(no subject)

[the_rck]

Last night was kind of miserable. We ordered pizza from our usual place, and they decided, for reasons unknown, to put oregano all over my pizza. I can't eat oregano without getting sick. I called Cottage Inn, and the manager tried to convince me that they hadn't put any herbs on the pizza because there wasn't any mention of herbs in my order. I could see them, I could smell them, and Scott could taste them.

Scott didn't emerge from the shower in time to be able to go out to get me something else, and the dishes I would have needed to prepare something else without wrecking myself were dirty. Washing them by hand would have been harder on me than just not eating dinner, so... Yeah. By the time Scott could have washed those dishes, there also wasn't time for me to prepare anything.

Then Scott and I snarled at each other for quite a while because he didn't like how I was dealing with trick or treaters. We had no jack o'lantern this year, and it wasn't dark enough for our porch light to be easily visible, so I wanted to keep the front door open. I've done that every Halloween for the last decade plus. Scott just hasn't generally been here.

Cordelia thought I was stingy when I limited the early trick or treaters to one piece of candy each (little bags of Skittles or treat sized Kit-Kats). I pointed out that we got a dozen kids in the first five minutes and that I had no way to know how many more kids we'd get. We ended up getting only about another dozen kids over the next two and a fraction hours.

Then we worked on the census thing. That required digging out a lot of financial numbers and adding them together. They wanted a lot of numbers for things over the 'last 12 months' which isn't an easy period for us to calculate because of how Scott keeps our records.

We did manage to (we hope) deal with the problems my laptop has been having. Disk Utility told us that my hard drive was corrupt. We had to connect my laptop to his in order to be able to make repairs, but as far as we can tell, the repair effort worked.

Comments

[evalerie]

I think trick-or-treat standards have changed. When I was a kid, people gave out *one* piece of candy to each kid. As a young adult, I was shocked that when I offered candy, kids would grab a whole handful, and nobody acted like this was weird or greedy, but rather it seemed like a handful of candy was the default and giving kids just one piece would have been seen as stingy. Though I grew up out-of-state, and I was a rigid rule-follower of a kid, so it's totally possible that this is something that I've imagined and not a real change in how Halloween works. For whatever that's worth.

On the topic of ending up with inedible food and no time to get more: I wonder if there is frozen food that you could either buy or set aside in the freezer so that you could heat it up in the microwave on days when dinner goes wrong. It would be nice to have a backup option.

**hugs**

[the_rck]

Most years, the 5 o'clock trick or treaters are all under the age of five, so it's still amazing to them that people are giving them candy at all (or they're not even sure what the stuff they're getting is). This year, we got a bunch of older kids (if any were younger than middle school, I'd be surprised) right at 5:00. That made me think that we might get a lot of kids this year. Some years, we get forty or fifty. Some years, we get three plus whoever Cordelia went out with.

At any rate, I tend to give more candy later in the evening when I'm less worried about running out.

Most of the emergency back up food options in our freezer right now rely on the pressure cooker because they need steaming. The pot for that was the thing that needed washing. We had some things I could have boiled, but I'd have had to be willing to leave them there while I watched the door. We got the pizza around 5:00. Scott went straight to the shower after that and didn't come back out until about 5:40. I can't eat after 6:00. Anything I-- or Scott-- could have prepared after Scott came out would have taken at least fifteen minutes and quite likely longer.

I think that, in terms of microwavable things, we probably had frozen green beans. I could have just eaten those, but I was so cranky that the idea of steamed green beans when I'd been ready for pizza (and could still see and smell the pizza) was pretty horrible.

[evalerie]

I dunno. I wish you had some frozen pizza or TV dinners or something, that you could pull out and nuke when you need to. Or soup cans. Or something!! Getting stuck not eating sounds awful!!!