Happy Halloween!

It's Garrett's favorite time of the year! We spent Halloween eve at a party at Beth's apartment, followed by a pub crawl in the area of Houston known as Montrose.

Here's Indiana Jones and his goddess! This year's addition to Garrett's costume was a handmade fedora -- from scratch! (Or "from felt.") He worked very, very hard on it, and the end product is fantastic. Soon I'll be putting together an online photo album to document the making of the hat.

Beth dressed as a sailor, and Stephanie was Miss Piggy!

Even Lucky had a costume. He was supposed to be a dinosaur, but has also been described as a Reluctant Dragon.

Chris is an engineering student. One of his hobbies is making speakers. It took him about two hours to construct this mobile boom box, using an iPod, some wires, a lot of duct tape, and the speaker from his guitar amp. He was the most popular member of our group on the pub crawl, blasting music wherever he went!

After several hours at Beth's place, we went out to the pub crawl. There were tons of costumed people roaming the streets. Here is Laura, Patricia, Spencer, and me. Laura and Spencer are teachers at my school.

I didn't get any photos of them, but some of my favorite costumes were Quail Man (from the Nickelodeon cartoon "Doug"), Tippi Hedren from "The Birds" (a blue dress with birds attached to it, and scratches on her face), and Mormon missionaries (two guys wearing white short-sleeve button-up shirts, ties, nametags, black pants, backpacks, and bike helmets). Finalists in the official competition included a group dressed as the cast of "Spaceballs."

We ended the night at the Firkin & Phoenix, a pub next door to Beth's building. She goes there on a regular basis and knows the staff -- it's her "Cheers"! Yesterday the bartender presented her with her very own mug, which sits on the Tuesday shelf. She is very pleased.

We plan to go on a walk this evening around dusk to check out the trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood. Have a spooky day!