Oh hell no.
Remember how, last week, the guys working on my garage told me they "might not" be able to complete the project? Amazing news! They totally showed up, got to work, and made it happen, and now my three-months-in-progress garage renovation is done!
Hellooooooo my love (via).
Yesterday morning, I had this post all written in my mind. I was going to talk about how, after I finish our garage renovation, I'm going to start thinking about redoing our bathrooms (hoorayyyyy home equity line of credit!). I was going to rhapsodize about cement tile (and specifically Villa Lagoon's tile, which we used for our entryway redo and which is gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous).
...And then guess what happened yesterday afternoon?
This photograph was taken in 1988, in case the crimped hair didn't tip you off.
Every year when I was a little girl, my mom would start making my Halloween costume in September. I might want to be a can-can dancer, or a character from Little House on the Prairie, or Cher (oh yes)...whatever it was, my mother would somehow pull out confusingly professional sewing skills that she apparently reserved solely for Halloween, and whip up a masterpiece of glitter and ruffles and perfection.
I am simultaneously sad about and relieved by the fact that kids these days ("kids these days"!! I'm so old) don't want homemade Halloween costumes. There was something grand - even heroic - about the fact that despite having no particular interest in crafting and exactly zero time to spare, what with her whole "being a lawyer" thing, my mother just rustled up her reserves and knocked it out of the park, year after year. And even when she didn't - my Cher costume consisted of a stretchy tube of sparkly fabric and the most unfortunate wig you have ever seen...it was still the only costume of its kind out there. It was mine. Made by my mom. I loved that.
OK, last post about this party - promise. (Maybe. It was SO FUN.) In these shots, you can see what we did with the decor, which went way further than last year's. My son had requested that the "whole house" be spooky, as opposed to concentrating our efforts in one space, and...ok, so that sounded a little intimidating, because I've never been one of those people who has a massive bin of, like, skeleton cats and spiderweb bowls in their garage. But one trip to Party City and one trip to the Dollar Store later?
Super spooky. (Or at least "semi-age-appropriately super spooky" - we wanted to mildly freak out the six-year-olds in attendance...as opposed to, you know, traumatizing them. I still remember the misty coffin that my neighbor set up in a faraway courtyard of our apartment building, and it still haunts my dreams, THIRTY YEARS LATER. That was not the goal.)
The blood-smudge on the edge of the plate is my favorite part.
My son said he wanted a "spooky cake" for his sixth birthday. Done - except I didn't want to just do a repeat of last year's ghost cake. I pulled up a picture of a plain fondant cake in my head - just a smooth, white circle - and tried to imagine what I could turn it into...and then it occurred to me:
Eyeball Cake.
