(no subject)

That's right! I promised a recounting of Halloween!

In short: We scared little kids. It was awesome.

At length: We've been planning for Halloween all year. We decided that we all needed long black robes so that we could be grim reaper-type ghouls. We commissioned my mom to make them for us (we bought all of the supplies, of course).

The Halloween stage was set on the first day of October. baylorsr turned the frontyard into a cemetary, complete with styrofoam headstones and glowing skeletons (one a zombie, the other a pirate). This year we added a bat that hangs off of the big tree; it lights up, swings back and forth, and makes spooky bat noises. There is also a witch that hangs on the door. She's motion-activated and cackles whenever anyone opens or closes the door. Of all of the decorations she's the one who has scared the most children (including the Baylor Nephew in years past). [Our resident ghost used to be fascinated with the witch, triggering it to go off at strange and random times.]

On the night itself we put on our robes and painted our faces bone white with black around our eyes and mouths. Then dodger_sister and I stood in the big picture window, all of the lights off behind us, with only flashlights to illuminate our faces. baylorsr silently and expressionlessly passed out the candy. In the background we were playing one of those spooky noise tracts on a loop.

A number of kids stood on the sidewalk, staring at the house, trying to gather up the nerve to come up to the door. One little kid dressed as Michael Myers got his candy and then suddenly noticed us standing in the window. He walked backwards all the way to the street, staring at us the whole way. One girl came up with a whole gaggle of kids and then squealed and jumped upon seeing us. We could hear her pointing us out to the other kids as she walked away. I spooked out another kid by staring at him the entire time. Another girl couldn't tell if we were real people or holograms so I pointed at her. She shrieked a little, it was awesome.

Lots of parents took pictures of the house and talked about us while their kids were getting candy. Our zombie costumes were the talk of the neighborhood last year and I bet this year won't be any different.

The two or so hours of trick-or-treating seemed to fly by. Our only disappointment was the lower than expected number of kids. I guess that's what happens when Halloween is on a Monday.

dodger_sister has some great photos of the decorations in the yard over here. I'll be sure to put up a shot of us in full costume when I get my hands on them.

Yay! Scaring little kids is the greatest!

comments at http://liptonrm.dreamwidth.org/38169.html.

Weekly Fic Recs

How do the weeks go by so quickly? I feel like I just did one of these.

A lot of fic in the past few weeks came from deancasbigbang. The challenge ended last week and there's a full index of this year's stuff over at the community. I haven't had time to read it all, yet, so the interested should definitely check that out and see what I've missed.

Avatar: The Last Airbender
Imagine the Ocean--Book One by Damkianna
Hakoda found the boy in the ice eight days before Kya went into labor. Longfic, AU

X-Men: First Class
New Beautiful Things Come by singlecrow
Erik runs a kosher bakery. Charles comes in for baked goods. They play chess, eat meringues, people drop other people's keys down the toilet, and there's mutant performance art. AU, Charles/Erik

Supernatural
The Winchester Revision by proxydialogue
A recently de-deified Chuck, dying in Italy, decides to revise the story of Sam and Dean and Cas to give it the fairytale ending it deserves as a last hurrah before he goes. In a world with no monsters Dean Winchester goes to the University of Delaware for physics and engineering where a terrible twist of fate lands him in a Feminism and Literature class for one of his general electives. It is taught by a dark haired, blue-eyed professor named Castiel. Sam, meanwhile, is a boy genius who gets into college at sixteen and really is going to be a lawyer this time as soon as he finishes his English degree at UDel and gets into Stanford. But the more Chuck writes, the more he discovers about himself, his characters and the friends he will never see again; because some stories must be told. Longfic, quasi-AU, Dean/Cas

Without a Map by jaimeykay and twoskeletons
Set after 5x03 and before 5x04. Dean knows a thing or two about absent fathers, but he didn’t expect Castiel to ask him if he wanted to come along on the search for God. He also didn’t expect to say yes. Cue the two of them going around the world, from mountain peaks to bustling cities to subterranean caverns. They talk with prophets, angels, and deities, but they are running out of leads and running out of time. As the dead ends and red herrings pile up, so do their frustrations, testing their faith in each other and themselves. Longfic

The Incredible Tale of Dean Winchester and the Angel Who Fell From the Sky by ibroketuesday and xxamlaxx
Loose retelling of Gabriel García Márquez’s A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, set in the Pacific Northwest of the late 1920s. Sam and Dean have retired young from hunting and moved to an island, and they're failing miserably in their attempt at being fishermen when a storm sends an angel crashing into their yard. Castiel is a feral creature with black wings and taloned feet, and though initially Dean regards him as a monster, the bond that develops between the two will set them against murderers, reveal a dark secret of angel society, and change both of them forever. Also, Castiel is naked the entire time. Longfic, AU

comments at http://liptonrm.dreamwidth.org/38420.html.