Time Flying By

It seems not long ago it was summer, and now we've put another Halloween to bed.  There's nothing particularly new about this, but time does seem to go so quickly.  I'll try to use this trick the other way, to telescope winter into next spring...

Anyway, it was a pretty good Halloween.  The weather forecast had been pretty menacing, and indeed it was raining kind of hard in the morning (and I had another bit of a TTC meltdown, but I'll skip over that).  But the rain held off after about 5 pm.  It was definitely fall weather, just a bit of a chill, but not really cold.  Most of the kids, including my daughter, went around with just their costumes, not a coat over their costumes (like last year).  That makes it a lot more fun of course, for the kids and the adults handing out candy.

I knew I couldn't work late, of course, but at the same time I simply hadn't been able to finish my SFYS contribution (and there was a lot of unexpected fuss at work).  So I finally got started at about 4:30 and in just under an hour, wrapped up my piece.  It's about what life will likely be like for teenagers in the near future when the environmental crisis has really hit and we have to offset our energy use for everything, mostly by pedaling hard and storing up energy.  I never got around to saying whether there were any cars or not, though presumably most people have to walk or bike around, but because it costs so much energy to meet in real-life, most encounters are just virtual.  And the biggest insult is to say that someone isn't worth the carbon.  I had sort of planned to go into an elaborate explanation of how one teen's family had already started banking up carbon credits for her wedding and eventual children (which came close to bankrupting most families) but decided for a simpler (and hopefully funnier) punchline.  I just need to make one tweak, and I can post it online here.  It's an attempt to be somewhat funny and somewhat serious about the future we have sleepwalked our way into.  And indeed, I just read an article about how much heat is trapped in the ocean, and basically we are even more fucked than we thought!  Yea, team humanity!  For a much more depressing take on what the future might look like, see The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.

The TTC ride home was another slow grind, but I got back just after 6.  My daughter was ready to go, so we went out to do our street, the cross-street and just a few houses on the next street over.  (They hardly get any kids, so were giving out three or four pieces of candy at a time!)  Our street is pretty busy for about two hours, and then things drop off considerably, which is nice.  I really don't like being interrupted late on Halloween, which occasionally happened in Chicago.  The one drawback of our house is that the gate discourages a lot of families, and you can't see all our decorations because of the tree in the front.  We probably give out half as much candy as the other houses, and I definitely overbought this year, which means I'll have to take a lot in to work.  My daughter did want to give out some candy herself, but no one came by (after she was done trick-or-treating).  Still, that was just a very minor blot on a nice evening.

I do hope the skies clear up by the weekend, as it has been overcast and/or raining for quite some time now.  I have a few tasks to take care of, and I was hoping to get back on the bike for the first post-accident ride.  Fingers crossed it goes well.