I guess it was Halloween yesterday, wasn’t it. Jen asked how we spent ours. I taught all day yesterday, actually I taught a little and observed a lot. I took a break from school mid afternoon and watched the end of The Kingdom of Heaven – which was just ok. Beth and I watched the first half on our trip to KC until the battery died on her laptop. After the movie I drove to my adjunct job, I have two hours of open office hours every Monday night. The twenty minute ride to campus took forty five minutes in the rain.

People in St. Louis forget how to drive when you add weather. Rain is a major crisis for them and when it snows, even flurries, they lose any ability to operate heavy machinery. I joke to my Wisconsin friends that St. Louis drivers actually try to dodge individual snowflakes. All the schools in St. Louis let out when flurries are suggested as a possibility. To a kid who grew up where you have school unless there is four feet of snow on the rural roads, the local hysteria is comic, while at the same time unnecessarily dangerous.

I had two students drop by at work last night and I got my teaching schedule for next term. I’m picking up an ethics class in the spring so it will be fun to break out my philosophy training. It’s always good to add an additional prep to the college teaching resume. One of my students is doing a research paper on the Million Man March, so we talked about Cornell West and Henry Louise Gates Jr. as possible sources for him. I enjoyed that immensely. It’s great to turn students on to important and potentially transformative thinkers.

After work, Jes and I went shopping for chicken to smash. We flattened it with a meat tenderizer. She covered it in spices and cornmeal, and rolled peppers and cheese up in it like a Mexican Cordon Bleu. We also made two apple pies out of a bag of apples from my family’s small orchard. I haven’t made a pie in years, so that was fun and took us into the wee hours of the time change. We watched the two hour season premiere of The West Wing’s fourth season. I am a West Wing addict.

We had no trick or treat visitors due to the rain and the busy street we live on. The only thing I had for them was the smarty sweet tarts that Michelle sent with her Jello Brain a few weeks back. We ended up eating them in place of a vegetable with our chicken. That was Halloween 2005.