Weekend Thoughts for 11/1/09

So, among the number of things that I figured I would experience while here in Michigan, I did not include large dead animals in the road. While coming home on Friday night, we were driving on a 2 lane road. As we crossed over the top of a small hill, shortly on the other side was a full sized deer carcass in the middle of our lane. At this point, we have three choices, none of which were particularly good: Swerve to the right, and potentially go into a ditch. Swerve to the left, and possibly get into a head-on collision. Try to pass over the carcass straight on, and hope nothing too bad happens. We chose option #3. The car is fine (or so it seems anyway), we are fine. The car is going to be checked out later this week to be sure, but other than the fact that even after a wash (with a full undercarriage), it still smells like dead deer at times. Hopefully when we take it in, they will find nothing wrong or potentially to happen later either.

Some other observations from this week...

• We had our fair share of trick-or-treaters last night, and went through 7 bags of candy! At one point, we had gone through 5 bags in a little over an hour, so we had to get 2 more. I think it's possible we may have needed more, but since it was dark and we turned off the light.
• Best costumes from last night: A family dressed as Mario (Dad), The Princess (Mom), and Luigi (Son).
  
• It was refreshing to see only children trick-or-treating. As I've gotten older, I have come to have more of a problem with teenagers (or older) doing a lot of trick-or-treating. But that probably stems from the most common costumes I get from teenagers: "I'm a high school student", "I'm a teenager", etc. It's one thing to go around with your younger brother/sister/cousin, etc. But if you're 16 or 17, running around without even attempting a costume, and collecting candy because you want free candy, that doesn't fly with me.
• The other thing which I hadn't really seen before was this: Most of the parents were following their kids around in their cars. When the kids would reach the end of the street, they would get back in the car and drive to the next street. I'm not sure if this is because it was fairly cold here, or if it was because there were distinct possibilities that a majority of houses would not be passing out candy, but it was different for sure.
  
• When we gave candy to one group of kids, Brynn noticed that they had toothbrushes in their bags. Apparently one of the local dentists was giving out candy AND tootbrushes to all his trick-or-treaters. Awesome.
• We went to Kalamazoo on Friday night to try out a brewery with one of Brynn's co-worker. We went to the Olde Peninsula Brewpub, which unfortunately does not have a website of their own. So here's their group on Facebook, for those that are interested. The food was excellent, and their beers weren't bad, but it was hard to tell since the one we really wanted to try was not available at this time.
• It was surprising how enjoyable it is to just walk around and browse in a bookstore. We were in Barnes and Noble, and actually didn't buy anything. But it is a lot more fulfilling to browse in a bookstore than it is to look online. Although the prices are better online to be sure.
• We enjoyed half-price pizza night here at Maria's. We'd been there before, and the food had been good, so we couldn't pass up an $8 16" pizza with 2 toppings. And good quality pizza too. Seems somewhat unlikely to be found some of the other places we've lived before.
• We carved our pumpkins this week (and they'll disappear at the end of this week as well). It was actually the first time I had carved a pumpkin that I could remember. I'm told that I carved one before, but that I wasn't very appreciative of all the goop and mess that goes with it. I found that my opinion on that part of it hasn't changed, but that it was still a lot of fun.
• We were also told that we "did our pumpkins the old-fashioned way" by one of the trick-or-treaters. Apparently stencils are considered to be required to carve a pumpkin. At least according to 5th graders (my best guess).
  
• The Bears won today, which is good, because they needed to beat Cleveland, and beat them severely. They can't lose to bad teams if they want to do anything in January.
• Getting ready to watch the Packers/Vikings game, and Brynn's take pretty much summed up my opinion of it: "Brett Favre blah blah, Brett Favre blah blah blah..." Looks like he may win though, which is also not great. This would be a game where we would both love to have both teams get a loss, but alas, not possible...