Fin 7:45 and the Skittles are gone.

trick-or-treat I love them all, but my favorite so far have been the first kids, two six-year-old boys both dressed and fully in the persona of Captain Jack Sparrow.

"Do you like Skittles?" I asked. 'Cause that's what I've got.

"Argh!" growled one. "We love the Skittles!"

"Ugh, I can't open this bag," I said. (They were, after all, the first kids.) "Hold on, and I'll get my scissors."

"Argh!" they growled. "The scissors! Bring the scissors!"

Halloween is awesome to me because it's, like, Super Awesome Fun Fantastic Best-Ever Day for Kids and Do You Have Candy? The kids dress up like superheroes and take over the neighborhood. Five years old is great for that.

Robert Goulet, no! I'm speechless.

I loved, LOVED Robert Goulet. I loved him on The Simpsons. I loved his commercials. I have several Robert Goulet mp3s on my Toshiba Gigabeat, and if you ride with me you will wait through them as I grip the wheel and pantomime "What Kind of Fool Am I?" because Robert Goulet was the fucking MAN. He was a class act and funny as hell and actually sincere--a combination you don't see so much.

J. and I have a running joke in our marriage in which we write random shit among the regular stuff on the grocery list we're sending with the other. For years I have requested "Robert Goulet." Like, if you see Robert Goulet at the store, can you bring him home? That'd be sweet! I could almost imagine him stocked among the mops, totally professional, doing Carousel, at home in any situation. The man, I'm telling you.

I'm not kidding You know, next time you're at the post office, just send Fisher-Price their shit back. Because seriously, are you going to want to make a special trip later? Wait in the P.O. with a small person or persons to whom you are The World's Biggest Asshole Who Sends Their Toys Away?

Here's the point at which, were I a better activist, I would say fuck you to conglomerate toy motherfuckers with toxic crap built in China with phthalates by people who live like slaves, but my sincere attempts to interest The Boy in tree blocks and silk squares have not been fruitful, so I have no soapbox upon which to stand. And I'm just going to come out and say I don't think the tree blocks really gave me that much to work with. I'm not saying they have to light up or teach French, but I couldn't polish that turd.

As a child of the 1970s--the decade that brought you plastic fabrics and pressurized cheese in a can--I am drawn to Cool Toys Made From Synthetic Substances with Amazing Properties. I used to trip out on Shrinky Dinks. And what the fuck is in Shrinky Dinks? I'd probably have to spend an afternoon Googling before I let my kid look at a picture of Shrinky Dinks.

But even then we kind of knew it couldn't last. That's part of why it was fun. We could not eat miniature sausages in a can forever; we could not loll about in petroleum polymers aplenty for generations to come. Kids were going to have to go back to rolling balls of lint across the floor with wooden spoons. I'm not saying we should start collecting our lint (unless you're into it) but I'm keeping an eye out for right-sized boxes.

Why wait? Seriously, just go ahead and send all your shit back to Fisher-Price.

El Nueve Nine years, J.

Nine.

Years.

Hooray for us!

Mole Day Happy Mole Day, everyone.

I will celebrate by reading the word "ionic" without thinking "ironic" or "iconic."

news/flash People in caregiving professions report being depressed more.

nap means fever Then again, fever means nap.

the puffy chair Well, our ancient blue pinstriped recliner finally bit it this weekend. Fortunately the occupant was unhurt. The chair is fucked.

We're going to have to sneak its remains off the premises because Baldo is traumatized by his lack and insists we try to sell it in a garage sale. The chair is unsound. It's not even fit for the curb, although I guess you could sit in it if you weighed 13 pounds and held absolutely still. Otherwise the chair is fucked.

I thought I'd miss it, but I don't. I spent six months postpartum sleeping in that goddamn chair--first because my c-section incision hurt too much for me to lie down flat, then because any time the baby got flat he'd try to pull a Keith Moon in a puddle of his own vomit. I sat in that chair for six fucking months. I was either evacuating waste, attempting to clean myself, or sitting in that chair. People had rotovirus in that chair. I went entirely crazy in that chair.

Part of me wants to set fire to it on the driveway. I do have a chainsaw.

I'm cheered that Baldo's associations with the chair are pleasant. So that's nice. We also found hidden in its back--exposed by the crash--a stash of childhood treasures, including a junior toothbrush so old its bristles have browned and broken off--it could only have belonged to J. We found the last missing wheel from our Brio Builder Dizzy the Cement Mixer. (I love that goddamn Brio Builder.) We found a tiny orange teddy bear from yesteryear, which Baldo immediately clutched to his bosom.

"Because I don't have my chair anymore," he said.

make it stop We were watching those Tomorrowland movies, like the one with Wehrner von Braun that imagines a trip to Mars, and at the end the Disney narrator gets really mad at "contemporary science" for suggesting that Mars is home to "low" forms of life like tiny plants instead of vast civilizations now in ruin.

Wehrner von Braun explains how the mission will be powered. At one point, billions of cesium ions are discharged.

ME: Oh, shit. Cesium ions are being discharged by the billions. We're going to have to write that in scientific notation. Should it be closed up or spaced? Where's the style sheet?

And the MOTFY goes to... Boy was my face red when I picked up The Boy's Tuesday folder at school today.

School pictures are next week (we're choosing Package E), there's a Field Day coming up with a Wild West theme, and the kinders and their fifth-grade buddies are going on a Shapes Walk! Awesome!

Tucked without comment in the other side of the folder was the article I had left in there: my piece from the Dick Monologues.

I like to take a folder to read from onstage. I didn't have one. So since I had conveniently forgotten to return the Tuesday folder last Wednesday, here was the only folder in the house; I borrowed it. And then I guess I left my printout in there, and it's sort of about penises that aren't circumcised. Mine is a relatively innocent monologue (Diane Fleming's makes my tender ears blush) but it's probably not the sort of thing you want to leave in your kindergartener's Tuesday folder. I mean, just don't.