HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Chances are most of you celebrated Halloween on the 29th this year, what with it being a Saturday and all, but don't let the 31st pass you by! 

 Even if you've already consumed all the sugar (and alcohol) your body can handle, here are some traditional spooky Halloween activities to entertain yourself with: 

You could try the Scottish way of predicting your future spouse, by carving an apple in one long strip, then tossing the peel over your shoulder. The peel is supposed to land in the shape of the first letter of your future spouse's name.

In the late 19th century, unmarried ladies would sit in a darkened room on Halloween and gaze into a mirror,waiting for the face of their future husband to appear in the mirror. If their destiny was to die before marriage, a skull would appear instead, which would probably be scary enough to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We're not sure what the whole marriage and Halloween connection is, but you could always skip the fortune-telling and go for a good, solid horror movie. Or more sugar and cocktails. 

 

The Scrapbook Hairdresser

One of the things we like about the location of The Automat’s office is that it’s in a neighbourhood that seems to believe pretty strongly in the whole “one man’s trash is another’s man treasure” principle. 
Interesting and unusual things are often left out for the taking, although we’re not so sure about who’s going to go for the slightly crusty purple toilet still out there waiting for a new home.

Anyway, the gem rescued this week by our best-neighbour-ever is a 40-ish year old scrapbook filled with magazine cut-outs of potential hair styles for categories like ‘young girls’, ‘teenage girls’, ‘women’, and ‘women as well as teenagers as the style is quite simple’. 

We’ve entertained ourselves by looking around at our long-time locals (of the right age to have been clients of the scrapbook hairdresser) and imagining which of these do’s they may have sported back then.