Happy Halloween!

Tonight we will attend the Mount Pleasant Lamont Street Halloween blow out and then we will collapse, exhaused onto our couch.

It's Almost Here

We love Halloween in this house. Sometimes I wish we had a slightly more House Beautiful approach for decorating during this spooky holiday but I've come to terms with who we are so we are going with the 70's old school version.

A Good Read

Yesterday I took a trip to Barnes and Noble to see what I could find. I had been meaning for months to pick up Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and was rewarded instantly when I saw it proudly on display first thing. It seemed like a waste of perfectly good free time to head directly to the cashier so I started to browse the aisles. First I found Rob Sacchetto's The Zombie Handbook and nestled it in the crook of my elbow and then I saw Stewart Copeland's Strange Things Happen.
A little history on my relationship with Stewart. When all the girls had their hearts aflutter for frontman Sting, I kept it real by loving the tall rangy drummer. I kept copious amounts of useless information about his drums, his childhood and his food likes and dislikes committed to memory and I seriously went home and threw a chair at the wall when the news of his marriage to Sonja Kristina broke. So what if I was twelve, we had a destiny dammit! Sadly, my imagined coupling with Stewart never materialized and we both marched off in separate directions, but this book of his had me howling with gut busting laughter. Who knew this affable kook was so smart and funny?
I'm currently on page 239 reading a chapter that covers the Police reunion tour, but my new favorite quote of all time came only 20 pages into the book in chapter 4.  In it he says " There is no greater glow of narcissistic validation than receiving my own art. I slay myself - always have and hope I always will."
Now that is some spectacular stuff. Call me Stewart, we need to catch up.

Don't Take This the Wrong Way

The playground is a great place to see humankind shrunken down into a microcosm and on display for all the junior sociologists to observe. There is a class system, rules and regulations for negotiating certain play equipment, alliances forged and forgotten.  Oh the humanity. I love to watch my own childen make their way through this group, and usually I am rewarded with laughs when one of them makes a disaster out of an interaction with another kid.
Last year while sitting peacefully on a park bench with some aquaintences, one of them turned to me and said, "I hope you don't mind me saying this, and please don't take it the wrong way but do you know who your son really reminds me of?" "Who?" I asked hoping it would be some adorable moppet from a popular TV show. "That little boy from The Omen." "Wait, you mean DAMIEN?" I was sure this couldn't be the case. "Yeah! That's the one!" I was completely stunned for several very obvious reasons. Number one is that I find that child positively revolting and not just because he has the mark of the beast. That kid was obviously cast specifically for the level of creepiness he projected and the ability to make grown ups cower with one withering look from his dead eyes. Secondly, my kid has had some bad behavior days but I don't live in fear of being knocked off my chair by his expert demonic tricycle riding skills while watering the plants that hang dangerously over my open third story balcony. (Seriously, who hangs plants that high when a drop from that height onto the marble foyer floor  below will obviously kill you?)
A day or two after that I was busy karate chopping imaginary ninjas and pushing race cars with him and I stopped to try and take an objective look at him. I mean, I could be kidding myself, but aside from the dark hair (it does occasionally get long and look like a 70's bowl cut) and the light skin, I don't think we have a match here.