Drugs Handed out to Trick or Treaters

"If your kids get these for Halloween candy, they ARE NOT CANDY!!! They are the new shapes of "Ecstasy" and can kill kids through overdoses!!!" 

With the coming of October, there are some things that are just quintessential to Autumn: pumpkins, the changing leaves, and the on going fear of drugs in your child's trick or treat bucket. For decades now the fear has been there. As a child in the 80s the biggest fear was LSD, but today's drug of choice is methylenedioxy-methamphetamine, aka: Ecstasy.

Well rest assured, this isn't going to happen. Not only has there been no record of this happening, but at $10-$20 a pill the likelihood that some strung out raver is going to be dropping these into children's buckets is in fact, very, very slim. Snopes did a great write up about this as well.

But as a parent I will go through my children's Halloween buckets looking for anything out of place, though realistically I'm basically just looking for the candy I myself will end up raiding.

Good Idea Friday - Glow in the Dark Cupcakes

Goulish Glowing Cupcakes : Recipe Snobs 

Pinterest  in general (well, the people on pinterest, so I guess "Pinners") have this weird obsession with all things glow in the dark. I've never personally put a lot of thought into what I can and can't make glow in the dark, but on pinterest a quick search can pull up dozens of different ideas, most of which are wrong and won't work.

A fan of the blog sent me this, and I was delighted to see something glowing that isn't a bad idea for once! Not only that, it's cupcakes! And who doesn't love cupcakes?

So, what's the secret? Well it's tonic water. It's the quinine in the tonic water that does the trick. However they won't just magically glow in the dark, you need a black light to activate the glow of quinine (just like you do with the infamous "Galaxy Cocktail")  I can't vouch for how this tastes, but it would be a fun and easy enough project for Halloween to test out. Head over to Recipe Snobs for the full recipe. 

And remember, if you have a pin you are curious about, we're always taking ideas! Find us on facebook or twitter. 

Glow Sticks and Nail Polish

"break a glow stick & put in clear polish" 

With Halloween coming up I've been seeing a lot more Glow in the Dark pins then you usually see. However as we learned with our other glow stick pins, not only will this not work, it's probably not the best thing for you. Not only that, glow stick formula typically doesn't glow that long once it's exposed to air. I was going to test this out and see how long it will glow, and if it would even set up properly but alas, I'm out of glow sticks. Even if it did set up right (instead of leaving your nails a big glowing gooby mess, which is what I think would happen) the glow would only last a short time, then you're left with a funky colored bottle of nail polish.

Instead, just buy glow-in-the-dark nail polish. A quick search not only pulls up a lot of different companies and online vendors that sell it, they also use the same exact image as the Pinterest pin! But I'd also like to point out that even with retail glow in the dark nail polish, without a blacklight you will not get the effect depicted here. That's not your standard glow-in-the-dark glow. 

Any fans out there with a spare bottle of nail polish and glow sticks want to test this out for me? I'm honestly really curious if it will even set up and harden right. 

Good Idea Friday - Bleaching Pumpkins

Preserving Jack O' Lanterns : My Science Project

I wasn't planning on doing these pins quite yet, but after everyone on my Pinterest page started pinning autumn things I figured I'd jump in. I've seen this pin and others like it a dozen times or more this time of year; so, does bleach really help keep cut pumpkins lasting longer? 

Yes! I figured it would, but I had no idea just how well it worked until I found the source of the above image.  Over at My Science Project they run a pretty extensive test on some of the more common methods people use to preserve cut pumpkins. It's pretty interesting read, and wouldn't you know it, but bleach actually came out the winner (neck-in-neck with a commercial product, but bleach is cheaper and would be my go-to), with the cut pumpkin lasting a whole 2 weeks before molding.

So with autumn just around the corner, it would be a good idea to keep a bottle of bleach on hand when you carve those pumpkins.