You learn something new every day.

Today, I learned the second half of an old idiom, that I had never, not once, heard before!

Run it up the flagpole, and see if anyone salutes.

How did I not know this!?

Trick or Treat!

Pretend you are 9 again. This is my own meme...

Best candy overall? Reese's peanut butter cup.

Best candy for school lunch? Sugar Daddy - it lasts the longest.

Worst candy? Raisins.

Candy your brother is dumb enough to trade for? Smarties.

Candy Dad steals, but you don't mind? Almond Joy.

Candy Dad steals, but you do mind? Butterfinger.

Best candy-gathering bag? Pillow case, of course!

You get an apple. You do what with it? Believe it or not, never happened.

Best book about Halloween? Blubber by Judy Blume, of course. It taught me the word flenser and made me realize how quickly the tides can change when teasing is concerned. It also made me endless jealous that there were places in the world with dried, crunchy leaves on Halloween, rather than drifts of snow.

Candy Mom steals? Trick question; she never stole any - she's Mom!

Date upon which Mom throws out Halloween candy if not all eaten? The weekend before Thanksgiving.


And yes, I was a kid who meted out my own candy, to myself, a couple pieces in my lunchbox each day, to make it last and last and last... and be at risk for parental theft... and then I eventually tired of it - or was left with nothing but suboptimal Mr. Goodbars and Three Musketeers and Raisinets and plain ol' raisins by Thanksgiving, dried out in a crumb-covered pillowcase on the pantry shelf. Happy Halloween!

An actually-real Thursday-evening quiz

I think everyone has an environmental albatross. There's this thing... this action, this item... that weighs on you. And yet, it's everywhere. Or a-lot-of-where.

I know someone, who shall remain nameless, whose albatross is toilet paper. Yup. They feel really, really guilty about toilet paper in the waste water system, about killing the trees, about the bleach used on those dead trees, about the metaphor of throwing our shit into our water, day after day, without thought.

I know someone, who shall also remain nameless, whose albatross might be closer to yours... plastic bags. They hate even having them in hand, because it's just a reminder of dead baby marine mammals and littered beaches.

Mine is wasted food. Any bit of tossed out food (with the exception of mushroom stems, say, or browned bits of lettuce leaf) equates with a stricken, internal panic over wasted food. Which equals wasted money. Which equals... well, you can guess. And so on, and so on.

But the moral of the story actually is this... my poor husband can be quite put-upon to help with the leftovers. I love leftovers. He does not. And yet, he recently ate seven-day-old quinoa because I felt too guilty to throw it out and also didn't really like the taste. And he paid for it, digestivesystemthankyouverymuch. So I try to prevent that from becoming a recurring event, and in the meantime... quiz time... what's your albatross?

A warning

John, the other night, to me, with a very grave face: "Baby, I have to warn you."

Me, thinking, oh shit. "What??"

"I think I may be developing into an Oxfordian."

Well, NOW WHAT?!

I kid, I kid. This is just a peek into the excitement of marriage. And heck, he would be in the company of such gentlemen and scholars as Keanu Reeves, John Paul Stevens, David McCullough, Jeremy Irons and good ol' Freud.

8.95 months later

Remember this? It was a trackback to an even earlier post, about giving a wedding gift to a relative and how long is too long for her to wait to cash the check.

Well, I wrote that check on May 27th and it was cashed today, a few days before the baby is born... the baby conceived on the honeymoon after the wedding for which I wrote said check.

A couple days shy of nine months is TOO LONG! It's official. And the saga is over, at least.

5 Things I learned this week.

1. "Kumbaya" is a distortion of an old spiritual called "Come By Here", a praise and plea to God.

2. I can skip reading BlackBerry messages until Monday if they are identifiable by subject line as a thing I can only work on while in the office. This saves me an evening (or a weekend) of stewing about a piece of casework, for example.

3. Toothpaste can treat and heal burns, polish old tennis shoes, fix car scratches and more!

4. If you make $34,000 a year, you pay $10 a year in taxes toward public housing, 24 cents toward funding for the arts, $1,040 to Social Security and $11 to Head Start. You pay $46 in foreign aid and $230 toward combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

5. This is the time of year for Delicata squash; go get yourself one, quick! They're incredibly delicious.