How Not to Be a Halloween Douche

After tonight's festivities, I have some rules to keep me from hitting you in the head with a brick:

• Unless you are taking your OWN children trick-or-treating, no matter how good the costume, if you are 6'5", stay home.


• Treat bags are $1 at WalMart, splurge on one instead of using that creepy pillowcase. If you are using it because you are worried about bag breakage, you are too involved in the quest for candy.


• If you can grow facial hair, stay home.


• If your idea of cadging for candy is loading up the van with everyone, and going to a different neighborhood, stay home. Or go to the mall, they give out candy. I want to give it to my neighbors kids, not huge quantities of random children from another town.


• If I've dropped the piece of candy in your bag, no matter how small it is, DO NOT give me a look like you are expecting more. You get what you get, move on.


• Once you've received your treat, GET OUT OF THE WAY, you are blocking my porch for the rest of the rabble. I want to get this distribution over with as fast as possible.


• If you are under 25, and only have a child under 1, you don't need to trick-or-treat. No one cares about your costume, and your very uncomfortable-looking baby should only be shown to a handful of people who give a shit. Also, you don't need that candy.


• I happen to be sick almost every Halloween (last one, this one, horrible coughing) so if you ring the bell and I don't show up right away. Give up. Don't bang on my door or continue to ring. I'm in the bathroom retching from the coughing. And if I reappear while you're still there, I will be mean.


• No editorials on what I gave you, good or bad. I don't want to know, no one wants to know, it will either be perceived as pettiness or gloating.
• If we have turned out the lights, we are OUT OF CANDY. DO NOT ring the bell or knock. Why are you walking up to a dark house anyway? Glutton for serial killers?

Oh, and have a nice Halloween.

What Won't We Do for a Patch

Here's my Cub Scout. He enjoys being a Scout, though he is so far from religious he has to work on his facial expressions when God is brought up. We had a Den Meeting last night and we met at the city Police Station for a tour. I'm not sure my child has one thought or another about the police. He's not the sort to be in trouble and I'm afraid, overall, he views police with some suspicion.

The tour was uneventful except the Autistic scout who kept pestering Fletcher and finally spit in his face. I'm sure I should be more understanding, but our Den meetings would go so much better without Jacob-on-the-spectrum. He's really disruptive. I don't have the tools to deal with him, his mother is exhausted and sometimes fails to deal with him, and the other boys freak at the sight of him. My son keeps turning around and rolling his eyes at me about Jacob.

The police officer (Officer Foster, to you) who took us on the tour was a short man, who looked a bit like a proper police doll in his little uniform. He seemed nice enough, but fairly dull and I suspect, not that bright. Our police station is very modern and homogeneous. At 7 p.m., nothing much is happening there. It's not as if they let the boys tour the jail. We stared at the 911 operators, saw a training room that was indistinguishable from every seminar room I've ever been in (though Office Foster did show the boys some training batons and the training cuffs) and peeked in a small gym.

At least the boys got a patch. And I'm sure this completed some step in the Wolf Cub achievements. We still have to determine which church will be the least offensive to my little Atheist so he can complete the requirement of religious institution attendance.

Witch of the West

Every year since Fletcher turned 3 we have a birthday party for him. Every year it's on a Saturday at 2 p.m. and we host it in our backyard with open doors and guests wandering in and out to get food from the table. Every year, my mother drives 500 miles to show off her skills as amateur caterer. I do love my mother, in the way you love something that is both good and bad, supportive and judgmental, bittersweet. But, she couldn't be a better user of the back-handed compliment and the best practitioner of damning with faint praise.

I cleaned like a maniac (badly and with loads of sweat) in preparation for her arrival and the party. To be honest, more of it was focused on making her happy than worrying about parents of my son's friends noticing how piggishly I live. I could tell by the way she looked around that I didn't accomplish what I should have. She sneers at all my attempts to keep house and begins moving things around and constantly wiping everything with a damp paper towel.

