An interesting assortment of costumes at the work Halloween party.

A little bathroom humor at work.

It's the little things that get you through the week.

Adal invited us to go to a haunted house in Indiana with him and Louie. Normally, we'd stay in on a Monday night and mourn the end of the weekend, but we decided to go and had a great time.

The haunted house/haunted woods was well done (despite them playing "I Will Survive" in the line outside, which kind of works when you read it here, but is not spooky when you listen to it), scary and inventive, and surprisingly elaborate.

They did lean a little too heavily on the movie monsters... which just ends up seeming silly. Guy in Leatherface mask with chainsaw: Scary. Guy in hockey mask with rubber knife: kind of scary. Short black high school kid dressed as Freddy Krueger, yelling, "Welcome to my nightmare!": not particularly scary.

That said, this guy dressed as a character, from, I think, 'House of 1,000 Corpses' looked great and was nice enough to let us take a picture with hi.

Michael Jackson did not seem interested in getting his picture taken with me.

Halloween weekend in Wrigleyville. Every year, after my Saturday night Whirled News show, I hang out with Sarah and some of the cast in the diner next to the theater and eat and drink and watch all the costumes walk back.

After a few pitchers we decided to go out into the madness and run around and ask strangers if they'd mind if we took our picture with them.

Here's Sarah with some random drunk dudes. I'm not entirely sure they completely registered that we were taking their picture.

Sarah: Andrew just sent me this pic of his girlfriend's frame with my pic! So famous.

Pictures of my nephews (Will, Tate and Ty) from Ohio.

They must have Halloween earlier in Ohio.

Mom: [via email] "We think that we had 61 or 62 trick or treaters. Great weather for it."

Sarah asked me if I knew what Ty was supposed to be dressed as and I said, "I think it's just the kind of elaborate and disturbing rubber masks that boys love at that age."

Sarah: Remember on your blog, right after I left, you wrote that you got the tool bag out and that you were fixing stuff?
Me: Yeah.
Sarah: What did you actually do?
Me: Oh. Uh... I don't remember. I did some stuff. Some window stuff. I took the A/C units out. I'm sure I did a few other things too. But mostly, yeah, it just sat on the kitchen table and I finally put it back in the closet the week before you came home.

Our fridge is back to being full of vegetables.

Catching up on episodes of 'Dexter,' and we saw, flashing by the in the background, our old cruise ship! I think. Maybe it's a sister ship. But we think it's the ship we were on. Porting out of Miami, it must have shot before we ever left to start our contract back in January.

Oh Spoiler Alert: Dexter drives by a cruise ship in the season seven premiere.

A nice Sunday at home, eating sandwiches and watching football.

Me: My Fantasy Football team is probably going to lose this week because both of my quarterbacks don't have games.
Sarah: You know you can trade players.
Me: Nah.
Sarah: But you should. That's the whole point.
Me: I'm not givin' up on my boys!!
Sarah: You're so stupid at football.

Wedding fun.

There were a large number of improvisers at the wedding so, of course, by the end of the evening, many of the decorative chair sashes were being worn on people's heads.

Sarah's home!

Tonight has a bit of a Christmas Eve feel... assuming that you spend part of Christmas Eve cleaning your apartment to get it back up to "Santa's" standards of cleanliness.

From Sarah:

"Quebec.

"I went to a cafe to have a glass of wine and read. A very outgoing gay man chatted me up. His name is Bernard and he is Quebec’s Mitchell. Kind, outgoing, and full of great stories. The only real difference is that he spent two months in a turkish prison for talking negatively about their government.

"After talking about traveling for a long time I asked for a recommendation for a french restaurant for dinner.

"Bernard: You must have this fish...it is...how do you say in English... (he grabs the table mat and draws this picture)
Me: ...a sting ray?
Bernard: YES! Sting Ray. You must have it.

"The cast ended up going there for dinner. It was fantastic. There was no sting ray on the menu."

Between hiking alone and chatting up strange Turkish political prisoners, it's kind of surprising that Sarah is still alive.

Sarah's back in three days.

None too soon.

From Sarah:

"Corner Brook, New Foundland

"We screeched-in too! Mission: Accomplished. Kind of. Instead of kissing a live cod on the mouth after doing the shot of screech we kissed a piece of popcorn chicken.

"We’re honorary Newfies!"

I gotta say... a little disappointing. A shot is a shot is a shot. The whole point seems to be kissing the cod, right?! I wonder if there are any places that offer this in Chicago?

From Sarah:

"We made it to the top of Man in the Mountain! Mission: Accomplished."

When I talked to Sarah about this she said that they were 20 minutes back down the mountain when they passed a hiker who pointed out they didn't see the really good vista that was over in a slightly different place, but they were already 20 minutes down, and thought, "Eh... we saw the top. We're fine."

