T minus four and counting!

[mousme]

I'm excited, can you tell? Three hours and forty-five minutes until NaNo starts.

In the meantime, my beef has finally thawed, so I'm going to make my chilli now. I have green peppers and mushrooms in the fridge, and this time I am determined not to forget to add them.

Hallowe'en was shorter than usual this year due to rain: fewer trick-or-treaters, although we got rid of most of the candy (for a while there it looked as though we would be eating rockets for the next year).

The kids in this neighbourhood are wonderfully well brought up. I can count on the fingers of one hand the ones who weren't polite, and in those cases it was simply because they were too excited and hopped up on sugar. The others all thanked us politely, or were accompanied by parents (in the case of smaller children) who reminded them to say thank you. They were all well-mannered, no one pushed or shoved, no one yelled. Same as last year. It gives me faith in the future of mankind, let me tell you. The costumes were mostly store-bought and not very extensive, but there were a few who had clearly put a lot of work into their costumes (or their parents had), and while there were a couple that made us scratch our heads ("Was that a costume?" "I'm not sure. I think so..."), for the most part it was nice to see everyone getting into the spirit of things.

One little girl dressed as a fairy got scared out of her mind by a teenaged boy with a scary skeleton-esque monster mask and had to be coaxed back to the door to get her candy by her mother. The boy looked very sheepish and said that if he was scaring little girls, it might mean that he was getting too old for trick-or-treating.

ai731 and I played games all evening. I beat her at Phoenix and she beat me soundly at Racko, so honour was retained on all sides. When baronscartop got home, though, everyone was kind of dead, and so after I took down the Hallowe'en decorations I beat a retreat. I brought my two pumpkins back upstairs with me, and I think I'm going to hack them into small bits and try to make purée, which will then become pumpkin pie, if I can find a good recipe.

I'm currently listening to the soundtrack to "Dawn of the Dead" which baronscartop lent me, along with a number of other mood-appropriate CDs for zombie-related writing. I'm a little nervous about this year's novel, since I don't really know what's going to happen beyond: Zombies arrive, people die, people fight back, the novel ends.

Can you feel the excitement? The air is crackling with it! Or maybe that's just George going bonkers for no reason in the next room. Freaky cat.

Comments

I should note...

[fearsclave.livejournal.com]

...that my offer of technical advice still stands :).

[luvenditti.livejournal.com]

racko! my sister and I play that .... mind you we made up different rules.