Halloween. Bees. Country.

Hello! I have the laptop charger back! But there is still only internet at the Library.

I love living out in the country and looking up at the stars and smelling the fresh air and listening to the dogs down the road go mental every time a cyclist goes past at 8am on a Sunday morning and the farmer next door's 'Music to Tractor By' country CD (I assume that is the name of it, you have to have it up quite loud to hear it over the tractor) and the bull in the next paddock bellowing for three straight hours about the sexy lady cows and the wooden windchime my flatmates are going to wake up to find stuffed up their nose one morning. I do.

But despite these many country joys, I can't wait to move into a house that has internet! At the moment we can barely get 'telephone'. Before we can get broadband we have to wait until someone else moves out of the area because there is, I guess, only so much internet to go around. Also, I lent someone my computer for the morning (dumb idea) and now it has Chrome and Firefox doesn't work any more and everything is slightly weird.

The country also means that we didn't get any trick-or-treaters last night, which is good because I don’t like children at the best of times and the best of times is definitely not “knocking on your door in the middle of the news, demanding lollies because they bought a mask from the $2 shop”, but not so good because I had the high-pressure hose all set up but never got to use it.

Living out in the country also spared us the egging bit of Halloween as well, because it’s a bit too far to walk to the next house and we don’t want to egg ourselves. Also, there really is only so long you can egg a cow before it gets boring. (Thought: the reason Halloween isn’t widely celebrated in NZ is because the people in charge of organising what we celebrate are highly eggable.)

On the Halloweeny topic, the Police sent an email out yesterday reminding people that Halloween “is not an excuse to commit a crime,” which rather put a damper on my plan to dress up, rob a bank and blend seamlessly into the Halloween revellers, just one more giant banana in the crowd.

Strangely, the Internet already has a picture of this.

I assume the email was directed at the sector of society who think “Ooh! Halloween! I’m going to egg my neighbours’ house and put toilet paper in their trees and fill their letterbox with bees*”, or whatever it is that people actually do at Halloween, but I don’t know. Maybe Halloween crime is massive.

Maybe people are constantly dressing up in gorilla suits and defrauding government agencies under cover of darkness.

Maybe small children dressed as pixies are distracting homeowners at the front door while their mums whip round the back and take off with the silverware.

Perhaps it is small-scale crime: maybe teams of small, uncostumed children roam the neighbourhood with baseball bats, ready to standover and extort the loot of better dressed trick-or-treaters.

ANYWAY this is all irrelevant because I am going to paint my butt like a pumpkin and moon passing motorists, even though it's not Halloween any more. That is the trick.

*Disclaimer: please do not actually fill anyone’s letterbox with bees. If you fill someone’s letterbox with bees, it is not my fault.

The Banana Dog of No Bees