Day: October 25, 2006

There is somethings that have been bugging me. It is a common misperception, and I understand the logic of how one can think in those terms.
One. Homeowner does not equal occupant. I don’t have the figures in front of me but home ownership supposedly now is at a record high or something like that, so it would be logical to assume that most people were homeowners 100 years ago. Nope. Well at least not in my subject group. On the form I use tracking 1900 households, I’m circling ‘R’ for renter than I am ‘O’ for owner. So that’s why the census is so important. The deeds and the ownership history won’t tell me jack about who lived in it. I have a mild curiosity about TC or Shaw landlords, but not strong enough to do any heavy research on it right now.
Second is women working outside the home. Married or single, poor women worked. Old maid middle class daughters worked. There are tons of ‘Laundressess’ in the TC not all of them heads of households. I also noticed in houses that may have 2-3 adult (anyone over 16 yo) generations, even the middle class white daughters had clerk, sales, and dressmaker jobs. Only so many are needed to keep house, everyone else either went to school or worked.

Here’s the deal: You dress up, I give you candy. Here’s another part of the deal: If you don’t want to bother with either the candy giving or the dressing up, don’t. Turn out the lights, stay home, go somewhere else where no one expects anything out of you. But don’t expect me to fulfill one part of the deal when you don’t pony up to the other. Meaning, no costume, no candy.
I like Halloween well enough that I do buy candy and look forward to giving it to the kids who come by. However, there are a number of kids who don’t bother and just ruin the spirit of it. When enough uncostumed kids show up at my door halfway through I just don’t want to be bothered because I feel that someone (several someones) aren’t keeping up their end of the deal.
Rapper, is not a costume. As I have noticed it does not require you to look any different than you normally do.
Being poor is not a valid excuse either. Go to Giant. Get a paper bag. Make two eye & 1 mouth hole. Viola! Mask! For those of us of a certain age, you are the “Unknown Comic”. Get a large sized plastic bag, wear it like a dress and stick a few twigs in it, you are a grocery bag stuck in a tree. With talcum powder and $2 of cheap makeup from the dollar store you can make a gang of zombies. Material poverty does not have to equal mental and creative poverty.
So next week, here’s the deal: You dress up, I give you candy.
Note: Jimbo you deserve a whole bag of candy.

Okay I hacked up most of my tomato plants and got two big plastic bags of green tomatoes ranging from the size of small grapefruits to ping pong balls. I have 96 green tomatoes in three windows to turn green or yellow. I gave away a couple of dozen small and mid-sized tomatoes to neighbors who I thought would have some idea of what to do with green tomatoes. Yes, I know you can fry them, but I’ve never ate a fried green tomato, so I wouldn’t know how to properly cook them. Besides I like them red, or yellow. I still have about 40 small ping pong sized tomatoes to give away to neighbors.