Oh, good, it’s still Hallowe’en here, I’m not too late! I dressed up as a grown-up Red Riding Hood - white peasant blouse, black bodice, long black skirt, red velvet cloak and a basket full of goodies for Grandma (but I gave it to some trick-or-treaters, 'cuz I think Grandma went to play bingo.)
Ran to pick up one of the Terrible Teen’s pals two towns over, got her back to the house and met up with the rest of the teenage horde. Everyone got dressed up - we had Dorothy of Oz, a Matrix-inspired batfaced thingie, a big baby, an invisible man, an eyeliner goatee guy with a neon guitar, a generic ghoul, a generic Goth chick (I gave birth to that one), a Renaissance wenchlet, a vampire, a skeleton, and an I-don’t-know-what-it-is-but-it-has-a-cool hat. I sent them to the streets for two hours of candy-collecting, while I handed out goodies to the goblins who came to our door. Honest to Pete, the little ones get cuter every year. One little fairy princess blew me a kiss, a little ghoul offered me very sincere Halloween wishes, and a tiny tiger said, “T’ank you Snow White. Why you got a red coat on?”
The teens returned here on schedule, ate four Tombstone (get it?) pizzas in thirty seconds flat, grabbed a bowl of popcorn and headed for the basement for a private showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Boy-type teenagers were picked up by their various parental units at 9:00pm. The girls (7 of 'em) are now watching Young Frankenstein and giggling like madwomen.
My one weird observation of my daughters friends from this evening: I had two Alexes, two Chrises and two Sams. Only the Chrises are male.
If I had a girl (I’m cursed, I mean blessed with two boys) I wanted to name her Alexandra and call her Alex for short. Or Veronica, as in the Archies comic strip. Every year as I go through my kiddo’s schoolmate listing I have to ask: “now are Jordan and Shelby boys or girls?”
(Continuing the hijack) It’s getting weirder all the time, Blonde. Yes, both of the Alex-girls here tonight are Alexandras, and both Sams are Samanthas. But the Terrible Teen also has female friends named Avery, Ryan, Cameron and Shelby. The only really weird boy name I’ve encountered among her pals is Messiah, which just makes me cringe (although he’s a really neat kid.) Oh, just for giggles: one of the Samanthas is Vietnamese, and her surname begins with “Nantha.” Samantha Nantha*******. I just love it!
Chilling out at home listening to the scanner as the cops cope with our petit Mardi Gras. Another Amateur Night like New Years’ Eve, people that just don’t know how to drink. The professional drunks know better then to get involved with this horror show.
It’s a frickin’ zoo up here! Fights…car crashes…a stabbing…a cop got nailed over the head with a bottle…a possible heart attack.
It’s so bad that a cop went looking for the guy with the heart attack and couldn’t find him, so they sent the cop to break up a fight down the street. Meanwhile, another call comes in for this heart attack, turns out the guy was behind the building where the cop couldn’t see him.
A girl got shot with a pellet gun at the college, and the call sat for quite a while before it got dispatched. Hope it wasn’t a serious wound!
They’ve brought in cops from other cities, including Marblehead (one of them was the guy who took the bottle to the head). This is way crazier than last year. Being that it’s Friday night, that’s surely a big cause. It’s 2:00AM and the scanner traffic is just starting to calm down.
So that’s the word from Samhain Central, where you can’t swing a dead cat without a Wiccan trying to steal it for use as a spell component