Every day I've been sending Sarah pictures of me reading the notes she gave to me. They started off as just nice pictures of me smiling at the notes while pretending to read them, but they've sort of devolved into me making weird faces, pretending to eat the notes, sitting on the toilet, pretending to be dead, etc.

From Sarah:

"I went on a hike by myself through Sentier, Eucher. I never saw another person, so I put in headphones and sang the whole time, which only caused me to trip and fall once. Right back there."

I wonder if she also tripped while hiking and taking a picture of half of her face.

From Sarah:

"Supposedly this is David Geffen’s private ship. I thought, 'what would it be like to work on that ship' not 'what would it be like to own that ship.' My delusions of grandeur are waning."

From Sarah:

"I hurt my neck. I woke up one morning and couldn’t move it. As it turns out, Prescott and Sean also hurt their necks when they slept on that bed during an earlier cabin rotation. I thought it might help to flip the mattress. Julie was kind enough to help me. This is what we found on the underside of the bed. I keep telling myself it’s coffee. 'It’s just coffee. A lot of coffee. (it’s blood) IT’S NOT BLOOD, it’s definitely coffee. TOTALLY coffee. (blood coffee) NOT BLOOD COFFEE. Just coffee. Coffee.'"

I'm surprised I haven't used this picture yet. I suppose I can only post so many pictures of Skype and Facetime and Google Hangout sessions.

But it's nice that we can chat, face-screen to face-screen, a few times a week.

I remember being on a cruise contract, in port, trying to find good wifi, and getting annoyed when my downloads would slow down and I'd realize someone in the bar or restaurant was using Skype. It seems to take a lot of bandwidth. Some places even try to discourage it. "No Skype, no Skype," they say. I'd get annoyed and think, "Come on, why do you have to do that? You're ruining it for everybody."

I get it now.

The loneliness is starting to get to me a little bit. I mean, I'm busy, I go out, I do things, I see people, I have fun. For the most part I'm doing fine.

But there's this night-loneliness. An emptiness at the end of the day. I've noticed that I've started talking to myself a bit. "Well... goodnight," I'll say, to the empty apartment.

From Sarah:

"Corner Brook, Newfoundland. We decided to hike the Man in the Mountain trail. We got halfway (pictured here) and decided to head back, realizing it was going to be a four hour hike to the top, and we wanted to find a place to Screech-in before we went back to the boat. Next week I’m going to hike to the top, weather permitting. Hopefully we’ll screech-in too, since we never found a place that day.

"So, next week: Hike a mountain, kiss a cod!"

If I'm understanding correctly, "Screech-in" or "screeching," or maybe "screechin'" is some local tradition of drinking a shot and then kissing a giant fish on the lips. I'm excited to learn more.

Megan's last Whirled News Tonight show before going on "maternity leave."

She'll be missed.

But it was a great show to go out on. Funny. Big responsive audience. And then... about two thirds of the way through the first act, an audience member ran across the front of the stage towards the bathrooms, clutching his hands to his mouth... with vomit overflowing on each side. So, a trail a vomit on the stage.

Shock quickly turned to concern which quickly turned to jokes.

Me: Personally, I didn't think the scene was that bad.
Eddie: Don't worry, ladies and gentlemen, and unpaid intern will be here momentarily to clean this up.

We checked with the front row and no one got any puke on them. The vomiting audience member was quietly escorted home by a friend. And the rest of the show had a weird, fun, "well this has never happened before" energy.

Honestly, this may sound strange, but it made for one of the more enjoyable improv shows I've ever done.

Megan: Well... I guess I should be glad I didn't miss that.

From Sarah:

"Prescott and I have been trying to find “authentic lunches” in every port. Basically we’re trying to eat what is fresh and/or local; mussels on Prince Edward Island, poutine in Quebec, etc. Naturally we had to have lobster in Bar Harbor, ME. Leading up to this I had lobster on the ship, so that I could see what the difference was between good and great lobster. On the ship I thought, 'maybe I just don’t like lobster' and this was confirmed in Maine. I’m kind of disappointed in myself. Still it was fun to eat and I’d like to find other foods I have to fight in order to enjoy."

Dinner and drinks for Trupe's birthday.

To accommodate Nick, who now lives on the Southside, we all met downtown, a part of the city I visit so rarely I hardly think of it as Chicago at all.

At the end of the evening there was a lot of discussion of, "So, wait... how do I get out of here?" "Where's the highway?"

There's a fairly elaborate foosball tournament going on at work these days. I'm not participating, because, frankly, I don't really enjoy playing foosball, but I do occasionally check in with the live feed of the games.

The slight time delay is funny because I'll sometimes hear faint cheering coming through the floor and then, a moment later, hear cheering from the live feed.

From Sarah:

"I took this picture in Halifax, Nova Scotia (it's a war memorial, guess which one) and put it on Facebook. Andrew's girlfriend liked it so much she printed it out and is framing it. I am a famous photographer now. I hope you're not too jealous."

This is the note I opened from Sarah yesterday.

Sure, why not? Let's pickle.