* Cold and rainy here and I wonder if I'm going to get any trick or treaters. I think I'm glad I bought little Hershey bars - I will eat them, or, I can chop them up and use them in baking or make a sort-of-redneck ganache out of them. (I made a ganache with dark-chocolate chocolate chips and canned evaporated milk once - since I don't keep cream on hand - and it was not bad at all).
And I hear rain again so yeah.
* Mike gave my co-worker Billie and me little bags of candy (he had made them up for the college kids and saved one back for each of us). There are several peanut-butter things in there, though, that I will either have to take over to school or tote up with me at Thanksgiving to give to my mom. I'm not 100% convinced I've become allergic to peanut butter but being all alone I don't want to risk it.
I did eat a white-chocolate KitKat and it was pretty good. I am slowly trying to work crunchier things back into my diet but I think truly hard things are off the menu forever - I don't want to break a crown.
* One of my students did recognize how I was dressed because in lab she called me over with "Janet, I need information!" and a couple other people asked me about the character. I guess not many people (or many college students) watch The Good Place. Oh well.It was fun enough and now I also realize I have....
"Mein Kleiner Gruner Kaktus":
Except I have no balcony to set it on, and hopefully no drunk neighbor for it to fall on at 4 am.
* I started "The Eagle of the Ninth" last night. Yes, I am still reading "Miss Mackenzie" but it's hit a sad point (looks like not only is she going to lose her entire fortune but maybe somehow be forced to pay back what she's lived on so far) and it just seemed like too much last night (I was tired and headachy).
I'm just a couple chapters in but I really like it. Like some books of this nature (more often, I have found, books aimed at older kids/young teens), you can almost feel and smell and hear the setting - the dust of the road, the smell of the latrines, the rough wood floor planks....it's very evocative.
I dunno. I never went for the "kids need to read books with people just like them, so they can relate to them" - these are old-Roman guys (or Romanized Britons), men, middle-aged, and I want to read about their lives. I like reading about people not like me because I would like to try to understand them. Or, if nothing else - I like the escape. I like hearing about a life different from mine. I think it would be extremely tedious for me to read about a single, middle-aged woman, working in the sciences or education, at this particular point in time: because I am living it. I don't want to live it in my entertainment. I'd rather read about Roman Britain, or about precariously-middle-class people in Victorian London, or about a detective in the New York City of the 1930s, or a Jewish family in Czarist Russia, whatever.
I also find I like books that are about the stuff-that-happens more than ones that focus on the motivations and brooding and interior lives of the characters, at least some times. At least when the world seems to be too much with me, and the weird human unpleasantness in this world, I just want a good adventure story - all the better if it's one where the "good guys" are clearly good and are going to win.
* I wound up with one (1) trick-or-treater. Maybe-seven-year-old-girl in a Violet Paar costume (from "The Incredibles"). I threw a handful of small Hershey bars in her (nearly-empty) bag.
It makes me a little sad that trick or treat seems to be dying out. I know the concerns about sugar and safety and all that but I have happy memories of it from childhood.
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