The last time I was in Washington, we had cleaned out a lot of my parent’s old stuff, and I was leaving after having booked a real estate agent to sell off the property. There were boxes and bags of miscellaneous papers that were going to be thrown out or destroyed, and I scooped up a luggage bag full of it without looking closely at it — I just didn’t want to abandon some piece of family history. I haven’t dug into it yet, but I had a moment free and plucked out a few random bits to see what treasures I had rescued.

Here are my parents, sometime in the late 1980s/early 90s.

Here’s Mom’s 5th grade report card (my grandmother also saved everything.)

That’s pretty good, young lady, but we’re going to have to have a little talk about that C in writing. Also, what’s the difference between writing and English?

I didn’t get any further in sorting through the collection because then I discovered she had saved all the mother’s day cards we had sent to her. Aww, Mom. You cared? Now I feel bad for not sending one this year. I am a terrible son.

I’m in the mood for some self-abasement, and also to nod in the general direction of the Xmas season. I’m going to tell you about the most horrible, embarrassing moment of my life so far. Maybe it’ll inspire you to mention your moment of humiliation in the comments to make me feel a little better.

In my youth, I was a regular church-goin’ kid. Sunday school every week, choir every Wednesday, confirmation every Thursday. I was not a believer, but it was the only club that would accept me, and I also liked the music–I was attending more for the choir than anything else. I had a few friends in the group, although…we weren’t good friends, I guess. We never socialized outside the church.

One year we were organizing for a giant Christmas concert involving dozens of churches in the Puget Sound area. We had to do multiple practices every week, and it wasn’t just walking down the street to my local Lutheran church. We were rotating among various churches, a different one every time, to practice together. It was a huge effort, my parents were ferrying me all over the region for a few months ahead of time. I didn’t mind. I had zero patience for the religious nonsense, but if you’ve ever been in a choir, you know that the feeling of singing in harmony with a large group is an almost primeval, inspiring sensation.

The day of the Christmas concert, we loaded up in vans and busses and journeyed to the site of the event: the Kingdome. I told you it was big. The stadium was filled up. All the Washington state choirs were seated in a vast array in the center. When we started singing, we made the whole place vibrate.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling my best. In the hours we were there, I started feeling a little woozy. Then I was trembling. Then I had a cold sweat. Was I nervous? Not really. It’s not as if I had a solo, I was one among many hundreds.

Then it was time for my church group to sing their special song. We stood up, and we started singing the song we’d practiced so hard: “O Come O Come Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.” Maybe you know it; I still remember the lyrics because damn, we repeatedly sang that thing so many times before the concert. I stood with my church group, raising my voice before the entire Kingdome audience with cameras aimed at us to record the event.

“O COME O COME…” I sang, wobbling and sweating, and then, suddenly, I felt Satan rising up in my body, like a greasy bubble of demonic filth, then “EMMANUE…” and it hit me, unexpectedly and irresistible, and I started vomiting. Projectile vomiting. A horrific geyser of godliness was instantly purged from my body in an terrible public display.

I did immediately feel better, with one regret: the girl in the row in front of me had a lovely cashmere sweater folded over the back of her chair, and I destroyed it. Sorry.

Our choir director, Mrs Whalen, was incredibly nice and gracious, given that all anyone was going to remember of our hard work and our performance was the kid in the middle who grossed out the entire Kingdome with his horrifying expulsion of bodily fluids. She was one of my favorite people, and she treated my ghastly spectacle with nothing but kindness. I continued on with the choir for maybe a year afterwards, before my inability to reconcile my complete lack of faith and aggressive skepticism with the whole goofy church scene drove me away.

That memory still comes back occasionally these many years later, usually around the holiday season, and I can never hear that hymn without being triggered. I also don’t sing anymore.

So what psychic scars do you all still carry?

If all of us take little steps to deprive billionaires of some of their power, maybe we can eventually make them care about us little people. Here are some simple things that could make them sting a little bit.

