Aaaargh!

It always stinks for me when Halloween comes right before deadline day because what I want is to just sit around waiting for the little Trick-or-Treaters, maybe hide behind the living room curtains Boo-Radley-style but no. Instead here I was trying to get my column done.  (This is me in the living room - I never stop to sit down right; I just kind of slide in to home plate and start clacking away. ) Then the doorbell rang and rang again and rang again and again and sure Old Dave is finally home from Germany but I made him go upstairs to the watch the Rangers vs. the Giants so as not to wreck the spooky feeling down here in the living room which meant I was all alone on door duty. And they kept coming and coming, little bumble bees and ogres, fairy princesses and  and even one wee little MD complete with hospital ID and a stethoscope and didn’t it turn out that I BOUGHT THE WRONG CANDY.Silly me, I thought kids got sick of chocolate on Halloween, the same old M & M packs so I only had two dozen of them. The rest were Mike & Ikes, Skittles and Twizzlers, and those little hands dug into the bowl again and again past the latter three to get to chocolate pay dirt and there wasn’t enough. Never mind the kids with their Unicef boxes which we forget about every year. We had only pennies and dimes so ended up giving out dollars and the tide kept coming until all hours and finally when it stopped I sat down and, well, here ‘s what happened:

And remember, Halloween is just the start, am I right? Because look what's waiting in the wings:

And after that it’s holiday parties and Yankee Swaps and strings of  twinkling lights all tangled  together as if in some Dental Floss graveyard...Just pray you can be ready, people; it’s all I can think of to do. That and maybe put on some weight to build up my strength.:-)

Who's Manic?

Whenever I see my friend Dottie (not her real name) she has already baked cookies for the whole county AND walked the dog AND practiced healing arts on three entire people before most of us have even had our coffee. We walked around the pond once, Dottie and I, she with her baby in a stroller  (grandbaby to be accurate, “the best thing I never did,” she calls him) and we  took those paths at 30 mph. That child’s eyeballs were jiggling. So were mine. I was completely out of breath 100 yards in and I was propelling nothing but my own increasingly porous skinny-white-girl skeleton.I saw Dottie professionally the other day and after scoring my bag of cookies asked her where she got all her energy. “Hon! I’m manic!" she laughed. "I take a shitload of meds just to say this calm!”She said ‘manic’ as in ‘manic-depressive’ but of course bi-polar is the term of choice these days and I've often wondered if I’m not a little bi-polar myself. Yesterday, for example, I was a mess. Partly because I couldn’t see out of one eye and partly because my messed-up neck hurt like hell I decided my creative powers were also shot and that nobody liked me. I whined to David the second he came in the door and fell into the bed at 8. He found a way to fall into the same bed (men! what can we say?) and today I wake up and whaddya know everything’s great. And today I’m not posting about pinned car accident victims and death's dark shadow.  In fact after I get back from my Global Grooves class at the Y and feed Uncle Ed and buy the food and work on the column and reread My Antonia so I can help a kid with his English paper tonight I’m going to start dreaming up tomorrow’s post about  - are you ready for something really serious? - eye makeup!  Onward and upward!