ALLIANCE of ONE: Hallowe'en / Comic Con Weekend

It's been almost a week since my last post. Forgive me, I'm a busy guy. This last weekend (Oct. 30 - Nov. 1) was full of a lot of fun and interesting (and expensive) stuff. There was Boo @ the Zoo on Friday, Central Canada Comic Con (C4) on Saturday afternoon, and of course Halloween on Saturday night. I snapped a lot of pictures along the way, and I've already posted a bunch in Flickr.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Boo at the Zoo, let me explain. Every year in the week leading up to Halloween, the Assiniboine Park Zoo hosts a family event featuring kiddie rides, haunted house type attractions, lots of scary/funny displays and over-priced concessions. You don't see any animals because they're all hiding in their enclosures from the noise and chaos. It's definitely not free, but my wife wouldn't tell me how much we paid for our family to get in, because she knew I'd complain about it. Anyway, Bobbie and the girls dressed up in their costumes, but I went in my civilian garb. It was a lot of fun for the kids, and I did manage to get a handful of good photos. Coolest thing was the fire juggler, and I guess the Haunted House was pretty neat too.

The next day, being a Saturday, we of course had Chloe’s swimming lesson first. She is as strong a swimmer as I’ve ever seen for her age. Her favorite thing to do is to jump in the water. Over, and over, and over again. Who can blame her? Oh – and she lost her first tooth while she was changing after her lesson. Exciting! Way to go, Chloe! The tooth fairy would also visit late that night and left a note and some money for her.

After swimming was the Comic Con. There was a lot of stuff going on there, and lots of cool stuff to look at. Hundreds of people in costumes, literally millions of comics, action figures, t-shirts and toys for sale, neat displays, tabletop gaming demos and tournaments going on, and celebrities to boot! I ran in to a lot of people that I knew, and to those of you who saw me and I didn’t say hi, I’m sorry – I was pretty distracted with all the colors and sounds all around me....

I spent most of our time there looking through the $1/comic bins. Hours – literally. I did manage to snap a far-away pic of Adam West, but I didn’t really see any other celebrities. There were huge lines to see them up close, and they charge for their autographs nowadays, so I steered clear of that area of the con for the most part.

I won’t waste time complaining about the prices of everything, but rest assured that we dropped a lot of cash there and didn’t even do one tenth of the fun things we could have done there. Still, it was a good con!

We headed home for dinner (steak & shrimp stir-fry that I made – and it was awesome!) and got ready for the main event – Halloween! Our pumpkins were lit and ready, the girls all dressed and ready and things pretty much going as planned. Daphne had to wear her backup orange and black Witch costume, since the zipper got broken on her lamb costume at Boo @ the Zoo the night before. She wasn’t very happy about it, either.

The girls went out for Halloween and I stayed home to give out candy to all of 6 or 7 kids that came to our house. At the end of the night, all that was left was to root through the mountain of candy on the floor.