Hmm.

Here’s my plan for Halloween this year:  my son is insanely excited about the holiday, so I’m dressing up too, for the first time since, I think, 1999.  Halloween used to be my favorite holiday.  It has not been, for many years, but the boy’s enthusiasm has been infectious and there seems to finally be a backlash happening against the onslaught of obnoxious “sexy XXX” costumes that have been plaguing the holiday for the last too many years.

The idea is this:  Walk around with the boy and my wife a bit, and then stay outside my own house to pass out candy.  We have two large and excitable dogs, so past practice has been to keep the candy outside so that we don’t have lots of doorbell-ringing and door-opening and there’s no chance of one of the animals getting past us and getting someone hurt.  We generally have a bowl full of the traditional stuff and I buy a dozen or so actual candy bars for kids with exceptionally good costumes.

Things I still need:  black sweat pants (I’m sure I have a pair, I just need to find them), black shoes (don’t even need to find those), zipties.  You can’t see it, but the second set of chains-n-hooks is being worn as a belt– I’m going to ziptie them together so that I don’t have to try and tie plastic chains.  The first set is actually threaded through the sleeves of the outer robe so that they dangle by my hands, which I think is a pretty neat trick.

Unfortunately, I probably need a new mask, too.  While I like the idea of the mirror mask, and it’s suitably creepy, I’m actually still kind of having a panic attack from trying to breathe in the thing and while I’m planning to wear contact lenses while I’ve got it on, visibility is still a real problem.  Plus, if you look closely at the picture, you can still see big chunks of my neck and what I’ll try to pretend aren’t extra chins, and that’s not the look I’m going for.  I found a decent old man mask at Target that was basically mask for the upper half of the face and a lot of beard for the lower half, and I feel like that ought to do the job just as well, or I could always go with some sort of monster look.  There’s no way I make it two hours in the mirrored one, cool as it looks.