Happy Halloween!

All day I've been wondering if I like Halloween.

Cons:

- Zombies walking into the store asking me if I can help them find something

- Loud (drunk) trick-or-treaters

- Egging

- People who get their clever pun costumes ideas from new episodes of The Office.

Pros:

- Candy

- It's fall

- Available parking in my lot (something unknown at 10:00 at night)

- The HILARIOUS exchange I heard when I got home tonight:

Late trick-or-treater: "What are you doing here?"

Neighbor (dude wearing blond wig and a baby carrier with doll -- Kate Gosselin?): "Just hanging out."

Trick-or-treater: "Is that a BABY? What are you doing with a BABY? That's why you don't do drugs you know."

Neighbor: Stunned silence

Trick-or-treater: "I mean...I mean...do you have any candy?"

Neighbor: Still stunned

I guess all I have to say is Happy Halloween!

Disappointed

So. One of the things in life I find most disappointing is when recipes don't turn out as well as they look. Just made pork chops with sweet potato chutney. Sounded delicious, since I love pork chops and I love sweet potatoes.

Unfortunately, maybe I cooked the pork chops poorly or something (stupid broiler), but it didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. I think I'll stick to my standard pork chops recipe with baked sweet potatoes from now on. Except I am a little proud that I tried something new and got out of the rut. Not being beaten down by the man every day leaves me room to get creative with the cooking.

Tomorrow's menu: beef stew in the slow cooker. Hopefully I'll have more success with it than with the pork chips.

Newsweek Being Stupid (Again)

I was reading Newsweek the other day and something caught my eye. In their weekly "Indignity Index" of all the stupid things people have done over the week, they had some politician in New Jersey who has, according to Newsweek, been attacking his rival's weight by running ads claiming that he "threw his weight around" to get out of a parking ticket. (Sorry about the run-on sentence).

And after talking to one friend who's a writer and another who's a grammar-cop, I determined that, yes, indeed, Newsweek is stupid. Any well-read person knows that "to throw one's weight around" merely means that you're trying to impress people with how influential, important, or well-known you are. But no editor at Newsweek could even run a Google search on that particular idiom. I mean, for real?

It's one thing to pretty much lie about being a non-partisan publication, but it's another to just let editing and writing go out the window. Completely.

The End.

Hiatus

So I've been on hiatus for a rather long time. But I have excuses. Like that I got a job. Sure, I'm only working retail, but a job's a job. Money coming in and all that. And even thought it isn't full time, I'm working hard and have such weird hours that I'm so tired. And once I get out of the habit of doing something, it's hard to get back into it. Like flossing my teeth. Or going to bed on time.

So, anyway, in the month or so since I last posted, I got the job, I watched the entire series of Kings (awesome), I've read some good books, and I've gotten myself an ear infection. Woot.

But I'm back.