Would you like some cheese with that wine?

Sunday night marked our first social gathering of the school year not involving a birthday, holiday, or wedding. Our friends need to literally pry our bodies out of our house to remind us how FUN it is being social! We gathered with 2 other families and brought wine, cheese, appetizers, and a baked salmon. It was quite a feast! The 2 families each have daughters in 9th grade who are best friends, so everyone has a buddy to hang out with. The last picture of my friend Hilke was at my birthday party (April blog post), and as you can see since then she has had her beautiful baby girl Pomai. The park where we are having our picnic is the parks and trails project Alex and I volunteered a few Saturdays ago. It is a lovely spot to take evening walks, have picnics, and run or bike the dog!
Living in the tropics with no seasonal changes, people tend to exaggerate the holidays to compensate. Walking into Ace Hardware this month feels like walking into a Haunted House decorated for Halloween. At Christmas time, you should see the elaborate decorations all over town; some folks taking their trucks up to Mauna Kea and bringing pick up beds of snow back home. VERY strange to see a beach on one side of the street, and children making a snowman on the other. (The snowmen have an average lifespan of 30 minutes in Hawaii. But the snowWOMEN tend to have a slightly longer lifespan) I wanted to have a Halloween dance party this year. Friends dancing to Thriller and the Monster Mash. I wanted our front yard to be a graveyard. I wanted children and friends to walk through my music room door and see a mummy playing spooky tunes on the piano, and then walk into the living room to play Halloween games like bobbing for apples, or wearing a blind fold and sticking your hands in mysterious things like cold spaghetti and peeled grapes. I also wanted to have a recital a week before Halloween and have my students wear their costumes. But this month is just FLYING by already. I'm not prepared to do those things! So my goal is to be ready NEXT year! Where DOES the time go?!