Look, if you celebrate Halloween, then you certainly don’t need me to get the jump on it for you. Our major retailers took care of that shortly after the Fourth of July.

I figure you know how to choose costumes and carve pumpkins and complain mightily about the high price of candy these days. (Is candy manufactured from petroleum products? The high price of gas is the only reasonable explanation for why sweet tarts and other formerly cheap “kiddie candy” now require a second mortgage to procure).

No, you need my help after all the heavy lifting is done. The real fun of Halloween, and trick-or-treat in particular, is dividing and discussing the loot after the fact.

Candy. There are many opinions on the best possible handling of Halloween candy.

The amateurs think you go home, sort through, remove anything suspect (in our house, that’s anything with a discernible nutritional value such as raisins, apples and popcorn) and then put the candy up to be doled out for months to come, one piece at a time.

Pikers!

Me, I go with the tried-and-true “gorge yourself until you nearly hate candy” method.

Arriving home, the booty is dumped into two separate bowls lest we incite World War III with one sibling’s candy touching or in any way THINKING about touching another sibling’s candy. Perish the thought.

There is a brief — albeit blissful — period of time before bedtime to just eat candy with wild abandon. Have at it kids! Candy! Chocolate! Food shaped like severed fingers, cigarettes, pop bottles and lips! What’s not to love?

This lasts about 10 minutes and then I pack them both off to bed just before the stomachache can really kick in.

The 10-minute window is important for one very important reason: deniability. You cannot allow your little goblins to get a really good grasp on what exactly they’ve hauled home. At this stage of the game, the candy should be one blissful blur. This allows the parents to cherry-pick through it with impunity.

Great. As far as my children know, the Great Pumpkin is someone who swoops down Halloween night after they are tucked tightly in bed and steals all the Reese cups from their candy bowls.

Great Pumpkin is also known to have a fondness for Snickers bars, Milky Ways and Kit-Kats. The Great Pumpkin, it should be noted, wouldn’t eat black licorice on a dare. He is not heartless, no. He always leaves behind anything fruity, sour, chewy and prone to turning tongue, lips and teeth garish colors such as bright blue.

The Great Pumpkin is getting on in years and his dental coverage isn’t worth jack (o’ lanterns). That said, I do applaud the brave souls who give out toothbrushes and similar high-minded items as treats. I think it particularly kind of dentists to do so.

Just think of how beautifully they could drum up business with just a few bags of taffy and some business cards? They are obviously better than that and I salute them.

Fun. If you still trick or treat then consider yourself lucky. I suspect this is one tradition that may be dying on the pumpkin vine. If you do it probably means you are blessed to live where neighbors are friendly and the streets are safe. Where we have the freedom and the security to traipse up and down the streets at dusk. Where the laws of reality and disbelief are suspended for only one night and princesses, werewolves and pirates are on the prowl. Where, if only for one night, candy from strangers is graciously accepted.

As I peruse the basket for what the Great Pumpkin might like, I see those teeny tiny little candy bars barely visible to the naked eye are foolishly labeled “fun size” these days.

An inch and a half of chocolate is not a fun size. A candy bar as big as my head. One that took two hands to lift and maybe a dolly to get down off the porch. Now THAT would be a really fun size.

Maybe next year?

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I’d like to personally thank Sharon Stone for making me feel like a better parent.  In her recently rejected attempt at changing the custody agreement of her 8-year old son, the judge cited Stone as an “overreacting mother” and used as an example the fact that Stone wanted to use Botox to treat her son’s smelly feet.

Just how smelly were his feet?  Were restaurants emptying out when Stone and her son entered?  Were the neighbors calling the police about possible dead bodies in the house next door?  I have a 7-year old son and had no idea that smelly feet were negotiable.  He removes his shoes and socks the minute he gets home from school and, while disgusting, it’s been a great help in my attempt to curb my snacking.  My 13-year old daughter’s skate bag smells like one of the cats died in it. 

What kind of world is Sharon Stone living in that has no bad odors?  Is there someone on her staff who fills out the Profession line on their tax return as Odor Removal Specialist?  She has two more sons, what the hell did she do with diapers?  I’m guessing a Diaper Genie wasn’t enough; was there someone waiting in a running car to take each and every diaper straight to the dump? 

Someone needs to tell Ms. Stone (and perhaps the judge just did) that once you have children you lose all rights to being Freakiest Person in the House.  You can try, but it’s pointless.  And if you’ve somehow created a career out of being a little bit freaky you will be given the child who dips barbecue chips in his chocolate milk, has a repertoire of crazy voices, and poses as a guitar-playing statue in the window at the Hard Rock Café.

Oh, and has super smelly feet.

