Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween everyone! . . . 11 days later.  We've been remiss in updating the blog, I know, but we've been crazy busy the last week and a half. Our stuff arrived last Wednesday (finally!) so its been all boxes and unpacking for us as of late. We also learned that apparently there is some crucial difference between the television signal here and in the States, so our TV is useless here. It powers up just fine, but just displays blackness like it's getting no signal. Which means we now have a new Australian TV, and our old one will be taking up space in our closet for the next three years. Awesome.

But we digress- Halloween! It's a pretty low key affair in Australia, they don't really celebrate it. Some of the Australians at Greg's work even seem to resent it existing- its just a stupid American export slowly invading the country. Those at Laurel's work were more intruiged or looking forward to an excuse to carve vegetables.  So we didn't do much, no parties no costumes, but we did buy a pumpkin! We didn't bother to check the price in the grocery store so we only found out that it cost over $20 when we were checking out. Oh well, a small price to pay for a little piece of home. Before we get to the pumpkin though, remember, it's always wise to stay away from black cats on Halloween. Unfortunately, we own one.  Check out that crazy face!

Now to the main event- Mr. Jack-o-lantern. Our pumpkin had a pretty big gash running through the face, so Laurel decided to make use of it as a design element. We imagine that our pumpkin got in a fight a long time ago and got slashed pretty badly across the face. Now he has a battle scar that partially closes his left eye. We think he turned out pretty well.

Also, and this is Greg's favorite part, we roasted the pumpkin seeds. So delicious.

Instead of staying home and waiting in vain for trick or treaters we went to a movie. Running for two weeks, right across Halloween, is the Canberra International Film Festival. A lot of the movies looked really interesting, so we added a bunch to our Netflix list, but one in particular we just had to see in theatres. It's a Finnish film called "Rare Exports." The poster is below, and if you can't read it the tagline is "This year, everyone will believe in Santa Clause." Its about archaeologists in Lapland, Finland who dig a little too deep and awaken an ancient evil- Santa. Really. It's pretty awesome and I highly recommend it.

When we got back from the movie it was now properly dark and prime Jack-o-lantern time. Below is our pumpkin in all his majesty. I think we did a pretty good job.

And there is shot using only ambient light. Oooooooooh, spooky!

Apparently, magpies really like pumpkin. But not fresh pumpkin, it needs to really start decomposing first. They ignored it for about a week, depriving us of our much sought after Jack-o-lantern + magpies piciture. After it was good and ripe though they couldn't get enough, as you can tell by all of the bird crap around the pumpkin. We watched one almost fall in trying to peck farther and farther into it. Silly 'pies!