Jack o'lantern jamboree and budgie taming

Our Hallowe'en Spook-tacular Spooktacular is officially under way! I spent much of the afternoon (after I came home from work) helping bring boxes of plastic jack o'lanterns (the kind that look real when viewed from about ten feet) downstairs while my dad ran extension cords for them all. We now have what amounts to a wall of jack o'lanterns across our front yard. People at work had been asking me when we were going to get cracking with our yard haunt: some unknown person even tossed a fake pumpkin (no face carved into it) onto our lawn a couple nights ago. My dad took this as a sign that he needed to get started -- and he even cut a face into the fake pumpkin!

Also: we're starting to tame Flurry the jittery budgie; I finally got him to sit on my finger for a minute or two. He's less skittish about hands being in his cage, but he still gets a bit "Hey, beat it: this my territory" about visiting digits. We also think he's trying to talk: both my mom and dad heard him say "baby" earlier this evening.