Frights & (non) Fireworks

Halloween:

I was rather nostalgically looking at my Halloween blog from last year the other day and remembering all the fun and frights we had at Smallhythe Place. Now  we have our own little house, this year I gave ‘Mini S’ the choice between booking a Halloween ‘ghost walk’ or having a Halloween party at home.

She chose the Halloween party option, so on the night before Halloween our was invaded by a selection of nine year old scary monsters... Knocking on our door in quick succession were a demon; a ghoul, a zombie, a pumpkin, and a witch. What did ‘Mini S’ dress up as I hear you ask ? A black cat of course ! Twilight and her made a great pair at first, but as more and more guests arrived, she (Twilight, not Mini ‘S’) sensibly took refuge under the bed ! 

I think I enjoyed the party as much as they did, though I have to admit, I was a little nervous of running it single handedly... It went without a hitch, and we enjoyed all sorts of games, including apple bobbing, a no handed doughnut eating competition, pin the nose on the witch and spooky musical statues. The evening culminated in a spooky treasure hunt which led the party goers up and down the street and in and out of the neighbours’ houses and gardens !

I can’t take all the credit though... I had help from my unwitting house guest ‘J’ on Saturday night, who was force fed extremely hot curry while being made to write poetic treasure hunt clues; next door neighbour ‘H’ who let us hide a clue and a spooky purple glowing pumpkin in the creepy alleyway to her back garden and opposite neighbours ‘J & J’ who were kind enough to hide the treasure in their house J.

Jerushah gets her core:

Last Saturday I was a very happy lady, as I finally got to take MY core at the submerged forest in Erith...
This time there were research supervisor (you’ve met him before) ‘Dr A;’ undergraduate environmental scientist ‘J’ and (now graduated and here for the fun of it) friend ‘K.’

We had some very heavy duty coring equipment with us, so I decided to pull into the Erith Yacht Club car park to ask if we could unload there. Our sea faring friends there were in fact, extremely kind and rather than risking life and limb wading out through the mud to our usual site, they invited us to walk out to the peat exposure via their lovely concrete slipway... Post field trip, we were so clean, you would hardly know that we had done any fieldwork at all !

We managed to core right through the peat unit into the mud below, a preliminary look showed an interesting oxidised horizon – can wait to get on with the processing !

 

 (Non) firework night :

oor me, I love fireworks, but I seem to have missed out on fireworks this year ! ‘Mini S’ dislikes fireworks and so does Twilight kitty, so we elected to stay in on the night of the biggest local firework display on Friday 4^th  November to keep Twilight company, and go to Ikea on the night of Saturday 5^th.

It was lovely and quiet, with no queues and bargains everywhere !  As it is getting increasingly difficult to dry linen in an environmentally friendly way, I was really pleased they were selling duvet sets for £1.99 ! As for the other things I bought though, I came home thinking ‘Were those really necessary ?’   

I’ll let you be the judge !

 

J’s record of the week :

‘Somebody’s
watching me.’
by

Rockwell

This week ‘Somebody’s watching me’ popped up on a compilation of Halloween music that we downloaded for the party... Reading up a little bit for this blog, I didn’t realise until now that the backing vocals featured both Michael and Jermaine Jackson.  Listening to it took me back to my first year of secondary school in the 1985, when in was released in the UK – my mum used to absolutely love this song and do funny actions to the line ‘When I’m in the shower I’m afraid to wash my hair !’ I wonder if she’d remember it now ? 

Jerushah X