now THAT's frightening!

Apparently hosting a party takes at least a week and a day out of my life, as I notice it's been that long since I posted. I was working on a post about neighborhood crazies showing up at meetings and disrupting speeches, but I suspect there's more interest in what happened at the Halloween party than in one nutty old lady's whacked-out opinions on creating walkable streets and more pedestrian-friendly communities.

So, on to the show.

First off, I went a little crazy at Costco. I've put off buying a membership there because I'm only one person, how many rolls of paper towels do I really need to buy at once, plus, it's clear up in suburbia hell, where I never really want to go, and furthermore, there's just a lot of crap there I don't need.

Like a 1/2 gallon container of minced garlic. Which I now have.

Or 4 cases of beer, 2 big bottles and 5 regular bottles of wine, some Captain Morgan's and some vodka. And a case of chicken broth. For the chili, you know.

It took 10 trips with the wheelbarrow to get all the groceries/beer/ice from the car to the house. Discover's fraud prevention unit called to make sure some raving drunken lunatic hadn't taken my card.

Nope, I said, this lunatic has her card right here!

Btw, I have a LOT of beer and chili left. Stop by for dinner sometime this week. Please.

All in all, the turnout was good for having given people a week's notice and having it on an evening when everybody and their undertaker is having a party. Zorro and the flamenco dancer were the first to arrive, followed by a vampire and the Crazy Cat Lady, who proceeded to creep the fuck out of everybody by doing things like standing in a corner alone, playing her recorder:

In short, hilarity ensued wherever she went.

Then the youngsters showed up, on their way out to the bars in Broad Ripple:

Hope made an appearance, the youngsters and Crazy Cat Lady/vampire left, and then Hope, too, was gone.

I was patting myself on the back for being a responsible party host, and having a party that ended at the respectable hour of 1:30 a.m., and not with me sprawled out on the kitchen floor.

That's when Colts safety Bob Sanders (or a reasonable facsimile) showed up, wearing his dreads and carrying the Vince Lombardi trophy:

Now, I know Bob from a neighborhood group I volunteer with. He's cute. And single. And he thinks my jokes are funny. Which is more than I can say for at least 90 percent of the men I come into contact with. So I opened one of the big bottles of wine and Bob and I sat down to get to know each other better.

I mentioned it was 1:30 a.m., right? Did I also mention I'd spent the previous 6-1/2 hours doing my part to reduce the overpopulation of beer in my fridge?

The bad news is that, unfortunately, Bob is not looking for a woman to date. He is looking for a wife to bear his children. Clearly, SuperBowl ring or not, Bob is going to have to look elsewhere. The good news is that by the time we got 3/4 of the way through the big bottle of wine, I seem to recall being quite honest about my voluminous emotional baggage, commitment issues, views on marriage being an outdated patriarchal institution, etc. I quite distinctly remember giving him my disclaimer, "I am probably way too independent to ever successfully be married."

So, I shouldn't have to worry about the bad news!

Sigh. It seems like just Friday night that the Greek was telling me that I'm hard to handle. I have no idea what he meant.

I just got an e-mail from Bob. He left the Vince Lombardi trophy at my house, and apparently I sent him home with a bowl of chili, because he wants to drop off the bowl and pick up the trophy. Yikes.