My annual tradition of walking North Capitol Hill's elaborate Halloween house and yard displays began with Alexia in 2020, and now spans six years with no break—not even 2021, when we walked the neighborhood two days early since we were in Las Vegas on both Shobhit's birthday (October 30) and Halloween Day that year.

This year, Shobhit and I walked the neighborhood twice, on both Thursday night (October 30) and Friday night (Halloween). I took 67 photos walking Thursday night, when we walked all the way up there from home and back, probably walking somewhere between three and four miles total. We did this after Alexia, who had planned to come into town from Issaquah to walk the neighborhood with me like we did most years since 2020, texted me to cancel because the forecast for Halloween night was grim: heavy rain. We already did that last year, and we got soaked. I totally understood her not wanting to do that again. The weather on Thursday, by contrast, was clear and beautiful. I asked her if she might be able to come do the walk on Thursday instead, but although she did check to see if she had any flexibility, she had other plans that day and couldn't make it then either. I figured I might as well take advantage of the better weather on Thursday anyway, and as Shobhit will take any chance to add to his steps, he was all about taking a long walk, even on his birthday.

As I noted in yesterday's post, Sachin had joined us for dinner, and he even walked with is to North Capitol Hill. At first he actually complained that he wasn't seeing any Halloween decorations, as we first walked up 15th Avenue, and I was like: we haven't actually gotten there yet! Impatient, much? His feet were also hurting, though, so he actually walked back to our place before we even got to the blocks with the best houses, which are concentrated on 17th and 18th between E Roy St and E Highland Drive, with some other good ones scattered among nearby blocks.

This was the first time we walked straight up 15th first, and it was because I wanted to see the chicken skeleton Laney had already posted to Facebook and I asked her where it was. Once I found that yard, we turned over to 16th, where we zigzagged a bit: a few blocks south on 16th; the same distance north again on 17th; then south again on 18th, until maybe Roy Street, where we shifted back to 17th for most of the walk south back home until finally cutting back to 15th again. Then, as I noted yesterday, Sachin joined up with us again and we all had Shobhit's birthday dessert at Coché Valley Dessert Café.

So that brings us to actual-Halloween, although the above photo was taken by Shobhit when it was still Thursday night, and I put together my Halloween costume for the year: a QR code that, when you scan it, takes you to <this page with black lettering on a white background that just reads, BOO!

Last year's "Gay D. Vance" costume notwithstanding (or "Crazy Cat Lady" in 2022; or "Drunk Pence" in 2020), my aim for Halloween costumes is always "simple and clever"—and most importantly, hopefully easy. This year's costume was one of the simplest and easiest ever. I already had the QR reader app on my phone to create the QR code once I made a jpg of the image and uploaded it to Flickr; the only money I spent on it was $3.03 for the lamination of the printout of the QR codes, which I printed out at work and then had laminated at FedEx Office at the Seattle Convention Center last Monday.

I used safety pins to poke through corners of the laminated QR codes and pinned them to my jacket—the large one on my back, and the small one on the lapel of the front. No one ever scanned the one on the front, although they could have.

Anyway, I showed it to Sachin first, on Thursday night, shortly before the above photo was taken. He was moderately amused by it. "That's very nerdy," he said. Then I asked Shobhit to take the photo of my back. When I shared that photo to the group text with Gabriel, Lea, Andy and Mandy yesterday, both Andy and Mandy went out of their way to say how great my hair looked—I had just had it cut on Thursday morning. I might make this part of my Shobhit-birthday tradition too: take the day off, and use the morning for my October haircut.

I walked to work yesterday with that jacket on, but with my backpack on so that covered it up. Being a Friday, very few people worked in-office, so it was unsurprising that, yet again, there was no office fanfare for Halloween this year—none of the hot apple cider or popcorn, no costume contest like in years past. I was one of three people in-office with any semblance of a costume on. Kim had cat whiskers on, but Lauren, our Executive Assistant to the CEO, had a spectacular butterfly costume on. It made for an amazing photo with the mural of flowers near the CEO desk. That wall is the only fully new mural, because the skillet mural that used to be there as part of the original PCC Downtown store had been painted around a Meat case that used to sit against that wall.

There's been a strange kind of inconsistency to Halloween at the office since the pandemic happened, leading to annual "Halloween at PCC" photo albums of wildly varying size. We got a surprising lot out of Halloween "gatherings" over Zoom in 2020, when I got 28 shots. I have come to the office in costume every year except one since then: even though virtually no one was in the office in 2021, when Halloween actually landed on a Sunday so the day I came as "Captain Awesome" was two days before the actual holiday, and hardly anyone came to the office on Fridays. Things returned to much more like pre-covid days in both 2022 (Halloween fell on a Monday) and 2023 (Halloween fell on Tuesday). The office gets the most people on Wednesdays, but 2024 was a Leap Year which meant Halloween last year was on a Thursday—when most of Merchandising is on store tours, and few of the rest of the office comes in either.

I might still have come to the office in-costume last year if it had been a simple and easy one, but "Gay D. Vance" took a lot of effort, and I did that for an event I went to with Tracy the previous weekend but I did not feel like repeating that effort for little payoff at work. Plus. the Office Relocation Team had a site visit that day, and I didn't want to go to that as "Gay D. Vance." Instead, I just wore my red button-up shirt with little black skulls and my Day of the Dead Cats earrings and let that be enough. Thus: my "Halloween at PCC" photos albums went from 28 in 2020 (Zoom celebrations) to 13 in 2021 (no office celebration) to 48 in 2022 (delightful return to office celebration) to 30 in 2023 (ditto) to 9 in 204 (no office celebration) and, now, 16 in 2025 (again, no office celebration—but, at least a few of us did have costumes).

I took a total of 39 photos yesterday, but because I combined them with the Capitol Hill Halloween Walk we did early on Thursday, my Halloween 2025 photo album has a combined 118 shots in it—67 of them from the walk on Thursday; then another 20 I took last night, when we went for a much shorter return visit, checking out displays we saw unfinished Thursday but we knew would be done now. It was indeed raining, and Alexia made the right choice in bailing, but this time Shobhit and I did a little cheat by driving up there instead of walking all the way from home. We brought our umbrellas, parked on 18th just south of Aloha, and walked around just maybe three blocks or so there for about half an hour. I'm really glad we did, too, because I got a lot of great shots I hadn't gotten on Thursday. We also found one house passing out cups of wine to the adults taking their kids trick-or-treating! Shobhit and I don't have kids, of course, but the lady at the table with wine in a front yard didn't ask.

Once we were done with that, we drove to PCC Central District, that being the other thing we had to do that we combined with our purposes going out again last night. There was a "Deal of the Day" going on where you get a free cheese take & bake pizza if you buy one other take & bake pizza. Can you guess what we had for dinner last night? We ate while finishing season two of Nobody Wants This on Netflix, thus closing out Halloween 2025.

[posted 5:11pm]