Hallowe'en

It must be this neighborhood. Last year, we had our biggest trick-or-treat crowd ever; last night, it was the slowest Hallowe'en I can remember.

Celeste stuck to her guns and refused to dress up, and we dinna have a costume for Quinn, but it was okay because we didn't get the girls out of the house. Evelin got home about 15 or 20 minutes past 6:00 p.m. (the start of trick-or-treating here, and our first doorbell ring came about five seconds after 6:00 p.m.), and since the shift back to Standard Time has left the girls a little disrupted that was just in time to feed Quinn and to start the long push toward bed. Celeste was asking for peas and pierogies, and I was trying to cut and sauté onions^* while keeping an ear out for the door. By the time we had to move the candy bowl outside so we could take care of baths and bed, it was a little after 7:00 p.m. and we'd had about 11 trick-or-treaters.

After the girls were down, I left the bowl outside so I could focus on cleaning up. Around 8:45 p.m., Evelin heard a bang on the porch so she went to look only to see a lot of (older) kids in the street ... and our bowl missing. Evelin is not shy about standing up for herself: "Hey! I don't care if you're greedy with the candy, but I want my bowl back." (I am on hold with a call center in India at this point, but I started to get my boots on to go and track down the miscreants.) One of the kids in the street says that it wasn't them, but some kids who took the bowl and ran down the street. After a little bit of yelling among the kids, I'm walking down the street and one of the kids is coming back with the bowl, still half-full of candy. I say thank you, gather the bowl, and head home — all the while still on hold.

The only other incident was at about 9:20 p.m. (trick-or-treating officially ended at 9:00) when the doorbell rang. Thankfully the girls both slept through it. When I opened the door, the kid at the door said something like "Sorry, I didn't think the doorbell would work." (So you rang it why?) I told her the cutoff for candy was 9:00 p.m., she apologized and led her group back to the sidewalk. We turned off the porch light after that.

^*Frozen pierogies; the onions were for "Mexican pizzas," a quick quick dinner we came up with over the weekend: A spinach tortilla, spread with refried beans, topped with sautéed onions, and a bit of cheddar and then broiled. It's far, far, far from gourmet, but it's quick and tasty and helps speed through the arsenic hour.
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