Candy? Check.
Kids’ costumes? Check.
Kids sick with coughs and sore throats? Check.
Wife away on business? Check. (but she’ll be back in time)
Medicinal whiskey (for me, not the kids)? Check.

Halloween can come, I’m ready.
Unlike Sunday, when some boys already came to our house, trick-or-treating early because they were going to be busy on Thursday… the nerve.

A little spider is spinning a web on my monitor. And I am sitting here watching, raptly.

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What’s it mean when I dream of a 6’2″ 220 lb (100kg) man (with no mouth) named Pat Murphy?

Genealogy sounds to me like a word that, had they lived longer, the Ramones would eventually have used in a song, like “lobotomy” and “psychotherapy”. Alpha and I have somehow gotten interested in researching our family trees. It’s a good way for me to finally brush up on my two weakest subjects, geography and history. So far I’ve been relying on the famous Mormon genealogy site familysearch.org and have found out a lot more about Alpha’s relatives than about my own. It’s like there are a couple generations missing right after my grandfather, and then I find all these possible ancestors from the 18th century but it’s hard to be sure.

Alpha’s in better shape, as are all Austrians and Germans, and possibly other Europeans. Not only did they move around less, and have access to church records: during the Nazi era, they had to do genealogical research to establish their Arian pedigrees. This information they were required to compile in little booklets, called an “Ariernachweis” or “Aryan Certificate” (crudely translated); this has all the information, going several generations back.

It strikes me that blogging is memoire writing. Maybe I should print out this nonsense for future generations…

The latest issue of our village newspaper had, somewhere inside, between a message from the mayor asking people to sweep their sidewalks on Saturdays and the opening hours of the local library, a picture of a local farmer with a pile of WWII-era bombs he’d recently found in his field.

When they built the new soccer field, they turned the old one into housing plots; but before they could build, they had to clear away a bunch of bombs and grenades some old guy remembered they’d buried there right after the war, back when it’d been a fallow field. I guess a lot of that went on back then. What else can you do with old bombs? Too dangerous to blow them up I guess.

My father in law still has a scar on his leg from when, as a boy in WWII, he and his friends went fishing with hand grenades they’d gleaned from downed Allied aircraft.

little+worms+in+the+house

I realize it’s pass