Yesterday, AJ and I had a lovely afternoon of playing Hide-and-go-seek in the yard and jack-o-lantern carving. After dinner at our favorite diner, where AJ ate an entire plate of spaghetti (plain, no salt, no butter, no cheese) with his fingers because he couldn�t get it onto his fork, we came home in semi darkness and lit our jack-o-lanterns. We stood in the driveway on the freakishly warm night and watched the eerie faces flicker under the almost fully moon. After a couple of minutes, AJ announced, �I feel like dancing,� and he began an incredible terpsichorean performance across the driveway that, he told me later, was called �My Pumpkin Dance.�

After a bath in many bubbles, most of which ended up on the bathroom floor, sleepy AJ trundled off to bed and I spent the rest of the evening on the phone with my friend L. ostensibly to discuss her upcoming conference paper, although our two and a half hour conversation included also my conference paper, her dating frustrations, difficulties of teaching, covered a million other topics. Toward the end, she gave me a pep talk about interviewing and gave me some excellent preparation advice. I�m now feeling much less intimidated by the whole process and even as if I may be moderately prepared to advance to the next step of my academic career.

I woke up with �Midnight at the Oasis� stuck in my head. I can�t think of a more annoying way to start the day. Fortunately, AJ, immediately upon awaking, wanted to watch his favorite video, The Little Bear Movie, which has a soundtrack by Sean Colvin that has the potential to erase any traces of bad lounge singing lurking in my head.

As I sleepily made coffee and noticed some motion outside the window. I looked up in time to see a massive buck, with a huge rack of antlers standing in the middle of the back yard. We regularly see female and juvenile deer, but I have never seen a buck here. They are much more elusive. He was an absolutely magnificent creature, close enough to me that I could see his nostrils flaring with each breath he took. I stood and stared until something spooked him and he took off in one flash of his white tail and disappeared down the creek bed and into the forest.

Shortly before lunch, AJ and I ventured out into the cold and blustery day (or, as AJ called it, �the windy wind�), he in his bee costume, me in my usual non-descript Saturday garb decked out in the jack-o-lantern earrings AJ picked out for me, and joined the trick-or-treat costume parade in what passes for a downtown in our village. Hundreds of parents and their costumed childrened promenaded up and down Main Street collecting candy from assorted members of the Chamber of Commerce. AJ had fun for a few minutes, but then became perturbed by the wind and quickly looked exhausted. We joined the parade for a block or two until it wasn�t fun anymore and then headed home for hot chocolate and peanut butter sandwiches, whereupon AJ nearly keeled over with exhaustion at the table. After his nap, AJ�s grandmother, aunt and one of his cousins will join us for our neighborhood Halloween party, which will probably involve a lot of screaming and overly-sugared children playing musical chairs and decorating pumpkins with glitter that will somehow all end up in AJ�s hair.

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