Hallifornia Pie

What do you get when you mix Chalise and Shayne and California and Halloween?  The answer is Hallifornia!  We weren't really planning on dressing up for Halloween but then our ward was having a trunk or treat party and we heard that most people did actually dress up so we figured we'd join in the fun.  We were also invited to our friend Zach's birthday party earlier that day, which was themed after The Hunger Games.  We were thinking for a few days about what we would be for the Hunger Games party but nothing ever came and then in a last-ditch, desperation moment it occurred to us that we could be tracker jackers with relatively little effort.  All we had to buy was some colored duct tape and then we made some antennae out of hangers and construction paper.  We were quite proud of our ingenuity.

We were flirting with the idea of just wearing the same thing to the ward party that night but then a few minutes before we left, we decided that we would do something else.  Chalise had seen someone on pinterest a while back who dressed up as the guy from Castaway with a volleyball.  She had the brilliant idea that we could do the same thing but make her pregnant belly be the beach ball.  I thought it was quality humor but as is usual with our Halloween costumes, most people didn't appreciate it as much as we did (recall Princess Leia and Juan Solo).

Granted our presentation was not flawless, but seriously that is a genius concept

Before we had made the decision we pulled out our dress-up totes and were brainstorming when Chalise encouraged me to try on some old warmups that I had.  This is what happened.

She said I can't wear them anymore.

On Halloween I came home from school and Chalise had made plans about having a party.  Nobody wanted to come to our party (no one else was invited anyway) except us but it was pretty darn funny.

We carved a pumpkin.  Clearly if you buy late in the season it's slim pickins at the patch.

The idea here was to make a Mike Wazowski pumpkin but I totally ruined it and we were left with this piece of work.  We seriously sat there and laughed at it for about 10 minutes and then we snuck outside and left it on our stairs and laughed for another 20 minutes about how cool it would be when our neighbors saw it and didn't know what it was.

We bobbed for apples.  This is not a sanitary activity.  Chalise went first and I watched closely - she dropped either a large saliva chunk or a snot bomb into the water and it was just floating around in there.  I had to bob anyways just for the glory.

Sometime between Halloween and Thanksgiving we decided that we would make pies and invite some of our friends over to eat it with us.  Chalise had to work on Thanksgiving so we couldn't really do anything then but we wanted to celebrate somehow.  It was the first time that either of us had attempted to make pies.  We did pumpkin, coconut cream and chocolate cream.  Definitely the hardest part was the crust - making the dough wasn't bad but we have some weird hollow plastic roller that I don't think works very good and we had pie pans that were bigger than normal and I didn't make enough dough to go around.  Trying to stretch that stuff thinner and thinner with a defective roller was enough to drive a freight train up a dirt road (as my mom would say).  In the end we finally found success and they were all really good, especially the coconut cream.  I could have swam in that thing it was so good.  Our friends either liked them all or lied to us as any normal people would and said they were really good.

A fair amount of dishes were produced

We acknowledge that the crusts won't win any beauty contests but they tasted good

We are practically Marie Callender's