Happy Halloween!

I have always had a thing for Halloween. I'm not exactly sure why, but I always have fun decorating and carving pumpkins. Plus it's fun to hand out candy to the kiddies and see their cute costumes!

One of my colleagues was telling me about his sons' costume ideas. His younger son came up with the idea to go as an old suitcase. They have an old suitcase at home and they were just going to cut a hole for his head, and arm & leg holes. How cool is that? And he came up with the idea all by himself!

Nancy & Christopher's Halloween Statistics:

Number of trick-o-treaters that visited us: 82

Price of pumpkins in Massachusetts & Connecticut: $0.37-$0.50/lb (much more expensive than Toronto. My 3 pumpkins cost me $25 this year, but last year I took advantage of the Loblaws pumpkin sale, buying 7 pumpkins for $2 each!)

Time of first trick-o-treater: ~6:10pm
Time of last trick-o-treater: ~8pm
Number of pumpkins we carved: 3
Number of treats we purchased: 246
What we gave away: Doritos, Cheetos, Snickers, Hershey, Twix, & Kit Kat
Average number of treats given out per trick-o-treater: 2.33
Number of treats for pre/post Halloween consumption by Nancy & Christopher: 55 :)

Canadian Thanksgiving!

For Canadian Thanksgiving Christopher and I made our first trip back to the Great White North since we moved down to Connecticut. In the days leading up to our trip I was getting quite excited about going "back home" for the weekend, even though we were heading to Calgary, which is almost 4.5 times further than the distance from Toronto to West Hartford, there is something homelike about being back in the country with dollar coins and funny colored money!

The purpose of our trip was to celebrate Christopher's grandfather's 90th birthday. What a special milestone! It's hard to imagine how much has changed in the past 90 years and that being a single person's lifetime. As you can expect from a 90th birthday, it was primarily a family reunion. Which was great for us because we had the opportunity to see and catch up with so many family members all on a single trip. Plus, there were several relatives that I had only met for the first time at our wedding last year and it was nice to be able to spend a little more time getting to know them.

During our whirlwind trip to Calgary (for all of 46 hours in total: noon Saturday to ~10am Monday) in addition to the birthday party we also managed to fit in not one, but two Thanksgiving turkey dinners! One thing about Calgarians is for sure, they are nothing if not hospitable. Thank you to everyone for opening your homes to us, inviting us for dinner, giving us a place to stay for a couple of nights, and letting us drink your beer!

Nancy and Christopher go to White Castle

Ever since I saw Harold and Kumar go to White Castle I've been dying to go. Every time we went on vacation somewhere in the US, or I was traveling on a business trip I would always check to see if there was a White Castle nearby. But I've had no such luck since I rarely travel to the midwest/eastcoast.

This past weekend Christopher suggested going on a mini-roadtrip to pick up a rug at IKEA we had been waiting for since we moved in. It was in stock in the New Jersey store and on our way to Jersey, he proposed stopping at a White Castle. Naturally I said yes :)

Being White Castle newbies, once we were inside we were completely lost trying to order. Anybody watching us try to figure out what we wanted probably thought we had just escaped from the loony bin. What we were struggling with was the Slyders. The thing about White Castle is that it only serves mini-burgers called Slyders. And we knew that they were small (the patties are 2.5 sq. inches), but we had no idea what quantity was a reasonable amount for one person to order. Christopher was hoping the combo meals would provide some guidance, but they covered quite a wide range. The options were a 4 Slyder meal, 2 double cheeseburger Slyders, 10 Slyders, and one we can't remember.

We stood back and let a few people order ahead of us, both of us paying close attention to how many burgers were being ordered. In the end, Christopher got the 2 double cheeseburger meal with fries and a chocolate shake, I got the 4 Slyder meal (2 cheeseburger 2 hamburger) with onion rings, and then we ordered some mozzarella sticks to share. As luck would have it, we ordered just the right amount of food for the two of us. Despite being intimidated by 10 burger sacks, 30 burger crave cases as well as a 100 burger option, we ended up doing just fine.

Now, I am sorry to report that I am not a big fan of White Castle Slyders. I really truly wanted to love them - especially after such favorable endorsements from Harold & Kumar, but they weren't really my taste. I liked that they were small and soft, but I found the patties very thin and quite tasteless, leaving me rather unsatisfied. Christopher thought they were okay - he prefers White Castle = to McDonald's but that really isn't saying much since doesn't really like McDonald's at all. One thing that was kinda neat was that we were at White Castle #2 located in the Bronx. We believe this to be the second White Castle ever opened!

Our next target: how about the Monster Thickburger at Hardee's? If the White Castle Slyder has a polar opposite, this would definitely be it!