I paid off all of my credit card debt today, and now I'm poor again.

Poor in the twenty-something sense, obviously: most actual poor people probably don't have Fallout 3, a month's supply of beer, and a freezer full of venison.

Did I tell you I'm getting half a deer now? No one shot anything the whole time I was up north this year for hunting, but my dad and uncle had more luck once we left on Sunday.

This was my first time deer-hunting with snow on the ground, which meant that I couldn't hear anything, which meant that instead of just shivering and reading, I had to spend 10 hours a day staring at trees and snow, occasionally imagining that this swaying branch or that misshapen log was actually a deer.

It seems like each year I either have to listen for deer, or I have to watch for them. And I'm fine with that, as long as I get to use one of my senses to entertain myself. If I go next year I'm bringing headphones in case it snows again.

I am also seriously contemplating rigging up some sort of luxury heated hunting stand as well. You know what I like? Room temperature. It's fantastic.

I finally broke down and bought Fallout 3 last night after an interlude at the Flat Earth Brewery with Barry. (About which more here.) The game is enjoyable, but it hasn't really drawn me in yet. Maybe I need to go exploring...

Also: I'm increasingly impatient with Western RPGs that haven't learned anything from the interactions in Mass Effect. Last year's big RPG.

It might have been a bad idea to spend money on a game right now, but the cost probably works out to $1/hour of entertainment, and I thought it would be good to get set for December before forcing myself back to fiscal discipline.

Back to the budget! In a week I should be OK again. I can do basically everything I want to do on the budget, anyways — and why not? I've lived on much, much less — it's just a matter of paying attention, which I'm apparently unable to do during a credit card's no-interest trial period. Curse this pretend money.

Every year I wonder if Halloween — funny, party-focused, completely secularized — is indeed my favorite holiday. I think it just might be: I mean, if you put any amount of effort into the day at all, your worst-case scenario will be staying in and giving out candy to little kids in costume.

This year I spent my Halloween in Appleton for Jonas and Sarah's wedding. Here's most of the Lawrentian delegation outside the church after the wedding on Saturday:



So let me tell you a tale. On Friday (that would be Halloween for those of you following along at home) I left work early, drove to Appleton, met up with Ben and Nora at ORC (where I also either met or re-met Ging... all these young kids at my college nowadays...), hung out for a while, and then went with my favorite Floridians to the rehearsal dinner after-party at the hotel.

I'd seen a lot of the Lawrentians who were there earlier this summer at Bill's purportedly semi-annual cottage get-together, but I haven't seen any of them often enough to stop each meeting from feeling like a mini-reunion.

And there were other people at the hotel whom I hadn't seen in years: Jonas' friend Jeremy certainly, and Bill's Beth, who insisted that we hadn't seen each other since her wedding.

(That seems impossible. Are all my recent memories of her really from the defunct Bill & Beth in Boston blog?)

The Politician was both my ride and the guy whose couch I'd supposedly be sleeping on, so I ended up joining Bill and Beth and Bill's family at the bars for Bill's sister's 21st birthday. We left the reliably-sketchy Firefly at 1 and even though this was the Night of Complete Lies (e.g. Meghan was singing an aria at the wedding, Jubb was Matthew's secret guest), Bill was as good as his word.

The wedding itself was pretty casual, especially for someone more used to the pomp and circumstance of Catholicism. There was no kneeling and just one hymn, which we rocked pretty hard. Jonas said that the ceremony clocked in at about 18 minutes all told.

Given that, I think it's fair to say that the reception afterwards — rather than the wedding itself — was the highlight for me, not least because it was a costume reception. As in, Halloween costumes.

A bunch of us had rented out of the fancy alumni house for the night for $13/person, so after taking some pictures we walked back to change.

I'd kept my costume a secret because that's part of the fun, and I have to say that I was proud of what I accomplished and pleased with the reactions I got from all the Losties at Lawrence. The only good snapshot of me in costume so far is irredeemably rakish, but here are some pictures I took yesterday night:







Maybe from now on I won't be terrible at Halloween? We'll see.

Lawrentians are inveterate theme partiers, so the other costumes were pretty great. Here're the bride and groom at the reception:



And here's Luigi and Mark Antony with the two Dorothys. I guessed "Evil Dorothy" and "Good Dorothy" and got yelled at — did you know that The Wizard of Oz was shot in both black-and-white (Kansas) and Technicolor (Oz)?



Not pictured: Matthew as Captain Mal, Meghan as Smurfette, Nora as Cleopatra, Annie as Sarah Palin, Prichard in a wedding dress, and Bill and Beth as Jareth the Goblin King and Sarah Williams from Labryinth. My selection of good pictures is still pretty limited right now, but you can see all of these costumes on Facebook.

Jeremy's pirate outfit was pretty good, but my favorite costume not worn by a Lawrentian was probably the Tony Stark outfit one of the groomsmen made by sticking a glowing circular light beneath his tux and wearing sunglasses. Easy and clever.

Highlights that evening included a choreographed performance of Thriller and the Politician's fantastical Magic Dance. Jonas and Sarah had selected all the music, so the unofficial Lawrence school songs — "I Believe In A Thing Called Love" and "Africa" — were both played at one point.

There was also an ongoing drinking contest between Ben, Meghan, and Our Bold Hero — I can't remember who won, so let's just say that we're all winners. Or that I probably won.

The party wound down back at the house with a game of King's Cup — which Miss Manners would tell you is a pre-party game — and the weekend wound down the next day at Perkins, where everything looked unappetizing and I decided that a vanilla malt was the only food worth consuming.

