Trick-or-Treat

In the suburbs is probably the best place to live if you're a kid on Halloween. When we first moved here, our neighbors warned us that the usual head count on trick-or-treaters is around 200. With this kind of gobblin & fairy population you can't simply turn the front lights on and wait for the door bell to ring, you'll never close your door. Around here, everyone sets up camp in the driveway, with their fire pit blazing, wrapped up in blankets, and nursing a beer/glass of wine. I was only able to capture a few (very blurry) pictures of the hustle and bustle in the neighborhood in between swarms of kids.

Blown away by this number, we still stuck with our treat of choice (soda pop). Yes, we wanted to bribe the kids the first Halloween we arrived to simply say, "We're the cool neighbors, don't egg/toilet paper our house." Each year it's worked and each year we hear things like, "Dude, seriously, you guys are AWESOME!" Or, "See... I told you this was the pop house!" We also get the occasional, "MOM THEY HAVE POP! CAN I HAVE ONE?!?" It still cracks me up, the kids that ask their parents permission to have a can of pop, because I'm not sure which is worse, our one can of soda or their entire pillow case full of candy.

This is our third Halloween and the numbers keep rising. I think this bad economy is forcing people to stay home, reproduce, and thus, more trick-or-treaters. Which, in turn, fuels the economy more by the amount of candy that is needed to sustain the whole two hours of trick-or-treat time. I think we might be treading on thin ice this year though. We bought eight 24 cases of soda (all a variety of extreme sugars: cherry, grape, orange, root beer, mt. dew, etc...) and loaded with 192 cans we still ran out within the first hour. We, sadly, had to close up shop and send them next door to the "pixie stick" house.

Next year I'm thinking we should buy for 250, that should at least last us an hour and a half. Man, to be a kid again. I struggled with whether or not it was appropriate to demand a piece of their candy in exchange for our soda. Ben thought that would be a little tacky, so I restrained myself.

This weekend also brought about the always dreaded daylight savings "fall" back of the clock. While I enjoy the first few days of extra sleep in the morning, I curse it at 5:00pm when the sun has gone down for the night. It makes for some really long evenings.

Turns out I'm not the only one that the time change is rough on. We have Hobbes on an eating schedule and, while many of you think he's fat, (he's just big boned) we try to monitor his diet. Anyway, every morning at 6:00am, Ben feeds him and, at 5:00pm, I feed him. Well, not only did kitty wake Ben up at 5am demanding to be fed, he put on quite a show by his food bowl from about 3:30pm until 5pm. He was cursing us and the world for making him lay there on the cold, wood floor, famished all because the stupid time change.

We are on day three of day light savings and Hobbes is still struggling, but he's getting better. Today I was thinking to myself, he's just a cat and he's not adapting well to the change in his feeding times... imagine if he were a kid. Eeshhh.