October 31st, the one day a year that Hello!Project costumes are not scary:

Don’t worry, tomorrow they’ll be back to normal:

Meanwhile, I’ve got the promise of a cloudless sky for tonight’s candy-grab, so I stopped at Costco and picked up 75 pounds of supplies. I’m kind of bummed that this year’s non-chocolate assortment has replaced a lot of the standard goodies with things like Haribo, Hot Tamales, and Swedish Fish, though; I blame multiculturalism.

On the bright side, I’ll eat less of it. Or just eat from the chocolates, anyway…

[Update: 65 pounds out the door, last batch of little monsters at just after 9pm. A surprisingly traditional assortment this year, including one group of quite lovely young Japanese girls. In Japan, they’d be old enough for bikini DVDs, but since we have no U-12 idol industry, they went with the more American witch and princess looks.]

A few Iron Men and Captains America, zombies male and female (including an undead prom queen), a pirate girl who could have been quite sexy if she’d been old enough for her taste in clothing, a lovely princess a few years shy of kissing her first frog, a teen witch who bought her stockings and heels at Fredericks of Hollywood and the rest of her costume at Toys R Us, and the usual assortment of ghosts, vampires, dinosaurs, ninjas, bears, cats, hungry teenagers, etc, many of them barely old enough to lisp out a “thank you”. The youngest were invariably accompanied by rather attractive mothers dressed up as Suburban MILFs.

[young teen girls with black-framed glasses in relatively normal clothing was a big thing this year; they looked to be dressed up as something, but beyond “cute nerd girl”, I couldn’t guess]

Since the neighbors at the end of the street started putting on a haunted house a few years ago, I’ve bumped up my candy supply. I give out large handfuls, so I figured 40 pounds wasn’t going to cut it this year, and bought 11 five-plus-pound bags at Costco. I had maybe a bag and a half left at 8:30. If they’d kept coming for another half-hour, I’d have been out.

… but I have uncled. Matthew Marion Greely was born this morning, making my brother Mike and his wife Polina into very happy, very tired, parents.

Welcome to Earth, little guy. You share a birthday with Poul Anderson, Ricardo Montalbán, Joe DiMaggio, Andrew Carnegie, Amy Grant, and the Bush twins, so we expect great things from you.

It’s 10pm on a Friday night. When I open my windows to cool the place down, what do you suppose I hear?

…

…

more...

So I’ve been sick for about two weeks now, with whatever cold/flu/sinus bug is going around, and most likely I’m getting reinfected whenever I feel well enough to get out of the house and go into public. This is in addition to the problem I’ve been dealing with since June, where a combination of sinuses and “silent heartburn” conspired to wreck my voice.

And, of course, getting sick again made that problem even worse, to the point where I was in a conference call early Thursday morning dealing with the fallout from a power outage, and people could barely understand the frog-like sounds that came from my throat.

Off to the ENT again this afternoon. Hopefully he’ll have something better than “try taking Prilosec for three months”, which helped a little, but not enough.

[Update: …and the word for the day is “endoscopic fundoplication”; something to investigate when I get back from my upcoming vacation]

In the mailbox: a hearts-and-flowers promotional mailer from my car dealership, offering a sweetheart savings on… replacing the cabin air filter.

In email: a web-bug-filled promo from Asus that says: “Spread the Love. Give the Eee PC. “

If I open my front door, will I find a door tag from the local pest-control company, telling me that the best way to show my love is to get sprayed?

On Saturday, the city informed me that my street will be “slurry sealed” on Tuesday, blocking all traffic in and out between 7am and 5pm. We’ve also been asked not to water lawns or wash cars that day. I have two predictions.

1. some cars won’t get moved because their owners took Thanksgiving week off and are already out of town.

2. the sealing work will look awful and have to be redone, because if runoff from sprinklers can affect it, the 11 hours of rain that’s currently predicted will really wreck the job.

No doubt this planning was done by the same genius responsible for taking a 40 MPH corner that went around a vacant lot and converting it into a 15 MPH corner that goes around a major shopping center. And the frequent damage to the new guardrail demonstrates that they’re not kidding about the 15 MPH.

I’ll be staying at a motel tonight. The alternative is over-sleeping by ten minutes and being forced to skip class and work from home. Given the logistics of the thing, they’ll start with circles and dead-end streets, so even if they quit early because of rain, they’ll be doing my block first.

I had planned to take a few days off work to relax, maybe do a little cleaning around the house, catch up on my Japanese studies, pay a few bills, perhaps even watch a little anime. Your basic five-day weekend.

Then I caught a cold, and by the middle of last week, was feeling pretty miserable. I spent the first two days of my mini-vacation lying around the house with a box of tissues and my last remaining caffeine sources. On Sunday, I finally managed to get a start on my spring cleaning. Spring 2007, that is.

Good thing, too, because I’m refinancing the house, and the appraiser was going to show up on Tuesday afternoon. I didn’t need to impress him with my housekeeping skills, but I did need him to be able to get into every room without tripping over the clutter or sneezing himself to death in the dust.

I’m not a very good housekeeper, you see. I’m a clutter-slob, and my usual practice is to let the stacks of books and piles of clean laundry accumulate until I can’t find a path from A to B, then spend a day tidying and call in a maid service to do the actual cleaning.

Unfortunately, I’ve been pretty busy at my current startup (now in 250 Best Buy locations, arriving in all Micro Center and Frys Electronics soon!), my office is 75 miles from my house, and I rarely have the (sweet, satisfying) luxury of telecommuting. The house has basically become an oversized hotel room that doesn’t have a housekeeping staff. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it didn’t smell; I can tolerate almost infinite clutter, but I can’t stand a mess.

[this, by the way, made life interesting in my rental days; clutter-slobs should never share a place with mess-slobs, but even worse is having two clutter-slobs reinforcing each others’ behaviors]

All told, I did about 24 hours of tidying, cleaning, and honest-to-gosh scrubbing around the house. By the time the appraiser arrived, I was getting unnerved by the sheer wrongness of having so much open floor space around the house, and I’d burned out most of the cold.

If I ever get the chance to retire, I’m hiring two maids. A sturdy middle-aged woman to do the cleaning, and a hot cosplaying coed to tidy up the clutter. Or maybe two of each.