Nick’s wife, Lindsay, was born around (on?) Halloween, so they often throw a combination birthday/Halloween party dubbed “Birthoween.” This year saw Birthoween’s revival, after a couple years’ dormancy.

When Nick & Lindsay throw Birthoween, they go all-out. Cauldron of (spiked) punch, cobwebs and orange lights everywhere, blacklight strobe light and fog machine (they had to disable the smoke detector partway through the party), bathroom with blood spots and bloody footprints. The food spread was also large and varied: bat (chicken) wings, Exorcist (split pea) soup, Witch’s finger cookies (dyed green with a red-dyed almond slice for a fingernail), worms (gelatin set in straws and then squeezed out)… A bunch of alcohol (of course), the most salient to me being Kraken rum. Nick was dressed as The Joker (purple suit and all); Lindsay was (I imagine suffering horribly as) Catwoman, in a whole-body latex suit.

Nate and I carpooled up. We historically do as little as possible for Halloween; this year Nate taped a “404: This costume could not be found. Please try again later” sign to his chest. I was sporting a Pokéball and 10,000 pokébucks, posing as a pokémon trainer hanging out on Route 1 between Nuvema and Accumula towns. (I might have overdone the amount of money I’d have as a beginning trainer.) Note that I was not attending as Ash (i.e. one of the main characters)–I was portraying one of the trainers that Ash would run into and do battle with.

For some reason (favoritism!), Nate’s costume passed muster while mine did not. I was then provided a costume–a spade from the Queen’s army of Alice in Wonderland. So I portrayed a spade soldier who also battled Pokémon.

Brian arrived as a “budget ninja,” wearing all-black clothing and wrapping a black scarf around his head. He later wrapped the scarf around his neck and attached a glittery spider (one of a bunch of little things that Nick and Lindsay had scattered around), claiming he was an “arachnomancer.” Kevin was wearing a monkey hat and sporting a monkey tail beard, which he promptly shaved off the next morning.

I didn’t take a shot of Kevin, but I did take one trying to illustrate how a budget ninja drinks: through a straw that somehow winds from below the head wrapping (i.e. about neck level) into his mouth. (Photo courtesy of my iPod’s crappy camera.)

Later in the evening Jeremy (who came as some sort of beastmaster) decided that his claw-glove (think something like Nightmare from Soul Calibur) wasn’t doing much for him, so he passed that off on me… making me a spade soldier with a demonic hand that battled Pokémon.

Greg showed up without a costume, and was given a lab coat and sombrero–turning him into Señor Doctor.

And I don’t know if I have the DC reboot to thank or not, but good Lord Wonder Woman.

…

It was an entertaining party, but a blow-by-blow probably isn’t worth the time (mine or yours). Perhaps my favorite invention of the evening (by Neil, as usual) was this trap self-inflating (!) whoopee cushion:

Oh, and I demonstrated my value as a friend to Brian by refusing to draw a cock and balls on his face with a sharpie when he was passed out (from tiredness, in all seriousness) next to me. Had people been demanding a funny moustache… that might have been a different story.