Three days ago it was seventy degrees and the asian lady bugs that congregate on the side of my apartment building were going crazy, crawling under the door and clicking against the lights, and today we got dumped on with snow.  It was cold and rainy all day, and then after dark it turned to a heavy, cold, wet snow that sugar-frosted all of the trees and turned to slush in the roads.  Walking home, I felt like the mythic Paul Bunyan, forming giant lakes with every footfall.

There is something about snow that inspires creativity.  An hour after the snow started, I found a little snowman perched on a garbage can, and two hours after that someone had constructed half of a man-high wall on the mall, and he was still building it, patting it down, adding clumps of slush, when I started my walk home.

Generally, I don’t like Halloween.  I don’t dislike it, I just tend to let it slide by without much notice.  As a kid, I remember loving it simply for the fact that it was the one day of the year that it was acceptable to toss my parents usual rule of “don’t talk to strangers” out the window and walk around in the dark trolling for sweets.  Now, I don’t know.  Maybe it’s the flippant mockery of fear.  On one hand, I understand that Halloween is for many a time when they can put up these comic depictions of everything that scare us, because one of the best ways to conquer a fear is to find a way to laugh at it.  I just tend to think that horror represents something more than big, bloated witches and shambling, dumb mummies.  There is a difference between conquering or facing a fear, and reducing our fears to something ridiculous.  I don’t know where I’m going with this, and it probably warrants further thinking, but, yea, Halloween usually is a source of annoyance rather than enjoyment.

However, two awesome things did happen.  One of them is documented here.  Two guys from my school, we’ll call them C and S, staged and elaborate Pokemon battle on the campus mall, complete with battle music, pokeballs, and pokemon in full costume.  I was very glad that this happened, and it made me love my school all over again.  I’m hoping it will be posted to YouTube soon, and if that happens I’ll link to it.

The other thing was, my partner and I were driving down to the cities this weekend, and wanted to grab some Chipotle.  Now, I’ve never been to Chipotle on Halloween, never knew Chipotle did anything special on Halloween, but when we walked in the line was almost out the door, and everyone was wearing aluminum foil.  Apparently if you wear foil you get a free burrito.  We didn’t have foil, but a couple gave us theirs when they were done, so we got free food.  Awesome.

Spent the weekend playing Arkham Horror, a fairly complex board game based on Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos.  It took us three hours to even get the basic concepts of the game down, but Saturday afternoon we played through and beat it.

Also, started reading Jeff Smith’s Bone on Friday.  I’ve only read the first book of it, the first 150 or so pages out of over a thousand, but I’m loving it so far.

It was a recharge weekend, a time to get away from everything that was going on.  Now tonight we’re driving back to Morris, and then the madness begins.