Halloween pics are in the gallery!! It’s behaving badly right now, so you might have to scroll to the bottom of the page if you click on a photo.

    

I spent yesterday cleaning the basement and putting up my Christmas Tree. Yes, my Christmas Tree is officially up. Nick wasn’t too happy about it. He thought maybe I wasn’t sure what month it was. I think he’s jealous ’cause he doesn’t have a Christmas Tree. My original intentions were to put it up on the Friday after Thanksgiving, which is when I believe the Christmas season should start (vote in my new poll), but then I remembered we’d be in Belize in December, so that’s 10 days that we wouldn’t get to enjoy it, and since Christmas is on the 25th, that’s almost half of the month. Besides, we haven’t had a tree up for about four years, so I’m making up for lost time.

This tree is my first official fake tree. I’ve always liked real trees, they look and smell so… real. But they are also really pokey. And really messy (we’re still finding needles from four years ago). And really sappy. Which means I get really sappy. And the cat gets really sappy. Ears all stuck to the side of her head and such. I got this tree after Christmas last year. It was on clearance. I don’t remember exactly how much it was or what I bought it for, but I do remember it being quite the deal. It’s one of those pre-lit trees that are supposed to stay lit of a bulb burns out. It looks nice too.

It was also a pain in the ass to get. Read More →

Once again, Nick stood me up on Halloween night and I was forced to hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters all by myself. I’ll have to admit it wasn’t as bad as it was in previous years. In the last two years we had 40-50 kids spread out over the entire night, which makes it really hard to do anything like watch tv, go to the bathroom, or just get comfortable on the couch. This year there were only 14 kids until about 8:30, then the night concluded with three very large groups, so it was a pretty relaxing night. Let me interject here that I have a completely irrational anxiety about answering the door. It just plain creeps me out. So top that off with knowing there are going to be small children on the other side… eeeesh. I’m not saying I believe in past lives, but if I did live in a previous life I was probably murdered by someone who rang my doorbell.

Anyway, one of the first kids was in a giraffe suit, and I like giraffes, so the night started off on a good foot. Not to mention he was a polite little giraffe. He said “thank you” even though I really couldn’t decipher what he said. But hey, I give him props for actually walking on his own and not having his parents carry him around. Although it was early, and I don’t really know what goes on once I close the door. And it’s funny how parents do things differently. Some walk right up to the door with their children while some hang back a ways. Then of course at the end of the night the big kids show up. This group of guys showed up with so much candy they asked if I could spare any plastic bags. The last person I had was a girl dressed up like a bunny. She was all alone and looked to be about 14 or so. It made me think, who trick-or-treats alone? It’s one thing if you’re a small kid accompanied by only your parents, but to go completely alone? It’s just weird. The only logical conclusion I could come up with was that none of her friends went trick-or-treating because they felt they were too old. Or maybe it was a dare. Or maybe she lost a bet.

Anyway, moving on, I think the fact that we are still in daylight savings time messed up the trick-or-treating schedule. Usually I barely have time to get candy and get home before the kids start showing up. I’m sure it sucks for the kids, I remember the wait for it to get dark out was long enough, but patience is a virtue, so we’ll be raising a well rounded society of people going door to door demanding candy.

jillapalooza.com has an all new look. I got the itch to change it up, so it had to be done. Not that I didn’t like the old layout… I think I like it better than the new one, but this new one is pretty fun. It’s got a lot of image files, which I’ve done a lot of manipulation to, thanks to the Gimp.

I fell in love with this layout because of all the nifty little images and the chick with the glasses, who may or may not be in the upper right hand corner (I’ll touch on that in a bit). I thought it would be fun to put an image of myself on my blog, and the glamorous lady just looks so cool, it’s very tempting to recreate the shot with myself.

Which brought me to a couple of issues. First, is it narcissistic to put a photo of ones self on ones own blog? Second, I can’t take good self portraits of myself. I would either need to enlist the help of someone else to take the photo, or deal with a bad photo and just cartoon or oilize myself up with the Gimp.

But then I realized this theme comes with a fun little header photo changer. So I can have the photo rotate between as many as I want (hence the cool lady may or may not being in the corner). It would be like a surprise during every visit to jillapalooza.com. But would that be annoying? I’m not sure. I removed the random photo from the sidebar, because I felt it was conflicting with the giant photo up top.

Let me know what you think about the all new jillapalooza.com.