Lantern

In the summer, the complexities of throwing a party melt away like ice in a pina colada. The setting? No sweat. Your backyard, lit romantically with lanterns and tea lights. The food? Dishes you've made in advance and serve cold or at room temperature. Or even easier: a gourmet-to-go picnic. The attire? Flip-flops optional. This season, stores are filled with things to make your summer party-giving even easier. Manufacturers have caught on to the fact that our yards are no longer just our yards; they're living rooms without the wall-to-wall carpeting.

LONDON - She was a British signaler on a Scottish shore. He was a sailor from Ohio on a decrepit ship at sea. Four miles divided them. The staccato flashes of Morse code on lamps united them. It was the spring of 1944, and for about a month they communicated via flashes of light from ship to shore, until the sailor departed without a goodbye, bound for France, headed to D-Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy. She got a letter he mailed before he left and then heard nothing else. She assumed he had died.

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Of ghosts and goblins. Of witches and black cats. Of Frankenstein's monster. Of things that go bump in the night. Halloween is nigh, and all manner of macabre events await the unprepared. So get a clue by reading this roundup of frightful Halloween events. But fear not; we've also included many happenings of a gentler nature, such as trick-or-treating, pumpkin-carving and apple-bobbing for kids of all ages. Anne Arundel County Halloween celebration. Oct. 28, 4 p.m.-6 p.m. Historic Annapolis Foundation, William Paca Garden, 186 Prince George St., Annapolis.

No-hassle gardening For anyone who loves gardens but hates gardening, there is hope. Gardens don't have to require back-breaking labor -- not if they're designed right. At least that's the word from Susan Berry and Steve Bradley, authors of "The Low-Maintenance Garden" (Firefly Books, $19.95), a guide to making gardens less demanding. Berry and Bradley point out that gardeners condemn themselves to hard labor when they add such features as perennial borders, fussy island beds and large grassy areas that will require weekly mowings.

The theater is dark, the audience mesmerized by brightly colored pictures projected onto a large screen. A mother is hugging her baby, and you're so close you can practically smell the infant's talcum-powdered skin. Desert-dwelling Arab warriors are attacked by a lion. Look at the teeth on that animal! Children ride through a wintry village on a sled, and you can almost feel a few flakes work their way beneath their coat cuffs and begin to melt. When such images are experienced today, chances are that the audience is sitting in a movie theater.

Let's say tomorrow you are appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. You decree that every household in the nation shall be expected to create and display a new sculpture each fall.Sorry, but it's been done. Think Halloween. Think jack-o'-lanterns.What is a hand-carved pumpkin if not a bit of three-dimensional art? And it should probably win you points that, unlike, say, the art in Brooklyn, you didn't need to chop up a cow or collect compost to create it.To demonstrate, The Sun asked four Baltimoreans from quite different walks of life to carve a pumpkin for Halloween.

Most people on this side of the Atlantic Ocean grew up knowing pumpkins in four main ways: as jack-o'-lanterns at Halloween, as blue-ribbon winners at state fairs, as crack-and-spit seed snacks and as the primary ingredient in Thanksgiving pies.Oh yes, we mustn't forget Cinderella's coach.Every now and then, a daring soul puts pumpkin soup on the table, but unless diners are properly primed, the proffered bowl is met with, at best, polite skepticism.As much fun as it is to carve, grow and show pumpkins, there are myriad other uses for our round orange friends: fritters, waffles, muffins, breads, soups, stews, puddings and casseroles.

Some dream of seeing their face on a 50-foot movie screen. Others fantasize about being memorialized in history books. Bob Wilson just wanted to see his face on a pumpkin.Wilson was watching the news a few years ago when he saw a segment featuring a couple of artists who had sculpted their faces into their jack-o'-lanterns."I said 'Man, I like those, but I want me on a pump-kin,' " Wilson said. "I started looking for the software they used to make the stencils, but I couldn't find any."That started Wilson's three-year odyssey into the business world of Halloween.

A frightful visionThis Halloween, the eyes have it.Not ordinary peepers, but pupils and irises that look like eight balls, sunbursts, pinwheels and starry skies.Such spooky eyeballs come courtesy of WildEyes novelty contact lenses.The lenses, first popularized by Hollywood special-effects artists, are now available to the public in eight styles. The newest are Cat Eyes (left); and Red Hot, which, as the name suggests, are the color of blood to awaken the vampire within.So far, they have been popular among Ravens football players, who have been seen in the eight-ball lenses.

We live in a two-story, Spanish-colonial style home. The floor of the entrance hall is covered in ceramic tiles with a geometric design. We would like to emphasize the Spanish influence, but we can't afford many new furnishings. How can we make the house more consistently Spanish-colonial in its styling?The quickest and least expensive solution is probably to change the color and texture of the entrance hall. How about painting the stairway wall white and giving it a troweled stucco treatment?