Tag Archives: halloween

Hallo-what?

Wow. We just had our first trick-or-treaters… as in, ever! I’ve seen the Halloween-y accoutrements stealthily making their way into supermarkets and craft stores in the last few years, but this is a first for us.

I’m not anti-Halloween per se. I do despair the ‘Americanisation’ of Australia in general (uh… no offence meant to the majority of you guys 🙂 ), and hey, if we’re going to celebrate a pagan harvest festival, then we could at the very least do it at the right time of year (ie 6 months from now, for those of us in the Southern Hemisphere). But really, any event that involves costumes and copious amounts of sugar has my vote :giggle: That said… I just wish the kids who arrived at our door could have gone to a little bit more trouble than black tracksuits and plastic supermarket bags, know what I mean? One had on a ‘scary’ mask, another had on a green wig, but apart from that, I was seriously underwhelmed by the completely crappy ‘costumes’. (We’re talking about young teenagers, btw, not eight-year-olds).

Oh well. Luckily we had ‘treats’ on hand, what with having been to the Bendigo Show at the weekend, so I didn’t let them go empty-handed. But if Halloween is going to make its way into the Australian calendar, I hope we see a little bit more ingenuity next time.

Happy 31st October

Happy Halloween, to the Northern-hemisphericans dropping by 🙂 Happy Beltane to those downunder who celebrate the old ways. And… um… Happy Tuesday to the rest of you?

In this household, it seems more like Christmas. Our tax return is through (well, half of it anyway). Usually this time of year means paying off debts – last year we paid off our car and a hefty credit card debt. Thanks in part to the baby bonus and in part to some gruelling overtime hours put in by OtherHalf, we’re reasonably okay on the debt front this year. Apart from the house, that is.

So today, we welcomed this new baby into the house. Isn’t she beautiful? Mmmm… digital SLR goodness. This is a purchase we’ve been planning to make for some time – my (film) SLR camera gave up the ghost recently, and we’ve been meaning to replace our (compact) digital camera with something better, so this is the ‘something better’ we came up with. We (OtherHalf) found a wonderful deal on the body plus two (two!) lenses and a 1GB SD memory card. Part of the attraction of the Nikon is that the remaining film SLR camera in the household is also a Nikon, and the telephoto lens we got with the D50 is fully compatible with both Nikons. Yay! Expect more beautiful photos in my future.

And with that… ‘Blogtober’ is over! I now return you to your regularly scheduled spasmodic blogging. Just kidding. I’m hoping that with my marking commitments behind me, and with Niamh starting to sleep a little better (okay, that’s wishful thinking, I admit) I’ll be stitching and crafting (and photographing finished products) a bit more frequently, so I’ll try and be here a little more as well.