Three red floating fireworks

[lathany]

I love this season - Halloween, Guy Fawkes, Christmas/Yule/insert preferred celebration - it's great.

• Kew Gardens - Being briefly childless, we headed off to Kew at the start of half-term (despite being very busy at work, I managed to beg a day's leave) doing our usual walk and cake thing. As always for the autumn half-term, this was the last week that the Pavilion was open, so we made the most of it and had our cake there. We also managed the tree-top walkway and Palm House. We had lovely weather as well - a sunny sky, even if it made for a colder day.
• Halloween - I have an extremely tacky candle holder; it's a ceramic skeleton with a hat that you can stick a tea light into. Every Halloween since we moved (OK, all three of them) I've stuck it out on the doorstep. We summoned various trick or treaters that way and dished out sweets to them.
• number9dream - Having quite enjoyed Cloud Atlas I tried a second book by David Mitchell. Sadly, I found it disappointing. No so much the main story, but the ending which I felt ruined it. Also I was left with the impression that Mitchell was more interested in doing clever things with the wording and structure than he was in telling a story, and that's not the way round that I like in my fiction.
• The Da Vinci Code (the film) - We finally saw this on DVD and... it wasn't as bad as we had feared. It stuck more faithfully to the book than I've seen in a film in a long while. Plus it had Ian McKellen. He was great, despite the lack of hobbits.
• Yule/Christmas/Whatever - I celebrate a real mix of the various things the late December brings. On the one hand, I love advent and already have a rather beautiful calendar and candle. On the other hand, I enjoy decorating the tree and generally doing the feasting thing. As a step in that direction I moved on to stage two of the cake - actually baking it (stage one was cooking all the fruit in whiskey and then fridging it for a week). I will leave the tree until December however, despite Ryan's growing efforts to bring the event forward (he's been told he'll see his grandparents for Christmas, so he reckons the process needs speeding up).
• Fireworks - Last night nine of us headed out to Kempton Park for the annual firework display. Apart from ourselves and the duo, we took along a friend of Bea's and four friends of our own (chrestomancy, TheHattedOne, huggyrei and telpher) which Bea pointed out meant we had an unfair helping of friends compared to her (although she counted huggyrei and half our friend and half hers). It was an excuse for me to bring out glow sticks (which turned out to be four red, two yellow, two pink and two blue from an advertised eight colours, although "boxes vary in proportions"). The display started about half an hour after the advertised time, but was well worth waiting for. My particular favourite was three glowing red balls which floated away and prompted chrestomancy to reminisce about the burning balloon from Danny The Champion Of The World and a comment that it was Danny's father's dangerous attitude as a parent that made him so appealing. We then returned home for drinks, cookies (from huggyrei and mince pies, plus chat which mostly focussed on past society games (sadly I couldn't find the picture of telpher as Queen Victoria for huggyrei, but I aim to keep looking). All in all, a wonderful evening.

Comments

[mrlloyd.livejournal.com]

I can't remember a single camera at any Inferno session although I'm sure someone must have brought one once. Odd really, these days you assume that any room of 50 students will contain 30-60? cameras cunningly concealed in assorted digital devices.

[cuthbertcross.livejournal.com]

I just remember with awe the phenomenal Victoria pose he managed to adopt.

Very regal. *grin*