And another thing...

Hey!  Long time, no see.  Uhm.  For some of you, long time, never seen.  What up, Singapore??  Hola Mexico!  I don't know what my draw is for some of y'all, but welcome!!

The sweet potato bread was okay.  It remained gorgeous.  But I kept taking bites out of it expecting it to taste like pumpkin bread.  So, next time I just need to make pumpkin bread.  BUT.  I think I might buy some of those pie pumpkins and make it from scratch.  I know.  Cray-zay.  But new.  And also, don't tell anyone else but I guess I should have refrigerated the left-over bread.  Because some of the heartier chunks of sweet potato that didn't puree all the way up made some of the bread turn green.  A weird color green.  It's one thing to let people know that you are kind of a slob.  It's altogether different to own that you had green food sitting around on your counter.  Green food that wasn't supposed to be green.  6 out of 10 Jenny's jewels for the ungreen portions I tasted. 

I just saw in the paper today that Jessica Seinfeld is coming out with another book - Doubly Delicious.  I'll be the judge of that.  And I'll let you know what my verdict is.

Today's new thing is not a new thing, technically.  I've done it before.  I'm calling it new because it is an annual event and I hadn't done it in 2010 so - it counts as new.  And because I say so.

HallZooWeen 2010:
I think this just might be our 8th year going.  It might be our 7th.  Either way, I think the point remains that we have gone consistently for more than one year.  We have other occasions to measure up against.  That's what I'm getting at here.  Our zoo hosts a trick or treat event 2-3 weekends in October every year.  I love it.  I love that the kids get to wear their Halloween costume more than once.  I love seeing the pumpkin bits laying all over the area of the bears or the elephants after they got to have fun and eat the innards.  I love seeing the kids run from one treat station to the next holding out a bag and having sweet peeps put sweet stuff in them.  I love looking at all the costumes.  I love the wonder and the fantasy of it all.  I love that I scrapbook a page about that event every year and that it is usually my favorite layout of the entire set of pages I'm doing.  I love HallZooWeen.  The first few years, they had a carnival kind of area where you could pick out a pumpkin and buy cider.  They had the soft cookies with the delicious frosting and the sprinkles on top.  They aren't homemade or anything - you can get them at the grocery but they aren't cheap.  And it's just not as much fun when you aren't giving someone all your treat tickets because that's the only treat you want and you want a lot of them.  Over the years, they have scaled back and made some changes.  The carnival area disappeared.  But you could still use a treat ticket to pick out a small pumpkin from one of the stations.  Last year or the year before, they eliminated the tickets that they required you to trade at each station for a treat.  Which was smart because I'm sure no one was going for all that chapstick at the one station and they just got crates of lip gunk sitting around year after year.  They have pretty good expiration dates, so probably it worked out okay but still.  The treats were good ones too.  I might have mentioned the cookies already... (okay, fine, I'll name drop - they were the Lofthouse brand- mmmmm).  But you also got a container of ice cream at the United Dairy Farmers store.  Which I loved because it made those kids so happy but I hated because I got uptight about every dangling drop threatening to sploosh on a costume that I had very little ability to clean.  Have you ever tried to blot chocolate ice cream on dragon hair?  It's like flippin' impossible!  The stations were all over the zoo - and there were plenty of them.  And every year, the kids would fly past the animals trying to find the next station and forget the fact that they were in the same area as Rhinos and Lions and Bears, oh my!  And I'm talking the real versions - not the costumed variety. 

