Trick or Treating in South Chase

(writing this as of Monday evening, November 1st...)

I'll stand by this statement until the day I die: Floridians can't celebrate Halloween for shit.


When I was a young trick or treater, growing up in small-town, mid-Michigan, it was a rare thing to see a house not participating in the Halloween festivities. You'd see a house without lights on and not answering their door for trick or treaters, and you'd think to yourself, "What the hell are those folks' problem?"


Down here, at least where we live, at least four out of five houses were like that. Seriously.


I don't know what folks' excuses were for this most heinous of transgressions - it definitely wasn't the weather.


We used to get frostbite running about Clare, MI., forgoing the much-needed layers of sweatshirts and sweatpants underneath our costumes as they'd only make us look 'stupid' (as pirates do not wear sweatshirts). Here in central Florida, it was a mild 68 degrees or so... which meant you could walk around in shorts and be perfectly fine.


This also means that someone could arguably stand in their doorway with a bowl of candy, in their shorts, and be perfectly fine. Alas, residents in South Chase evidently have no soul.



Alas, that candy wasn't about to be delivered to our front door, so we had to venture out into the perfectly acceptable night weather, skip over those soulless houses, and collect it ourselves. We took our kids out alongside a coworker of mine, his wife, and their four kids, so we definitely resembled the Fellowship of the Ring as we trudged along the sidewalk, all ten of us adorning costumes and desperately seeking out Halloween participants.


Things started off slow, sure enough, but fortunately they picked up before the kids got too tired to carry on. The worst part of the evening was knowing that I had to get up at 5am the next day - I can't even begin to describe how much it sucked having to do trick or treating on a frickin' Sunday (working that next day was not fun).


But, in the end, Alayna had a blast, so it was well worth it.


...except now the adults are binging on Halloween candy, and my teeth couldn't be more pissed at me.

- Brian

A Forced March Through Disney World

Hi players.

This weekend saw my parents come down for a visit. Good times as usual. As it was the weekend before Halloween and everything, we decided that at some point in time we'd go and pick up some pumpkins to mutilate, but there was also a strong desire to hit up the Food and Wine Festival at Epcot as well.

Let me talk about the latter first.

You readers know, by now, that the Houghs are seasoned veterans when it comes to the Parks. We know the tricks, we know the traps, and we know how to kick out our Ya-Yas when in Disney country. A day strolling around the fabricated international community that is Epcot's World Showcase - sampling various boozes and delectables from around the globe - sounded down-right awesome. Righteous, even.

Well, this time was different.

I don't know if the Gods were against us, or some other sort of otherworldly ne'er-do-well decided to kick sand in our face, or what, but our attempt at enjoying the 2010 Food and Wine Festival was sabotaged from the get-go.

Our first mistake? Thinking we could 'swing by' the Magic Kingdom, do a few rides, have a meal, and make it back to Epcot for a few hours of beer-drinking and cheese-devouring, if you will.

Not happenin' this year, folks. Not by a long shot.

Apparently, the It's a Small World After All ride (I hope that song gets stuck in your head reading this, too) is the single coolest ride at the Magic Kindgom. Seriously. My parents wanted to take the Cannonball on this, because she likes it and, hell, the line is usually really, really short. You can imagine, then, our dismay when the trio reemerged from the ride after an hour-long wait.

Were we pissed yet? Almost, but not quite.

...we hadn't had dinner yet.

We opted for yet another hypothesized 'quick stop' at the Pecos Bill restaurant. Here, the vicinity was shoulder-to-shoulder with touristy idiots from around the world, and it took a solid 45 minutes to place our order. During this grueling period of time, both Abby and Alayna were miserable and making all kinds of racket, and we were quickly losing all patience with the entire concept of theme parks in general. When we did finally get our food, Alayna spilled her chocolate milk all over the table, consequently soaking Kris' meal and ruining dinner for all persons present

Now we were pissed… but we weren't over being screwed with. The Gods still had it out for us.

We made it back to Epcot around 8:45pm-ish, assuming the park closed at 11pm... thereby giving us a sound two hours, at least, to stroll around the World Showcase and enjoy ourselves.

You can imagine our agitation when we were told that we had 15 minutes before we had to leave.

Evidently, at 9pm the park was shutting down for the evening firework spectacle, Illuminations. While it's an okay firework show and all, I wasn't feeling Fourth of July-ish, having worn my sandals paper-thin fighting crowds of idiots all day long and feeling the clock work against me throughout the entire course of the afternoon and evening. We walked to the back of the park long enough to obtain a half-ass view of the twenty-minute firework show before having to turn about-face and walk all the way back to the front of the park.

Now I was pissed.

I'm sure someday I'll be able to laugh this whole affair off, but, without a doubt, the day's chain of events went down as the absolute crappiest time I've ever had in an amusement park. Bar. None.

...the silver lining to this tale, folks, is that such a weekend cannot possibly get worse. On the contrary, our failed attempt at the amusement parks was the only low note in an otherwise awesome weekend with my folks. As mentioned before, with Halloween fastly approaching, and preparations reaching a fever-pitch, we decided to drive out to Celebration (where all the yuppy, Disney executives live) and pick out some pumpkins to carve.

