Neither Rain Nor Snow Nor Dark Of Night...

Halloween on Saturday should be easy. You have all day to get ready, right? So why did Larry and I find ourselves with 4 yet-to-be-carved pumpkins at 2:30 this afternoon? And why was I visiting the grocery store at 3:00 on a Saturday to buy a new battery-operated pumpkin carver? Can anyone tell me?


Believe me...you want scary? Try fighting the crowds at your local Harris Teeter on Halloween. It was a harrowing situation which caused even yours truly - Miss Can't-We-All-Get-Along - to contemplate shoving a certain woman's shopping cart into the checkout-line candy display. Hello? It's a single line for the self-checkouts. Don't give me that crap that there's a line for the right and a line for the left. There is one line, and I am at the head of it. Me, the person armed with a battery-operated pumpkin carver...



The rain began this evening at precisely 6:30 PM, the official trick-or-treat start time... In a perfect world, it would be possible to say to the kids, "Oops, it's raining out there. Take off your costumes, we'll just do it next year!"

Alas! This not being a perfect world, we have 2 soggy princesses and 2 soggier pirates (those felt capes are quite absorbent) traipsing around in the dark with a Daddy who has enough foresight to make them stop at home between neighborhoods to empty their candy bags. "You don't want those bag handles breaking like last year," Larry warns the kiddies as he dashes into the kitchen to pour himself a quick beer. Selfless, I tell you...

7 Quick Takes: Night Of The Snack-Size Twizzlers

1. I had a post ready which lamented the condition of my overstuffed mess of a refrigerator; but then I read this article in The New Yorker this morning about North Koreans and how their lack of food caused them to eat corn husks, tree bark, and other delicacies (that is, the North Koreans who didn't just starve to death). Somehow, my fridge post doesn't seem all that funny now.
2. Yes, I do sometimes read something besides blogs.
   
3. My new-found social awareness, however, is not stopping me from preparing for Halloween, that most gourmand-ish of all holidays to be celebrated here in the US tomorrow. Nor is it keeping me from exulting over the annual appearance of snack-size Twizzlers. Their chewy goodness, a far-cry from the stiff dryness of their year-round brethren, has knocked me completely off the diet wagon for now. I may climb back on sometime after New Year's. Or maybe not.
4. "Exulting" doesn't begin to describe my behavior, actually. I've already eaten half a bag of these things. I cannot stop.
5. Americans do not know who is in charge. That is what I can surmise from the results of our "Name Those Cabinet Positions" test. Only two of you even took a stab at it. Of course, it might be that the rest of you found the subject so boring that you clicked away to something more interesting, like Miss G's post about her first frat party at The Women's Colony. I don't blame you.
6. This year we have 2 princesses, a pirate, and a knight in shining tinfoil armor for Halloween. I didn't have to lift a finger except to spend 3 bucks for tiaras at Michael's. I call that a good Halloween, don't you? It sure beats the tornado costume fiasco of 2007. Throw in those Twizzlers, and I'm in heaven.
7. Everyone around us has the flu. The only question now is will we be sick for Thanksgiving? Chanukah? Christmas? Or maybe all 3! The suspense is killing me.

Click on over to Conversion Diary for more 7 Quick Takes, where no one is quizzing you on your knowledge of US government. I promise.

Name This Post (Cause I Can't)

Apparently, the H1N1 pandemic is providing fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. I watched a YouTube video (why? I don't know) in which a woman propounds her theory that the (secretly deadly) swine flu vaccinations are part of a sinister gov't population-control plan. Why else, she asks, would pregnant women and young children be first?

Apparently, she has never seen Titanic.

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Fortunately, there were less frightening videos being passed around this week also. This was the family favorite:



Of course, we don't have cable. So anything will amuse us.

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Finally, I'm sure the Supreme Court will be relieved to know that, collectively, we've remembered all their names. Turns out that it was Souter who retired (Sotomayor took his place), Stevens is still there, and Kennedy was the one that none of my friends and I remembered. Jeopardy, here we come!

Not many people wanted to tackle the Cabinet questions though. Shelley was brave enough to take a stab at it and mentioned Janet Napolitano, Director of Homeland Security. So now we've got 4: Napolitano, Clinton (Secretary of State), Gates (Defense), and Sibelius (HHS). There must be more, right?

Remember, honor system, no Googling - how many Cabinet members are there and what are their names? I know that, together, we can do it. Yes, we can.

Well, maybe not...but it's worth a try.

A Quiz

Why, hello there! Larry had the nerve to leave me for a couple of days and somehow he took my blogging mojo with him. Also, I've had to do all the work around here. What's up with that?

Today, at our weekly Burger King date (yes, it's a glamorous life I'm leading), 2 other homeschooling mothers and I could not come up with the names of all 9 Supreme Court Justices. We got 8 of them: Souter, Alito, Roberts, Sotomayor, the other lady, Breyer, Scalia, Thomas. So, who's the ninth? Help us out here, or our kids will grow up stupid.

I know I could just look it up, but it's more fun this way. No cheating now!

Also? Among the 3 of us, we could only come up with the names of 3 members of the Obama Cabinet: Clinton, Gates, and Sibelius. Then we argued over whether Obama's Chief of Staff (Emanuel) was a member of the Cabinet or not. And how many Cabinet members are there, anyway? And is "Emanuel" spelled wrong?

These are the sort of things homeschooling mothers discuss at lunch. I'd like to say, in our defense, that any one of us could have recited the 8 parts of speech and the formula for the quadratic equation at the drop of a french fry. Not to brag, or anything...

So? Remember that ninth Justice yet?

Conundrum, Solved

Larry, recounting to me some episodes from the Boy Scout death march he took David on last weekend, said, "What was really scary was when the huge tree fell down..."

"Wait," I said. "You were hiking in the forest and a tree fell?"

"Yes," he said. "And the noise it made..."

"Whoa!" I said. "You were hiking in a forest and a tree fell and it made a sound?"

"Yes!" he said, catching on. "It did! So I suppose that proves that even on that trip, far away from civilization and all its womenfolk..."

"...you were still wrong!"

Poor guys - they just can't catch a break...

(You really have to click on that last link to understand the joke...)