Halloween

Okay, so I’m a day late. And… if you count the days since my last post I’m a bit later. Ah well, I’ve no defense so we’ll just move on shall we? So. Halloween. Definitely one of my very favorite times of year. I love dressing up. I love carving pumpkins. I love watching all the little kids come to the door in their costumes. Sadly there was none of that this year. Ewan and I didn’t manage to make it to any parties, we weren’t organized enough to carve pumpkins (since Ewan has been working with the cow herd every evening this week), and we only got six trick-or-treaters this year. SIX. I mean, really. Come on. I thought we were scraping the bottom in Montana, but there is just no excuse for this in Madison. That said, we did still have a Halloween of sorts in the Wolff house. Ewan brought me a goodie bag of my favorite treats and cooked me a fabulous pesto dinner, which went very well with our movie choice of “Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” That will be my favorite Halloween movie for all time. Thank you, Nick Park.

For my part, I pulled an all-nighter the night before last in order to get a Klausie costume ready for Ewan. They had a contest at the vet school, and a bunch of people went as characters from The Life Aquatic. As some of you may remember, this is not an entirely new idea for Ewan, since he dressed as Steve Zissou two Halloweens ago. Still, we had to start from scratch… his last costume was just his tuxedo and a red cap. To pull of Klaus we needed a new cap, blue shorts, a blue turtleneck, a glock in a holster and of course the signature Team Zissou Adidas shoes. Ewan has been coveting those shoes for years, so I finally broke down and made him some. We found directions online, which I altered a bit, and I hand painted some Sambas to fit the bill. It took 3 coats of paint and 3 coats of varnish. Yeesh. I also had to make a pom pom to attach to the cap, and design an iron-on Team Zissou patch for the shirt. You have no idea how hard it is to find any turtleneck, let alone a men’s light blue turtleneck, these days. Then there were the shorts. It’s October. Men’s blue shorts were no more to be found than the turtleneck. I ended up buying an xl women’s turtleneck in white from Walmart (yeah, I know, I’m sorry but we were desperate) and a pair of very light khaki shorts from Goodwill. I then had to bleach and dye these to the appropriate shade of blue and iron on the logo. The Glock was tricky too. One party store actually still had a realistic handgun ripped out of its packaging and hidden on the back of a shelf, and amazingly enough it looked almost identical to a Glock… but the only holster I could find was a shoulder holster for a tiny sissy gun. Scissors and some hand stitching took care of that. Finally, there’s the shoelaces. If men’s blue shorts and a blue turtleneck were impossible to find, it was nothing to my attempts at locating yellow shoelaces. When I asked the clerk at the party store, she laughed and said, “That color is SO out.” Indeed. Apparently everyone else thinks so too, because I think I can definitively say that no store in Madison carries them. Ewan tried to dye the ones that came with the shoes, but since the laces were acrylic it did next to nothing. Enter the yellow sharpie. In the end it all paid off. This costume was definitely my best yet. Plus, Ewan got a new pair of shoes out of it. Just don’t tell him that the yellow shoelaces are out.