great pumpkin

Halloween is a strange sort of holiday, and I bet this one will be the scariest yet with the slow, creeping spread of Swine Flu. It is sort of rather a bump in the road towards the long processing of the holiday season to come, and in Europe at least, transitional since we had the time change and the dark days that make for a zombified sort of week, miserable and staving off everyone else's contagions. I got candy to ward off the reprisal of the neighbourhood kids, but I doubt we'll have many visitors, unless parents can convince their children the hottest costumes are doctors and nurses and Asian tourists (with surgical masks--who's laughing now?), like the cast of Outbreak, Twelve Moneys, the Thaw, etc.

fall back

It's really bizarre how annual time bids a hasty retreat. I am sure that those who conceived of this plan and its perpetuators find the ritual rather laughable, that people dutiful greet the sunrise an hour earlier one Monday a year--afterwards, the novelty wears off. It's just a brighter shade of grey in the mornings and depressingly dark too early, even on days when one can escape from work a bit sooner. There's even apparently a different change date for the States. On Sunday morning, there was a time warp happening at home, with computers and cell phones smart enough to adjust themselves and most other gadets transposed somewhere in the future. It's not nice to fool Father Time

infringement

Good old Diploma Mill University is presenting an unending challenge. Mostly I manage to reap descent marks, however, I would have better overall grades if I just managed to follow directions and not take off running with a flash of colourful prose and a witty twist of phrase that I cannot bring myself it edit out. Sometimes it is hard to read expectations, especially in an on-line environment with a class full of beauty-school drop-outs (go back to high school) and the temptation just to phone it in. It is hard to find a posting or email that is anything but terse and rushed, as if these were telegrams and one was paying by the letter. Even plagiarism, though not a real temptation for me, is like this strange sort of monolith that no one speaks of, save beating up on Wikipedia for lack of academic rigour--universities universally condemn Wikipedia, I think, out of jealousy and a sense of self-preservation. If one searches for any permutation of the rubric of the assignment, one will quickly uncover those completed assignments for sale or complete crib notes with abstracts and references that one can cut and paste and submit.

lumberjack orgy

Though having committed to the delivery way back at the end of August through a popular auction website, our supply of firewood was not brought by until later Saturday evening. I guess that H and I will not be hearing Torch Bunny transform very much this winter, or the next, since we've been rained on with an embarrassment of kindling. The whole process, delayed as it was, was sort of strange and suspect. And most deliveries in Germany stop at one's threshhold or at the bottom of the stairwell, but I was a bit miffed that the guy dumped his trailer full of wood in front of ours and neighbour's garages. To his credit, he spent a good half hour tossing logs into the big pyramid that now occupies H's parking spot. Unceremoniously dumping the timber onto the driveway and street did not exactly strike me as unprofessional, but I just had the thought in my head that it would come shirnk-wrapped on pallets that were four neat and stowable cubic meters. We're still sorting through it all. Some is a bit rough-hewn and young but certainly conbustable enough. In the run-up to the arrival of the wood, the Wood--it's an entity, real-estate in its own right, we stoked a fire a frantic pace, letting our supplies dwindle and had the house an obscenely toasty 23° Celcius, and now it's like some Elemental Smack-Down in our house. Fire versus Wood, Heat versus Cold. Before, the only time it seemed like I hosted such a battle royale was in my old place, when the water pipes had frozen after being away one bitterly cold weekend and the faucets refused to cooperate until a coaxed thaw.