We were determined to continue our annual Halloween Pumpkin Carving tradition. We had expected to have plenty of time to get ready for it after the birth. As it turned out, Magda was born only three weeks ago, so some of the more ambitious plans (and the mailing out of an early invitation) didn't quite happen.

The party turned out well. We're getting seasoned pros at this and Magda was cooperating by letting Jennifer have enough time to make the house ready. I spent Friday night cooking the traditional potato mushroom soup (Custco has got dirt cheap dried Shiitake mushrooms, BTW) and then most of Saturday making Grissini (bread sticks) and my Ghost bread rolls using the flour I brought back from Switzerland. And we wisely made cookies last week and bought the veggies pre-cut.

With the late annoucements and holding the party on Halloween Eve (yeah, I know that's All Hallows' Eve Eve) we had a smaller turnout, but still lots of fun. It's remarkable how the kids change from year to year and it's fun watching them play more with each other as they grow older. I was too busy to take enough pictures of everyone earlier in the evening -- if anyone has got good photos, please send them to me.

I did manage to carve my pumpkin and to photograph all of them. I'm still working on getting the right lighting for the shots (most are too dark). In this photo, the exposure was 8 seconds and I shone my flashlight on my pumpkin for a second or so. Next year I'll try more long exposures and "paint" the pumpkins with a (more diffused) flashlight. BTW, this double exposure (courtesy of Henry bumping my tripod) is pretty neat, too. It makes my pumpkin have six eyes.

There are all sorts of useful voting related sites out there.

• MyPollingPlace.com lets you find your polling place based on a street address and ZIP code
• TimeToVote.net has state-by-state information about laws giving employees the right to take time off from work to vote
• VerifiedVoting.org has county-by-county (e.g. Travis) information on which voting system they use and instructions on how to use the electronic voting devices employed

Halloween is in a couple of days. I've ordered a cute costume from Magda online a couple of days ago and I hope it's going to make it by Saturday.

If you're still looking for that perfect getup for the holiday, you should check out this adorable do-it-yourself list of 2004's Scariest Halloween Costumes. The costumes should be easy to scale up to adult size and most can be made in under an hour.

I don't watch M-TV or listen to pop music on a regular basis. But I do find the slowly growing resurgence of political protest music interesting. I think it's healthy and good to rock the boat a little and to make the music consumers think about the important issues that are happening.

Eminem's Mosh and the accompanying video is stark, unapologetic and outspoken. And at the same time subtle and despite its anger hopeful.

It's definitely not "Blowing in the Wind"...

Errol Morris, who did the Apple Switcher Ads has a large collection of Kerry Switcher Ads he did for MoveOn.org. Too bad we won't get to see any of them in our non-swing state.

The ads are interesting to watch -- although I'm not sure how many Bush-2000 voters will be able to overcome their cognitive dissonance and make that switch in 2004. Considering the recent poll about perceptions of pro-Bush voters, they seem to be overcoming it in the classic way of avoiding or rejecting facts that contradict their perception.

If you're teetering, watch those ads -- maybe you'll find someone with whose reasons to switch you can identify.

I got off my butt and implemented a "Recent Photos" feature for my blog. It shows a random picture from my three most recent albums. It helped that I had a bunch of photographs to upload and I couldn't been upstaged by Rita's weekly photo.

And while I was at it, I changed the default size in my iPhoto export script to be 600 pixels, as opposed to 480. Let's face it, low-resolution monitors are a thing of the past and everyone seems to be getting broadband these days.

Speaking of which, what's up with my Roadrunner connection this weekend? It seems to go down every couple of minutes. Must be all that money they're spending on their "We're better than DSL" commercials...

We're slowly preparing for our annual Pumpking Carving Party. We were hoping to have a little more time, but the girl was tardy.

This year I decided to make gingerbread skeletons. I love my gingerbread recipe and they cookies keep incredibly long and get better as time passes. So last week we baked a gross or so cookies and decorated them yesterday. The glaze was running a bit thin, so many of my skeletons look more like deformed Roswell aliens. It worked for Jfer's ghosts, though.

The pictures are a bit dark, I really need to get an Omni-Bounce for my flash...

We got Magda's Social Security card in the mail yesterday. It's strange seing her name (without the hachek, of course) on that little green card. It's not like she's going to be getting much out of it by the time she's retiring, but it does remind me that we better start saving for college (I have only memorized my SSN because UT used it as my student ID -- ah, the sweet, innocent days before the age of identity theft).

So now that my little tax deduction -- er, I mean "daughter" -- has her own Social Security Number, I think I'm starting to understand those sleepless nights. Or is it coincidence that the last three digits of her SSN are 666?

When Magdalena was born, the doctor beat me to the announcement that she was a girl, but I did manage to stop them from clamping her cord until it stopped pulsating. I then got to cut the cord. It was weird. In all the baby videos you see this thick, ropy thing and that's what I expected. Actually, by the time they hold it to you for cutting, the clamped cord section is empty of blood (I assume they do that to minimize the mess and parental freak-outs) and looks like some sort of semi-transparent, off-white latex hose. Cutting it felt that way, too and it took me a couple of tries to cut through (and brought back memories of a jelly-fish salad I once prepared for a Korean dinner).

The (empty) umbilical is totally alien. It's most striking where it attaches to the baby's belly button. It's like at the beginning in the Matrix (the first movie -- the one that didn't suck), where people are hooked up to all those hoses. The transition from the inanimate, plastic looking cord to the baby's soft, live skin looks very artificial.

Once they trim the cord, they apply some sort of purple drying agent to help it fall off more quickly and without getting infected. Over the next week or so the umbilical stump has to be cleaned regularly and kept dry while it shrivels down, and eventually falls off.

We did a good job of regularly swabbing it with alcohol and thus didn't get any bad smells -- at least not from that area. It's been hanging by a thread for the last couple of days and we successfully resisted any temptation to pick it.

Well, last night, Magdalena dropped her umbilical stump. I'm glad Jennifer warned me about it, otherwise I might have mistaken it for a roach or something while changing her in the middle of the night. This will make diapers changing easier and she'll get to have a proper bath in a couple of days when everything is nicely healed.

I don't think we'll be saving it (it's pretty grody) and Jennifer won't let me give it Homer to play with. So I guess it's going in the trash...

What's better than being friends with a massage therapist? It's being friends with someone who's training to become a massage therapist. Because they are excited about their new and improving skills and because they don't already have a fully booked schedule and because you can volunteer to be their homework.

I got a really nice massage from Meredith O on Sunday in preparation for one of her tests. Since she's in her first semester, they only do Swedish -- as opposed to the deeper kind I've experienced before -- so this was a new experience. The fact that Sammy (Meredith's dog) frenched my ear after I laid down on the table was quite unique, too.

I definitely give Meredith thumbs up on her work. I'm looking forward to her learning and needing to practice new stuff. I also need to remember to lend her my copy of Grunt, it would make for very good massage music.