Halloween '07

Halloween '07

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It's been two weeks of Halloween around our house. That's how long ago Grandma and Grandpa took the girls shopping for costumes. The girls have worn their costumes almost daily ever since. They each chose their own. Audrey had been saying for weeks that she wanted to be Spiderman for Halloween. Charlotte couldn't communicate her desires, but we could have guessed it would be dog-related. Dogs are Charlotte's favorite thing. When they entered the toy store, Charlotte made a bee line for the dog costume and wouldn't even consider anything else.

On Halloween night Carol and I took turns taking the girls Trick or Treating while the other stayed home to answer the door. It was a little cool out, but not too bad. Carol took the first shift with the girls and they did both sides of the street on our block. When they came home for the handoff, Charlotte chose to stay home with Carol and Audrey and I headed out for Round 2.

Audrey was a very polite Trick or Treater. Several houses tried to get her to take several pieces of candy, but she'd often say, "No thank you, I already got one piece." We only visited about 5 or 6 houses before Audrey told me she was finished and wanted to go home. On the way home she told me that she wanted one piece of candy before she went to bed, and one piece of candy every day until it was gone. I told her that sounded like a very sensible plan. I think someone had been influencing her in the days before Halloween. Amazingly, Audrey has almost stuck to that plan. She is definitely not gorging on candy, even though she knows it is available. Charlotte, too.

We've had a couple of fairly lazy weekends. Carol's been working on her latest furniture project. I've been futzing with the pickup truck. This weekend I got a radio installed in it (it had none) and tried to fix the horn, which doesn't work (I tried a bunch of solutions, but there is a short somewhere in the wiring harness and all my attempts to outsmart it just blew fuses). Other than that we were unusually lazy. Nice for a change.

The midterm for my Biostatistics class was two weeks ago. I was feeling disheartened after the test (open book tests are the worst!), but grades came out this week and I scored well above average so I'm feeling more motivated again. I'm only taking the course for my own edification - there's not really anything riding on it - but an expectation of high grades was programmed into me very strongly as a child.

Since having kids I've lamented that I never "read" anymore. I realized this week that I still read just as much, I just don't read books. I read tons of material on the web, including news and whatever historical or technical topics grab my interest during the week. For example, I'm reading "A Tale of Two Cities" a little bit at a time from dailylit.com. That led me to do a few hours of reading online about the French Revolution. I'm also a throwback who reads the local newspaper cover to cover every day. I've done that all my life. Anyway, I was amused to have the sudden realization that my reading hasn't stopped, it's just changed shape.

Someone pointed me to dailylit.com a couple of months ago. "A Tale of Two Cities" was the thing that caught my eye the most, and made me wonder how I got all the way through four years of high school honors English classes and college without every reading a Dickens novel‽ I'm really enjoying it. I never knew Dickens was such a smart-ass. Right up my alley.