Halloween is always fun. And there are always challenges.
Living in a rural/semi-rural area (technically it’s a small village, or hamlet) is also both – fun, and challenging.
There are definitely pros – it was easy to isolate during covid. Isolation is our natural state. It’s beautiful being surrounded by trees.
And also cons – it can be hard to get deliveries. There is no Uber Eats or corner shop if you run out of milk.
This time last year I was planning designs for covid-friendly delivery of lollies, tossing around ideas of catapults, chutes, string-lines and more. Given that it took me two months to build a letterbox out of wood, neither eventuated. But we got a surprising amount of visitors on their way to a halloween party in the next village – I even drove down to that village to get some more lollies at the last minute.
This year there is less fear around covid. Now access is the issue.
The huge rain event at the end of February caused an incredible landslide that is still completely impassible. There is talk of the road being repaired by July 2023 if we’re lucky. So anybody from the north end of our hamlet no longer drives past my home on the way to the next village – there’s a 20 minute longer detour in the opposite direction.
I’m also going on holiday for a couple of weeks, and not returning until the day before halloween. (Dear would-be burglars, my 6’5 son and his fearsome brown labrador will be guarding the place. But he didn’t inherit my halloween decoration obsession). Part of the holiday is on a sailboat for 4 days. This will be the longest time I’ve been away from a laptop in years. Even hospitals haven’t kept me away from my laptop for more than a day.
So I’ve just put out some teasers as decorations, to let the locals know that halloween will still be on at my place. There’s a primary school across the road, so they’ll be trooping past on their way home. I’ll be in that first-day-back-at-work overdrive mode, but will probably sit outside with my laptop saying hi and handing out lollies, in between debugging code, reading hundreds of emails, and wallowing in my favourite analytics platforms.
As usual, apologies for not adding more features to the site. This is a fun hobby site on the site. I often don’t touch it for months. My normal/unbalanced life is made up of extremely long days online doing IT stuff for work (I enjoy being a geek too much), with every other moment out in the garden weeding and caring for the remnant rainforest in our backyard. A holiday was overdue.
Happy halloween!
Waiting for the landslide to get fixed…..