couples costume parade

Happy Friday everyone! I hope everyone has recovered from Halloween by now. Dane & I love dressing up for Halloween, but we don't always wear a "couples costume." Here's some couple & non couple photos from the past few years!

 2012: Annie Hall & Alvy Singer

 2011: Silent Film Star & Leo Tolstoy

2010: Albert Einstein & Mayor McCheese (yep, that's Dane under there!)

2009: Sharpay Evans & Troy Bolton (we look so young! sorry for the blurriness, but this was snapped by a friend at a college Halloween party, so quality wasn't a top priority)

2008 was the first year we celebrated Halloween together (just before we began dating), but sadly there is no photo...Dane was Quail Man & I was Margot Tenenbaum :)


Have a great weekend!

Inspired by : scream queens

imgae from here

Despite Halloween falling on a Wednesday, I hope you have an opportunity to celebrate! Of course, this means dressing up in costume. I'll be sharing some costume photos of myself later, and am pretty excited about this year's getup!

One of the best parts of Halloween season is watching horror movies. There are the classics, the teen slasher flicks, the thrillers, the cheesy 80's movies, the sci-fi weirdos. Our netflix "recently watched" history is full of these movies come Halloween. And let's not kid ourselves, the ladies that propel the great ones are pretty bad-ass. Elsa Lanchester (above) in The Bride of Frankenstein sports one of the most iconic Holloween hairdos of all time (did you see the homage in Frankenweenie? That movie was wonderful!).

image from here

Alien is so. Bleep-ing. Scary. Once you can sleep with the lights off and the nightmares have gone away, you say to yourself, "Wow. Sigourney Weaver was awesome in that movie."

image from here

Poltergeist is one of the must-watches of the season. Both the young daughter, Carol Ann (Heather O'Rourke) and the mom Diane (JoBeth Williams) are great. And everyone loves Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein) shouting, "THIS HOUSE IS CLEAN!!!"

image from here

I, embarrassingly, had not seen the original Halloween until a horror movie marathon last year in Chicago. The movie itself wasn't one of my favorites, but Jamie Lee Curtis was so endearing and sympathetic that I would give that movie multiple viewings.

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I've only seen two of Barbara Steele's horror movies (The Pit and the Pendulum and The Mask of Satan/Black Sunday) but she is one of the top scream queens of all time, often called "Britain's First Lady of Horror" (she's also one of Dane's favorites). Some of her films are available on instant Netflix--but be warned, just because these movies are old does NOT mean they take horror lightly.

Obviously there are many other great women in horror films (I know, I know, Janet Leigh isn't on this list). Who are your favorites?

Happy Halloween!

parking lot pumpkin patch

Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young once sang: "If you can't be with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with."

With those words in mind, on a sunny, 85 degree morning in Southern California, Dane & I headed to the nearest "pumpkin patch" that wasn't a cardboard box in front of a grocery store.

It was in a car wash parking lot.

A far cry from our last pumpkin patch experience on a small Wisconsin farm, where we got to pick our own pumpkins, feed the goats, and milk a cow.

The hot weather hasn't transitioned me into the normal cozy fall mood, but that is NO excuse not to carve pumpkins for Halloween. Celebrating fall in such a warm climate involves a lot more effort than it does in the Midwest.

Pumpkins and palm trees in the same photos. Strange, huh? Today we're off to another fall activity that I've planned for Dane's birthday. I've managed to keep it a surprise, which is no small feat for me--especially when I ask him every day, "do you want me to tell you the surprise?!" hoping he'll give me permission to spill my secret (he always says no).

Happy Friday! I hope you enjoy your Halloween weekend--it's time for that last minute costume scramble!