My wife volunteered us at the last minute to be one of the trunks at her church’s Trunk Or Treat event. This is a big deal in our area, since it’s a big church and there are a lot of cars involved. People from all over come to get huge gobs of candy.

So here’s what Terry threw together in what seemed like minutes to me. I was at work and not involved in the design or creation of the trunk decorations.

Nice, isn’t it? My wife drew those pictures. She can just whip that stuff out–it’s pretty cool.

Hundreds of kids marched by. Terry has the total count, but I think we gave out something like 800 pieces of candy. I noticed two interesting things related to our trunk:

1. Lots of kids love The Peanuts. There were many kids who exclaimed things like, “Snoopy!” as they walked by. There were even two kids dressed as Charlie Brown! I would have guessed that the popularity of The Peanuts would be greatly diminished these days, but that certainly didn’t seem to be the case.

2. I heard many comments of, “that’s on TV tonight.” I’ve personally lived for a long time now where I have no idea what time or channel anything comes on (other than perhaps a Chiefs game). We don’t have cable and never watch anything (other than maybe a Chiefs game) live over the air. I’m so used to this that it was a little jarring to hear so many people talk about being tied to a specific day, time, and channel to watch something. I know as a kid many, many years ago I’d get excited when a Peanuts special was coming up, and I would be sure to have my butt parked in place so I didn’t miss it. But these days? Nearly everyone seems to have a DVR, not to mention all these specials are easily obtainable on DVD or as a streaming video. Yet still there are clearly large numbers of people who were going to sit down yesterday evening to watch It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown live, at the appointed time, with commercial breaks. (I can’t stand commercials.)

Neil, our 6-year-old, decided he is very interested in learning to play the violin. After a few weeks with his cardboard version (that’s how they start) he was still enjoying it greatly, so we broke down and bought him the real thing. This is a 1/4-size starter violin.

And this is actually the second instrument we’ve purchased this month. Calvin also got a very, very nice saxophone upgrade. He’s been working hard to increase his skills so his mother and I decided it was time for an upgrade. A significant upgrade. The last upgrade. He gets to purchase any future saxophones. Did I mention this was a very nice $$$axophone? Nice enough that I insured it as fast as I could.

I think the next instrument should be a guitar for me.