labor day weekend

Summer is gone and that is becoming more apparent as the weather changes to rain, some fall color is beginning to peak out of the American sweetgum leaves around town. Mornings are darker and colder and evenings vanish into night faster than they did all summer.
Seasons do fascinating things to our lives. They seem to account for quite a bit of the change we feel in ourselves. At least it seems to work that way for me. Autumn in Nanjing defined my life a year ago; autumn in Portland defines the setting for my life's story this year.
A whiff of Halloween in the air has got me a little excited. Last year I missed out on it completely. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that my company will let us dress up in costumes to go to work the day before Halloween.
This year I would like to uphold a lot of the Halloween traditions I practiced in my youth, such as pumpkin carving, pumpkin seed toasting, going to haunted houses, watching horror movies, dressing up in a costume, etc.
What was the weekend? Just like every labor day in my memory: lazy. Stayed up until 2:30 last night with Shawna and a friend named Kevin watching "Are You Afraid of the Dark?" episodes on Youtube. That's an old show that used to play on Nickelodeon; Alexei and I watched it at either Grandmother's house in Waterloo or at Kathleen's house in Naperville. We often watched while playing a game we created called "Miagi with Ice Cream" which was a mercy game. We would sit against either end of the sofa and take turns extending our legs while the other was squished against the other sofa arm until they couldn't take it anymore and said "Miagi with Ice Cream".