Working Mushrooms Website

Phew. I finally got my website working. Here's the address.

http://fileserver.art.utah.edu/~scharles

Spooky

It's getting close to Halloween, and a few people on my street have been decking out their houses in spooky ornamentation. The woman living across from us covered the entire entrance of her house with fake cobwebs, fake pumpkins, and other assorted fake halloween goodies. What she doesn't realize is that we are totally beating her in spookiness. Sure, we have our fair share of fake halloween plastic decorations, like the fake grave stones that sit in our giant potted plants, our fake skeleton that hangs from the front porch, and the fake plastic glow-in-the-dark bugs that are all over our patio. However, our porch is covered in actual cobwebs, filled with actual spiders, tangled in a mass of actual dead flies, moths, and other assorted bugs.

Call it laziness, or a bit of Halloween brilliance, but no one in our neighborhood can hold a candle to our spooky/disgusting porch.

I'm Lost

I was riding the bus home along main street the other day when I saw an incredibly sad man standing on a corner. He looked like a disheveled, homeless version of Karl Marx. The bus stopped, and I was able to get a good look at what he was doing. He stood on the corner, not by a bus stop, not by a restaurant, and not by any place meaningful. In fact, it seems he had found the most uninteresting and useless corner to inhabit. And what was he doing? Looking around in confusion, holding a grocery bag full of who knows what in one hand. He looked completely lost, and I wish someone had asked him if he needed help.

Homeless

Maybe I've already touched on this subject before, but is it just me, or are there more homeless people than usual? The past couple weeks, I've seen a few people sleeping in the park up the street from my house. One morning, I even saw a man sneaking out of an abandoned lot with an old shed, presumably his new home (are squatters considered homeless?). Is it from this recent economic downturn, or are more people simply without a home?