The weekend was packed with activity. It was also packed with more gorgeous weather. I must say that I am a fan of the recent trend here, which involves cold fronts passing through on Thursday or Friday and leaving us with cool temperatures and cloudless skies for the weekend.
First there was Friday night, which we spent grilling kebabs and carving pumpkins over at Gavin and Jen’s. The jack-o-lanterns all turned out really well. I’m partial to my scary face (second from left) because I’m a traditionalist and like scary faces. But I’ve got to admit that Jen’s witch silhouette looks really, really cool…and Jose’s grim reaper got compliments from some of the trick-or-treaters that came to our house. Even Becca’s bats look pretty awesome, especially considering she seemed to have exactly zero clue about how to carve a pumpkin. That was amusing, to say the least.
Halloween was pretty relaxing overall. We got our first trick-or-treaters just after 6:00. The sun went down at 7:00 and for the next hour we handed out candy to a steady stream of witches, princesses, football players, ninjas, and other assorted characters. Jose bought about 6 bazillion pounds of candy, so we just dumped it all in a bowl and let the kids choose what they wanted. It was hilarious to see their reactions. Some of them would just take a couple pieces. Some of them would look at my suspiciously and ask “how many pieces can I have?” as if it was some kind of trick. And of course there were a few kids who dove into the bowl with two hands to grab as much as they could possibly hold.
It was fun to guess all the costumes and see all the cute little kids. I even got compliments from a 4-year-old on my red sparkly devil horns. By 8:30, things had pretty much wrapped up since all the kids in our neighborhood are middle school or younger, and we spent the rest of the night hanging out at John and Kelly’s house.
We spent a good portion of yesterday at Wings Over Houston. The flying was great and the weather was fantastic, but overall it was only a so-so year at the airshow. The traffic was a NIGHTMARE. We left the house more than an hour later than we’d planned, and it took us an hour to get parked — and that was despite our slighty underhanded flouting of the directional signs that saved us a bunch of time. Then I was turned back at the gate because I had my camera backpack — bags are allowed, but no backpacks. This was frustrating because 1) I had specifically looked on the website prior to going, and did not see anything saying no backpacks and 2) once we got in, I saw dozens of other people walking around WITH BACKPACKS, including one person with the exact same photo backpack I tried to carry in. So the guy at our gate was apparently just on a power trip. I ended up slinging my camera around my neck and carrying it around like that.
By the time we actually got through the gate, both Jose and I were frustrated and grumpy so we just plopped our chairs down straight ahead of the gate by the runway. We had originally planned to find Jason, Debbie, Byron, and Becca but we didn’t feel like searching the crowd, so sorry guys! But we did almost trip over John and Kelly while we were walking to get some food, and they ended up moving their chairs over to where we had set up camp.
Traffic on the way out was just as bad as it had been on the way in and it took another hour to get home. On top of that, I don’t think I got many great photos, but of course that’s not the airshow’s fault. I’ll post a full set of photos once I have time to go through them sometime this week.
October is really a packed month in Houston with so many fun events going on. The Bayou City Art Festival, Ballunar Festival, and Wings Over Houston were all in the same four-week span! The next few weeks should be more low-key leading up to…the STS-129 launch on November 16!
