#halloween

Halloween is a major holiday in our household: the girls decorate with jack-o-lanterns and cobwebs and giant-ass spiders, and they put hours of planning into their costumes. This year Chloe went as a cat and Zoey went as a vampire, and they looked pretty damned cute (as the picture heading this post shows). This was our first year trick-or-treating in the new neighborhood, and it quickly became apparent that we're surrounded by rich folk. Sure, we knew it to be true; the only reason we were able to afford our house was because the previous owners were desperate to sell it (we could put it on the market now and make 30k in profit easy!), but it became even more apparent when half our neighbors let the girls scoop king-sized candy bars into their bags. It started to downpour towards the end of the night, and we were all soaked head-to-toe by the time we made it home. The girls weighed their candy, and each got around seven pounds! I don't think I've ever seen a haul like that. Ashley rounded out the evening making Halloween-themed 'Mummy Dogs', but it turns out Pinterest is full of shit--the 'mummy dogs' came out looking like gauze-wrapped penises. Zoey found it hilarious. We wrapped up the evening watching a classic Halloween movie that Ash and I loved as kids: Hocus Pocus! 

Ash and I spend Octobers watching scary movies; last year we watched most of the classics (such as Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween, etc.), but this year we stuck to more recent films. We watched the 2017 remake of IT (creepy rather than scary, and waaaay better than the old version), along with some Netflix and Amazon Prime selections. We binge-watched The Haunting of Hill House, perhaps the best 'scary show' to come out in a decade, and I was delighted to learn it's based off a book that is hailed as being far more darker than the TV show. I've added it (along with Stephen King's novel of the aforementioned IT) to my 2019 Reading Queue. Here are some of the movies/shows in our 2019 Halloween Bonanza: 

The Frankenstein Chronicles is a remastered look at Dr. Frankenstein and his machinations involving piecing orphan kids together into hideous caricatures of their old selves. Interestingly (to me, at least; when I explained this to Ash, I'm pretty sure her eyes yawned), the British show has a veiled connection with Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe Series. Cornwell's series takes place during the Napoleonic Wars and follows the career of a rifleman in Wellington's army. The BBC adaptation of the series casts Sean Bean as Richard Sharpe, and in The Frankenstein Chronicles, Bean plays a veteran soldier who now works as a detective in London. In the first episode Bean says that he served with the 95th Rifles, in the Second Battalion--just like Sharpe. Thus when I watched the show, it was like watching Richard Sharpe in his retirement.