Friday Five:
1) The Daughter's Halloween Party is going strong out in the living room. She made enough food for a small army, so there should be leftovers for me. Or I might sneak out while they are watching Beetlejuice and get a plate.
She made dark chocolate fudge brownies, an apple cider cake that is basically a huge apple-flavored cake donut glazed in boiled-down cider. Tollhouse cookies. Oatmeal and raisin cookies. Three kinds of mini-quiches, mini-pizza (store-bought), baked cheeses. Popcorn. Three kinds of tea and a big percolator full of Hawaiian coffee.... The house smells ~really~ good. She also got out all the Halloween decorations we brought with us (quite a lot) and they're all up, much to her guests' amusement.
There was some cackling at the decal of the witch-on-a-broomstick on the toilet seat cover and they all seem to have gotten silly out there now - there's much laughter. (The allergy person showed up and all seems well.) This is good.
2) So, the Daughter was chatting by phone with one of the Universities in the USA this week. For almost a half hour. It's a
really good one. (And costs like $60,000+ a year if you are paying cash. For the tuition. Not housing. For an undergrad. Which, thankfully, she is not.
) She has been encouraged to formally apply. If admitted, she'd have full funding for five years, assuming she was doing well. If selected for the shortlist they will fly her over to meet everyone and give a presentation. The Uni here has suddenly also started to reach out to her to help her with her funding applications. I'll be remaining here, if she goes to the States, at least for a while (if not permanently) as she'll need to come back here every summer for her research anyway and she won't need me to be providing a place to live over there as they'd give her a living stipend. It's nice that things are starting to turn around for her, finally. She's more than paid her dues. So fingers are seriously crossed, if it's what she really wants to do. Brexit be damned.
3) The Botanic Gardens have their annual Halloween light show on. They are charging an arm and a leg to get to walk through the gardens in the evenings. They have various decorations and colored lights set up to shine on the trees. And spooky music. I believe there's also a beer garden. Did I mention spooky music? As in you can hear it several blocks away spooky music? (At least they shut it off before it's tooo late.) Thump thump thump wooooooooooo. Thump thump thump wooooooo.....
4) We took the hamster cage apart today and packed it away. It seems something is missing in the house, without a sentient pet. The fish are great and all that, and somewhat interactive. And the house-spider in the loo is definitely alive. But it's not the same. I'm on the fence about getting a cat now. We're allowed pets, but if things don't go well or plans change and we have to go home, I don't want to have to deal with shipping a cat overseas and also trying to find a place to live that would take it. It would be really nice to have a cat again, though. I had cats for many years, growing up. And we got the Daughter a kitten when she was quite young that lived with us until it died of old age a few years ago (a week short of age 21). I was quite fond of that cat. Even though it would wake me up at 5:30 every morning, 365 days a year, because I had to get up at that time when we first got it. Persistent thing, too. I couldn't just talk to it, I had to get up, walk to the kitchen, and turn on the coffee maker. I could then go back to bed, but she would keep after me if I didn't go to the kitchen and turn on the blasted coffee maker. Graveley old cat yowl. Would crawl under the bedcovers to continue to yowl if I tried to hide under them. ~sigh~ I miss that cat. She was in the window waiting every day when we got in from work/school. And would purr up a storm. Loved to sit on laps.
She was a Really Good Cat.
5) I got myself a one-month subscription to Coasttocoastam.com and am going to download a bunch of the radio show archive tonight. Bigfoot. Aliens. Secret military agendas. Ghost EVPs. Illuminati. Reptiloid Shape-shifters.... It's the Weekly World News of the air. And entertaining. Probably not in the way they intended, but I love it.
I used to have it on every night when I was trying to get to sleep, at home. It worked like a charm - I rarely made it to the second half of the show.
