It is Halloween. Traditionally this has been one of my favorite holidays, and today is shaping up to be another enjoyable one. On Thursday night my friend Connie and I made a pact to do an art night every Thursday during the winter, and we started by working on pencil and oil pastel projects. Last night JSP and I were up late watching silly horror movies with some friends in the neighborhood, and this morning I went in to my not-so spooky acupuncturist and had needles placed in some new locations.We are about to go to a few estate sales. Estate sales can be creepy, but dead people have some great stuff. Later tonight I am psyched to attend the Barebones Halloween Extravaganza.

The nerd in me is really pleased recently. I am excited to try out the new Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala operating system, which my friend Don says is excellent. I have recently installed the new Windows 7 (64 bit version) on one of our home computers, and I am using it right now. It is a bit faster than Vista, but so far I am underwhelmed after hearing hype from Microsoft for the past several months. What has the geek in me really excited is that this morning I received an invitation to use Google Wave. For those of you who are not nerds, this might mean nothing. For those of you who are excited about cutting edge technology like me, I am sure you understand my excitement.

In other news, life in Northeast Minneapolis is been going well. City elections will be held on November 3 using the new ranked choice, also called instant runoff, voting. I am a big fan of this voting method. I look forward to voting in a new way on Tuesday.

JSP was outside this morning, raking copious mounts of fallen leaves from the back yard. The weather continues to be cool and damp, suggesting that winter weather will be here before the calendar date of December 21. My younger sister and her peeps out in Denver got about a foot of snow this past week, which seems crazy early for voluminous snow.