Ever have one of those days when everything breaks? Today was one of those days. There I was, chugging along at work, highlighting passages in a PDF of a study I was writing about so my editors could see where I got my facts and figures, and suddenly there was a pop-up asking me whether I’d like a free trial of Adobe Creative Suite or just purchase it outright. When I took too long to answer—because I was hella befuddled—it quit. Then I got an email telling me I had lost access to Adobe Creative Suite Pro or some such. Right as I was typing this into a group message on Teams, our art director sent a message saying he was dead in the water because he lost access to Adobe Creative Suite. A friend at another organization said the same thing happened there, too: People were suddenly losing their access at random.
Eventually access came back except for me, but one of our IT folks sorted it out and I was up and running for about an hour when suddenly my Word crashed. Thank goodness for autosave or I would have cried. Word never fully recovered so I finally just called it a day and headed home, when along the way I discovered that the escalator at my work Metro stop was broken. Fortunately, it was the one where I enter the system, so I only had to go down the stairs and not up, but maybe I’m not the only one whose depth perception goes bonkers after about 25 steps down on an escalator. Or maybe I am, and I’m the only one who just kind of suddenly freezes up for want of seeing where the next step is.
Then the Metro itself broke and I got stuck in a tunnel for about half an hour.
After all of that I was very glad to get home, where I could pause to admire the tree-topper on the Halloween tree in the lobby.
We’re having a Halloween door decorating contest and this year I may just participate. I’ll have to think about it. If I were more social I’d decorate my whole apartment, get a Halloween tree and ornaments, and have a party, but I haven’t hosted anything in over 20 years and I’d probably give myself a good bit of anxiety worrying that no one would show up. Decorating a door might be possible, though.
And now, for today’s candy, the Mary Jane, a molasses and peanut-butter taffy candy invented in 1914.
Someone left a comment on a social media post about how these always fall to the bottom of the treat bag when you trick-or-treat. Come to think of it, yes, they always were on the bottom, along with the pennies. (Don’t get me started on people who gave pennies. I hope no one does that anymore.)
I hated them as a kid, but sometime in my 20s I fell in love with them. Perhaps molasses is an acquired taste. Today I’d be just as afraid of these pulling out a filling or pulling off my crown as the flavored Tootsie Rolls in the previous entry. Some candy I just won’t eat anymore, but for those who like these, looks like you can buy a 30-pound case of them for $152.79 at Oh! Nuts, the website where I yoinked the picture. Your dentist will love you, if not your primary care physician.
