Tag Archives: Halloween

The Trick of the Treat

For the first 20+ years of our married life we celebrated my husband’s Halloween birthday either by taking our sons out trick-or-treating or answering the door to hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood (or both). For the last decade or so, we’ve carefully avoided trick-or-treaters by planning dinner out and have learned to linger over our food and enjoy the mostly empty restaurants on Halloween evening.

This year, it seems we have been celebrating all month. We headed off to Disneyland earlier in October (see here), spent last weekend in Alabama with his family, and yesterday set off for an adventure on Catalina Island (about 26 miles offshore from southern CA). To make this treat less of a trick, this year Halloween fell on a Saturday. We’d talked about exploring Catalina for a while now…and when we learned that the boat ride over is free on your birthday, it seemed like the perfect solution to our Halloween/birthday celebration dilemma–we turned the trick into a treat!

We headed out from Long Beach and were accompanied by playful dolphins as we neared Avalon. They jumped and dove, surfing the wake of the boat. I wasn’t able to take any decent photos, but the view was majestic…and unforgettable! We arrived in the Avalon harbor to a beautiful, warm and sunny day making the blues brilliant and the whites crisp as you can see in this unedited photo.

After breakfast we climbed into a military hummer for a tour of the interior of the island. We maneuvered over rocky, dusty, steep unpaved roads as we explored the history and the topography of the island. We learned about the native plants and animals, the conservation efforts, and how they are dealing with the drought. And the views were breathtaking!

You can see San Clemente Island in the distance, almost seeming to float on the sea. The sky was so clear we could see for miles! We also took in the prickly pear as well as other native plants, and learned about the Catalina fox and the bald eagle–both which faced near extinction on the island and are now recovering. We also learned about the only non-native animal on the island, the buffalo, brought originally by a Hollywood movie maker at the turn of the century and then encouraged by the Wrigley’s who owned the island. In its native beauty, the island is spectacular, now mostly owned by a conservancy that protects and maintains its natural state.

Hot and sweaty from our time in the back country (it was an 85 degree day!), we treated ourselves to some ice cream and spent some time exploring the city of Avalon. The iconic building is the casino, but it isn’t a gambling hall, it is the home of a movie theater, a small museum, and we hear…a magnificent dance floor. We hoped to go inside, but alas, it closed quite early on a Saturday. We did explore the outside.

We spent some time watching the divers who enter and exit the water from behind the building. While I was watching them, I noticed a couple in what seemed to be brilliantly colored wetsuits (most wetsuits are black). As they swam up, I noticed that the Hulk and Aquaman (I think) were emerging from the sea…and was ready to snap a few shots as they headed for dry land. They were definitely diving in the Halloween spirit!

Further exploration led us to discover the local radio station, this small green building. We also talked to a woman who has resided on the island for 45 years and was eager to close her shop and accompany her grandchildren to the Halloween parade.

As we got ready to head back to Long Beach, we came across a friendly pelican who was more than willing to pose for photos. I took a number of shots and managed to snap this one as the pelican took flight.

As the sun began to set, we said good bye to Avalon and headed back to the mainland.

This adventure was quite a treat and a fun way to celebrate Geoff’s birthday. By the time we returned home, the trick-or-treaters were back home sorting their haul and we enjoyed a spectacular Halloween filled with wonder and play. Now the big question…how do we top this for next year?

Weekly Photo Challenge: Orange

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October is nearly over and the weather has finally cooled a bit, so I’m starting to feel the fall vibe in the air. And I’m noticing tones of orange in my photos.

Just yesterday when I took a calming after-work walk on the beach, I saw this guy on a very large tractor creating a big berm along the shore to protect the beach from the fall and winter tides.

And with the sun setting earlier (I know, next week will be crazy dark with the time change back to standard time…it will be dark before I get home from work!), I’m noticing the golden orangish glow of the sunset too.

Over the weekend I was in Alabama (celebrating my mother-in-law’s 89th birthday) and got to spend some time in the local mountains exploring the changing leaves…the reds, golds, oranges…

A visit to the Huntsville Botanical Gardens brought me eye to eye with this wonderful Halloween blossom of orangish and black! (I have no idea what its true name is, but I love the slightly crumpled look of it.)

Here’s another orange beauty from the gardens.

And we’ve been studying the monarch butterflies that inhabit the garden box outside our classroom. Like my students, I am fascinated by this beautiful orange and black wonder. This guy put on quite a performance today, showing off its proboscis as it sipped from the milkweed blossoms…and it posed patiently for me to snap a few shots with my phone.

So as October ends, head out with your camera and take a look for orange. What will you find?

You can post your photo alone or along with some words: commentary, a story, a poem…maybe even a song! I love to study the photographs that others’ take and think about how I can use a technique, an angle, or their inspiration to try something new in my own photography. (I love a great mentor text…or mentor photo, in this case!) I share my photography and writing on social media. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter using @kd0602. If you share your photos and writing on social media too, please let me know so I can follow and see what you are doing. To help our Weekly Photo community find each other, use the hashtag #orange for this week and include @nwpianthology in your post.

I can’t wait to see all the orange that you find as you explore your world this week through your lens!

More Adventures in Coding

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It’s Halloween…the perfect day to continue our adventures in coding with our first, second and third grade students!

And thanks to Mark, our ed tech guy, the kids had the advantage of having someone other than their regular teachers reinforce their initial learning and suggest some next steps.

We returned to Beebot today. Our students love this friendly bee that responds to their fingertip commands. And it becomes the perfect vehicle (pun intended) for reminding them that programmers have an idea in mind for their code. Today’s challenge: can we make Beebot travel in a square and return to where he began? (The answer was yes!)

And then we transitioned to Hopscotch. And our students were in for a treat! Hopscotch characters were dressed for Halloween today…a special Halloween update. (The room was electric as the students discovered this new edition on their iPads!)

Mark guided the students as they matched the commands they used on Beebot to the blocks on Hopscotch. And they carefully coded their first character to make a square.

As you might expect, there were a few glitches…a perfect opportunity to do some “debugging.” And then we all tackled making a triangle.

That was a bit harder. And some students figured out if you used the repeat block, some interesting triangle designs resulted! And here is the basic square and triangle we aimed to code for today.

I hope students take away the value of being able to make the characters do what they want them to do. This planning is not to get in the way of “happy accidents” but instead to help students do more than move blocks and push play randomly. I know that many of our students can hardly wait to create some more triangle designs. Our next invitation might be, what picture can you make with triangles and squares?

The Halloween costumes will go away the next time we update the app…but I hope the lessons learned on Halloween will remain…and become a platform for continued learning. I know I learned a lot today and am more interested in programming than I was before! I can’t wait to figure out what my students (and I) will do next!