Hey, it's November! Perhaps I'll try to do the ol' NaBloPoMo or whatever it is. Post a day for the month of November. And they have to be real posts, not Twitter-ish short ones. Let's just see how it goes.

Halloween is over, and I'm going through post-holiday syndrome, where I can't stop looking for things I could use for it even though the holiday is done and my costume is half-disassembled. This year I was A Middle-Aged Woman Who Cannot Wait For Christmas. I had found an excellently tacky Christmas sweater and extremely cringe-worthy Mom jeans at the Salvation Army -- seriously, two different people said, "please never wear those pants again" -- and I borrowed a Santa hat from the prop closet at work. I also had a small strand of battery-operated mini-lights, so I turned those into a necklace. I baked Christmas cookies too, for a prop. It went over well at the show I went to, and I won a set of four classic mini game pens. I only hope my cookies weren't what pushed that drunk girl over the edge and into Barftown, USA.

The day before was Halloween at work, where all of the parents in the office are invited to bring their kids in to do some cubicle-to-cubicle trick or treating. Workers choose whether or not to participate, and if they do, they get a sign and a basket of candy. Since I work with a bunch of bookish nerds, a lot of them dress up for the day -- usually not in full costume, but they'll put on a crazy hat or a wig. I still have my bird costume from 2 years ago, which is essentially just a hoodie with felt fabric-glued onto it, so I decided to wear that. And I wanted to do something to my cubicle, too. I considered finding four big branches and duct-taping them to the corners so I could have a little mini-forest, but that seemed too hard. There happened to be a never-used, still-flat cardboard box nearby my cube, so I stayed late Weds. night and made it into this:



It's a birdhouse! A birdhouse with the added bonus of acting as a door to my cubicle! I got a lot of envious comments from my coworkers, lemme tell ya. It slides to the side to open it, but whenever a person came to my desk to talk to me, they'd just lean over and talk through the hole. In the photo I'm kneeling, which I did throughout the trick or treat thing, and I actually have bruises on my knees now. Corporate-strength berber carpeting is no joke.

I wrote down the costumes the office kids were wearing, just for anthropological interest:
Apollo (the mythological figure)
cowboy
pink bunny
bee
Tinker Bell
dinosaur (2)
classic ghost (2)
Ariel (the little mermaid)
cat
dead bride
headless football player
an "oxymoron" (a dunce cap with ox horns)
crazy clown
Batman (with fancy mechanical wings)
A Bionicle (?)
2 devils
2 Transformers (Optimus Prime and Bumblebee)
turtle
farmer
baby on back of old man
A family with mom: daisy, dad: beekeeper, baby: bee
two renaissance ladies
angel
tiny lion
Lightning McQueen
"girl from the 80s"
skeleton head
candy corn witch
forest fairy girl
Hannah Montana (I assume)
Sponge Bob Squarepants (hand-painted cardboard box)
vampire
gypsy woman
lady bug
Statue of Liberty (a 3-year-old boy)

In other news, we bought tickets to go to Belize in early February. "Fuck the economy," we said, knowing deep in our hearts that my magazine will probably fold before then. (Luckily, there are always going to be crazy people for CJ work with.) More about that later.