Goodbye Halloween, hello November

It's November! In fact, it's November 6th, so it's been November for a while. But I must start this post with Halloween, which was last Monday, and which we enjoyed very much.

Although I had planned to carve the pumpkins on Sunday, we ended up doing them all on Monday afternoon, which was fine. I carved three and Teen B carved one (Teen A declined to participate). I thought they looked very nice and they certainly attracted trick-or-treaters -- we had as many as we've ever gotten, maybe 30 or so. I had bought a few bags of candy at the last minute, and to appease Rocket Boy some granola bars, and we ended up giving out a lot of everything.

Teen B wanted to go trick-or-treating, so we made a costume out of his old wizard hat (the only part of the costume that still fits) and my old witch cape from, hmm, 6th grade? Why do I still have that? Maybe just for this purpose. He said lots of people praised his "costume." The thing is, you can't see costumes very well in the dark, so he really looked just fine. Many kids who came to our door seemed to be wearing sort of generic costumes that I couldn't identify. It's all good.

I usually go out with the boys, and it's very fun, but Rocket Boy hadn't had the chance to do it in a long time. So I suggested he accompany Teen B, and I think they had a good time together. Teen A and I stayed home and watched the movie of The Woman in Black, which was not very much like the book and was full of jump scares, most of which scared me. Also,  just as something scary was about to happen, our own front door handle would jiggle, scaring me before I remembered to jump up and grab our bowl of candy for the kids at the door.

Teen B came home with a massive amount of candy, but it is already basically all gone. Teen A finished off all the leftover candy that we were handing out (I put the granola bars away for Rocket Boy). I washed the Halloween cloth that I had on the coffee table and put it away, and now we have more of a fall/winter cloth there. The pumpkin tin is allowed to stay until Thanksgiving because it doesn't have a face. It holds what's left of the candy: things Teen B doesn't like, like Almond Joy, and some Hershey's Kisses. 

As to why Teen B's candy bowl is full of plastic Easter eggs, well, as I clean, I keep FINDING the blasted things. The Easter bunny hides eggs in really strange places, often much too high for little boys to reach. Granted, they aren't little anymore. By next Easter I expect they'll both be taller than me. I guess, though, that they still look for eggs lower down. Anyway, all these eggs need to be returned to the Easter box in the garage, which I can't reach, so one of these days Rocket Boy will do that.

A few days after Halloween the weather turned, and we got 6.5 inches of snow, our first of the season. (I was grateful it waited until after the 31st -- I remember some very snowy, cold Halloweens in the past.) I had taken the jack-o-lanterns off the porch and put them in the dead flower bed, so they all acquired nice snow hats. The snow knocked every single orange leaf off the honey locust. When I went out to shovel, around 2 pm (it's hard to remember that snow means shoveling -- have to get back in that mindset), I was confused by the heavy layer of leaves on top of the snow. Then I looked up into the tree. This picture suggests that there are still leaves on the tree, but they're really all gone now. The high winds we had the next couple of days helped with that too.

The snow is all gone now too (due to those winds, plus rising temperatures), so now we get a little more fall. The maple tree in the backyard still has leaves, some even green. 

As always, November takes me by surprise because there is so little of it. We've had one week already. Now there are two more weeks of school, then Thanksgiving break week, and then another half week -- and then it's December. And Rocket Boy expects to leave to head back to St. Louis the weekend after Thanksgiving.

The FlyLady is trying to get me to prepare for Christmas already (we have a holiday "mission" every weekday in addition to the regular cleaning missions), and I'm sort of going along with that, but sort of not. She wanted me to get rid of my fall decorations, but I refused -- it's "fall" in this house until December. She also wants me to plan my holiday meals and start shopping for them now, and I admit that makes sense. I always end up trying to find candied ginger and frozen spinach (two different recipes) right before Thanksgiving and sometimes failing. Same thing with certain cookie ingredients. Maybe this week I'll start looking for some of those specialty items. It would also make sense to buy our Christmas cards before Rocket Boy goes back to St. Louis. I should stop by McGuckin's and see what they have in stock.

She wanted me to do all my online shopping this week, to give things time to get here before Christmas. That makes sense too, but the problem is that I haven't thought of anything to buy anyone yet. It's the same problem we've had for a couple of years now. We don't need anything and we don't want anything -- but it's sad not to have packages under the tree. The twins have already told me, firmly, no clothes! I think what everyone really wants is a bunch of toys and games -- and to temporarily become five years old again so we can enjoy them. I could buy the boys some toys, but they wouldn't play with them. I don't even really want any Barbie stuff. I have plenty.

