A Frightful Halloween

Typically, at our house, Halloween decorations start going up pretty much as soon as October begins. Though, in deference to Townshend's birthday, I wait for the inside decorations to get too involved until after his birthday.

This year started out no differently:

And it was all going along swimmingly... until we discovered that we had a water leak behind our dishwasher. From a distance, it doesn't look like much of a problem:

But upon closer inspection, you find this:

While the actual damage was fairly minimal, the fix was still intensive. They had to tear out the counter top with the sink plus the panel of cupboards right around the dishwasher (which is pretty much the whole kitchen), and chop out all the wet parts of the wall and floor. Then they left fans running behind the plastic divider for a few days to dry things out.

Yep. No stove, no sink and no counter tops.. cooking suddenly got very exciting. The good news is the microwave still works, so between that and the slow cooker, we've been doing ok.

Finally, after an (seeming) eternity of incessant noise from those industrial fans, our house was declared DRY. There was much rejoicing. Sure, our kitchen still looked pretty much the same... but we could hear ourselves again.

Also, one entertaining bit amid the chaos: the slow plummet of the plastic partition that they'd put up to contain the dust and everything. The day the drying was finished, the workers left up the plastic divider, saying they'd want it again when they came back to reassemble things. It, however, had other ideas; it was on the floor before dinner time that night:

In the end, though our fabulous party was canceled, and our house still is not reassembled leaving us with a frightful Halloween, despite all this, we managed to cobble together a fabulously macabre dinner:

(decapitated) mice meatballs on a bed of worms

And, happily, we did manage to find a few opportunities to wear some costumes, and they were, indeed, fabulous: