to meet some new expats and see the costumes people came up with. Lots of witches and Joker's. There was a Dalai Lama, Count of Monte Cristo, and a few others that were pretty impressive. Most people liked our costumes which is always a fun bonus. Too bad we didn't bring some of our past Halloween costumes or we could have gone from bar to bar winning costume contests. Oh well, live and learn. All in all, it was a fun Halloween and I enjoyed getting to let the creative juices out for my own personal crafty talent show.