November 1, 1999
It's a beautiful day today in Seattle. The sun's out, the air is dry, and all the leaves are simply fantastic. Chicago never had fall weather like this. Everything feels so crisp and clean, it's a joy to be alive. It's especially nice to have weather like this the day after Halloween -- I always feel like Halloween should be dark, rainy, and grim, but the day AFTER, everything should feel bright and fresh again. Maybe I'm just being overdramatic. I really love the seasons here, though.
Halloween was completely groovy this year. Saturday night we went to a Halloween party at the house of some of Keith's friends. It was a costume party; unfortunately, I regret that I did not go all dressed up. I procrastinated thinking up a costume for far too long, and then the day of the party it was really too late to do anything about it. Keith and I contemplated painting my face white on the left side and blue on the right side, and his face blue on the left and white on the right, and going as those characters from original Star Trek, but we didn't follow through with it. For one thing, I would have felt that to stay in character, I would have had to pretended to hate him for the entire evening, and that would have been no fun.
Keith informed me that last year he had an incredibly lame costume (brushed his hair forward over his face and went as Cousin Itt), and that this year he planned to have an even lamer costume. Personally, I think he succeeded; he sewed a cotton ball to the ass of his jeans and went as a cute fuzzy bunny. Also, before we left the house, I planted bright red lipstick kisses all over his face, but that wasn't really part of the costume. It was just fun.
The party was fun, even though I wasn't wearing a costume. Two guys showed up as Neo from The Matrix. One of them was MUCH better than the other one -- the first one just wore all black and slicked his hair back, but the other one came complete with trench coat and arsenal. It was a Nerf arsenal, granted, but it was still mightily impressive.
The other really cool part of the party (besides for getting to see all the people that I only get to see at social functions) was the game. Every year Craig and Sherri (the hosts) do a puzzle at the Halloween party. This year, the puzzle was to find clues all over the house, decode them, put them together, and tell Craig the answer to get a prize. Keith and I went at it with a purpose, and managed to find all the clues and put the puzzle together in, I'd say, less than half an hour. I'm most proud of finding the Casablanca clue; from one of the hints we found, we knew that one of the code bits was to be found near something that had to do with Casablanca. Well, in Craig and Sherri's TV room, they have a huge Casablanca poster, but there was no code on or behind it. Then I checked in their video case, and looked in the Casablanca videotape box, but there was nothing there either. THEN I checked their DVD collection, and sure enough, it was stuck to the inside of the DVD case. Yay me. Keith and I weren't the first ones to finish, because we started late, but we won prizes anyway. I got an alien pencil case and Keith got an alien-head pencil to go with it. It was tres groovy.
Sunday morning we went to the grocery store and picked up a BUNCH of candy to give out to trick or treaters. It was a crapnacopia of candy, I swear. I think it was enough to feed all of the neighborhood children for an entire week. Keith objected to my including an entire case of Pixie Stix, but I said that I always liked getting those when I was a kid, so he gave in.
You know, where I'm from, Halloween has turned into this completely organized event. The neighborhood moms make up flyers the week beforehand that say when trick or treating will happen, and put them in everybody's mailboxes so they know when to be home. The instructions tell you to turn your porch light off if you don't want trick or treaters, and for as long as I can remember, trick or treating has been for a set three-hour period during the afternoon of the Sunday closest to the 31st.
Well, not here in Seattle. I kept asking Keith if he was SURE the kids were going to be trick or treating, since we didn't get anything in the mailbox, and he looked at me like I was nuts. Here, Halloween is on the 31st, and that's when kids trick or treat, whether it's on a weekend OR a weekday. And nobody is so lame that they go trick or treating before DARK, unless they're really little and their parents make them.
He was absolutely right. Right about 6:30, just as the sun set, the doorbell started ringing. We got maybe 6 or 7 groups of little kids, all of which were entirely too adorable. There was a fuzzy lion, a U.W. Huskies cheerleader, a princess, two girls in poodle skirts, Qui-Gon Jinn, a skeleton, and a few witches. The last little girl to ring our door really made out like a bandit, because it was about 9 PM and we figured we wouldn't get any more trick or treaters after that, so we just dumped the rest of our candy bowl into her bag. She was really impressed.
Next Halloween I'm going to think up a really great costume, you just wait and see.