Halloween, Election Day.

 1) My landlord had some "Demon Slayer" costume from anime, and his wife was the counterpart. She wasn't a fan, but she went along with it anyways since she got to pick the anime costumes last year. Their little daughter was some cartoon character "Apple Blossom" who I didn't know, and their son was somehow some large cat where the costume was a blow-up figure like people put out on their lawns for Christmas, kind of, only you could wear it instead of putting it out on your lawn. I told him that he better be careful, because with that costume people might give him dead rats instead of candy.

2) Election Day I was sitting out on my chair on my stoop having coffee, and my (older) (Mexican) neighbor said he was glad to see me relaxing, since he sees me working and I work too much (I have my blinds open when I'm reading and writing in my living room, since I can focus better that way, with a connection to the outside world). I tell him that I actually don't work too much, since my jobs are active and social and that leaves me plenty of headspace for what I want to do on my time off, and at that he tapped his finger on his head and was like, "Smart, you learn from the people," and I stopped and I thought about it, and then I told him that yes, I do, especially when it comes to stuff I write about politics, I learn a lot from the older folks that I work with, and that I've actually asked people if I can quote phrases that they use. Later, I give myself a haircut over my bathroom sink, using my beard buzzer. My mom calls upset before she's going to bed since it doesn't look good for Biden, and I tell her that that's a factor of how the ballots have been counted, and that there's been articles about this for weeks. She says that she had been thinking that night about when she was a girl and they were discussing elections on TV, the commentators used a blackboard to illustrate their point. "A blackboard!", she was like, and I asked her if a passing stegosaurus ever interfered with the TV reception.