All Hallows Eve

So comes October to its end.  It was a fantastic month, ushering in the long-awaited fall season at last.  Soon, winter will be upon us as well.
This has been a most eventful week, indeed.  I'll begin by airing my work-related grievances, so that I can conclude with all of the nice things.
I did not have enough swim lesson instructors for Tuesday/Thursday evenings when I made the schedule for the new swim session last week, ergo I ended up putting myself as one of the instructors, at least for the next 3 weeks until one of the high school swim team girls can take my place.  This inclusion of Tues/Thurs evening lessons has me in the pool about 14 hours/week now, with my Monday/Wednesday morning lessons and my 5 water fitness classes per week..  That is so much chlorine, my skin and my sanity are barely surviving.
When I brought this up today at our manager meeting, I mentioned how we need to hire some new employees who can teach in the evenings, because none of the 3 who were hired have evening availability.. how that happened is unknown to me, as I specifically asked for people of that description.  Karen, the Aquatics Director (i.e. my boss), felt that I was being too whiny and was not justified in my complaint, and, as usual, made it into a big "Ky is an incompetent idiot" scenario.  I am not entirely certain as to how I became the one to be her punching bag, especially since I have kissed more butt than a baboon during mating season.  I do my best to avoid giving her any fodder to use against me, but some people can make anyone feel small if they condescend with enough effort.  I just recognize that she needs to do it in order to feel better about herself.
Having said all of that, between working with Karen and being immersed in chlorine 5-6 days out of the week, I have all the incentive I need to graduate as soon as possible so that I do not have to keep living and working here in Pullman.  No more swimming pools, please.
Oh, I have to mention another fun tidbit.  At the end of our meeting today, she remarked that I need to buy skinnier jeans because my ass is too flat (to be clear, this is very insulting for gays).  I just bought these pants yesterday and they were the skinniest ones I could find in my size... I thought they looked really good.  Now I want to cry a little bit.

On a lighter note, I have gotten to spend a lot of time with my Danish babes this week.  Laura, Marie, Trine, Andrew, Andrew's friend Gabe, and I all carved pumpkins together on Wednesday.  It was the Danes' first time pumpkin carving.  I thought it would be nice to give them a lot of great Halloween memories so they don't return home having only seen all of the stupid, commercialized, slutty costumes all of the university students wear out in the 35˚ weather.  Can I just say how irritating that is to me, by the way? This is an ancient harvest festival, introducing the beginning of winter and recognizing a time when the spirit world and our world have the greatest instance of overlap.  Now it is about wearing lingerie and animal ears or guys dressing up in giant condom wrappers.  Someone should tell them that they don't really need to go to all of that effort to get laid.

Andrew & I carving our pumpkins in my dining room

The end result! Mine is the evil one on the left.  I'm a big believer in keeping Halloween scary, but I think Andrew's is adorable.  Mine can scare the spirits away so that his can keep on smiling.

I seem to be on a spree of learning to make new things.  I baked pumpkin bread again tonight, this time using my mom's recipe.  I won't share the details this time, because I think that her sharing it with me now constitutes it as a family recipe.   The final product still doesn't look like hers.  I baked them for an hour, the outsides got kind of crunchy, and my testers came out clean, but the inside just looked.. not quite done.  Very moist in comparison to the last batch, which is what I was going for.  Well, I've had a slice and it tasted fantastic, so if I get food poisoning, we'll know the truth.
The other new thing I made this weekend was eggs benedict.  It is my favorite breakfast food, but rather arduous to make oneself.  They ended up being especially scrumptious, however, so Andrew and I were very pleased.  We also used SPAM instead of ham, which was really an added bonus.

The eggs benedict

Andrew enjoying his extravagant breakfast

Yesterday evening I assembled about half of the aquatic center staff, as well as Andrew & the Danes, and we all went to Haunted Palouse together.  Palouse is a precious little town about 20 minutes from Pullman.  Every October, the entire town is transformed into a sort of Halloween Town - everyone is dressed in scary outfits and they have two terrifying haunted houses, fortune tellers, and a spooky hayride.  Last year it was the most fun time I could've had, so I was a huge advocate to get everyone together for it this year.  One of our co-workers, Natalie, lives out in Palouse, so we met up at her house first.  She had prepared pumpkin and apple pies, as well as hot spiced cider for us all.  Her little home was the epitome of hyggeligt.  The warm colors, the cozy atmosphere, the pies & cider, the comfy chairs, etc.  It was just delightful.

From Natalie's, we embarked into Haunted Palouse.  It wasn't quite as thrilling as it was for me last year, but I attribute that to the fact that it was the last day they were putting it on and they may have been tired or short on volunteers.  All the same, I think we were all adequately frightened.  Marie wouldn't unbury her face from my back while we trudged through the haunted houses.  I kept saying, "Marie, you have to look! You have to look!"

"No! I'm too scared!!" she screamed.  I think this made it a memorable Halloween for the girls to take back to Denmark, so I'm happy for that.

Andrew is in Seattle now, interviewing with some major accounting firms, and will likely find out whether or not he has a job this week.  How exciting! Let's send him positive feelings for his future.

Happy Halloween everyone.  Welcome, Winter.