Halloween

So as you know in a previous post, we got our pumpkins from the farmer's market a couple weeks ago. But due to the craziness of graduate school, I hadn't had the chance to carve them yet. We finally sat down Saturday night in the living room and did it while watching The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (my Netflix choice). I carved the face of a schnauzer (found the template online and it looks similar to Penne) on my pumpkin and Brian made his own template of Big Red to carve in his pumpkin. I think that both of them look really great!

Also a couple weeks ago, I made brownies and used some cookie cutters (thanks Vickie, Staci & Barb) to cut out ghosts and pumpkins. Then I put them on my cake plate that has the candy corn ribbon. On Saturday, I also made cupcakes (thanks to Mom, Vickie, Staci & Barb for the cupcake liners) and used orange colored frosting to make them more festive. The orange isn't as bright as I had hoped, but for my first time coloring frosting it came out pretty well. Again these went on my cake plate for display!

Sunday was Halloween and we had bought two big bags of candy in preparation for all of the trick or treaters. We thought that we would have a lot of kids because there are 5 or 6 apartment complexes on this road alone. But we only had 27 kids stop by and we have a lot of candy leftover (although Brian doesn't mind that at all). Penne did pretty good with people coming to the door, at first she was barking at them. But as the night went on she got less and less excited about the visitors. So she is doing pretty good.

BBQ Festival

Again sorry for the late postings, I have been super busy studying for tests these past couple of weeks and just now have had the chance to relax. So keep a look out for some more postings. On October 23, Brian and I decided to go to the BBQ Festival in Lexington, NC. For some reason, this weekend was packed full of festivals to choose from. There was the BalloonFest in Statesville, NC and a Wine Tasting Festival here in Greensboro. But we both decided that the BBQ Festival had the most that we wanted to do plus we were craving some pulled pork sandwiches.

We decided to try and get to the festival early because there was a steel drum band we wanted to see and to try and avoid some of the crowds. So we parked at Childress Vineyards and took a trolley to downtown Lexington. On the trolley, the tour guide told us that they had been preparing the sandwiches since Thursday and that they were expecting 150,000 people to attend. At first it was nice not having huge crowds because we were able to walk around with ease, but it soon filled up quick.

First, we saw the sand sculpture. Every year they carve a sand sculpture, usually of pigs but it has a different theme each time. It was really cool! Then we found the steel drum band that we wanted to see. It wasn't quite what we were expecting, but it was still good. Next we went to the antique car show and there was some really nice cars there. I think my parents would have really liked them. The next thing we wanted to see was the BMX stunt show, so we looked through some more booths before taking a seat in the stands. The show was good and my favorite was the flat rider. He does stunts on the ground by using momentum to keep his bike going. I thought that was really impressive. I also got some really cool shots of the stunts in the air (see above).

There was definitely a lot more booths to go through and then we decided to get lunch at one of the BBQ stands. We got pulled pork sandwiches, pig's tails (curly fries) and drinks. We sat on the grass in front of a church and ate our lunch. We actually hated the sandwiches, which was really disappointing. The onions on them were nasty and the buns were soggy. The only thing that saved us was the fries. From there, we went to the lumberjack competition where they compete in different events with saws and axes. It was really interesting, until this very tall guy suddenly appeared and gradually stood in front of us which blocked our view. It was quite frustrating since he probably could see just fine due to his height, plus he knew he was doing it on purpose. So we just decided to leave.

We tried to see the pig races, but it was too crowded. Then we saw the corvette show, but since we lived in Bowling Green for so long there wasn't any corvette there that really impressed us. Basically, the festival was good at the beginning but gradually got worse. However, we are really happy that we went to experience it.