So, this year, everyone had their costume and was good for go.  Or so I thought.  Scooby's costume was too small.  Don't even get me started on this.  For real.  You know I like a good ramble so we will just forge ahead.  So, I spent close to two hours trying to find a viable option.  He wanted to be Prince of Persia.  That was so last - never.  For real.  Did anyone see a Prince of Persia costume last year?  No!  And you know what?  You aren't going to see one this year!  And I KNOW that the only reason he wanted to be Prince of Persia is because he wanted a dagger.  And he told me that wasn't the reason but when I asked Hubs if we could put the outfit together from real clothes and not have a dagger, Scooby was far less interested in the garb of middle eastern men as dramatized by Hollywood.  So, option 2 was Bumblebee from Transformers.  I have to clarify that because when I went into the Halloween store to ask for an adult Bumblebee costume, she took me to bee costumes.  Bumblebee is the aforementioned too small costume.  So Hubs and I are texting a storm on the textplus free texting app for iphones (6 out of 10 Jenny's jewels.  It's free, but you get what you pay for.  That dang app crashes all the time), going back and forth with suggestions and shoot downs.  I end up at Target and since costumes are 30% off and Scooby loves Star Wars, he gets a pretty awesome Jango Fett costume.  And, at that price, he will thoroughly enjoy the costume again next year.  The helmet of which he kept taking off and dropping.  This decreases it's ability to last through to next year.  Grrrrrrr....  Big Stuff wanted to be Spider Man.  But we already had a Batman so he had to trade out one hero for another.  At times that was fine and one minute later he wanted to be Spiderman again.  Princess was a Peacock princess.  Because that is what you get to be when your mom finds a beautiful, unique costume at TJ Maxx and it's 75% off.  And Peanut was a ballerina because - and this is a tip just for you, my loyal readers, if you go into a consignment store that specializes in children's clothing (read: Once Upon a Child) and go over to the dance stuff, you can find some KILLER recital outfits for like 6-7 bucks and make little girls very very very happy.   Which I have done for 2 years in a row now.  Princess had a headband that came with her costume.  I made a headband for Peanut.  Princess got all sad and said that Peanut was going to be more beautifuller than her.  Next year, I'm dressing them both up in brown paper bags that are identical.  At least then their bitching would make some sort of sense to me.  Oy.  They both looked beautiful.  More beautifuller than any other girls, I'll tell you that much.  So after all the face painting and the pinning and the complaining, we get to the zoo.  I get my scrapbook picture snapped and then I'm happy for them to do their thing.  We brought our own bags - as requested by our awesome zoo who is making every effort to be more green - or at least appear to be making the effort to.  Our first treat station was fairly close by.  It was dum dums.  Kind of blah.  But whatever.  We have to walk a little while before finally landing on the next station.  I'm not going to walk you through the whole gig so let me just boil it down to this...

L.A.M.E.  HallZooWeen was a total bummer this year.  There were very few treat stations.  The zoo tried to cover this up by posting people with animals around so that the kids forgot that there should have been a station right about there.  Oh.  If I touch this snake, I will be distracted by the fact that there is no candy!  But I am not so easily fooled.  Oh no.  Not I.  There were no cookies this year.  And the biggest let down of all... no UDF ice cream.  It was so disappointing that Hubs and I didn't even have the heart to do the usual taxation that we usually do.  It's the fee they have to pay for us to traipse along trying to get "just turned head" or "finger up a nose" pictures.  But to take a piece apiece was going to leave them about a piece.  Not cool. 

And here's the kicker.  I feel like a rhino butt complaining.  I know that the zoo owes us nothing and this is totally icing on the cake.  We have a killer zoo.  World renowned, even.  We are members but we don't have to pay for that as my mom foots the bill as a gift to our family.  I think it is cool to have perks as members... but this is open to the community and that's cool.  The zoo doesn't owe me anything.   But our zoo also charges a pretty healthy admission.  They get sponsors for many of the booths and the candy.  They get a lot more foot traffic for doing this event.  United Dairy Farmers is a local ice cream/convenience store.  What happened?  I hate sounding entitled.  It's something God is really opening my eyes to lately.  But where is the line?  This is something that is one of our (few) annual traditions.  Our kids get super excited to go.  The zoo has been reducing their A-game slowly but there was a significant drop between last year and this year.  If I had known that it wasn't going to be great, I would have preferred to have had the option to go invest all the time and energy in something else.  So, maybe that's the line.  I don't feel like the zoo owed me a wow HallZooWeen.  I'm disappointed that I didn't get it, but I don't think they owed it to me.  What I do think they owed me was a little forewarning.  It's kind of like when Miley and Brittney and Christina all decided that they wanted to grow up and for them that meant "trashy".  They have every right to grow up and change their look and change their songs.  I don't fault them that.  Although, as far as Miley is concerned, I do fault Billy Ray.  But not really specifically about what she was doing.  More just for breathing and stuff...  What I fault them is that they drew every last dime out of impressionable kids.  They designed clothes for some of them and they made songs for them and started out as friends of the Mouse House.  They reined all these girls in and looked all cute and perky and then just turned around and started singing about inappropriate for girls to listen to things and wearing inappropriate for anyone other than your betrothed to see you in clothing.  I just feel like there should have been like a PSA or a press conference or a billboard that let parents know that a new Brittney was about to emerge and the kids should avert their eyes.  Or that we all should because, good gravy, that was a train wreck.  So.  I guess in closing, I would have liked for the zoo to have advertised it's lameness or issue an apology for failing to get sponsorship so that I could lay the blame where it's due. I'm happy to bitch at many a party - believe it. 

My rating for the 2010 HallZooWeen is 3 out 10 Jenny's jewels.  My rating for United Dairy Farmers for bailing altogether is 0 out of 10 Jenny's jewels.  Great UDF. You just scored my first 0.  Way to go. 

Of course, I don't really feel like I'm offering you a valued service today.  If it had been 3 weekends ago, this maybe could have been super handy to all 10 of you who read me locally.  But today was the last day so I'm not saving you from much of anything.  But if any of you know someone at the zoo or at UDF and want to send them a link to this post - well, I don't think there would be much wrong with that at all...

I'm out.  I have to go forage around the house for a treat.