• Obviously, get off Twitter. There’s no excuse anymore — tweeting enables fascists.
• Unsubscribe from any big, national newspapers. They’re all bought and paid for. Subscribe to a local paper. Alternatively, read The Guardian, it’s not American and it’s totally free.
• No more books from Amazon. This one is going to be tough: we don’t have a real bookstore in town (the University Bookstore is a joke, selling only the necessary textbooks, and most of the floor is dedicated to t-shirts and souvenirs). The nearest bookstores are 45 minutes away, but I guess they’ll get more of my business. Here’s a good list of alternatives to Amazon. Added complication: Amazon has been buying up competing vendors aggressively.
• Even better, use your local library.
• Don’t buy anything else from Amazon. That’s difficult here in small town America, too — we rely so much on ordering things from Amazon because we can’t get them here. Huh…I wonder why local availability has been drying up?
• Just generally buy local. It deprives the massive rich stores (which are usually owned by assholes) of money, and is better for the environment, too.
• And finally, never ever vote for a Republican, no matter how nice they may be and how much they promise you.

Teeny tiny steps. It’s not much, but it’s a way for me to cope.

The latest Stephanie Stirling video dropped a tantalizing mention. There exists something called a “woke content detector“, which is basically a small group of self-appointed censors who are busily telling everyone which video games are bad. Not particularly interesting, except that the criteria they use to decide which games are too woke are hilarious. They have a spreadsheet listing their reasoning.

Here are some examples of things that make a game unrecommended or too woke. These are things the censors consider bad.

• “The Myplayer clothes shop features apparel with BLM slogans.”
• “has Non-binary gender option”
• “Features a diverse cast and LGBTQ+ characters”
• “Pronoun selection including an option for they/them”
• “POC soldiers on both sides”
• “LGBTQ+ decorations/furniture, diverse students, students can enter same sex relationships”
• “LGBTQ+ and diverse characters including a plus size POC queen”
• “Pride flags displayed in the police station and fire station”
• “Optional homosexual romance”
• “Pronoun selection including an option for they/them. Homosexual and non-binary romance options”
• “Contains overtly pro-climate action messaging. ‘an environmental card strategy game with climate change as your opponent.'”
• “Demonizes golfers and golf-courses by highlighting potentially negative environmental impacts of the sport”
• “The player character is a woman with depression. Features a story about living with depression”
• “Features a story about living with a disability”
• “Features a story about a world where ‘climate change has made life hard'”
• “Contains overtly anti-capitalism and anti-western society messaging”
• “The player character is a WOC who can fix any antique. She immediately finds plenty of work in a town she has never been to before”
• “Features a diverse cast of 1st gen immigrants to the USA. Features a female CEO of a green tech startup”

I’m impressed with the pettiness, and how they can be offended by just the existence of LGBTQ+, women, disabled people, pronouns, and decorative features that don’t affect the game. I’m amazed that anyone would want to play such culturally impoverished video games. Checkers is probably a safe game for them.

You will be relieved to know that “Alex Jones: NWO Wars” is recommended and has no woke content, so there are some games you can play.

I am pleased to announce that not only have I gotten all my lectures/discussions planned out for this week, I have completed all grading to date. On Canvas, my to-do list is completely empty, for now.

I was scheduled for jury duty for tomorrow (one of the reasons I was striving to get all caught up), and the case was settled out of court.

Now what? Is there something people do when they’ve finished all their work by mid-afternoon of Sunday? Or are all of you swamped right now too?

My mother’s house just went on the market, which meant the asking price has gone public. As part of the probate process, the names of all of the heirs were publicly posted a while back. There are skeevy people who are tracking that kind of information, who instantly swoop in and contact the heirs, asking if they’d like a fast advance on their inheritance, for the price of a small, tiny, hardly even mentionable fee, so small that they don’t even mention it, and you won’t know about it until after the estate is settled.

It’s like a payday loan scam run by funeral-chasing ghouls. I think I’ve just learned about a whole ‘nother industry full of people I hate.

My whole family is about to get junkmail from these horrible people who promise painless advances on their inheritance, except for the big bite they take out of it (one company was going to skim off 20%) and the nuisance to the executor (me) and his lawyer. I’m just telling everyone to be patient, we’re making good progress on the estate, and I’m hoping we can get everything cleared up by Christmas, so I only have one complicated tax year.

(In good news, we’ve already had 3 people tour the house, so maybe it’ll go fast.)

My mother’s house is now officially on the market. Go buy it! The price is $435K, but if you want to round up to a half million, I won’t complain.