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Why the U.S. isn’t exactly known as a nation full of thin, healthy aerobics instructors:

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Since we look to Hollywood to shape our political views, why not our medical ones as well? Actresses Jenny McCarthy and Amanda Peet are having a bit of a spat over the subject of vaccinations. See, McCarthy, who thinks showing off your surgically enhanced tits makes you an expert in human anatomy, has been very vocal about the MMR vaccine being the cause of her son’s autism — a link that has not been scientifically proven — while Peet is champion of vaccinations, calling anti-vac parents “parasites” in a recent interview. But what really takes the cake is that McCarthy claims to know not only caused her son Evan’s autism, but says she has also found a “cure” for the disease as well. McCarthy has been giving her son vitamin B-12 shots, as well as keeping him on a strict diet, methods she says helped him “recover”. When asked about the science behind all these notions, she stated, “My science is Evan, and he’s at home. That’s my science.” To quote her famous live-in boyfriend, “Well, alrighty then!!”

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You never know when your own fossilization is going to fall on you like a piano from above. 

For me, that moment came when a friend’s nine-year-old flipped open her brand-new cell phone to show me all the features. It was way better than her “old one” she informed me, which was “lame and did nothing.” For the record, she had her “old one” for approximately one year. 

Now, I’m a tad older than nine and my old cel phone weighed about four hundred pounds and the only time it “flipped” was if I dropped it. My “new” cell phone is a few years old, is not pink, and has no abilities beyond making and taking telephone calls. I guess that counts as “lame” don’t you? Fabulous. My accessories are being outpaced by a nine-year-old’s. 

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Well, it’s been almost a year since I wrote my first critical post on Jon and Kate Gosselin. Of course I had no idea what I was getting into. Never could I have imagined that a reality TV show would be met with such ardent opinions, with Kate Gosselin turning out to be quite a polarizing figure. The very mention of Kate Gosselin to those who have caught the show conjures up resentment on one side and admiration, and even sympathy (dare I say “pity”), on the other.

I have mentally divided the “pro” Kate crowd and the “anti” Kate crowd and even though I don’t watch the show on a regular basis (I lost a lot of interest after the first few seasons), I do happen to catch it once in a while. I was never a super-fan, but found some redeeming values in Jon and Kate and can now admit after catching a few reruns that I really can’t stand Kate Gosselin. There, I said it. Now, lest I be associated with the obsessive-stalking-loathing-Kate camp, I wouldn’t waste anymore bandwidth on the subject matter than this post is taking up. Subscribing to the KIA philosophy (Kate is an a-hole), is priority number 16,232, after plucking a stray eyelash out of my eyelid. And even though I have come to terms with the disgust for this woman, I’m not as prepared to run with the KIA crowd. In no way do I want it to be part of my identity. First of all, I have many internet friends who happen to like her, and I have been known to reach across party lines to embrace those with differing opinions [Ed. note: You're such a maverick]. Second of all, I kinda like having my very own villain. Even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense, I kept on watching the reruns while cursing at the television. In fact, the more angry I got, the more I stayed glued.

So, either Kate Gosselin is an a-hole and doesn’t care, or she’s an a-hole who knows how to keep viewers entranced or enraged. After all, Howard Stern gained his popularity by listeners that hated him more so than from listeners that loved him. Something tells me that she isn’t that smart though.

Or is she?

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I am not a pioneer. I have been heard to say (often and loudly) that it would pay Mr. Wonderful to remember that he did not marry Ma Walton or any one of those insufferably plucky Ingalls girls. I was raised a city kid. I turned a spigot and water came out. I flipped a switch and lights came on. I turned a thermostat to 80 and my mother had a coronary. This is how I roll.  

Then we moved to the country. Overnight I went from a wholly reliant on public utilities type of person to someone with the equivalent of her own water treatment plant in the basement. This is to treat our well water which is hard as iron and will cut you if left untamed. We run it through our own little answer to a municipal treatment plant just to beat it into potable submission. We also heat with wood in order to stay abreast of heating bills running slightly less than the national debt. While a money saver, the wood stove and all the resultant stacking and chopping (and swearing) does have a distinct air of the pioneer about it.  

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So, I’m in the market for some black pumps. But like a lot of working moms out there, finding time to sneak off on my own for an extensive bout of shoe shopping can be somewhat… challenging. I made the mistake of trying to take a peek at a few shoes today while shopping for gym shoes for my oldest son — which I’m sure anyone who has taken two kids under 10 along shopping already knows that was a completely pointless exercise.

Well, I’m an online shopping kind of gal, anyway, so I decided to go that route instead. I’ve bought from Zappos before, pretty painless. They have “free” shipping — free for anyone who is dumb enough to never have comparison shopped and noticed that the shipping is built into the price. But more importantly, they have free shipping back to them if it doesn’t work out.

So, I’m browsing through the pumps, trying to figure out which ones won’t hurt my toes, and I came across the most beautiful, practical, and mom friendly shoes I have ever found in my life, especially for a “working girl” like me. In fact, they impressed me so much, next time a family member or friend is about to birth their next baby, I know exactly what to get them for their trip home from the hospital…

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So, the saga of our severely fucked-up neighbor family continues. A couple of days ago, they knock on our door, grubby two-year-old in tow. The kids say he was scratched by our cat, and they’re taking him to the doctor for it.

Yeah. It gets better.

After they get home from their pediatrician’s office, they come over asking for our cat’s vaccination records. To see if the kid needs rabies shots, you understand.

For a cat scratch.

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