Halloween

Halloween, originally uploaded by gramarye.

There were no little trick or treaters around our street last night, although husband said he saw a few in the next street as he was on his way home, so now I've got a good supply of lollies to work my way through.

I was a bit disappointed, I'd been looking forward to handing out the loot, but there's always next year.

Halloween is not generally celebrated in Australia, so it was surprising to see the sudden increase of interest this year.

We had Halloween sales advertised on TV and a Halloween lotto draw and Halloween school fetes - I guess the retailers are feeling the pinch and any new field has to be worth pushing (is that mixing metaphors? can you push fields?)

Halloween party

What a day it's been!
My Ladies Who Lunch became the Ghouls Who Gourmandise for the day.
They are such a great lot of friends and all entered into the spirit with their costumes although when we got to the party games, I found their knowledge of horror movies pretty abysmal!
Here's the coven:


The guests were greeted at the front door with a bevy of bats




Of course the day would be nothing without lunch, so on to the kitchen where my kitchen witch had been joined by a group of ghosts and more bats:




a witches kitchen has lots of interesting ingredients:




..although I noticed not many were taking sugar with their coffee:


despite the Hellish Herbs and Sordid Seasonings in the bottles, we managed a pretty good nosh








After a day of good talk, good eating and lots of laughing, the guests have departed and the lights dim and turn to purple,
good night all

More halloween

I was up at 3am this morning, seeing husband, son and family off to Phillip Island for the superbike championships

They had a 13 hour drive ahead of them .... I think there will be lots of "are we there yet?"
The other half of the family is holidaying in the opposite direction at Stradbroke Island so for 4 days it's just me and the dog, ahh.....now THAT'S a holiday!

So at 4am I was wandering around the house photographing my halloween decorations, all of which were voted "COOOOOOL" by grand-daughter last night.

This one is using a lightbox that husband made me for applique work, rarely used but at the time was one of those things I "had" to have, at last I've found a use for it.


This came from the Christmas shop, they had a great display, but unfortunately not much of their display was in stock, just not enough demand here in Australia for them to carry the (very expensive) items.


More photos later, I think I need a nap now to catch up on the 3am start.

Halloween

Halloween, originally uploaded by gramarye.

Our Ladies Who Lunch group always celebrate Christmas in July (and again in December) this year the October meeting is at my house, so I decided to have a Halloween party.

We don't generally "do" halloween in Australia, although it's slowly infiltrating.

It was a mission to find any decorations in the shop, but I finally stumbled onto a couple of party shops stocking bits and pieces.

It came down to surfing the internet and making a lot of my own decorations, I have been having the best time with them.

I was telling daughter something about the dog,
"...I was in the backyard painting the spiders when the dog......."
daughter: ".....wait.....you were doing what to the spiders....no stop, I'm not even going there......"

I think I could very well get into this as a regular yearly event.

The Telstra salesman arrived at our door just after I put up the wreath, not sure what he thought, he's just lucky I hadn't hung the spiders.

hand problems

They say that it only takes 21 days to develop a habit.

I don't know what 'they' have to say about dropping a habit, especially the habit of regular blogging, you just find that life keeps getting in the way, you have nothing creative happening and you have nothing for the "show 'n tell" aspect of blogging.



One of the main reasons for the lack of creativity has been problems with my hands, both thumbs have been giving me increasing pain which I originally put down to some sort of RSI injury after a very intense crochet session at the end of last year.
I eased off, gave it rest, hot and cold treatments, various rubs and lotions.
I am having pain when I try to hold a pencil or a needle so anything requiring fine handwork has just been too hard.

Then we started helping daughter with some house renovations which involved lots of rubbing back woodwork and walls and painting, this seemed to freshen up the pain, I finally went to the doctor, had x rays done which shows I have degeneration and cysts in the base of both thumbs.

I was not happy with my doc who didn't even bother to look at the x rays and just said "oh that's part of the aging process" When I said "but it happened so quickly" the smart B... laughed and said "what?? 60 years??"

I asked if cortisone injections would help, non committal from him, but he did give me a referral, so now I have to decide for myself whether to go ahead and have the injections. I've also discovered via google that there are 'hand' doctors who specialise so I think I'll also pester doc for a referral to one of them.

Meantime, daughter (who was staying with us during the house renovations, with boxes and belongings ad infinitum in my living room) has bought the house and moved back and taken all her boxes with her....phew....
...and her house looks amazing... I never believed a brown wall would look so good

it's been a while

(unfortunately I haven't been anywhere exciting like a desert island)

Problems with Blogger comments

Over the last month or two I kept coming across Blogspot blogs where I've written a comment and had it totally disappear - at first I wondered if it was awaiting moderation or just a glitch on my part, then lately I've found I couldn't even reply on my own blog to comments, so apologies if you have left a comment here and I haven't replied.

I went googling and found I'm not alone in this, (I found a post from Rurality with just this same problem and lots of her readers with similar)

It appears to be the blogs that have a little comment box under the post - which is called embedded comments.
No matter how I try to sign in to this box, with my google ID or open ID, just nothing works.

It has to be a Blogger problem and I suspect it has only recently begun to happen.

Which is why I've now switched to the full page view for comments, this seems to be the one that works best.

It would be interesting to hear if you have a Blogger blog with the embedded comments form - have the number of comments on your blog mysteriously dropped off during the past month? You might want to switch to the full page comments.

Edit: November 2009
I found another "fix" which involves allowing third party cookies on your browser -
If you are using firefox, go to tools..options..privacy.. enable third party cookies.
I was already allowing these with the option of "keep til I close Firefox", I changed my option to "keep til they expire"
I have no idea why this allows the comment box to work but apparently it does.
This was on the blogger help forum

In answer to another comment on how to change from embedded box to full page comments:
go to your dashboard...settings....comments...comment form placement...full page... and save settings

It's a bit hard to tell everyone they should change their cookie settings so they can comment on your blog, so by swapping to the full page for visitors and changing my cookies, I think the two "fixes" will work together for me, I hope it helps someone else.

(by the way I use the Firefox browser, so have no advice on how to do this with other browsers)