It’s now empty and shined up and ready to go. Look at this lovely kitchen!

That’s one of the last things my mother had redone on the house before her death. She was very proud of it. I wish my house had a kitchen that nice.

Charming 3-bedroom, 1.75-bathroom rambler with plenty of space and a cozy layout! Great opportunity to make this home your own. Home features a circular floor plan, opening to the living room, then flowing into the dining & kitchen area. Kitchen boasts natural cabinetry, large window above the sink & ample storage & countertop space. Back room has tons of potential, use as a 4th bedroom, second living space or even a play room! Outside, enjoy a large driveway with ample parking and a single-car garage for extra storage or workspace. Large backyard features cozy patio. Easy commute & convenience to everything! Quick access to Hwy 18 & very close to Game Farm Park with ball parks & picnic areas & Wilderness park for enjoying the White River.

Now I want to buy it and move in. Not mentioned is that on a clear day you can see Mt Rainier from the backyard, and that the convenient shed is full of spiders. I don’t know why they left that bit out, especially since it’s going on the market on Halloween.

I have lot of happy memories in that house, so it’s sad to see it empty. Go fill it up to cheer me up.

Here’s a Halloween thought for you: what Halloween/movie monster do you most closely identify with? Is it the tragic cursed werewolf, doomed to a life of mad animal viciousness whenever the moon is full? Are you a more modern rage monster, a Freddie or Jason slashing their way through the world? Or a blameless Frankenstein’s monster, hideous and hated? There are a thousand choices. Pick one now and explain your reasoning.

I was thinking of this yesterday while I was doing some drudgery in the lab. I had fed the spiders the other day, lots of big juicy mealworms. I raise mealworms at home, and I have a terrarium in the basement where I cultivate thousands of the little bugs. You throw in a big box of cornmeal every few months, and periodically toss in table scraps — the ends of carrots, a mushy tomato, a shriveled orange, and they thrive in there. I comb my fingers through the meal, which is steadily being converted to frass, and scoop up handfuls of wriggling larval beetles. I drop them one at a time in the adult spiders’ cages.

Here’s the catch: the spiders are adept at quickly killing and eating them, but the way they do it leaves behind a tube of cuticle filled with the soupy mix of digested guts and venom. It’s an amazing medium for bacteria — you would not believe the stench that a rotting mealworm can produce. They reek of death and decay, and I have to go through all the containers and clean them out.

The younger spiders need more delicate food, so I raise fruitflies in an incubator in the lab. Flies are also easy, but the bottles full of medium can get quite nasty, when they got old they get moldy and a bit slimy. So yesterday I was scrubbing out a month’s worth of fly bottles, filling up a sink with scum and floating bits of mold and insect parts, and thinking…hey, this is quite pleasant. Low stress, no demands, light work, I was quite enjoying myself. I could be quite content as a lab assistant, doing the dirty work behind the scenes as long as I didn’t have any more long-term demands on myself.

It’s obvious then. I’d want to be a lesser horror movie character, not a monster, not a mad scientist, I just want to be an Igor, a Fritz, a Karl, maybe occasionally aspiring to a Renfield.

Me and Dwight Frye, we’d be the bestest buddies.

Your turn. What’s your Halloween avatar?

We grandparents love to hear about the cute and adorable things our grandchildren are up to. Here’s the latest news about Iliana:

Tomorrow, she gets to wear pajamas to school because her class filled up a “good behaviour” jar. The final fill-up was because the class did really well during the lockdown drill today. She explained to us that a real lockdown is when a person with a weapon comes into the school to kill you. They hid for the drill and the principal acted as the threat person. She said if she gets outside she’s supposed to sprint away because they’ll be trying to kill her. She said that the teachers weren’t talking about killing, but the kids figured it out. She and her friends were playing a game called “lockdown drill” after this and acting it out again.

Wow. That sounds like such a fun game. We didn’t have games like that when I was a kid.

Here’s a map of average precipitation across the US.

I’m in the dry band that stretches from Texas to Minnesota, drawing a vertical line across the middle of the country. I grew up in the dark green to purple wet part of the country on the West coast, and my favorite part of the world is that dark purple blotch over the Olympic peninsula.

No wonder I’m thirsty. I need to get a drink of water and get to work now.