It looks like the Reston Town Center does a fun joke each year for April Fool’s! Last year the balls were all rainbow colored and this time around they went with a new theme. Pretty fun!
This year, there was a sports theme!
I claimed a giant blue one. 🙂
There was no way it would fit in the car like that.
Obviously stuck, and so started the deflation process.
Getting there…
Success! Snugly inside.
Buckle up for the ride. 😉
This was my view from the driver’s seat.
Selfie with the ball, of course.
Yesterday our company had our holiday party celebration at a laser tag place! I think it was my first time, but then I have this faint memory of darkness, glowing lights, and being downright awful at the game. I don’t know if that was just a dream from my childhood or an actual memory. Either way, I was very new to this experience and had a lot to learn. We booked the whole place for over 4 hours and it was quite the night of fun and exercise!
Arriving at the holiday party after the Secret Santa at the office.
We signed waivers, gathered in the break room, then moved on to the briefing room before putting on our packs.
I’d show you those pictures, but some of my coworkers might not want to appear on my blog. 😛 Just imagine a break room painted with some sort of alien landscape with observation domes. There are a bunch of long tables and chairs there for people to sit (in our case, eat and drink). Across the way are doors leading to the briefing room, which is mostly kept darkened. There are other things painted on to these walls and it sort of looks like the background in the next picture. Three sides of the room have wooden benches lining them, one row in front, one row in back much like bleachers. Along the forth wall are the rules, a sample gem (glowing thing on the wall that can give you power-ups but also tag you), and a blown up example of what the display screen on the gun look like.
They walk you through the basics and then let us choose how we wanted to play each time. The first time it was two teams against each other. The second time we went crazy with four. The third time we toned it down to three and the forth time we had team captains split us into two teams (I’m pretty sure I was the worst player on my team then, but we still won!). And finally they went a fifth time with free for all. I really wanted zombies and didn’t want to get demolished in the free for all, so I sat out and got to stand by the entrance to watch everyone else battle it out. The same 6 or 7 people kept running around and around the area closest to me. Seems like many people had zones they preferred, so some sort of pattern.
Got my pack 14 on and ready to rumble!
The display on our laser guns let us know all sorts of stats that thoroughly confused me. Half the time I couldn’t tell if someone got hit or hit me.
In we went! It wasn’t until later that I realized there was a gem right at the beginning.
A few rounds in, I suddenly noticed the sign for our party!
After each game, we’d convene outside to check out how everyone did.
They even handed out score cards! I was pretty consistently one of the last (usually third to last).
It’s our first Halloween as homeowners and you can tell by the massive bags of Sour Patch Kids we gave out (along with Rice Krispy Treats too). The Sour Patch Kids were a hit with pretty much ever kid who came to our door. I think we had a total of twenty-some-odd visitors over the course of about half a dozen doorbell rings. A mostly quiet night, but that’s probably partly due to our neighborhood still being new and many condos still standing empty. It wasn’t easy to tell whether people were home and/or living in each unit, plus with our condo style, the doors are down a sidewalk between the walls of our buildings. The other style condos in the area have the front doors all along the front facing the street, so it’s easier for the kids to run from one to the next.
We made sure to turn on our front door light and we lit up fairy lights in one of the windows facing the road. Inside the front door, we lit up the tiny pumpkin I got from my recent HelloFresh box. Panda originally wanted to shine a light on it to cast a shadow like the bat signal, but the shadow was either too small or too blurry, so we decided to light the mini pumpkin instead. Next year we’ll have to make sure we carve a pumpkin and light it up out by the end of our sidewalk to get more people to our door. It also took use some time to hop off the couch and run down the stairs, so maybe we can read books on the stairs or something to be closer to the door.
Overall it was a fun Halloween, not too crazy, but it had its moments (especially at work). Here are some highlights:
This idea for Where’s Waldo sounded much better in our heads, but still provided for some great amusement today.
In no other scenario would you find a lumberjack axing a shark attacking a Waldo. What fun!
Fits in the palm of my hand.
Our makeshift lighting for the “pumpkin signal” that didn’t quite work.
From the outside, I think you get the idea that we’re open for business, right?
Smokey tried to dig in as soon as the kids were gone and the doorbell stopped ringing.
When cats see a cardboard box, it may as well contain catnip for how much they enjoy it. What a silly cutie!
cat leaps and licks from Mary Qin on Vimeo.
cat in box playing with finger from Mary Qin on Vimeo.
cat playing in cardboard box from Mary Qin on Vimeo.
Missy is a playful cat who just wanted to chase around the mouse. Of course the mouse wasn’t aware of this, so it was frozen until it saw an opportunity to run. I was able to help get it outside, but Missy still wanted to have some fun.
