John's Blog

A belated Halloween recap is in order, especially since I don't have anything else new to report. Despite some great 11th hour suggestions, I stuck with the construction worker concept. It didn't come off that bad, and got me off the hook with little effort or embarrassment. The only problem I encountered was that every time I had to have an encounter with the public, pretty much everyone got confused thinking I was an actual construction worker and couldn't understand why I was talking to them. Admittedly, it's kinda' lame to dress up as a pretty common and honorable profession and call it a costume, but I never expected an identity crisis. I taped a cheesy copy of the company logo on the front of the hard hat in a half-assed fashion, but I guess I needed to be a little more over the top than that to have it be considered a real costume. And several co-workers ask me seriously "how did you get a company hard hat?" Both reactions surprised and scared me a great deal.

But at least it worked out better than the guy I heard about recently on the news, who took his daughter trick or treating, and decided to wear his old prison uniform as a costume. Unfortunately, somebody who worked for the corrections department recognized the uniform, and a prison lockdown and a manhunt resulted because they thought a prisoner had escaped.

Then after work, the parade of the costumed munchkin extortionists began. But in a pleasantly surprising reversal of trends from previous years, each and every one of the trick or treaters were "age appropriate" kids in cute costumes, and none of the uncostumed teens that we've seen in the past. With the exception of the dog (restrained in the family room) who felt the need to agitatedly bark VERY LOUDLY every time the doorbell rang, it was fun. What's NOT fun is the excess of "fun sized" candy which is now left over. Not much fun in fun sized candy actually. The person that came up with that name, is perhaps the same marketing genius who came up with the name of the "no child left behind" program. And with the wimpy size, I find myself eating more of them than I really should. Can't wait until they are gone.

The classic moment of the night was when three wee tikes came to the door and announced that they were trick or treating for Unicef. I stopped to put the candy bag back on the table so I could get my wallet out, and the first kid said in a panicked tone, "no wait, we'll take candy too". I stuck a buck in each of their boxes, and I hear the one excitedly exclaim, "Oh boy I got a ten!" Jeesh, how did I do that; I'm not sure if his excitement or my panic was greater, but I almost felt bad when he discovered it was in fact just a dollar.

Tags: pointless rambling