Halloween and Hurricane Sandy

Happy Halloween, everyone!

We have had a very interesting week so far here in Boston, to say the least.

On Saturday, we celebrated Halloween with the LGOs.

Vampires!

We went the historic route this year- Amelia Earhart and Abe Lincoln.

Lobsters in pots!

A hunter and a deer

The Hamburglar and Sexy Grimace.  They handed out real McDonalds hamburgers!

Captain America got into a battle.

We went to 4 different houses as part of a "Liqu or Treat" and ended at our friend's Greg and Tiffany's house. They had their house decked out in Halloween decorations, a special dance room with a strobe light and fog machine, and tons of amazing food and drinks. They even drove out of Boston that day and picked up a huge thing of ChickFila nuggets for the party! (If you followed the ChickFila drama from this summer, you know the Boston Mayor banned ChickFila from opening any stores here....)  The party was a big success until the neighbors called the cops with a noise complaint and we all got kicked out. I'm 25 years old and have never been to a party that was busted by the cops until now. I found it pretty humorous. Especially considering the party was full of people in their twenties and thirties, and most of them are MIT students. Not exactly the type of crowd you would think has parties broken up by the cops.

On Sunday we relaxed and prepared for Hurricane Sandy, who was scheduled to arrive Monday morning.

I carved a pumpkin!

Chuck and my pumpkin before he took it to the hallway. It was attracting gnats. :(

I also made the baked ziti I talked about in my last post. (It was so good.) Sunday night, we learned that MIT was closing on Monday, just like the rest of Boston and most parts of New England. We were very excited to have a surprise 3 day weekend but also kind of nervous about the oncoming storm.

Luckily, Monday came and went with just some high winds here and there and nonstop rain. We never lost power or anything. We watched the news a lot though.

Around 2 o'clock, boredom set in and I decided to make popcorn balls- a tradition for the Annual Hagan Halloween Party my parents host every year.

Want to make them? They're super easy! (Unless you burn the caramel because you're not paying attention and then have to spend 15 minutes cleaning up the mess you made and unwrap 28 more caramels to try again... What? That didn't happen to me! Or maybe it did. I guess I can add this to my list.)

Recipe:
28 caramels
2 tblsp. water
popcorn (I used about 1.5 bags of popped popcorn)

Melt the caramels in a pot with water on low heat. Pop popcorn. Pour melted caramel over popcorn and mix. With wet hands (so the caramel doesn't stick to your hands), form the popcorn balls and place on a baking sheet or wax paper. The end.

 Since we recently got Showtime so we can keep up on Dexter, we also now have Showtime On Demand. I found that the entire 1st season of Homeland is on there, and a lot of people have told me Homeland is an amazing show, most recently my best friend Lauren. We decided to watch the first episode and, well... that was the end of our day. Thanks to Hurricane Sandy, we were able to watch more than half of the first season of Homeland in one day.

We were very lucky to not get hit hard by the hurricane. Thank you to all of you who were texting and facebooking me and Chuck to make sure we were ok. We are more than ok and now just feel very sad for all of the people affected by it, especially those whose homes were flooded or burnt down, whose cars were flooded, or who were injured or lost someone they love. I can't even watch the news coverage of all the destruction without crying. Mother Nature sure can be a beast.