Man, the spiders are going crazy this year! They seem to be all getting ready for Halloween, busily building gargantuan webs across every available open space. And the spiders themselves are huge! There must have been a serious bumper crop of bugs this year, in order for these guys to have beefed up to this extent. I've never seen anything like it, in all my 41 years. The spiders are taking over!

En route to Trader Joe's today, I passed a house with a huge Halloween/Oz display:



You really can only get the full effect by clicking on the image to see it at its larger size. Otherwise, it's difficult to identify the Wicked Witch hanging from the porch in the background and the tiny, fluffy Toto in the foreground.

Upon seeing the Halloween/Oz photo, Shannon's immediate reaction was, "How do the people who live there get into their house?" Indeed, the Oz characters seem to quite thoroughly block the entire entranceway. Perhaps there is a back door, and the residents plan to use it for the next two weeks?

In other news, my friend Donald has gotten me addicted to a Facebook game called "Words With Friends," which is basically Scrabble, if Scrabble were played by snails. Seriously! Sometimes days pass between the completion of my turn and my opponent's play. You can also play with strangers, which is rather more temporally satisfying, and I've done that a bit, but it's kinda nice to play with friends I don't see very often. Do any of you want to play? Come on ... you know you want to!

PS: Check out my new Oogie Boogie icon!