We had a plan.

Sort of. Leah was coming in from a business trip, Sarah was coming straight from work, and I was coming from a long-scheduled (and desperately needed) hair cut. We would meet up somewhere in the vicinity of the parade, have a drink, and watch the freaks and ghouls. 

Oh god, quel nightmare. More barricades than the French Revolution, more cops than an Irish bar, more Clockwork Orange droogs than the movie, A Clockwork Orange. I ended up sitting in a cafe on Bleecker St. with a turkey wrap for nearly two hours. Never saw the parade, technically, but my hair looked really good. And I was wearing a necklace with a rhinestone-studded boom box. YAH.

It turned out fine, ended with Guinness and a subway ride across from some chick with skulls for kneepads, but the absolute highlight was finding my favorite house in Manhattan. I first found it ages ago, maybe even in high school, some random wandering day in the city, and the instant I saw it, I considered it mine. It's built behind a big old wooden gate, which makes me think there's a carriage house back there, and it's set at a 45 degree angle to the street, and it has glassed-in porches stacked one on top of the other, and lace curtains, and warm floor lamps and big leafy plants and it's whitewhitewhite, and when I saw it last night, it was like a clap of thunder, spotting someone you haven't seen in forever in a crowd of hundreds. I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and thought, "It's you."

And then Sarah Palin's dead moose asked me for directions to the PATH.

And now it's November. The anti-climax of all anti-climaxes. Now it's one giant Slip 'n Slide to Christmas. But I am hopeful, and excited, and excitedly hopeful for Nov. 4, and Thnxgvng, and mostly Nov. 4. I think about it a lot. It's in three days. You know how when you were a kid, and you really wanted a snow day, you wore your pajamas inside out? I've been wearing my 'Polar Bears for Obama' t-shirt to bed every night this week. Right side out.