What to do, what to do. I don't know. It seems like a dumb, first-world problem, but it is a problem. Christmas is all about ritual, and one of the rituals is gift-giving. I have to figure out how to make that work without bringing a lot of unneeded, unwanted STUFF into the house. I'm particularly cognizant of that this year because while doing FlyLady I've been giving so much stuff away! I've taken bags and bags of stuff to Goodwill, with more to come. Why would I want to bring more stuff into the house?

Anyway, it's November. We might have done something fun this weekend, but instead we all got sick. Just a cold. I didn't even realize the boys were already sick when I came down with it Friday afternoon. They're like cats -- they don't tell me when they aren't feeling well. I was miserable on Friday and yesterday was awful. Today is a little better, though I had a difficult night. 

I'm taking it very very easy. Wouldn't go out to dinner last night, wouldn't go to Starbucks this morning. Rocket Boy is less sick, so he took Teen B (who is also less sick) to his haircut appointment yesterday, took him out to dinner last night (Teen A stayed home sick with me), and he did the Starbucks run today. Following the FlyLady, I've gotten in the habit of getting dressed in real clothes every day, no pajamas (though I don't wear shoes, as she wants me to). Yesterday and today I wore pajamas! Pajama pants, that is. I figured if I wore pajama pants I wouldn't go anywhere, and sure enough, I haven't gone anywhere.

This coming week I expect we will all start to feel much better, and there are a few appointments on the calendar that we'll probably make it to. Friday is a holiday, for Veteran's Day.

I finished the last of my spooky books, finally, and have started my November reading, which is intended to be more serious. I'll read my last Presidential biography of the year (it's on its way from Prospector) and my last Classics Challenge book of the year. 

I started, however, with a book of essays called Bee Reaved by the San Francisco writer Dodie Bellamy who was profiled, sort of, or I guess reviewed, in a November 2021 issue of The New Yorker which I just got around to reading recently. I thought the book sounded interesting, so I checked our local library and found that they didn't have it, but a couple of other libraries in Colorado did, so I could get it from Prospector. So I did.

It's an odd, interesting book -- I'm almost done with it. She references a lot of pop culture in her essays, so I read with my phone at hand, ready to look up what she's referring to. I've watched some very strange videos in the last few days, as a result. 

Much of the book is about her late husband, Kevin Killian, who died in June 2019 after 33 years of marriage, and her grief for him. He was gay and she was bisexual and they both liked to write about their sex lives and their bodies. This book is thus a bit like a crude version of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which Bellamy reports having read obsessively after Kevin's death. I found myself wondering, if I knew someone who'd just lost her husband, which book would I give them? I love The Year of Magical Thinking -- I think it would be useful to anyone who's suffered a loss. But this book is good, too. One thing about Didion -- she had a lot of money. Money to jet across the country, put on an elaborate funeral, pay for complicated healthcare. In that way, she's not like most people, though I've never had trouble identifying with her because of it. Bellamy, while not flat broke, does have financial concerns, and sounds more like a regular person (though maybe not in any other way). She and Kevin lived in a one-bedroom apartment stuffed with stuff. He dies after a Kaiser doctor possibly mismanaged his care. She pays for Kevin's niche at Cypress Lawn with Kickstarter donations (she and Didion are both rich in friends). 

A month after Bellamy's husband dies, her cat Sylvia is diagnosed with intestinal cancer and starts having unpleasant "accidents." In one essay, "Plague Widow," Bellamy describes cleaning up after the cat, again and again and again (she refers to herself in the third person, as "Bee").

Somewhere there's shit, somewhere close, but Bee can't find it. She turns on the flashlight on her iPhone, lies on the floor and looks under the bed. Nothing, but then she sees it, a foot from her head, a huge splash of diarrhea all over the bramble of cords plugged into the surge suppressor next to the nightstand. It takes her fifteen minutes of patient wiping and spritzing to clean it up, all the while fearing electrocution.

I thought, Joan Didion would not have done that. On the other hand, maybe she would have. I might be selling her short. I would have done it, in fact I have done it. Bellamy's story reminded me of how whenever something awful happens, a whole lot of other awful things tend to happen too. You can never just concentrate on being sad, you have to clean up after the cats and call the plumber to get the tree roots out of the sewer line and deal with the kids being sick and all of that. That's most people's lives.

I had a bunch of other things I wanted to quote out of the book, a lot of good stuff about aging and about love, but now I've lost them. I don't know whether I recommend the book or not. Let's say if it sounds like something you might like, you might like it.