They had a really, really cool set-up at the ol' Celebration Pumpkin Patch. Tons of photo opportunities to be had, and we definitely took advantage of them. If I were to upload them here this would be indeed one hell of a long entry. Instead, seeing how my Dad's already done all the leg work for this one, I'm redirecting you all to an already up-and-running website.

Check it out.

After the pumpkin patch, we brought our haul back to the house where we watched way more Yo Gabba Gabba than was probably necessary, ate some flatbread pizza, and mutilated the hell out of those pumpkins. We even got some swim time in at Dad and Cindy's hotel pool.

Enjoy.

- Brian

In Preperation for All Hallows Eve

So it's getting to be that time of year again. Halloween time. Personally, my third favorite holiday of the year, behind Christmas and St. Patrick's Day, and not without reason. I'm a big fan of random crap, and Halloween sure has its fair share of it. This year marks our first Halloween in a house, so I decided that the Houghs would 'spookify' their residency appropriately.

'Tis the season.

Down here in Orlando, as in all other civilized pockets of the known world, one tends to notice large, retail spaces suddenly pop up - seemingly overnight - distributing the usual Halloween goods. Costumes, decapitated latex corpses, fog machines, strobe lights, stretched out cotton balls with a cheap plastic spider attached that automatically turns it into 'spooky spider webs.' The usual. Within five miles of our house, about six of these stores opened, and Yours Truly - being the impulse buyer and purveyor of all things random - spent a sound majority of his free time (and disposable income) in these warehouses (...of horror!!).

Now, this is the first year that our kids can really get into the spirit of things. We're fairly excited about the whole thing, but we're nowhere near as pumped for Pumpkinfest '10 as our two year old is. I'm not sure if too many of you guys know our eldest daughter all that well or not, but there's a reason we call her 'Cannonball.'

You know those cutesy, button-nosed, two year old girls that wear pink and hearts and unicorns and what-else, and that are way too into the whole Disney princess thing?

We sure as hell don't have one of those.

Last year we dressed her up as a witch, and it was the most fitting costume we could've picked. If they had sold a costume that rhymed with 'witch,' we probably would've sprung for it. As such, we knew that this year, we'd have to find yet another costume equally fitting to her personality and demeanor... and when you're searching in Halloween stores for girl toddler costumes, you're left with the following choices: a princess (no), a fairy (no), or a fairy princess (hell no).

Left with aforementioned crap options, we decided to go the D.I.Y. route and make her a Punk Rocker.

(Oi.)

We found some bitchin' temporary tattoos so we can sleeve her arms, some fishnets, some hair-spray, and a pair of old school Converse shoes. I took a razor to a blue jean jacket and, after adhering some sequins and buttons and the like, she's got herself a costume. Rock and roll.

...Abby's first costume, alas, is going to be a flower. We had a flower costume lying around that Alayna never wore and said 'what the hell.'

What can I say - we're lazy parents.

House decorations and costumes aside, I've also begun to amass gigabytes upon gigabytes of the greatest Halloween music and TV specials known to man. Ultimate Halloween Party mixes, scary sound effects, haunted house crap - you name it, I probably have it now. Hours of work, but well worth it: now I've custom-designed numerous playlists, DVD specials (classics from back in the day, of course), and all other sorts of Halloween-ish crap that will hopefully last us through the next ten or so Halloweens.



....and in other news, and Kris and I decided to stay married for yet another year.

...that makes four!

- Brian

A Duel 10 Years in the Making...

If it's one thing I can't stomach, it's some a-hole cracking wise on my golf skills. I refer not to that sissy, 18-hole, pastel-polo-tucked-into-khakis golf you see the well-to-dos killing their idle time with. Nay. I refer to a real man's golf.

Pirates Cove Adventure Golf.

To call this 'miniature golf' would be akin to referring to Indiana Jones as a professor. I had lots of professors through undergraduate and graduate school, but not one of them carried a pistol and whip, combated Nazis, and trounced around the world theater collecting ancient relics of antiquity and occult. Not that I'm aware of at least.

No, Pirates Cove is something glorious and unique, and therefore it was with great offense did I scorn the infamous Zack Smith - co-founder of the Sausage Pad and fellow Alpha Team compatriot - when he dared to state that he would 'destroy me' at an 18-round tour-de-force at Pirates Cove. Without missing a beat, I accepted his challenge, however ludicrous and heretic it was at the time, and we made a pact to hold a duel at the earliest possible juncture.

That was ten years ago.

Now, this week, the duel commenced.

It was an epic battle of gigantor proportions, and definitely one for the history books. I had an early lead over Z. Smithers that I somehow managed to squander about three-fourths of the way through the course, and so he managed to catch up to me on a few of the last holes. Alas, as the tally was taken after we completed the 18th hole, we discovered that, after ten years of shit-talking, we had tied.

That's right. It was a tie. Unbelievable.

So what happens now? I'll tell you what happens now:

Hough vs. Smith 2020.

Be there or be square.

- Brian