Some days are just more fun than others at work. Today was our annual Halloween Pageant, Parade and Spectacle. Candy stations are set up throughout the office complex and employees bring in their kids for a pre-Halloween sugar festival. Departments decorate their office areas in a variety of themes (the smoke machine caused a citation from the fire department a few years back) and prizes are awarded for the most creative decorating. Costumes are judged as well across a number of categories - funniest, scariest, best group costume theme. This year I got to be one of the judges and I swear that the $5 I was offered by the fetching little toddler witch didn't affect my voting at all. Although there was not a category called "Most Secure in His/Her Gender Identity", if there had been it would have gone to the guy dressed in the full Wonder Woman costume, including strategically placed, uh, padding. So instead we awarded him the scariest costume prize.

Books: Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton; Dancing Barefoot by Wil Wheaton; Jonathan Norrell and Mr Strange by Susanna Clarke; New Skies, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden; Way too much to read! Not enough time! My new life goal is to live long enough to read all the books my bookstore stocks. Every one of them. Even the dull, dry historical tomes and the nasty political rantings and the superbly awful Lint Collecting for Dummies genre. On a marginally related note there is a book called Dim Bulbs, Dull Knives that is just waiting to be written. Would it be political satire? Or a new century follow-up to Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City?

TV: CSI - do people really wash their sex toys in the dishwasher, or is that only done by criminals trying to sluice away evidence?