Halloween has come and gone. We live within walking distance to two schools, and trick-or-treating is so formalized here that it gets its own scheduling announcement in the newspaper, so I expected a small swarm of sugar-seeking munchkins to descend upon the neighborhood. We bought enough candy to fill two large glass jars, and set them out to hasten the appeasement of the costumed.

The sum total of the encounters of the evening: 3 visits, less than a dozen kids. We still have two half-full jars of candy.

A neighbor got far into the spirit of the evening, heavily decorating the house, and (obnoxiously) playing a looped recording of "scary sounds" at high volume. Said soundtrack included moans, rattling chains, and most annoyingly, an angry cat. After a hundred or so repetitions of that sound, I started fantasizing about improbably disastrous accidents that might befall the large torches they had lit out in front of the house.

I've lost my taste for that sort of ritual. I stayed in, looked at some code, and did some writing.