She rolled in around 5:30 on Friday evening and immediately said several things. My husband needs to help me more, using the words "well you (meaning me) work full time." Implication being he doesn't. No, he doesn't, but he does make money for us. Also called my son, her only grandson, chunky. Yes, he's gained some weight. We are addressing it. She needs to back off about it. I'm chunky. My husband is chunky. We're all trying not to be chunky. Guess what, woman?! Insulting us never helps.

She took us out to eat at Red Robin as Fletcher (who had just turned 8) had restaurant choice. She always orders a petite burger and gives us all the evil eye if we order something larger. Claims that she really isn't glaring at us, but her vision is failing in her old age, but I remember her when she was my younger mother and she did it back then, too. I can't be fooled.

After dinner, Mom and I made a big trip to WalMart to get beverages and other sundries for the party. She was mostly tolerable on that trip but we had to spend too much time dithering over sun dried tomatoes in olive oil. And there was a long discussion about the olive oil I had in my cabinet, along with the admonition that I really should keep it in my refrigerator. Cause, you know, I love having to make it go from solid to liquid each time I use it.

Saturday morning was a fairly early start so I could send Fletcher and Joe off to Fletcher's soccer game and Mother and I could get the house ready fort he party. She cooked and fussed with things and I finished the cleaning the house so desperately needed. I got myself into a sweaty, cranky mess and already had a list of things I needed help with by the time Joe returned.

The day moved on with lots of sweaty running about for me, errands for Joe and nice cooking smells a product of what my mother was doing. I managed to be almost ready when the first child was dropped off early by his grandmother. Certainly by the time most of the guests showed, we were ready to entertain and feed them.

Two hours later after much decorating of superhero capes, greedy mad dashes for prizes and pinata droppings, it was over. Except for the brother and sister who were still there because Dad used that time to do some work. The sister had been invited, the impulse-control impaired older brother was like a prize we couldn't give back that came with. He managed, during the party, to hit my son twice in the head with a soccer ball, which prompted Fletcher to whack him in the head with a whiffle bat. Only fair. Much crying ensued on both sides at each injury. Ice packs were distributed.

The evening after the party included dinner made up of party food scraps and going to a showing of Where the Wild Things Are. Mom and I enjoyed the movie but I think Joe and Fletcher found it too melancholy. It might not really be a children's movie. But, visually, it was so stunning, I had to love it.

Mother left this morning with admonitions about picking up the living room each night and more worried comments about my son's health. I appreciated her help with the party but was not sad to see her close her Suburban door and drive away. I can only take so much Judy.

More Time to Create

I love making art. But sometimes the creative portion of my brain can't fight its way out from the part busy filling spreadsheets with numbers, or designing pegboard units for Sears or picking up a mind-numbing number of toy parts from the living room floor.

Even with a degree in art, I have no delusions about making much, if any, money from it. I will never be a good marketer of my art, not good at making multiples of one thing, just not that sort of artist. I make things for friends, family, myself. I make things because the thing is in my head and I want to make it real.

But lately (and that covers a lot of ground) I've been so busy with work projects, house cleaning, party preparation and just general laziness in the in between bits that I haven't been creating. Now we have reached that point in the yearly cycle where my creations need to be aimed toward gifts. I'm good with this. I have pictures of past gift creations that still make me happy that I made them. So, it's time to start thinking of what is in my head that wants to be made real AND will be a great present for family or friend. Start my engines...the creative ones I mean.

Three colors, one flavor

I do like Halloween. And, though it's not popular to say so, I like candy corn. My husband hates it, my son won't try it like most things and it's not good for me, so there isn't any in the house. But trust me, late the night of October 31st, after my son has looked over his haul, I will pick through and find the candy corn and eat it.

My son's birthday is essentially a week before Halloween. So, though usually I have decorations out, this year, I'm so swamped with work and getting ready for his party (cleaning the house so my mother doesn't tsk tsk about the state of my mind) that I haven't decorated for the season. Also, most of my outdoor decorations go in my flowerbeds, which are filled with weeds. I was hoping someone would tell me, that for a small fee, they would dig up the weeds. No one has volunteered to be paid for the honor yet.

And then there are the 22 superhero capes I have to make. Still working on that. But really...I'm looking forward to Halloween...and candy corn.