A decision I've made a few times before, actually.

We said our goodbyes and I drove home. I'll see Ben in December and many of these people next January, which doesn't actually seem that far off.

I just finished shaving my head, and of course I feel wonderful.

It's almost as if my negativity is stored in those hairs — encoded along with where I've been, what I've been eating, and what if any drugs I've been using. I imagine an arcane science devoted to measuring hairs and determining the history of our moods.

Or I could draw a diagram like the water cycle, with arrows going from things like "stress at work" and "messy room" to my eyes and ears, from there to my head, and finally from my head to the trashcan and back into the world.

Hung out with Barry, Jess and Rae on Friday: a nice end to a less-than-relaxing week. Except for parties and Girl's Night, I haven't really hung out with my friends much this fall, so it was nice to just sit around with a few people, some beers, and no schedule.

My annual review at work went well, really well I think, but with the raise freeze still in effect and winter making its first appearance (right now), I'm leaning more and more towards leaving the country.

I'll be moving out of Matt's place in mid-April in any case — I can officially tell you now that my little brother is getting married. Huzzahs all around! — so it might be interesting to just put most of my stuff in storage and head over to Korea or Japan or Germany or something for a year.

I know that as an introvert I can handle living prettymuch anywhere, and if I went with Korea I'd have friends already there waiting for me, which you have to admit is a nice setup.

Especially if (as Caitlin claims) I can make enough money to pay off every single one of my debts in a matter of months. I've got a master's in English, I like teaching, I have some experience: it seems like a good fit.

So. Considering it. I'll need to have this discussion with myself a few more times before expatriating really seems like a real possibility. I promise not to blog endlessly on this topic, but it's one of my main concerns right now.

Either I go abroad, or I'll find a place around here where I can actually settle down and live for however long. A house isn't that plausible at my current hourly rate, but I should be able to find something that I can make mine. Preferably with a source of light for my nomadic garden.

An apartment with suitably low rent might even work (shall we say, Summit-University neighborhood?), if I still can't decide where I want to be in the long term... but that's not really progress.

I keep telling myself that I've got some time. Probably I'll know what I'm doing next year before this year is out.

The big event this weekend was "Hottoberfest," as I insist on calling it. Prettymuch everyone came over for German food, German beer and colaweizen, and — this is key — a subtitled showing of Germany's Next Top Model, hosted by Heidi Klum.

I went way overboard (my mom would be proud) and prettymuch everything came together only at the last minute: the files took forever to download and even with subtitled versions already on YouTube, it took even longer to create and encode hardsubbed versions that would play on the big screen downstairs.

I had fun, but if I ever, ever do that again, I'm giving myself three months of lead time.

But hey, I won't see any of these people for Halloween, and this is probably my last party here until February or something. I keep rationalizing this stuff on the grounds that I'll spend less and less money as more of my friends leave the state and/or country.

(My own future also looks increasingly unpredictable in the particulars, however optimistic I am about it in general.)

The rest of the weekend was sedate, too much so considering how nice the weather was. I read, ran errands, etc. I got some thinking done, but not enough. Ultimately, if Our Bold Hero were some character in an RPG that I was playing, I would not be satisfied with his progression lately.

Tonight I made ice cream. I guess I should say "today," because I was chopping up chocolate at 2 this afternoon and taking the finished ice cream from the freezer at 8:30 tonight. I haven't made ice cream in a year and a half, but somehow I've gotten way better at it. I can actually make a custard now.

The flavor was mint chip. At this point in the season my garden is half dying tomato plants, half rampaging mint, and I've been trying to use up as much of the mint as I can before the season is over. I had mint pesto last week; it's not bad, actually.

Today I went to the Twins game (woo!) and yesterday I went to the Renaissance festival (huzzah!), but I don't really have anything I want to blog about right now. You'd think I would, but no.

Still, I thought I'd let you guys know the sort of weird stuff I've been up to.

So I went to Dylan's this Saturday for Michelle's birthday kegger — which is funny, because I think her b-day party last year was the last time I'd seen Dylan.

We're working on that, if the drunk talk this weekend is to be believed. We're neighbors now, sort of, and Dylan and I have always been able to pick up our friendship right where we left off.

The party. I think I'm getting better at socializing with strangers, although for all I know they were all patronizing me. The line between polite interest and bemused disinterest is hard to pinpoint at a kegger.

We played some foosball, did a shot, and (with the declaration "Sir, I studied under Aaron Jubb!") I entered and lost a chugging contest.

I have never seen anyone finish a cup of beer that quickly. This wasn't "wow, you're fast," it was "wow, I didn't think that was physically possible."

Dylan had an "Obama on a stick" sign from the state fair, so there was some talk of the election. On the way back from Stillwater last Friday I'd gotten into a typically combative conversation with Graham, so it was nice to talk politics with people who keep the emotional stakes low.

(Move to Minnesota, Bill: I don't care that you've reversed polarities. And I'd extend the same invitation to Alan if he weren't on the moon or wherever it is that he's gone now.)

I've become weirdly averse to sleeping on people's couches — I think it's the autonomy issue rather than any worries about being a bother — so I stopped drinking right before they unveiled the Disney princesses ice cream cake.

My piece had Ariel: this has been the month of The Little Mermaid references for some reason. I hope, hope that I didn't sing Shelley's cigarette version of "Part of Your World," but I don't remember and it seems at least possible that I did.

Oh, ice cream cake, how I love thee. Hurrah for birthdays.