This Is Halloween

Happy Halloween, whether you had trick-or-treaters to attend to today or not! Our trick-or-treating is being held off on until Saturday. Oaklyn may have weathered Hurricane Sandy better than most, but there's still a lot of downed trees and limbs to be cleared. Maybe it's just as well. I still need to throw a costume together to help Dad and Jodie give out candy.

I spent most of the day making up for the lack of kids with Halloween-themed programming. Started off with three fall-oriented Max & Ruby tales. In "Max's Halloween," Ruby wants her brother to be a prince to her Cinderella, but Max would rather be a spooky vampire. Max is an enthusiastic leaf collector in "Ruby's Leaf Collection," but Ruby wishes he'd stop burying her school assignment in his leaf pile. Both bunnies get quite a scare in "The Blue Tarantula," when the book Ruby reads to Max before bedtime about a rabbit-eating insect proves to be too much for their imaginations!

Max and Ruby aren't the only ones who are spooked by Halloween. Garfield and Odie also have a frightening encounter with some ghoulish characters in Garfield's Halloween Adventure. Garfield and Odie are out trick-or-treating dressed as pirates, but their night takes at turn for the scarier themselves stranded on an island with no candy and real ghostly pirates after their treasure.

The Grinch may be best-known for trying to steal Christmas, but he's been out at Halloween, too. In Halloween Is Grinch Night, a sour sweet wind sends Dr. Seuss' nastiest villain on the prowl. Inquisitive Eukeriah Who takes it on himself to make sure that the Grinch never reaches Whoville with his cart filled with wild psychedelic scares.

Bugs Bunny's Howl-Oween Special and Disney's Halloween Treat are bits and pieces of, respectively, Looney Tunes and Disney shorts. Howl-Oween has Witch Hazel chasing Bugs through several classic horror-and-Halloween-oriented shorts. Halloween Treat is an old copy of a Disney Channel Halloween special from the 80s that combines Halloween-oriented episodes of several different Disney TV anthologies with additional material, including the full versions of the classic shorts Lonesome Ghosts (with Micky, Donald, and Goofy as the original ghost busters) and Trick or Treat (another Witch Hazel helps Huey, Dewey, and Louie get treats out of their trickster uncle).

Not everyone appreciates the spookier side of the holiday. In Boo to You, Too!, Piglet is so scared by his friends' Halloween costumes, he refuses to go out for trick-or-treats with them. Winnie the Pooh decides that they shall simply have a "Hallo-wasn't" and do without costumes. Tigger, Gopher, and Eeyore cry foul and convince Pooh to help them prove to Piglet that Halloween is nothing to be afraid of

The best-known of all classic Halloween specials is by far It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Linus is determined to await the title character, whom he believes brings treats to all good little children, in a sincere pumpkin patch. Against her better judgement, Sally joins him. Meanwhile, Charlie Brown has his own problems with trick-or-treating and Halloween parties. Snoopy's more interested in fighting World War I than in Halloween festivities.

Piglet isn't the only one easily spooked by horror. Blood and guts scares leave me queasy, and even less overly gory scares can give me the willies for weeks. No, I'd rather laugh at my fears and enjoy the ghoulish atmosphere in comedies like Arsenic and Old Lace, which I ran while having a soup I threw together from leftovers and water I'd put aside for the hurricane for dinner.

Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) is a drama critic who just got married to the sweet girl next door (Priscilla Lane). He's the lone sane man in a family full of loonies. His two sweet elderly aunts (Josephine Hull and Jean Adair) have been poisoning lonely men and burying them in the basement. Their nephew (John Alexander) thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt. His brother (Raymond Massey) is a homicidal maniac who turns up with his own body and a face reconstructed by a jittery German doctor (Peter Lorre). And the local cop (Jack Carson) just isn't buying his story. Mortimer has only one very busy Halloween night to get all the murders and bodies sorted out and keep his impatient new wife from figuring out what's going on!

If you love black comedy, this should be high on your list of must-sees. It was based after a smash-hit stage comedies, but unlike most stage-to-screen transfers, it never feels confining. Everyone is spot-on, from Adair and Hull (repeating their original stage roles), to a frantic Grant, to perfectly ghoulish Massey and Lorre, to Carson as the cop who can't believe these nice people would be that crazy. Highly recommended for fans of Grant, Lorre, or wacky comedies with a dark streak.

I ran errands and did a few things around the apartment between comedies. Took as good of a look around the house as I could with my ankle. Everything seems to be in good shape. The rickety steps to the garden from Miss Ellie's porch held. There were lots of huge branches strewn everywhere, including some doozies in the path...but the side of the house where my bedroom is that borders the path is brick. It would take a lot more than one branch to harm that!

My money was more troubling. I got my disability money today...all eighty dollars of it. I was expecting a LOT more. Not only that, but it came in a card, not a check. I activated the card, but I need to call the State and find out what's going on. I can't live on eighty dollars every two weeks!

I did get to the Acme with Dad. I'd put it off again. I just don't have any money right now. I needed a lot - chicken, fish, sugar (brown and white), fruit concentrate, eggs, cake mix, cornstarch, cereal (I had a coupon for Chex - got Corn Chex), sweet potatoes and apples and romaine lettuce. And I still forgot a lot of things!

One of the big things I did remember was two bags of dollar peppermint drops. Yes, my stomach is still feeling a bit off, though the fever's gone and it's not quite as bad as yesterday. Hopefully, I'll be fully recovered by the weekend.