My favorite trick or treat moment was the woman who was saying, "This is like Queens, New York! This is how it should be! They've got sidewalks here!" I guess most of North Carolina does not live up to her trick-or-treating standards.

I have to take the day off work, and I have very little vacation time. But the nanny is taking her mother for a 4-hour GI procedure and mr. flea has jury duty. Life!!

Happy November! I started out my morning by eating some leftover Good & Plenty, so I'm going to pretend the sugar rush can zoom me through the morning.

go sugar.

do to car issues that would be car issues only a few days a year- I have to take DH to BART at 430. My body - which often wakes up at this time for no good reason - is confused. So is the cat.

Name-of-Deity-Taken-in-Vain here, I'm missing trick-or-treaters. I was so out of it last year that it feels like this is the first year we didn't do Halloween. I miss all the kidlets in costume, and setting up the graveyard, and chatting with the neighbor families.

Annabel is absolutely beautiful. Great costume too!

And, in honor of November, today was the Christmas Bazaar at the embassy. It did remind me that Mallory needs a stocking, which teared me and the DH up.

That deserves a definite Awwwwww! from here.

That is an aww moment.

My nephew has way too many stockings. I think it is the hazard of being born Christmas Eve. At the Ft. Hood hospital, they had a standard issue one. Then the nurses got him one. And of course, in the scramble of his early arrival my mother got him one. And his other grandmother, who was en route, had also brought one (thinking it wouldn't be used until the next year, since he wasn't due until January.)

Scary thing is, between the doting overboard grandparents, all get filled.

I actually think some of my rebellion against receiving christmas gifts of late is born of the excess that is showered on the kid. His mom is pretty sensible though, and rotates the stock in and out of play, and as soon as he starts losing interest, it is garage saled or donated. But still. So much stuff.

This morning's commute was sponsored by Baltimore drug busts drive through!

I was born at 5 AM on the day after Christmas, so the nurses presented me to my Mom in a red Christmas stocking. You would have thought my Mom would have been all sentimental and saved the stocking, wouldn't you? Ah well for sentimentality and my Mom.

I had my first Ambien last night. Are they supposed to make you sleepy, or to just knock you out? I'm not sure it did either, but I'm curious.

I'm sure there will be BMECT! but I can stay awake on Ambien pretty easily-- like everything else I've taken for insomnia, it doesn't force you asleep so much as shut down your brain. If I stay awake on Ambien it just starts to get psychedelic.

So how does it make sleep easier? I'm having the weirdest insomnia ever. My mind's not racing, nothing. But the best bit about sleeping, the fuzzy parts where you're melting into the pillow and your blanket is completely missing. Saturday and Sunday I lay down for over an hour and a half before falling asleep (and then it was out like a light) -- not sure about last night, which was when I took the Ambien, but I'm also waking right up, bolt upright every few hours almost, and the Ambien didn't seem to have affected that either.