Just for fun, let's repost these Halloween goodies from last year:

Ben & Jerry’s –  A number of fun games to play here;

Kids Domain – has a bunch of stuff for kids, like downloads and spooky sounds; even ghost stories for kids and adults alike.  (Links to Washington Irving’s  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Mark Twain’s “A Ghost Story” are particularly appealing.)

BlackDog – some quirky fun stuff at this site, includes screensavers.  The vintage Halloween greeting cards are quite cute.

Halloween Fun-4-Kids – pretty dense with links, you could spend a lot of time around here!

Have any new links to share?  Fill us in below in comments!

3:23:19 PM    comment []

Hope you get more treats than tricks this evening.

We have a special treat here tonight; hubby will be bringing a dinner guest to share in the festivities.  The guest is a co-worker visiting from Germany; I can only wonder what he will think of this American excess which is Halloween.

I’ll be brushing up on my German today while I clean the house, so that I can at least offer a polite greeting.  I only took a couple semesters in middle school; it never really came readily to me.  It was a bit of a struggle compared to the Latin languages.  French rolled easily off my tongue, as did Spanish.  I suspect Italian and Portuguese will be similarly easy when I give them a try.  But the German language and I never really cozied up to become close friends.  We’re only polite acquaintances.

It’s rather odd that I didn’t do better at German; my sister took to it like a fish to water.  She’s fairly fluent, able to make jokes readily in that language.  Not me, even though a substantial portion of the nearby population is German, even though there’ve been opportunities in the county to actually speak German on a regular basis.  It’s not for lack of chances or exposure.

A former significant other was German, on both sides of his family.  His paternal grandparents’ friends were all German as well, people who’d emigrated to the U.S. before World War II.  His grandmother taught me how to make rumptopf and bierok and a smattering of other German dishes.  Unfortunately, she’d Anglicized the names: chicken pot pie, chicken soup with dumplings, veal loaf…I never learned what her own family would have called these everyday dishes.  I know they wouldn’t taste any better than they did, but I think I would have been drawn to them more had they kept their German names, even if I couldn’t pronounce them properly.  Chicken pot pie, for crying out loud; why would anyone trouble to make that banal dish?  Yet this German grandmother’s version with the Anglicized name tasted like heaven…I’d have given a try at its real German name out of genuine respect for that crispy crust, the tender poultry, the succulent gravy.

Her grandson – my boyfriend – was employed by a firm in a nearby small town which was nearly all German, prides itself on being Germany away from Germany.  I remember the discomfort I felt at the company Christmas parties as the employees danced polka after polka all evening, no doubt because they’d hired the most popular polka band in the area.  You would have seen two black employees and this non-polka-dancing not-German girlfriend, sitting all by themselves off to the side for the duration of the party, watching as hundreds of German-Americans bounced around the dance floor.  It looked rather fun from where I sat, but not enough to persuade me to join them.  It was rather like speaking German – it sounds good when someone else uses it properly, but it just doesn’t work for me, didn’t move me then or now.

Still, it could be worse (there will be no polkas here tonight, after all!); I could also be more like my husband, who took a little Spanish in high school and a handful of classes in German just a couple years ago.  (A linguist he is not; English sometimes fails him, too.)  He’s not used what little German he learned – it’s probably evaporated from his brain, withered away.  At least I’ll be able to greet his comrade with: Guten Abend.  Wie geht es?  Mein name ist Rayne.  Willkommen zu unserem Haus.

Und Glücklich halloween, Herr Tomas.

To you, as well: Glücklich halloween!

10:09:06 AM    comment []