Caoine

Boo!

About half of my office dressed up for Halloween today, which is awesome. We have a very convincing hippy and a fantastic pirate, among others. I wimped out and am only wearing demon horns - but they're pretty great demon horns. I was thinking of going to the parade tonight but I suspect Chris and I will end up carving pumpkins and handing out candy instead, which isn't such a bad way to spend a Monday night.

Over the weekend we had occasion to purchase a large number of Halloween cupcakes. We ended up getting them from Sugar Sweet Sunshine, which I can't recommend enough. The decorations were great (monsters, witches, pumpkins, ghosts, etc) and the cupcakes themselves were divine. We got an assortment, so I believe I had at least a bite of almost every flavor, and without exception they were delicious. The staff were also very helpful even though my request was fairly last-minute. Definitely check them out.

I'm a little sad that the Halloween season more or less ends today, but I'll probably leave the site all spookified for at least a little while longer. And I can say that on the whole, this was a pretty great October. Happy Halloween!

Spookiness

Overslept this morning, which always puts me in a bad mood, but the good weather made up for it. I just wish the weekend would get here a little faster.

Our Halloween this year will be fairly low-key, I think, which is fine. I have some plans on Saturday, but on Monday we may stay in and watch horror movies hand out candy to the kiddies - something I never got to do when I lived with my parents, because our house was so out of the way. I'm sure I'll also carve a few pumpkins, because I always do.

I think I actually enjoy all the build up to Halloween more than the day itself, which is probably the case for most people and most holidays - it makes me happy just seeing orange and black and ghosts and bats everywhere. I don't care all that much where I end up doing my drinking on the 31st. One of these years, though, Chris and I are going to have to have another Halloween party, especially now that our neighborhood isn't the scariest feature of the night, and we have access to a courtyard that would be perfect for pumpkin carving. There's also the roof. Maybe I'll start planning for next year right now.

Drip

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It's wretched and wet and windy out. In the brief five or ten minutes it took me to walk from the subway to my bank, I got completely soaked. The wind wasn't so bad at first, but it picked up all at once and up and down the street you could see people fighting with their immediately broken umbrellas. But at least I finally went to the bank. (Now that I don't need to leave the office for the rest of the day, of course, I'm sure it will be deliciously chilly and completely dry by lunchtime.)

The plague is subsiding. I can breathe without coughing and my fever seems to be gone. Chris was fine days ago, but that's because his immune system pwns my immune system.

Blech

I got to spend most of my weekend feeling sick, so that was fun. I still don't feel so hot today. Actually, I do feel hot, but it's in a feverish way, not a good way. My goal is to get over this cold or at least to make it through the week without dying. (I can die next week.)

Our week and a half of good weather seems to be gone - now it's a little too cold for my taste. But I'll take too cold over too hot any day, that's for sure. It would just be nice to have my favorite season last a little longer instead of going almost immediately from summer to winter.

Do you have the will?

Feeling cruddy today, so I'm not in the greatest of moods. I really just want to go home and sleep for a couple days straight, but I don't get to do that until after work tomorrow, sadly.

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Video killed the wired remote

My foggy-headedness from yesterday seems to be developing into a moderately annoying cold. Sore throat, congestion, headache - always a good time for all concerned. I would say "at least it's almost the weekend," but I'm not really sure that Wednesday counts as almost the weekend.

I'm considering one of the new black video iPods, but what's the deal with it not having a jack for the wired remote? I keep my iPod safely nestled in its case inside my bag and rarely take it out at all - I have no desire to dig it out on the subway whenever I need to skip a track or adjust the volume. Maybe they're planning a new remote? I know it works with the new Apple Remote that comes with the iMacs, but that's only when it's docked, so that doesn't really solve my problem.

Yawn

So Chris and I stayed up a little later than usual last night to watch the first episode of the Colbert Report. Normally I try to get to bed around 10-10:30pm, which is fairly lame, but I get up so early that it's not really practical to stay up much later. In any case, I woke up at my normal time this morning (5:15am) and I can't believe I used to regularly go to classes and work on even less sleep than this just a couple of years ago. My brain is all foggy and my eyes are burning and feel physically tired, and I had to add extra shots to both of my morning coffees. And that's on five hours of sleep - which is a generous amount by the standards I had at eighteen. Is it that my sleep requirements have changed, or was I just insane to think that four hours was enough at the time?

Come to think of it, I guess my four-hours-a-night years did coincide with my three-No-Doz-a-day years and my sleeping-on-the-subway years. Funny how that works.

Anyway, we thought the Colbert Report was pretty good. The pacing was a little off at times, but the interview with Stone Phillips was gold. I'll be curious to see whether or not the show will hold up over the years as the Daily Show has done. If they're going to keep introducing new things I want to see that are on after my bedtime, I really need to get around to setting up our TiVo. Maybe this weekend (she says for the umpteenth time).

The weather continues to be pretty excellent. This is the time for eating things that are pumpkin-flavored and wearing all the blazers and jackets that live in the closet for all but three weeks of the year. I have also switched to my fall perfume - Demeter Pumpkin Pie. Good stuff.

Those Naughty Serpents

A+ on the weather this morning. Keep it up.

Chris and I had kind of a lazy weekend, which we enjoyed. Lots of movies, not a lot of anything else. We finally saw Napoleon Dynamite, which was good-bizarre, and Alien vs Predator, which was bad-bizarre. I thought Alien Resurrection was bad, but AvP really raised (or lowered) the bar for terrible Alien-related movies. There was no development or suspense at all, and for some reason they decided to condense the entire alien life cycle into about ten minutes. After the first instantaneous chestburster, we lost whatever interest we originally had and watched the rest only to make fun of it. (Much like Saw, which apparently is getting a sequel this year.)

Still Raining

It's been raining for pretty much a week straight now. It's no longer raining and hot, as it was last Saturday, and for that I'm grateful - it was really unpleasant. I am getting a little tired of it always being wet out, though. The temperature's fine, and I don't want sun - can it just be dry and cool and cloudy? Is anyone taking requests?

I ordered the Daily Show's Indecision 2004 DVD recently, and Chris and I have slowly been making our way through it. As I thought it might be, it's a lot of fun but also fairly depressing. We were so full of hope and confidence, last year - and look at us now. I was never thoroughly enthused by Kerry (was anyone?) but I'm pretty sure this would have been a better year if he had been in charge.

It's been one of those four day weeks that feels much longer, and I'm glad that it's almost over. After work, I plan to bolt directly home through the rain and change out of my perpetually damp work clothes. I will then settle in for a day or so of pizza and DVDs. Just try and stop me.

Hankering for hardware

Lovely and chilly today - just a little too wet for my taste. It seems like we get about four days a year with perfect weather that I can't find anything to complain about, but today isn't too bad. At least the air conditioner can stay off now.

I've been thinking for the past few months that it's time to get me a new Mac, but I'm unwilling to sink a lot of money into a machine now when I could just wait a year or so and have something faster after the Intel switch. On the other hand, I don't really want to put up with my ancient G4 for another year. Chris and I have upgraded almost all of its bits - new graphics card, tons more RAM, external hard drive, DVD drive, new monitor, etc. But we're sort of stuck, processor-wise, and that's what's killing me.

Maybe I'll snatch up an iMac to tide me over until the new towers and laptops come out. They're fairly cheap and would at least be an improvement over what I've got now. We'll see.