Part of my costume this year involves a polar fleece hoodie. Mind you, it's a BAT hoodie, with wings and fuzzy ears, and I'm wearing it with a ballgown skirt, but. Hoodie.

I can remember wearing long underwear under my costume when I was a kid in Utica, NY.

Yeah, some years if we're lucky, it's in the 50s at trick-or-treat time (and there is an occasional glorious super-warm Halloween where it's in the 60s, even at 6 pm). But chilly is usually the way it goes, and a few years we've even had snow.

I try to sit out on the porch for the whole trick-or-treat time, but that's not happening this year. I'll light the jack-o-lanterns and then retreat back to the warmth and the teevee for some Buffy Halloween episodes.

Our costumes as kids were usually designed to go over coats.

So I'm driving home from my exciting day of an 8:30 dermatology appointment for a mystery rash and then a 9:15 transfusion, and there's a science spot on NPR. As the reporter/host introduced one story, I heard, "What would a comic perfume smell like?" He listed some things, and then said, "How about a hefty amount of sulfur? I thought, "Well, yeah, there are fart jokes, but..."

Then I realized he said, "comet perfume."

Never mind.

I guess I won't be taking the lakefront path to walk home from work today, because the path has been closed due to Lake Michigan flooding Lakeshore Drive: [link]

I am not giving anything for Halloween. We usually get around 200 kids between 530pm and 10pm and J and I take turns staying out on the porch so our dogs don't go nuts. I am on my own, wont get home until after six and need to feed and walk the pups, who have been out in the yard all day. I can't deal with the mishegas, so I am holing up in the back of the house like a grinch. NO CANDY FOR ANYONE.

Wow.

ETA: regarding flooded LSD news.

Aww. It's OK, Scrappy.

I will not get any trick or treaters--I don't think there's many in my immediate neighborhood anyway, but especially since my house is BEHIND another house...I'd have to like, put up a whole trail of lighted pumpkins or something, arrows pointing "CANDY HERE!"

One of my neighbors stopped by because she knew I'd get her costume: she was carrying protest signs reading " down with stuff!" and "Annihilate Matter!"

Antimatter, naturally.

Meara, I would use as many specifics as I could, because IME general comments like 'disorganized and bad communicator' just don't get the traction that specific incidents do.

My boys have already gone trick-or-treating at the Mall, Sorority row, a Freshman dorm, and the University Science Fest on different days in the last week, and the athletic department is staging a candy fest at the basketball arena tomorrow, so I don't think we will get any protest about skipping the cold and rain tonight.

One of my colleagues is a statistical geneticist, and he told me that, in planning their evening, his kids had worked out an equation for different neighborhoods, including parameters like average amount of candy per house (of obvious importance) and average distance between houses (also important but likely to be overlooked by those without an algorithm). These two parameters are negatively correlated, so the fit function is complex.

If they can work this up into an App there may be a future in it.