In which I am Enlightened

All has been revealed to me.   The prophecy was not "if you build it, they will come."  It turns out  that our prophecy was "if they come, they will build it, and make liberal use of the porta-potty and sometimes the bushes while they are here."  Go figure.

This morning, before the sun was even fully above the horizon, this truck showed up.  It was carrying a number of construction workers, complete with hard-hats, several of whom got out and made immediate use of the Purple Porta Potty.  

Having established their everlasting dominion over the PPP, they got to work digging holes

and adding poles

and now the Purple Porta Potty Zone looks like this:

Or really like this, because the other picture was taken before lunch.

That guy in the red shirt?  He must have a thing about Purple Porta Potties.  I swear I saw him stalled at the bushes for longer than would normally be required to stop and smell the flowers, and then he needed to adjust his pants and fix his shirt.

I really hope he gets over his issues by tomorrow.

The Halloween issue was solved with a small amount of creativity and a lot of styling gel.  As promised, Matty dressed in his clone costume (yay, Star Wars.  I think.).  Nate cobbled together a marginally army-ish outfit with the loan of a pair of army green pants from his sister and the timely purchase of some junky plastic toy paraphernalia. Happy as I am that his costume worked, I am sorely tempted to collect all the new bits of junk and chuck them in the garbage. I may have issues.  

Isabel decided on the way to her violin lesson that she wanted to be a zombie and that this would require hair gel. Not much of a problem, except that on Mondays she goes from violin to basketball and doesn't get back until after 6:30.  As much as I thought I had secured the Extreme Halloween Procrastination award last year (when we pulled Isa's costume together sometime after 6), last night I outdid myself in stunning fashion.  Isa walked in at 6:40; we all sat down for dinner (a huge improvement over last year, when we thought there would be plenty of time to eat when we got back . . . at 8:45 p.m. HA!) and at 7:15 we started putting costumes on, discovering in the process that really Isabel was dressing up as "an evil scientist zombie dude."  

Can't you tell from her hair?

 So it wasn't until 7:30 that we got into the car to drive to our trick-or-treat spot. The up-side of this is that we didn't have to spend forever collecting candy because half of the people in the neighborhood had already run out by the time we got there.  The down-side: not as much candy.   Except for Emma, the ultimate Halloween scam artist.  She and her friends started off nice and early in a nearby neighborhood, then were driven to the same neighborhood in the village that we went to.  They were well into their village rounds before we even left the house.  She came back with a HeapOCandy.  If any of the other kids did this, I might object.  But Emma likes M&Ms, plain chocolate bars, and Mike & Ikes.  The rest?  She gave it to us.  Although she did ask for some of it back so she could give it to a friend who hadn't gotten quite enough of the candy that she liked. As if!

I absolutely can't write any more right now.  I've joined NaBloPoMo again (dummy!) and I still need 29 more days of material.  Ideas are welcome.