BeMused

The family and I went to a Halloween party on Saturday night at my friend Krysta’s house. She usually pulls out all the stops for a party, and Saturday night was no exception. She decided on a Harry Potter theme, and decorated her house accordingly. She had gotten some coverings that looked like castle walls and covered all her walls with them. She had shots of various alcohol in small potions bottles, sugar quills, cauldron cakes, and butterbeer, just to name a few of the treats. She had various rooms in her house decorated as well: There was the grand hall, where she had several candles floating by the ceiling (small battery operated christmas-like candles hanging from fishline), an owlery, with several stuffed owls and feathers on the floor (Glad there were no owl pellets!), a Golden Snitch room, with Snitches all over the place and one tied to the fan going around and around, and finally, a Potions room down in the basement with potions homework on the wall.

We had a great time. The wife went as Ms. McGonagal, Sarah as Mrs. Norris, and Cody as a Dementor. Myself, I went as Hagrid and won a prize! The wife should actually get the prize, as she did a great deal of work on my costume. We spent probably a total of 10-15 hours on the wig alone. We couldn’t go the easy route and buy a wig and beard, noooo, we had to make it from scratch. But it turned out excellent.

It’s been a busy few weeks, and it’s only going to get busier. I have several papers coming due in my English class, birthday parties for both kids, and then we’re smack-dab in the middle of the holidays. What this all means is that, most likely, the changes I’ve been wanting to make to the site here will be put on the back burner. Gotta have those priorities and this site is low on the totem pole.

I’m going to be still posting, it’s just the small things that are bugging me (why the background color keeps changing from blue to yellow and back to blue, the static page links, the cursor, the edit tag…it goes on) will be allowed to bug me a bit longer.

It’s been awhile since I’ve hoarked up the site good n’ proper, so I thought I’d tweak something and now all the stuff in the sidebar is nice and hoarked. Hoo-AH!

My son and I were slated to go camping this weekend, and as I’m writing this on a Saturday morning, you can probably guess that didn’t happen.

We met the group we were going to go with at about 3:30. The new Isuzu Trooper we’d gotten about six weeks ago (as a result of the wife’s accident last July) was loaded with the camping equipment, ice chest and miscellaneous other stuff. It was to be a “guy’s weekend”, with just a bunch of dads and their sons. So we’re caravanning up to our campground, when the Trooper starts acting like it’s popped out of drive. I check, and it’s still OK, at least according to the transmission. I drop it down to third, watched the RPMs shoot up, and realized the transmission was gone. Either the clutch plate went south or something else. About that time, the oh-so-helpful “Check Trans” light came on the dashboard. Bit too late, but thanks for the notice.