Thursday Night – Football practice. Finished pre-setting up for my daughter’s party. Carved a pumpin with my son. Mother-in-law flew into town.

Friday – Party food run and preparations all day. Saw Jackass 3D in the evening. More of the same. If you like the Jackass stuff, you’ll dig this. Fun more than funny, but we were laughing and smiling the whole time. Plus, they actually ripped off our “pissing in the wind” idea…kinda…we’ve been saying for years they need to do a bit called “pissing in the wind” and piss into a big fan blowing back at them. “Hi. I’m Johnny Knoxville and this is ‘Pissing In The Wind’” – that sort of thing. So that bit was worth it alone to know we think on the same level as the Jackass crew – or Bam, at least, as the case may be. Suggestion for Jackass 4? “When the shit hits the fan,” of course. We followed the movie with Steak and Shake – which I still enjoy but feel unsatisfied by. Like good-but-overrated-at-the-same-time. And our server was creepy in a “wear your skin” sort of way. We carved a bunch more pumpkins and I finally accepted that I just suck at carving pumpkins so I’d have to be creative with it in other ways. (more on this later*)

Saturday – Up bright and early for our Round 2 tournament game. We lost. Which sucks because that damn team seems to have our number as much as we have theirs. All regular season they only had four touchdowns scored against them in 8 games. We scored 2 of those in our 1-point loss. In this game we put up three touchdowns. We knew how to score against them like no one else (including a badass TD pass that’s kind of unprecedented at this age level – the crowd went nuts – it was awesome), but we can’t seem to figure out how to stop them from scoring. We were solidly in it until late in the fourth quarter when we tried to recapture that pass magic and threw and interception. The final score was 27-18. Turns out they lost 18-0 the next day in round three so that kinda felt good. Just makes me shudder at how tight the team that beat them must be this year. It was the team that knocked us out last year, for the record.

We spent the afternoon getting the garage, deck and backyard ready for the party…and we crushed it. We had decorations, lighting, props, fog, a menu that included things like human flesh, mucus & phlegm, werewolf balls and infectious diarrhea and even had real bugs to eat (a total hit) and lollipops with various critters like real scorpions in them, a fortune teller, sound effects, glowing rings hovering overhead, Michael Myers lurking in the woods behind the house – it was nuts how well it all came together. We had 15 kids show up (girls and boys, even) and they had a blast. Apparently it was the talk of the day at school on Monday.

I pulled out the old boots and hospital gown from the wrestling days, added some crazy powdered hair and face and a crown of barbed wire/thorns and looked pretty fucking cool…but as far as I know, no one took my picture. The usual. I’m behind the camera, never in front.

Sunday – Lazy sunday. Food and football. Watched the Steelers lose.

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*alternate pumpkin creativity included cutting a simple square, finding some nails and the light-up skull pendant my son bought at BooBuzz: