The life of a single married girl

Here I am on a Friday night, alone, in a house on which I have given up but which is in my possession until the 3rd week in November. [That's right, the P&S is signed and we have a closing date!] Due to the upcoming Halloween festivities, I chose to stay in Framingham this weekend rather than going to visit my stuff, and hubby, in Portland. Due to playoff games, said hubby chose to stay in Portland and enjoy an evening of solid baseball games without his channel-surfing wife before joining me tomorrow in my endeavor to build this year's haunted house.

This is my 8th year hosting a Halloween party and every year I feel the same party anxiety: will people come, will they mingle, will my party be fun? And every year, people come and wow me with their creativity and Halloween spirit, and they mingle, and after a visit to the ice luge, they certainly seem to have fun. This year, with all that has been going on in my life (marriage, new job search, move to Portland, selling my house), it has been tough to get motivated about the party, yet now that it is upon me, I feel that familiar thrill as I concoct new ways to spook guests. I still worry that no one will come and that it won't be fun, but I am drinking vodka so that fear will fade away with my second drink.

I really love Halloween with a child-like fervor. I am not sure from where this comes, but just the thought of a group of people in a room, all dressed up and surrounded by severed body parts and skulls and oozing vampire heads, I love it. I had a very normal childhood - I wasn't allowed to watch scary movies and my first encounter with a Nightmare on Elm St. movie in sixth grade sent me spiraling into nightmares for days. So much so, that my parents, in an effort to stop the nighttime terrors, one night put nylons over their heads and crawled into my bedroom. I sensed that someone was in the room and when I said, "who's there?", they popped up in front of me, all squishy-faced and laughing their asses off and said, "we're Freddy Krueger". Yup, completely normal childhood. No emotional scarring at all.

This week has been a weird one, starting with a day off on Monday (happy birthday to the Schroeckionnes), to the crash of a Satans pitcher into the side of a Manhattan building, to listening to the former ambassador to Iraq speak about the complete fuck-up of a job America is performing in the Middle East, to a blizzard in NY, just weird.

I'm off to a bar, with my mom, where my brother bartends. Seriously.