The Week Before Halloween

With less than a week before Halloween, exactly a month before Thanksgiving, and exactly two months before Christmas Day, I have plenty of things to do and increasingly less time to do it. I got started early this week with the laundry. Not as early as I would have liked, but I still in by quarter of 10 and out by just after 11. For once, I timed it well. There was only one other person when I got there. As I was leaving, at least three or four other people arrived with big loads of laundry.

I didn't work until 2, so I had plenty of time to put the laundry away. After I finished that, I ran to the library really quick to return Charlie and Lola and The Fantastic Mr. Fox.

When I got home, I worked on editing the Bowery Boys story we're currently writing. When Slip angers a gypsy, she puts a curse on him, the other Boys, Gabe Moreno, and Louie Dumbrowski that turns them all into women. They have to find the Gypsy to lift the curse...and figure out how to literally walk in someone else's high heels.

(I posted some other stories late last night as well. Look for two more fairy tales, a short Slip and Sach story, and a longer story about the Boys' trip to Niagara Falls at The Basement Clubhouse on our site The Riverside Rest!)

I got things done so quickly today, I even had time for a decent lunch of leftover chili and home-made rye bread with farm market honey before I changed into my uniform and left for work.

Work was very busy, and a bit of a pain. We had a lot of annoying people today, including one woman who held up my line when she didn't get half of what she was supposed to on her WIC Checks. I finally got fed up with waiting and put her things aside to take my now-long line. She threw a fit, even after the managers explain that you're supposed to get what the pamphlet says, not what you want or what a dairy man says you can get.

(Please, PLEASE read those WIC Checks pamphlets carefully before you come to the store! They tell you exactly what you should and shouldn't buy.)

Thankfully, I was able to get out and home with little fanfare. When I got home, I made an omelet with farm market vegetables and cheese for dinner and watched the first half of Paris '36 (or Faubourg '36). Monsieur Pigoli was the manager of the Chansonia for 35 years before the owner killed himself and the theater shut down. He's heartbroken when he is unable to keep his beloved son with him and the Chansonia is bought by a ruthless Fascist businessman. He thinks he might have a chance when the businessman reopens the Chansonia and he discovers that the businessman's mistress is a wonderful singer. But she might be too good for the small-time music hall...and too embroiled on the wrong side the left-leaning, strike-encouraging stagehand who is pursuing her.

Though technically this isn't a musical, music does play a big part in this tale of changing politics, broken dreams, and lost memories in Paris just as the Popular Front came in. I'm especially enjoying Pigoli's tale. The story of the mistress and the striker is a bit more conventional, but still touching.