On Halloween, it's a wrap

Happy Halloween!

If you've been tuning in here at all this week, you will have noticed my Halloweeny posts, featuring everything from scary penguins to eyeball coctails (not cocktails - long story... By the way, I can reveal that Mark solved "The Mystery of the Missing K" in yesterday's post, in case you missed it...). Did you also notice that some of the posts had hidden "Easter eggs" (because, nothing is as appropriate to give Easter eggs for Halloween...) in them? A few of the images (but not all) had Halloween-themed links. You'll have to go back and see for yourself if you're curious (I'm sneaksy that way).

Anyway, this is not only Halloween, it is also the end of the 31 day long blog marathon that is NaBloWriMo. I have proudly accomplished my target, of posting every day, even if some of the posts were sorry excuses to say the least. Hope you all enjoyed it, because I know I did (even if I was overly stressed at times - this largely had to do with other things than blogging, though...).

I will not continue my everyday schedule here - but don't be too surprised if a post or two pops up in November too. Once the thesis is done, I expect to return to a more regular schedule (whatever that is) come December (more about that later). I have a few weeks left of suffering (and suffering it is), before I have a few days to recover before Christmas mania sets in at work. And then there is the glorious Christmas vacation which this year probably will involve moving for me...

You see, another big thing coming up. I suppose it is official now (I've signed the contract and everything, plus a certain Watery Tart insisted on sharing it with her closest 261 friends *snort*) - I'm going to JAPAN in January. For the next six months I'll be an intern at the Norwegian Embassy in Tokyo. I am very excited (and somewhat terrified) about this, but if my previous experiences in Japan are anything to judge by, I should have a glorious time.

So there. I survived October. If I also survive November and December, chances are this blog will report from the life of a gajin come 2011...

On Packman

On fangs

On birds (Hitchcock edition)

On coctails

On giraffoween

On penguins

And yes, before you ask; this post is dedicated to my good friend Stacy ;)

On Halloween, sort of

Halloween is coming up. So what? I'm Norwegian, we don't really do Halloween here. Well, we have started to celebrate it the last few years, but when I was a kid, there was no such thing as trick or treat. The only I knew about Halloween, I got from American movies and the annual Halloween card sent to me from my American relatives.

Halloween is a commercial wet dream, though, so the retail business have done a considerable job of adopting it the last few years. We now have kids running from door to door (though nowhere near the amount they have in the US), we have Halloween parties, and the larger grocery stores even stock up on pumpkins for carving (a very un-Norwegian vegetable).

Personally, I like the idea of Halloween even if I think that the commercial aspect of it (especially here where we don't really have the tradition) is a bit silly. Though, it's not entirely true that we don't have the tradition - we do have the church holiday Allehelgensaften which originated (like Halloween, I believe) in the Catholic church, and somehow stuck as one of the minor celebrations in the Norwegian Lutheran church after Catholicism was abolished in the 16th century. Or something. My knowledge of the subject is limited, because even if this technically is a church celebration it isn't one of the big ones (and I'm not much of a church-person).

Anyway. Halloween is here to stay, apparently, and I think that in the future I'd like to celebrate it more. Dress-up, scary movies, pumpkin carving (and -cupcakes, or something pumkinish pastryish), lanterns, decorations - I'm all for it. Next year. This year, I probably won't even remember to celebrate my own birthday (which is on Allehelgensdag, the day after Halloween)... Instead, I intend to "celebrate" Halloween here on the blog. For the last week of NaBloWriMo (and probably the last week of everyday/regular blogging for me for a while), then, there will be a Halloween themed post up. Most of them will be just pictures (though funny pics, if I say so myself), some of them might contain more. We shall see...

On Halloween season

My writer’s group, the Burrow, has a website where we have specialized in drabbles. Drabbles are 100 word long (short) pieces of fiction, and we like to accompany them with appropriate pictures. We’ve had a good, long summer break, but now we’re back, celebrating the fact that Halloween season really is all of October. The drabble below, along with others, can be found at http://www.the-burrow.org/ this entire month. While you’re there, you might want to check out our archive as well, where some of our earlier projects can be found.

'Twas a dark, stormy night. Delete. Setting the mood for a story was harder than he remembered. It was as though he didn't have it in him anymore. Maybe he should give up horror stories entirely and write romance?
With the cessation of the typewriter's steady clicks, the door creaked open. A girl entered.
"Daddy?" A pair of puppy eyes stared at him.
"Yes, darling?"
"Read me a bedtime ftory?"
There was no resisting those puppy eyes she was squeezing in her hand.
"Of course," he said, reattaching his head.
"I promise it'll be a scary one."
She smiled happily.