Halloween Horrors

Why, yes, the Halloween season is my favorite time of year. And also, yes, 2020 is surely the most fucked-up year of my 61-plus-year existence. So, I cannot say I was much surprised for Halloween 2020 to offer up its own share of royal fuckage. Now, altogether, nary a thing for Brugger and I proved all that horrible, but little about this past week has gone quite as expected or hoped. (I must be also be fair; on a couple of counts, things have gone better than anticipated.) Of course, most significant in the disruption of Life As It Otter Be are the Covid Death Cooties, which have thrown the monkey wrench into the works in general. My brother continues to face critical health issues. And my mom’s death during the summer has left me with far more lingering challenges than I might have expected, given her thoroughness over the years trying to organize her affairs to be as straightforward as possible. Regardless, things leading up to Halloween, in themselves, went pretty well. Brugger and I made it to Villa Appalaccia and Chateau Morrisette; there have been horror movies aplenty; the geocaching has been a little sparse but generally of fine quality (of particular note, the Guilford County Spooky Spots adventure lab cache, which I did on my own one night last week); and, so far, we’re doing pretty well health-wise.

Then, on Thursday, came Tropical Storm Zeta. Although the worst of it didn’t hit us directly (and some places I saw really did get hammered), we had damaging wind and rain that took out power at both Brugger’s house and mine for almost two full days. I had recently spent a few hundred bucks keeping the freezer stocked, so despite being frustrated by the lengthy outage, I was happy as a clam when the power came on in the nick of time to keep most of the frozen things from going bad.

Or so I thought.

Because the outage caused a series of electrical spikes, my refrigerator/freezer burned out. But I didn’t realize it right away because it did have power and appeared to be functioning. Eh. Not so much. Anyway, after considerable hunting, I have a new fridge on the way... but it’s going to be over a week before it can get here. Apparently, in the entire city of Greensboro, there is nary a refrigerator to be found that can just be delivered and plugged in. Today, I did find a mini-fridge at a good price, so I picked it up and got my surviving goods in there. I hope it will do the trick till the new one arrives. The old fridge wasn’t all that old — a little over eight years — but I guess these days, that is about what one can expect, especially when the power goes out with such frequency as it does here.

All that aside, I enjoyed spending a portion of Friday in Danville, VA, where I went after Danville Millionaire’s Row adventure lab cache. This one takes you on a tour of Danville’s historic Main Street, where one will find some of the town’s most elegant and imposing old homes from its glory days of tobacco and textiles. This was the best possible time of year to hunt this lab cache, since so many of the old homes were done up right for Halloween. And that evening, friends Terry & Beth came round for a pleasant, socially distanced dinner (burgers!), followed by a showing of The Exorcist, which Ms. Beth had never seen before.

Halloween itself turned out to be a fair mix of work and play. Ms. B. and I are in the opening stages of doing an intensive and much-needed renovation of Casa de Rodan. For a good portion of yesterday, we occupied ourselves stripping old wallpaper, mostly in the kitchen. There is still a long way to go. We’re looking at painting, replacing flooring, replacing the old, all-but-useless outdoor shed, all kinds of things that have languished for far too long.

Through it all, I have continued to make at least some forward progress on New Hampshire: Ghosts From the Skies, my upcoming Ameri-Scares novel. It progresses. Slowly but surely, it does.

Today, there had been geocaching plans with the usual suspects, but a big dump of rain forced a change of plans. However, the skies cleared late morning, and was yet another adventure lab cache awaiting my attention at nearby Gateway Gardens. So I went for it. I had gone geocaching there some years ago, but I had forgotten how attractive that little park is. There were five stages to the cache, each requiring the discovery of certain information to complete. All in all, it made for a nice diversion from the more prevalent pain-in-the-ass nonsense.

There is yet more to do regarding Mom’s estate this week, which I can only hope will go as painlessly as possible. I can’t say I look forward to it, but at least with every such step that gets done, the closer that little dim light at the end of the tunnel gradually comes.

And so. There it is.

One bad apple....

The kiddie area

Musical instruments in the woods?

Froggie went a-waterin’