Halloween TACO, anyone?

Welcome, spooky reader, as I take you on a quick jaunt through our Halloween weekend.

As I've often opined in these hallowed virtual pages, Halloween is a Big Thing over here. Like many American holidays, it's really just an excuse for dressing up, and I have to admit to enjoying it quite a lot (as long as I don't have to take part).

2020's Halloween was fairly low-key, for obvious reasons, but this year we were back on track with something more resembling normal levels of, er, paranormal activity. Rather than have folks call at the door of the house, we once again prepared a bunch of bags full of sweets for the kids, and chucked them on a table in the front garden for the inevitable visitors to help themselves.

And help themselves they did. Our roster of visitations looked something like this:

As you can see, it's not that scary a list, unless you have some sort of phobia for princesses, in which case you'd be pretty worried. Still, we got rid of 49 out of 50 of the bags of sweets, which is good because as we know, I'm not a massive fan of American candy (about the only thing they seem to have not messed up is fun-size Twix; even the humble Kit-Kat doesn't approach the splendour of its UK counterpart).

Earlier in the day, we'd been down to Mountain View, the next town along from Palo Alto, which was having a Halloween family event in the afternoon in its main street. But we weren't there for that; behind the Mountain View Arts Centre, the Terrible Adult Concert Orchestra (or TACO) were scheduled to perform. Helen's not managed to find a regular orchestra to play with since we moved here, and TACO definitely isn't a regular orchestra: it's a turn-up-and-play event for folks of, er, varying skill levels on either their instrument or in orchestral playing. The good news is, the violin still works, and Helen had fun. Is the 'terrrible' in the name accurate? Reader, it would be indiscreet of me to judge; I went off and spent a couple of hours doing some work in a cafe in Mountain View, so I'll let you make your own mind up. TACO's good fun.

The baseball season has now finished (well done Atlanta Braves on becoming 'World Champions' without playing anyone from further outside the US than Toronto; they don't even play anyone from other countries that have relatively active baseball leagues, like Japan or Korea) and we're into the football season. We have tickets to go and see Stanford University's team play in a few weeks (the stadium is walking distance from our house), which should be fun as Stanford aren't much good and don't seem to take it that seriously, then we're off to see the 49ers at home just before Christmas. Until then!