Admissions of a Shrew

I'm a shrew. Really. But I don't mean in the eats ten times my own body weight to survive, I mean in the taming of way. I'm a yeller, at my child, at my husband. Sometimes I'm also a thrower during a particularly heated tantrum, usually in housekeeping and equitable division of chores arguments.

I don't like being this way. I'd love to be one of these measured Moms who speaks in gentle tones as I ask my child for the umpteenth time to stop putting his toys on the floor where I just cleaned, but since the minute I see said toy sitting in the area I just picked something up from I turn into a raging bull. Hmmm, I'm mixing my animal metaphors. So be it. Line up all the negative animal associations that convey anger, irritation, meanness and screeching and you will find me.

Every sound irritant, every mess (and the house really is a pigsty, part my fault, more theirs), every overwhelming new request for a work project sends me into a tizzy. I live a lot of my life in a tizzy. I don't like it. I'm just not sure how to change.

And, yet, here I sit, typing this blog instead of working on the chores that have an endgame. I should be completing tasks that have a completion. Helping myself feel accomplished. But in addition to being a shrew, I'm also a slug. A champion procrastinator of a slug. Again, another negative animal metaphor to add to me oeuvre.

Celebrities, Has-Beens, Wish-fors: Oh My

I'm constantly reminded that there are people who really want the attention, the camera, the crowd on them, looking AT them. On Twitter, the reminders are constant. Oh, there are the "nice" celebrities - like Virginia Madsen or Stephen Fry. They tweet some personal items, more likely links to things that interest them. They don't seem to be dancing around trying to get us to notice. Course I also don't find their politics offensive. Unlike someone like Scott Baio, a washed up has-been I hadn't given a thought unless I accidentally (and most unfortunately) have happened on a Happy Days rerun with Chachi in it.

Suddenly, he's all over Twitter spouting his, clearly, uninformed and uber-conservative "opinions." (One hateful opinion was actually the bimbo utterings of his wife that he agreed with.) He's telling all us "regulars" (you know, those of us not in the media spotlight for some reason or other, or at least not sucking at media's teat in a whore-ish fashion) how great it is to be him and a Conservative and how great his life is. So a follower of his made a silly joke relating to his brag of how rich he was. He completely overreacts, claims he's being extorted, blah blah. What a tool. And, really, it's not as if this upsets some good opinion I had of him, just reinforces what I suspected. He's a stupid, tiny man with no talent.

Yesterday, our TVs were entranced with the silver popover zooming through the Colorado skies, possibly carrying a six-year-old boy. As the story has unfolded, the boy wasn't in the popover, he didn't fall from it, he hid in the attic and perhaps the entire thing was yet another bid for this media whore-ish family (or at least the father) to get more attention. Dad Heene, first off, don't name your poor child Falcon. Do you want him to be ostracized for the rest of his life? Or, spend so much time saying "Yes, Falcon, like the bird." And, Dad Heene, a six-year-old, even a particularly clever or media savvy one, still can't keep a secret straight and will easily blow the deal when you want him to "pretend" the facts.

And, if you are an actual celebrity, not a has-been or a wishing-to-be, such as Miley Cyrus (yes, I'll concede by definition she is a celebrity, though I will not pretend I find her talented or fun to listen to) stop being such a princess thinking so many people care if you are or aren't on Twitter or anywhere else for that matter. I know you have all these bubbly tween girl fans who still want to think of you as Hannah or a bunch of skeevy older guys who have gross fantasies about you. But I'm guessing most people won't notice your absence. So stop making it into something.

As for the rest of you has-beens, come back to us with style. You want us to pay attention again, do some good and do it a bit selflessly (and for my money, do it on the left, not right: I won't pretend to care about you if you agree with Beck.) And the wish-fors, do something truly interesting or heroic, or at least kind. Stop trying to get our attention like a four-year-old with a frog.

And, real celebrities, those I see too much in the news, on my television, on Twitter, use your galaxies-revolve-around-me for extra good things. Donate some of that money, notoriety, time to a good cause. Pay attention to the regulars, speak to them occasionally because even without the spotlight some of our ideas and lives are interesting, too.