caerula's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- halloweeny On one hand, I am wearing my Beautiful Sweater today, which always makes me happy. On the other hand, I have the hiccups, for no apparent reason, which annoys me. Halloween was fun. I had the day off yesterday, and went in to help out in YMB's classroom in the afternoon. They had a costume parade through the school, and a party in the room. I felt for Teacher. This is her first year, and you could tell she just had no clue what to do with all these hyped-up kids. She wisely didn't attempt to get any actual work done -- they did a Halloween word search and coloring pages, and then got into their costumes for the parade -- which took about half-an-hour, what with all the kids who needed help tying and snapping an buttoning and putting in fangs and all. I was rather disturbed by the number of second- and third-graders with truly gross and icky costumes -- a number of "Scream"-like masks, really disgusting masks that come with a pump that drips blood down them, and just generally inappropriate things. YMB looked awesome in his Musketeer outfit, although he's decided that next year he has to be something SCARY. There were lots of Harry Potters, with varying degrees of authenticity; vampires and princess and witches abounded, of course, and the requisite hobos and ballerinas and cheerleaders. There were some clever ones -- a girl in YMB's class was a bandito, with a poncho and sombrero, and one of the student teachers (my cousin S, who is student teaching with YMB's former 2nd grade teacher) was Sherlock Bones in a dinosaur outfit topped by a deerstalker. It was fun, and Teacher made the kids chorus "Thank you" to me at the end of the day for helping out, which was neat. But I was so reminded why I got out of teaching. Gack. Trick-or-treating went well, too. I was unsure what to expect from our new neighborhood, but more than half the houses had their lights on and were passing out candy, and lots of people had set up lawn chairs on their driveways to watch the parades of kids. There were lots of kids out, most actually accompanied by a parental unit, and only one group of annoying older kids. Who didn't seem too ill-behaved, except that they were on skateboards and so posed a health hazard to themselves and others. Most of the kids seemed to say trick-or-treat and thank you, which impressed me, and the grown-ups were nice. So I was happy with the whole experience, and YMB was happy to have filled up his bag and the reserve bag as well. And he got the good-stuff -- Snickers and KitKats and Tootsie Pops. Very few of the the icky off brand stuff, or the misguided attempts to be healthy. Although one place was giving out Pantene sample packs, which I thought was a little weird, and YMB also ended up with a pad of paper and a pencil from somwhere. After trick-or-treating, we went over to Grandma and Auntie's, so they could see YMB dressed up. Grandma is not doing well. Her 80th birthday was Oct. 30th, and she wasn't up to doing anything at all. We usually go to dinner or something, but she's not really even leaving the house. When she talks she gets all out of breath, and she shakes, and can hardly walk. I really don't think she has much time left. It's hard to say, though. They told her 15 years ago she had a couple of years left. She's at a point now, thought, where she seems ready to go, and we're ready to let go. She's miserable all the time, she sleeps like 18 hours a day, and that's just no kind of life. Of course, she still excels at making everyone around her miserable and being incredibly insulting. She'll be like that until her last breath. We've accepted that. Well, that was depressing. Anyway, then we went home and sorted candy, YMB went to bed, we watched a couple of episodes of Buffy on FX (the same one Natalie saw, with the tiny little fear demon, and also the one where the substitute is a praying mantis), and then tried to watch "Blair Witch," which I had not seen before, but I fell asleep on the couch before the end. What a pointless movie. And not in the least scary. The people were so annoying I was rooting for the witch to get them long before I was bored enough to fall asleep. And here I am. Stiff and sore from sleeping on the couch -- Blue claimed he tried to rouse me enough to stumble to bed but I was uncooperative, so he left me on the couch -- tired, sugared up, and so ready for the weekend. Except there's no rest for the weary this weekend, with Minnie's shower on Sunday. Sigh. And what am I gonna wear? 9:55 a.m. - 2001-11-01 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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