This is Halloween!

"Boys and girls of every age,
Would you like to see something strange?
Come with us and you will see,
This, our town of Halloween!"

--The Nightmare Before Christmas

It was a pretty mellow Halloween around the y&g household today. No costume for the J-Man (at almost 2, he's much too contrary for that this year...we'll wait til next year) and no candy to pass out. Instead, we played copycat with Heideho and passed out little tubs of Play-Doh for the kiddies (I won't talk about how many "adult kiddies" came around without costumes begging for treats...). Overall, the Play-Doh was well received and a fun idea. It was only about $5 more than we usually spend on candy for the 100+ Trick-or-Treaters who knock on our door and now we have no candy in the house! (Which is a good thing, we're happy about that.)
I quickly carved our pumpkin from Lostview Farm and roasted the seeds while Jackson snoozed this afternoon. Dan always gets to choose the Halloween meal since it's his Birthday Eve too, so we had a mish-mash of (vegetarian) Tater Tot Hotdish* (what can I say? we do live in Minnesota), tofu hot dogs + real, all-beef, grass-fed hot dogs (for the boys) and salad. Jackson ate a total of 3/4 of a hot dog bun, handfuls upon handfuls of Goldfish crackers and some ketchup. Yep. He's definitely a toddler.

I just uploaded some new stash photos to Ravelry so I'll share them here too. The charcoal gray yarn is for Dan's birthday sweater vest (obviously not to be completed for his birthday, since that's tomorrow) and he picked it out. It'll be one of those leave-at-the-office-for-chilly-days kind of sweaters, so it's a good color choice. It will go with everything. I'm thinking of the Camel Classic Vest from Men in Knits, but it will ultimately be up to the Birthday Boy to decide.
The purple** yarn is for me just because I loved it. Don't you hate that? No project in mind, it's not going to be socks so there goes that automatic quantity solution, but you just HAVE to have some? Maybe a hat...
The Cascade 220 is yarn that my sister-in-law, Christa, purchased for me to knit Christmas stockings for her family. It really started out as just a stocking for my nephew Tommy, but Mom & Dad need stockings too, right? Tommy's will definitely be done for this year's Christmas, we'll see about the other two. I want to make sure that Dan's sweater vest is finished before it gets too chilly!
In actual knitting news, I've been plugging along on the Organic Alpaca Cardi and have just about half of one sleeve left. "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..."

I've also been tossing a sock or two for Jackson into the knitting mix whenever I can lately. I was going to buy him some Smart Wool socks from REI for this winter, but they were $17 for two pair. Yikes! Leftover sock wool, here I come! The only thing I'm worried about is that they're so slippery on wood floors. Does anyone have a solution for this? Puffy paint on the bottom?

Flying Mum: I wish I could share a fancy-pants recipe for that butternut squash risotto from last weekend, but it's just a box mix from Lundberg's. It's fantastic though! It's also currently the only food that Jackson will eat besides cottage cheese, Goldfish, hot dog buns and ketchup...

With that, I'll end the babbling on Halloween night. The Birthday Boy is already snoozing on the couch next to me and I haven't even made the birthday brownies yet!
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*My Tater Tot Hotdish consisted of two packages of Boca fake ground beef crumbles, one can of diced tomatoes with basil + garlic, lots of shredded Monterey Jack cheese and a bag of frozen tater tots on top. YUM.

**I swear it's purple. The camera lighting lightened the color quite a bit.