Halloween

Happy Halloween (a little belated) to all! As many of you know, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I love putting a lot of effort into an inventive costume and having fun with others who have done the same.

This year my costume creativity was limited a little by lack of time (Our final ICP presentation is tomorrow!) and costume resources. In Houston I knew all the party supply and costume shops I could visit for specific costume elements. In Lausanne, though, I just haven't familiarized myself that well with the costume supply infrastructure yet.

So this year I resolved to make a costume given the constraint of using exclusively materials I already owned. This limited me significantly since I really don't have much in the closet I call an apartment. As I perused my wardrobe, however, I was inspired by my cold weather running gear: black and bright blue spandex. Hmm, I could probably do something with that. I ran a Google image search on "black blue spandex" to see which characters might employ similar outfits but I didn't find much. My best option turned out to be Nightwing, the superhero that evolved from Robin, Batman's sidekick.

I had no emotional bond to Nightwing, however, so I wasn't too keen on it. Looking at pictures of him on wikipedia, though, reminded me of another character to whom I did have a strong bond: Subzero of Mortal Kombat fame. Nick and I used to spend hours and hours playing Mortal Kombat on his Sega Genesis. My favorite character from the game was Raiden, but unfortunately my running clothes didn't look at all like his outfit.

So I went as Subzero, covering my face and head such that only my eyes were revealed. The Halloween party itself was pretty tame. The organizers did a great job of converting the IMD "dungeons" (where we spent most of our lives during the first part of the year) into  real dungeons. People got into it and it was fun to guess who was behind the costumes. My face covering forced me to drink through a straw all night, which made taking shots interesting, but I managed.

Still, I turned in by midnight--not exactly my Halloween party experience of yore! It's good that I did, though, as I was able to wake up early today, rehearse my ICP presentation, go for a run, and finish Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which is my favorite of the books so far. Tonight I'll head to bed early again as we have an early train to catch to our client's headquarters in Zurich and I'd like to run through the presentation one more time before we leave.