etc.

What better way to usher in a new month than with a head cold. Briefly:

· All is not well yet at our crazy little house but if understanding the problem is the first step to correcting it then we are well on our way to correcting said problem. This past weekend, it was determined that there is no live animal in our chimney, but there could well be a dead one. A simple chimney cleaning should have the problem licked but when your fireplace is bricked up, there is no such thing as a simple chimney cleaning because chimneys are cleaned from the bottom-up, not the top-down. I’ve spoken to three different chimney sweeps this morning and have now confirmed that we will first need to unbrick the fireplace, which means many more dollars.

· No go on the part-time work. Rational minds have convinced me that I will be working myself ragged if I took on anything else right now. For many reasons, it’s good to surround yourself by people more rational than you are.

· We estimated about 30 kids showed up trick-or-treating on Friday night. I had originally planned to give the whole thing a miss since I’ve never quite bought into the hullabaloo that is Hallowe’en, but my sister convinced me that since it is our first year in the neighbourhood, it was probably a good PR thing to do. She was right. As we were leaving the neighbourhood at about 7:30pm, we noticed that most of the other streets were teeming with kids, hundreds of them. When I told the mister about this he informed me that since our street is sort of dead-endish (about 10 houses and then a hospital at the end of it), it wouldn’t hold up to a thorough cost-benefit analysis. That is, the amount of time taken to canvas the street compared to the estimated candy haul. Now I know.

· Three buttons picked up at the bookfair this weekend: “Civil Disobedience is Civil Defense”, “War is Murder” and “Don’t Close the Chapter on Our Libraries: CUPE Library Workers”.