Halloween arrived early this morning — about 2am. Jeffrey knocked at our door to tell us that he couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t feverish, didn’t have any need to throw up, and wasn’t aching, so the obvious diagnosis was Halloween Fever, to which the cure is a re-tucking in and instructions to go to sleep and if you can’t sleep, just read quietly. It worked.

But then while I was finishing breakfast at 6:25am, there was the pitter-patter of not-so-little footsteps — Jeffrey was up and ready to greet the day, almost an hour earlier than usual, and telling me Happy Halloween!. It looks like a bad case this year, I’m afraid, and it’ll be far worse by tonight.

He’s also convinced us to give away scary candy like Skull Pops and Eyes of Terror gum from Oriental Trading Company so that we’re in the spirit of the holiday — and just in case we run out of those, we have a bag of Snickers (how mundane).

It was a quiet evening, and we didn’t run out of candy; the first trick-or-treaters arrived at 6:05, and the last ones about two hours later. Jeffrey and I went out about 6:30, and we joined forces with one of his friends from school a few minutes (and several cellphone calls) later; they stayed together till the end of the evening.

Some of the houses were well-decorated for Halloween; most had at least a token decoration (we had a lighted pumpkin in the window). And Jeffrey came back with more candy than he’ll eat.

On the way home, Jeffrey said that it hadn’t felt like a year since last Halloween, but that October had felt like a very long month waiting for Halloween to arrive. Next Halloween is probably going to be very different — he’ll be in middle school, and probably not as innocent as he is this year.

This morning, I left the house in the capable hands of the electrician who was going to install four ceiling fans for us. I just got a call from him — there are parts missing from one box, so that one can’t be installed, and some sheetrock fell down from the ceiling in our bedroom when he removed the old fixture (apparently it had been burned by the old fixture, which doesn’t surprise me at all — the bulbs were very close to the ceiling), so he couldn’t install that fan, either. I guess it’s time to get the sheetrock guy back — the missing parts are already on order.

At least I have two working sets of car keys now; it only took the Saab dealer a few minutes to reprogram everything to match (I was, clearly, not the first customer not to be told to bring both keys in when there was a problem with one remote). And Saab has just started offering a key/transponder combination, which will let me get rid of the huge separate remote I currently have to use, so soon, we’ll have four keys to keep in sync.

Ah, well, what can you expect on a Monday?

Obviously, I should have expected even less — it’s now 8pm, and the electrician is still here, trying to get the power back in the living room (he said he must’ve nicked a wire earlier in the day).

We do have two of the four ceiling fans installed, which is good. But I am disappointed in the brightness of the light in the office; I had had two 60-watt incandescent bulbs, which we replaced with one 100-watt halogen bulb. Since halogen is supposed to be brighter than the same wattage of incandescent, I had expected to have to use the dimmer feature on the fan to avoid being blinded. Wrong. This is the dimmest 100-watt light I’ve ever seen! Luckily, we have some other lights in the room over one of the work surfaces, but it’s still surprisingly dim.

And I was able to reach the drywall guy, who will let me know tomorrow when he can come out and fix up the burnt sheetrock so we can continue this fun.

But in the cosmic scheme of things, or even just looking at things in local perspective, I can’t complain. My family and I are healthy; we’re gainfully employed; we’re not in a war zone; the weather is ok; these little annoyances at home are just that — little annoyances, and it won’t be long before they’ve been conquered (I always did like the idea of track lighting, so I guess I’ll enjoy trying it in the office).