More Creativity than Candy on Halloween '06

I kept my promise to my kids that I'll change their Halloween costumes this year. They've been fairy princesses for the past 3 years. Same dress, same wings.

For this year's treck to Ayala Alabang Village's traditional Halloween treat, my kids went to Toy Kingdom for new costumes to transform them into All Hallow's Eve vixens. Mira went as a pretty wizardress. Sachi, well, a princess with a crinoline collar and faux earrings. Others went out of their way to come up with more unique costumes. Check out the Dad who came as an M&M. His entire family came as a pack of M&Ms. I saw a Mom and her daughters come in Dalmatian-spotted shirts as a tribute to the doggy Disney movie. Another guy was dressed as the traditional Pinoy dead person: barong, head tied with a white bandana, pale face and cotton-balls-in-nose. My friend Pia P. brought her kids, nephews and nieces to Divisoria to buy cloth. Then went to a hard-to-find dressmaker in Baclaran to have a furry feline jumpsuit , bunny suit, and K-zone character costume made.

Dog lovers gave their furry friends a chance to enjoy the revelry in the frontlines. Here's Pumpkin the Pug (featured below) as Dracula. We met Happy the Poodle in carnival togs, terriers with warlock hairdos and another pug dressed as Batdog.

Noticeable this year was that the candies were fewer and some residents made kids think before getting their jaw breakers. Amidst the fiendish pumpkins, Freddy Kruger slashers, skeletons, and hodgepodge of Disney characters one resident was good enough to inject Christian spirit amidst the ghoulish displays. Kids listened to his talk on Jesus and the significance of his knot trick in Christian life (sorry, sir, didn't get to catch the entire spiel!). Then they got a goody bag with a Christian Ministry pamphlet.

I loved how one neighbor in Country Club Drive put up a huge, colorful taurpaulin display of marine and wildlife creatures on her lawn. She was with the Children's Environmental Awareness and Action Foundation , and made the kids' visit a fun and educational affair. Kids had a great time guessing what the different creatures were. My daughter thought the colored tarps were the giveaways, so I was surprised when she brought a stingray painting into the car! On the ghoulish side, another resident transformed her courtyard into a full-scale graveyard complete with gravemarkers with cute names, casket, cadaver and eerie smoke.

Kudos to those who gave cotton candy and dirty ice cream in place of the usual Halloween sweets. That's injecting Filipino spirit into this Western tradition.

After orbiting the neighborhood for 2.5 hours we hied off home to watch "Ghost Whisperers" series on DVD, complete with homemade nachos and cheese sauce. My husband and kids stayed awake with suspense til 2 am. I was dead tired with a headache and promptly fell asleep.

I think it was the most fun and least expensive Halloween I've had. The greatest shocker of the night was finding out that there wasn't any water in the second floor bathrooms.

Want to share your Halloween experience? Post it here!

Some Bogs with Blogger on the Go

Ok. After the initial excitement with Blogger Beta, I'm now trying to transfer my m-blog entries to my main blog, I just found out that it's available only in the US. Patience, patience. When, when?!?

In the meantime I have temporary m-blog sites for this experiment. Hmmmm.

Blogger Beta's Sticky Proposition

I just moved Mom on Mobile to the new Blogger Beta, after seeing the irresistable "Move to Blogger Beta" icon and a tip-off from the Geekette. Blogger made sure that I didn't have to lift too many fingers to do it: simply register for a Google account, and they automatically transfer the entire content to the new platform. Well, that's service.

I find Blogger Beta's emphasis on doing mobile blogging highly, highly attractive. Look how I got to capture my daughter's sleepy moment during Typhoon Milenyo and my retreat moments in Makiling Conference Center using my new Sony Erricson K800i . Thanks to Blogger's savvy tie-up with Sony Erricson, it's so easy to regularly capture blog-worthy moments in true anytime-anywhere fashion. Now, Mom on Mobile can really live up to its name! More on the m-blogging journey later in another post. . .

I can now make labels for my entries too. What I don't like, though, is that they have to tie me up to a new e-mail address, which I frankly don't need. I'm having a bit of a hard time uploading my photos too. Well, Blogger Beta's saved by the photo blog function in the m-blogging apps.

Blogger caught me in time before I completely became enamored with Wordpress: I was quite happy with the way Wordpress elevated my Architelago e-learning blog and Architerra real estate blogs to pro-sheen status. It was soo cool and efficient to organize my blog entries by my own named category. Plus it's e-commerce-savvy to have free blog stats to track your traffic! However, I missed being able to program my own keywords (so I'll be searchable, of course!) in Wordpress (or maybe I haven't found out how to do it in the templates?) .

So the move is complete, and Mom on Mobile is on an exploration trip with Blogger Beta. Let's see how far we can go!

Postscripts: Remembering Milenyo

Ok, I haven't been posting for a long time. But aside from the usual excuse that I've been busy (and a good deal dizzy not only with work, but due to a medical condition), I've been having connection problems with my dial-up service.

Thanks to my handy, new Sony Ericsson K800i's 3.2 megapixel camera , I was able to record moments and the almost surreal experience of living through a Typhoon Milenyo's howling vengeance. Driving through strong winds, walking through the streets in search of drinking water, food, or candles, running from the sweltering heat by checking in at the nearby Eurotel, the only place with a vacancy on that stormy day--I almost felt like I was part of a reality tv show. Seeing age-old trees uprooted and so much vegetation, power lines, and billboards wrenched from the ground like they were threads made me feel even more puny in the face of nature's power. We had regular power only after 3 days, some for a week or longer. Internet and mobile lines were unstable for a time. I'm just having some trouble uploading my images from September 28 as I passed through BF Homes Pque and Ayala Alabang Villages. Will do so later.

The one shocking-humorous experience was finding out (rather naively?) that there were only 2 tv channels available in the motel, and they were x-rated. I promptly pulled the plug and told the kids that the tv was dead. So we watched only DVDs on the laptop for our entire stay there.