Halloween stuff

We didn't decorate the yard for Halloween this year: shalmestere has been ill for a couple of days, so she wasn't motivated or energized, and whatever we were going to do for Halloween was on me. She had mail-ordered some red masks and red hand-looking gloves a month ago, so I put on an all-black medieval wool gown and hood, a pair of thigh-high leather boots, and a mask and gloves and sat on the front steps with a bowl of candy.

It's apparently really terrifying to see someone not move. At least a dozen kids (some as old as ten or eleven) were seriously scared to come up the walk to where I was sitting, and one girl (at least 8 years old, maybe more) was actually reduced to tears. Swear to God, all I did to her was sit on the steps in costume, motionless. Anyway, once they got within five feet, I would slowly raise a red, long-nailed hand and intone "Good evening" in what passes for my bass range these days. Then hand out some candy and variously wish people a happy Halloween, a happy Diwali (which a number of them appreciated and reciprocated), or un buen Día de los Muertos (ditto). One pair of tween girls were trying to coax one another to go up the walk towards me first, speaking to one another in Spanish, until (seeing one was dressed all in black with whiteface) I said (again in a deep voice) "¿Y hace cuánto tiempo estás muerta?" Eventually they steeled their courage, came up and got some candy, then came back twenty minutes later for a photo-op with me.

There were probably at least a hundred kids in three hours. A bunch of "classic" witches, at least three Hogwarts students (all Griffindor), few if any Marvel characters, a few "Good Guys" (who I gather are really bad guys), a few Super Mario characters, a bunch of decent homemade costumes by teenagers, a bunch of other teenagers who didn't bother with the whole "costume" thing at all, a teenaged girl in a skin-tight skeleton outfit about as revealing as Seven of Nine's uniform.

Once things seemed to be winding down I turned out the lights and came inside to watch holiday stuff with shalmestere: we couldn't find the DVD with Charlie Brown and the Great Pumpkin, but she looked online and found "Halloween is Grinch Night", which neither of us had ever seen, nor needs to see again. To clear the palate after that, I put in the DVD of "Young Frankenstein", in honor not only of the holiday but of the late great Teri Garr, who died a few days ago. It's still good. Bedtime.

Tomorrow evening I'm scheduled to do some phone-banking, calling likely Democratic voters in Pennsylvania (who have all gotten thousands of phone calls, texts, and e-mails about politics in the past month, so I expect to be hung up on a lot).

Another phone-banking shift

My shift two weeks ago was all about encouraging early voting. This one was "if you have a mail-in ballot, it's probably too late to put it in the mail, so you'll need to drop it off in person; do you know where?" or "if you're planning to vote in person on Tuesday, do you know where, when, with whom, and how you're getting there?"

I talked to two people who were definitely voting for Trump, but were friendly about it, and a few who were definitely voting for Trump, but were nasty about it, and five or six who were enthusiastically voting for Harris (one of whom wasn't certain about his registration, because he had recently moved, and wasn't certain where his new polling place was, so I was able to help with that).

And lots of Pennsylvanians who were sick and tired of getting political phone calls. One little old lady answered the phone "Hello! F*** you!" [click] before I even said a word. A number of people weren't sure whether they were the person I had asked for until I identified myself, at which point it became a wrong number. One woman answered the phone, I asked for David, and in an outrageous fake-male voice she said "This is David; how may I help you?"

Perhaps the oddest answer I got was "I actually don't vote; I'm religious." [click]