A Big Halloween Night In

LittleStuff have teamed up with brand new bingo review portal Two Little Fleas and set a blogging challenge. Bloggers taking part have to describe how they'd create the perfect night in, if they had £750 splash on the event! I love planning stuff like this and often go on fantasy shopping binges so here goes...

It's a month away, but I think I'll plan the perfect Halloween night in. Halloween is about scariness, spookiness and creepiness. I am going to be strict about my Halloween theme - there'll be no sexy cat costumes or super heroes at my Halloween party! Halloween is the one night of the year that it is OK for my more macabre side to come out!

Fun and Games

Oh - OK - fun will be acceptable too! Apple bobbing, pumpkin carving and trick or treating are good Halloween fun. They are also cheap! For an extra challenge eager contenders could try turnip carving, which is what we used to do for Halloween when I was younger!

After these activities let's have some scary video games and scary movies available. Dead Space 3 and Resident Evil 6 should do the job for adults. Before kids have to go home/to bed we will have Monster House on Blu-Ray for those who are interested. This is the perfect kids' Halloween film. Just scary enough, but with a really good Halloween trick or treating atmosphere.

For later on we can replace the grown up video games with grown up horror films. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a classic Halloween film. But we will need something scarier as well. Evil Dead (2013) should have the right tone!

Terrifyingly Good Entertainment

Music and dancing will be Ghoulish. In fact, my dancing is pretty Ghoulish at the best of times! All songs must be Halloween-related. Yes - Thriller, The Monster Mash, The Timewarp. A Halloween Party CD (or two!) should suffice... if Halloween related songs run out... start the CDs again from the beginning. Yes it's a chilling kind of torture!

Food and Drink

Bloody Scary

All of that excess pumpkin can go in some pumpkin pies and pumpkin soup. Let's hope somebody likes pumpkin! We also need to make some glow-in the dark ghost cakes.To make the (almost) glow in the dark icing you need tonic water (Google it). The quinine glows under Ultraviolet light. So part of the budget will have to go to some LED UV torches! Lychees really remind me of eyeballs. If you stuff them with berries they are even more convincing. A nice strawberry coulis to dip in gives a convincing eyeballs in blood effect - Hooray!

Some spooky cocktails such as Martha Stewart's Blood Scary will be great fun for the adults. For the kids, the Halloween punch (thanks to BBC Food) featuring floating gummy worms is equallly fun!

A good proportion of our £750 budget will go on food and drink. We better remember some sweets for for trick or treaters too!

Decoration

Thankfully our house is already covered in scary looking cobwebs. Perfect decoration for this one night of the year (although admittedly a bit disgusting the other 364)! We will add some hanging spiders, bats, our carved pumpkins, gravestones, etc. Some spooky receptacles for snacks and drinks are also necessary.

Costumes

Fancy dress will, of course, be required. For my family I have picked out the following gruesome costumes:

For me: A mask, a red and green striped jumper, a fedora and some claws and... Tonight Matthew I'm going to be Freddy Krueger (Some people may claim I don't need the mask - but that's just mean)! What could be more terrifying; and those claws are perfect for skewering party food too!

For my wife: A flimsy pink prom dress and some red paint. Splatter the dress with paint and you've got Carrie!

For my daughter: A ragged white dress and a long black wig and she'll make a perfect Sadako (from the Ring)

For my son: I think he'll be a good Chucky. Some dungarees, a striped sweatshirt, fake knife and a mask will be required.

Ad hoc Mummy Costume... Spooky!

For those not entering into the spirit of things, a stock of toilet roll shall be on hand (that's around 1% of the budget). This will make the perfect ad hoc mummy costume for those forgetful enough to come in normal attire. In the unlikely event that the toilet roll is not needed for this purpose there are at least three other uses for it. I suppose that toilet rolling people's houses as the "trick" of "trick or treat" is to be frowned upon, so this will have to go in the bathroom for the guests, or be used to mop up the tears of terrified children.

