The Girls are a bit peeved with me ... part of my birthday swag was this "mad scientist" mask that they intended for my Halloween costume, but I've not had it on all weekend. Bad Daddy! In my defense, we've had a rather "full" weekend of activities, and my getting dressed up was not an essential element.The school system here pretty much "gives up" on Halloween ... they had a half day, the majority of which was taken up by Fall Assembly, with all the kids in costume. Daughter #1 was really working an Alice In Wonderland costume (she had Alice's curtsy down pat, straight out of the movie), and Daughter #2 had a vampire get-up that was using make-up and hair grease to as close an approximation of Bela Lugosi as a 9-year-old blond gal is likely to get (though they still don't like me singing the song!).
Friday afternoon I ended up leaving the Deloitte workshop early (it was targeted at a far more rudimentary level than what I'd been hoping for, and no chance for any meaningful networking) to get back home to get The Girls (and their friends) up to the Halloween party at dojo. This ran from 5:30 to 7:30, and was a madhouse. We then spent the next couple of hours getting their friends back home (not having a car, this involved a lot of walking and buses).
On Saturday, The Wife convinced me that it would be "too much" to take The Girls up for their actual dojo classes, so Daughter #2 headed off on projects with her, and I ran Daughter #1 up to her "selective enrollment" prep class (an 8-week program to make sure she aces the test for getting into the hard-to-get-into highschools). The Wife managed to tack on a couple of other errands for me up on that end of town (you can get shoe repair services at about 1/3 of what they run down here, for instance), and I still got some reading in.
We then scooted back here, as they'd moved up the trick-or-treating in our building to a 4:30 start this year (it used to always be in the evenings, but that may be due to Halloween falling on a Saturday), and they were having their friends back over (plus a couple of others) to do that. Over the past several years, I've been the one to go with them (actually, Daughter #1 and her friends, at the wise old age of 13, got to go on their own), but this time The Wife volunteered, leaving me no excuse to put on the mask. After doing the building, they all headed out to hit some of the extended neighborhood and take the one boy of the group back home, as the rest of them were staying for a sleep-over.
The kids are all still here at this point, although I understand there's a birthday party in the offing (for the aforementioned boy), so #2 and her friend are off for that at some point. Me, I've got 50 plausible job openings lined up in my browser tab bar to get through, a Bears game to listen to (I don't have a coax feed in here and don't have a converter box for my old mini-desk TV, so I can't watch the games and work anymore) and a bunch of other projects to get to if I find the time ... I'll probably just throw that mask in with the Halloween stuff and maybe use it next year.
Oh, yeah ... and this makes me 1/1 for NaBloPoMo!