It is the day.

My new home is one block from an elementary school, so we have hopes for some cute trick or treaters.

I’m excited.

There are a lot of halloween decorations up. We did not decorate. Chris kept lingering over the fog machine, and various other scary stuff.

“Buy it!” I told him.

“Let’s wait and see how many trick or treaters come…”

He says that people are more into decorating than he remembers. We see a lot of fake spiderwebs on hedged. I see a lot of christmas-style lights.

Apparently, the witches have become much less skilled broomstick drivers. There are flattened witches all over fences and trees and doors.

I bought the tootsie roll combo pack. I hope it will be enough. I’ve snacked on it a bit, but there is a big bowl left.

Happy Halloween every one!

Watch out, friends. It’s flu and cold season

I got the flu shot, but right now it’s colds going around. One is encircling my head. I hope it passes.

It’s been rainy and cold. Now it’s just cold.

Of course, cold is a relative thing. This is Los Angeles, after all. Cold means it dips below 70 in the afternoons.

But I’m glad it finally feels like fall. Protracted summer is wearing. I am ready for the season change.

People say there is no change in seasons here. Probably other people have missed the changing colors of fall, because there are more than a few cultivated maples and other such trees that change color and drop their leaves.

I was kicking some of those leaves across the sidewalk yesterday. I thought, This is really an artificial fall. This tree isn’t from around here. It was brought here to drop it’s leaves.

And then I realized my disdain wasn’t really fair. I’m not from around here either. Why can’t the trees be validated as transplants? A whole lot of the people are.

So, happy fall everybody. Wherever you are. Even if fall is long past for you. Enjoy the seasons.

America…since…Gosh, I don’t know…But we started to think in decades.

The 50s…the 60s…the 70s…the 80s…

The 80s are coming back, don’t you know?

But, what’s up with the arbitrary emphasis on the ‘0’? the 80 to the 90. Or the 1950 to the 1960.

We have an extra zero now, and we hardly know what to do with it. We don’t have a cute term for the now…The fifties, the eighties, the nineties…and two thousand five…or worse, two thousand and five.

We’re kind of drifting until we get to call it the teens. Then it’s back on solid ground, the twenties, the thirties and the forties.

But at this moment, we are half way. 2005.

And for me, that concludes my own personal decade. On October 15, 1995 I flew from the Anchorage airport to Sacramento California.

My first decade of California living has passed.

I have a geeky reason for remembering that it was 1995. That was when it went from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95

A big year, to be sure. And the decade that followed has been justly monumental. I am so happy to be where I am and to have the skills that I have.

I know Bill! I lived in Eureka from grades 2-5. The zoo was free, and Bill was a great favorite. He would throw his poo at you.

“EUREKA, Calif. — An escaped chimpanzee is back at the Sequoia Park Zoo after a jaunt through a residential area that provided quite a sight for the Neighborhood Watch.

Bill wandered off Thursday night after vandals cut a hole in his cage, officials said.

The Eureka Police Department received a call about 10:45 p.m. from a neighbor who said the chimp was in a backyard on Glatt Street. Zoo staffers arrived with police to take Bill home.

“He was extremely stressed and excited,” said zoo supervisor Gretchen Ziegler. She said changes to zoo security would be made immediately.

The 59-year-old chimp came to the Sequoia Park Zoo from a European circus in July 1957.”

It is fall, or so they say. I does not feel like fall to me. The weather is in the nineties. Most of the trees are very green.

But, it is october, which is not summer anymore.

Chris, who is used to uniform trees, want to go see the colored-leaf trees this weekend. Which is great by me. Every single trip we have ever gone on has been wonderful.

We are going up to Mammoth, and we are going to see the oldest trees in the world, the bristlecone pines. They say they are 6 thousand years old.

Wow.

I’m taking monday off, since my sweet new job allows for the occasional day off. I am so looking forward to it.

It will be cold there. I will have to bring scarves and sweaters, and it will be lovely.