Plan Your Own Night In

OK. Whether I win £750 or not I am now thinking "roll on Halloween". I really should have this party! As you can see Halloween excites me more than is generally accepted as normal. I could happily have written a blog post four times as long as this with a detailed Halloween inventory. Even I don't want to expose you to that much horror! In fact, if you have a better idea for a big night in, then blog about it, and enter here to win £750 of John Lewis vouchers to make it a reality.

I'm not sure I do love to shop with Love2Shop

This weekend we tried to use a Love2Shop gift card at a local retailer. We got to the till, and felt some trepidation about presenting this unusual form of payment to the cashier, but actually the staff were OK and seemed to know what to do (after a bit of discussion of course). Unfortunately the transaction would not go through. The system said that the card wasn't authorised. There was nothing the staff or ourselves could do about that right there and then. So we left, feeling slightly disgruntled, without our goods.

"Maybe we haven't actually activated the card after all," we thought. So we go through the online process again. The process proceeded in exactly the same way as usual and there was no indication whether we had already activated the card or not. I can't help thinking this needed to say "Card already activated" at some point (1st black mark in the book)!

On Sunday when we went back to check the balance on the card we hit the real problem. The £95 transaction had been debited from the card after all. We still had the receipt which said tender cancelled at 15:24, but at 17:01 the money had been deducted from our balance anyway. Aaarrrggghhhh! Since the Love2Shop customer service was only available in normal office hours (2nd black mark in the book) we decided to call the retailer first. They were quite helpful, understood our problem, but had no record of the money going through to them (only the cancelled transaction) - so unsurprisingly directed us to contact the card provider.

Since we couldn't phone them over the weekend we e-mailed them using the address from the Contact Us section on their website. On Monday we received a reply:

As the card is a Flexecash Card you will need to contact them direct. The number you require is 0844 375 0739. I hope this helps.

Black mark number 3: Why not give me these details on the Love2Shop site? Black mark number 4: Oh I see it is an 0844 number! Black mark number 5: Oh and you haven't even passed my query on to them?
Thanks. You may "hope that that help"s - but that is a poor attempt at customer service in my book. I am actually quite tolerant of this kind of thing in general. Mistakes can be made and let's face it we Brits put up with this stuff. But this is supposed to be "customer service". Why shouldn't we expect it to be as helpful as possible?
To avoid using the 0844 number (and potentially sitting on hold in the middle of my working day) I tried using the contact form on the flexecash website. It didn't work! All I got was an error page.Black mark number 6!!!
As it happens, when I did get through using the number provided, I was connected relatively quickly and the problem was resolved. A refund was given. There had been problems with the computer authorising the transactions over the weekend. Whilst this does not give me great confidence in using these gift cards at least it is now resolved. Hooray!

Bikes and the Family

I have been attempting to teach my son to ride his bike this week. It is amazing how fast he has picked it up. We've only been out twice and he can basically do it now. Setting off and steering were the most difficult parts. Balance seemed to come quite easily. He just needs a bit more practice now and we can go on some bike rides I think.

It is one of those satisfying (and in my experience all too rare!) moments where I feel like I am being a proper Dad. I have also resurrected my old bike, which is now usable as well. I do a lot of running, but I also really enjoy getting out on the bike when the weather is good. As long as you don't hit too many hills it can be slightly more relaxing than running and you can get much further than if you walked.

I've just got to encourage my daughter to get on her bike now. I also probably need to get them both new (bigger) bikes. I am keeping my eye on eBay! I should probably resurrect Mum's bike too. We got them cheap before we had kids as far as I remember and they have been a bit neglected to say the least.

If you are also in a getting the family cycling kind of mood then why not enter your details into the Highland Spring Giveaway on their facebook page. They are also working with Chris Hoy on a Summer Cycling Challenge. If you think you could log 100km of cycling with your family  then then sign up to take part! You can win stuff if you manage it.