Spooky Plagues

 I love driving around with my kids and seeing people's cute Halloween decorations.

As for my own house, though, I haven't really put up much. Inside, I have exactly two (2) small decorations that are Halloween specific. It's just not a priority for me.

However, yesterday I realized that our house is already Halloween-themed without any extra effort on my part. For example, we have:

- Skeletons: baby teeth count as bones, right? The Tooth Fairy doesn't throw these away for some reason.

- Banshee: electric pencil sharpener

- Spiderwebs: we let the real spiders do these themselves. Last week I started mowing the lawn, stopped, and came back an hour later to see a newly-strung spiderweb on the lawn mower. Free decorations!

- Ghosts: this month I have become very interested in learning about William Clayton and his in-laws, so they and their stories have taken up residence in multiple tabs of Google Chrome. I have been haunted by the awkwardness and angst in William's journals from his late twenties. 

- Undead: somehow there are still grasshoppers. We think local cats and magpies ate our adopted lizard pets but really they should have stuck to annihilating the grasshoppers.

- Witches: there has been a coven of Ditch Witches in our part of town (sometimes blocking part of our driveway) and figuring out which roads aren't closed has been as tricky as a corn maze.

- Kraken: I don't have one to release because it turns out it doesn't actually exist.

- Bats: magpies count as bats, right?

- Scarecrow: This one we actually do have on our porch. It wouldn't have done any good in our garden because the grasshoppers have no fear of humans, as evidenced by the one that somehow jumped down my pants and stayed there the whole time I was mowing the lawn.

So, as you can see, our house has plenty of features to make it perfectly spooky for Halloween. Especially the grasshoppers.