Considering that this was a very last-minute Halloween, we had a great time last night.

We carved our pumpkins on Sunday evening, and they came out wonderful. Even the Bugs one that was supposed to be a dog turned out OK.

None of us had costumes, so I ended up throwing together a vampire cape that I had tucked away, a black wig that I had tucked away, and smeared eyeliner all around my eyes. Not a bad result!

After we put our pumpkins out, I was going to trim the bushes in front of the porch with our groovy rechargeable trimmer/chainsaw, and then once I had it in my hand...aha! What a great prop!

I also had a old CD burned of several hours of scary Halloween sound effects, so I set that up playing on semi-hidden PC speakers out front. VERY effective. And then I had candles burning in the front yard all over. Very low-tech, but more spooky that way.

So trick-or-treaters would come to our door and there would be the scary sounds emanating all over the front yard...groaning, chains dragging, screams, howling dogs. No fancy stuff, just our pumpkins lit up and candles burning in the yard. They ring the bell and...

SCARY CACKLING UNDEAD MOM ANSWERS THE DOOR WITH A CHAINSAW! Yes, and it was running too! Well, quietly...after all, it is a rechargeable one. A real chainsaw just wouldn't be practical or safe. Undead moms are still moms, you know. Safety is job #1.

So that was great, because I scared the living SHIT out of quite a few people, even grown ups. Lots of people walked away from our door saying to each other, "Wow, that was scary! That was cool!"

Several people screamed out loud when Undead Mom burst out with her chainsaw, and that made my day.

Plus we had good candy, and I got little toys too...bouncy balls and dinosaurs and mini-Play-Doh cans.

The funniest part was my little helper, Scary Baby. Julian would wait until I had already scared the Living Shit out of the T-or-Ters, then when I put down my chainsaw and came back to offer the candy, he would rush to the doorway and yell "YAAAAHHHHHH!" at the top of his baby voice. Sooooo freakin' funny.

Between the scared screaming kids at the door with their O-mouths, and Julian's Scary Baby routine, the whole evening was one big laugh fest. Oh, and we watched the South Park and Simpsons' Halloween episodes, which were also funny.

So now I have to bitch a little. WHERE were the good costumes? I saw NONE. Seriously, not a single costume was memorable. Most of the kids had on some plastic $2.99 crap under a coat. There was a Star Wars guy with a light saber who was decent, and a kid in a full-head monster mask at the end, but otherwise...yawn.

And the girls sucked worse than anyone, because every SINGLE last one of them was some kind of Princess/Harem Girl, and they all were just trying to be sexy/pretty instead of scary or creepy. There wasn't even a single Vampira type, except for me. No one even looked Goth, for crying out loud!

So bah humbug on that. Girls, you have the next forty years at least to look sexy, but only once a year do you get to be as scary as you want to be. Are girls afraid to be scary now?

As for the Princess thing, get over it. Ain't ever gonna happen, so might as well let you down easy right now. No Prince Charming is going to come and sweep you off your feet to live happily ever after. Get a good education, learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, treat others with respect and compassion, and forget that fairy-tale crap.

Brings to mind one memorable Halloween long ago...my best friend Angela, then-boyfriend Andrew and I went to get last-minute costumes at a rental place. All they had left were a Frog, a Pumpkin and Big Bird.

We dressed up, Angela as Frog, Andrew as Big Bird, and Me as Pumpkin. Then we went to a party. (Did I mention that we were in our mid-20's at the time?)

Well, at the party every single chick was dressed Sexy. There were harem girls, Mata Hari spies, princesses, vamps, vampire... sexy, sexy, sexy.

And there we sat in our round, fuzzy, primary-colored costumes, ostracized by everyone. I mean, NOTHING is less sexy than a pumpkin. I could barely sit down, due to my orange roundness.

Oh, and someone slipped us some *speed* too, which is the Devil's Own Stuff, so we sat there relentlessly grinding our teeth, tremendously anxious, paranoid and freaked out. Angela and I clung to our fuzzy comforting Big Bird consort (Andrew felt OK, whereas AJ and I felt like we had just taken 12 consecutive doses of No-DOZ). Not good. Not good at all.

I don't even remember what happened in the end. I think we went home early as soon as our collective uber-anxiety allowed us to leave the safety of Big Bird's feathery embrace. Speed kills, people. Ugh, I can't believe people ever do that stuff on *purpose*. Horrible.

I guess that doesn't exactly reinforce my previous message of dressing scary instead of sexy, but whatever. My real point is that we all had a good Halloween last night, in spite of being ultra-low-tech and basically unprepared until 30 minutes or so before it got dark.

Julian didn't even have a costume, and he still had fun. You GO Scary Baby! (By the way, yes he DID have pants on during the evening. We had just taken him potty before snapping this photo, and didn't really have our acts together to put his pants back on before our photo op. Ooops.)