October 18
Well, Halloween is a'comin, and we finally have all our ducks in a row. All I have left to do is put the star on my magic wand and hem Jake's dragon pants. Sadie's all set to be Chicken Little, Jake's thrilled to pieces with his red dragon costume, and I have all the pieces to the Fairy GodMama costume which will likely be my Halloween mainstay for the next several years. Steve? Well, I have a feeling he will put on his Cowboys jersey and be happiest handing out the candy. Last year we had some father trolling the neighborhood with his kids, and he was dressed in full Batman gear -- what fun! Jake is very excited about this, and as an added bonus, one of his classmates has a birthday party the day before which of course will be Halloween themed. Then there's the day at school with the costume parade, and then the evening events cuminating the whole shebang. The cats are the only ones who hate Halloween around here, because the damn doorbell rings all night and they freak out and run down the cellar stairs every time.
Read a couple of fantastic books this past weekend. Caroline Cooney's The Girl Who Invented Romance was funny! Girl trying to figure out the difference between love and romance builds a board game around that question and uses it as a project in her sociology class. Lots of fun, and she learns a lot watching the situations around her with family and friends. The board game is included in the back of the book -- we are laminating it this week and we'll be playing it in the media center soon. Twilight was another romance -- wonderful and unexpected. It's a high school romance/vampire/suspense story, and doesn't fit neatly into any box you try to shove it in! Great for my 8th grade girls -- excellent writing and plotting, and it's CLEAN! Unusual as most writers who are trying for a little edginess tend to throw at least one fairly graphic sex scene in for that purpose, and it doesn't always work. This works on so many levels -- I want to ditch everything and read it again!
The Radioactive Boy Scout was good too. Heavy on the science material, but that's necessary to understand how a kid with a Boy Scout Handbook and a 1950's era Golden Book of Chemistry could attempt to build a nuclear reactor in his backyard and have to have the EPA come do a fullscale cleanup. I just HAD to find out what in the world he read that made him think he could pull that off -- and how he got hold of radioactive stuff to boot. I ended the weekend with another Caroline Cooney book, her new one, Code Orange. High school procrastinator tries to pull together 10 pages of notes on a biology project on a virus, using old books his decorator mother bought from a doctor's estate, and winds up exposing himself to smallpox via some old powdery scabs in an envelope from the 1918 smallpox epidemic in Boston. Are they still viable? How can he tell? Now he HAS to do his research in order to figure out if he's going to die or not ... and in posting some of his information online he becomes a target for terrorists who see his potential as a biological weapon of mass destruction. Whew! What a ride!
It finally stopped raining here and Noah didn't show up, but the town got worried enough about the dams on the Byram River to call the state in the middle of the night last week, so we DID get a lot of rain (12 1/2 inches) and it did make things dicey here and there. The weather is now much better, the kids have been outside playing every day and wearing themselves out, and it looks like it will be dry for a while now. Can't believe we have ANOTHER hurricane brewing (Wilma). Enough already! At least it doesn't appear that it will head for the upper Gulf Coast (yet).
Powerball is tomorrow night, and there are lines all over Greenwich with people from all over making stops to buy their tickets for the 340 millionish jackpot. I'm going to ask Steve to go buy a couple quick picks tomorrow just for fun, as there probably won't be lines up in Danbury like there are here. Wish us luck! Maybe if we win a little we can afford chairs to go with the dining room table we ordered last weekend!! :)
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