The Desert Rejoices...

'Tis true my friends, there is joy even in the dry and aird desert southwest!

The Church of The Seven Day Recreationalists was pleased, nay thrilled to entertain none other than Silvertounge Friday evening along with novice recreators Mom and Dad in a peaceful and fun repast of pork! Alas High Priestess of the faith, Princess M was not in attendance but was within our hearts and so present in spirit. We miss you sister...

No blood was spilled despite the presence of my father at an entire table of Obama fans. In truth the subject was only broached once and only briefly at that. We were having too much fun to be concerned with tiny matters such as politics! Huzzah!

Saturday, Co-Founder and High Priestess TLL and myself were lured away from the safety of the castle to a lovely pub call Papago Brewery in Scottsdale for a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Holy Beverage from Holland, Chimay on the shores of these United States. Chimay has been produced by Trappist Monks in Holland for the past 146 years and trust me, they know what they're doing.

An afternoon of wonderful beverage, trivia games and the finest of company made for a Saturday that the CSDR is well pleased to note for future reminiscences.

Sunday was a banner day in the desert, as session two of the 2008-2009 Picnic Season was held with the added joy of the company of Our Father and Silvertounge. A lovely afternoon, soft breeze, quiet park, fine food, and company to boot! We had a grand time. Alas Our Father was forced to return to his own Abbey but Silvertounge remained and the three of us spent the remainder of the afternoon proving what terrible pool players we all are! We are bad, but it was a lot of fun, and THAT is after all the point!

All Souls Day...

..Was an anti-climax. We received even fewer trick-or-treaters than last year. "Hang on Michael," you say "didn't you say you only got one last year?"

Well, yes I did so less than one is, you guessed it, a big goose egg! Not a single one. I swear, it was down right depressing.

TLL did not carve any scary vegitation this year, but we did have all of our luminaria out and some creepy lighting. These oddly glowing designs are cut out of black paper sacks that TLL found somewhere and then an orange paper sack is inside to act as a light diffusser. They came out really cool, we made a whole mess of them. TLL did the spider and the cat, the tree is mine. The spider is my favorite one though.

But alas, no little gobblins came to be frightened. (Sniff)

The cats did end up with costumes though (evil snicker) and were oh so thrilled to be dressed up for the occation! Well, ok perhaps they were a bit put out. Enzo looks like he's going to kill the first person to get too close to him! Neither of them liked the hat much, but the wings were tolerated alright. At one point Nicholas was just wandering around in them and every step he'd take they would sort of flap making us both think of the Monkey Bats in The Wizard of Oz. Nicholas would walk by and both of us would start humming that music...

Enzo was dealing with his wings just fine for a while and was even up and running about.

The HAT however was the last straw for the little pudgy boy! Feeling his dignity maligned he chose to show us his best impersonation of Satan's cat...

Also Enzo was, while wearing the wings, doing the math to jump into the tube on their cat tree. Both of us were secretly hoping he would actually attempt this since the tube and Enzo are roughly the same size and the wings added about 7 inches on each side! It would have been a good laugh, but unfortunately Enzo is very good at math and he figured he would never fit and stalked off to pout.

Nicholas was, if it were at all possible, even less impressed with the hat than Enzo was, fixing the camera with a look that could kill at 20 paces. I must have laughed for 10 minutes! And that is something that Nicholas definately does not like, being laughed at! But what else could I do, I ask you.

As I said, Nick tolerated the wings a bit better than Enzo did. You see him here up and moving about, not lying on his belly like you tied a 50 pound weight to him! But you can see from that face that he is far from pleased. (Que maniacal laughter...)

(Oh, in that last picture, behind Nicholas is "The Tube", and yes that is the hole that Enzo was performing his calculations on entering. He regularly gets stuck in this hole due to his very round belly, the wings would have just added to the comedy. Shame he wised up to it.)

So, the CSDR sat about, Frankenstien head at the ready, and never gave out a single tidbit of candy. Since I am still on these stupid antibiotics I could not partake of the holy beverage, so we watched movies and drank juice on All Hallows Eve! Sigh. These pictures however attest to the fact that we still had a laugh or two. (Or maybe three) We hope yours was fun as well.