The day of Halloween itself is always full with activities, and often a bit stressful for the kids and parents alike. So we've learned over the years to spread out the activities as much as possible. The AMH party is a wonderful low-key event to don costumes and hang out with other parents, and for the kids there are other kids, juice and cookies. We had a lovely morning.

Nora's witch costume worked really well -- after some tears over whether or not to wear a sweater underneath -- and the boys were terrific in their firemen outfits.

One of the kids at school had an inflatable dinosaur costume, that scared Adrian a bit and he kept his distance. When Sasha asked Adrian what he liked afterwards, he said "xраната" (food) and, surprisingly, "диносавр" (the dinosaur).

The Chrome browser is now explicitly marking non-https websites as Not Secure, a good step for them to take. A few years ago I was a Usenix Conference where the UX folks for Chrome were discussing their roadmap towards this -- time has flown and now http is officially "no good".

A good nudge for me also... I finally set up a HTTPS cert for my site. I've used a free certificate from letsencrypt.org; it will expire in a few months but by then I should be fully running on AWS and have the auto-renewal acme scripts in place.

Halloween is a big event in our house... today we went to get Nora's new outfit. The boys received a nice fireman costume from Oma & Opa in the summer, so they're all set.

We went to the Party City store on Columbia Pike. It was busy but not crazily so. Getting there was a bit of an adventure though -- the car didn't start! It seems like there's a problem with the battery. I took my bike to Cherrydale Auto Parts and got a jump start pack, and that did the trick. We didn't need it on our way back from Party City but I'm going to bring it in for service for sure.

Nora choose to be a witch, with a black hat and a broom.

Earlier in the morning it was raining and we went for a walk in Hayes Park, collecting acorns.

We went to see the decorated houses at Jackson Street tonight. It was a lot of excitement for the kids, from the moment we told them at dinner there was a lot of laughter and giggling.

We saw about 12 houses, some were scary even for adults, others were funny. At some point, a man passed by with a dog with a shiny collar. The kids were so excited and yelled "Halloween hond! Halloween hond!" (dog). We saw the old favorite, the "hand washing the window".

Adrian had enough at the end, Leo wanted to see more, but 30 minutes of excitement were plenty.

It was a rainy weekend and the kids loved the fall weather. We went to Hayes Park to pick acorns, it was terrific.

Last Saturday we went to Cox Farms with the whole family, that was a lot of fun.

This is the fourth year were visiting, and the first time on a busy Saturday. We arrived at 9.45 am so we were there when it opened. The highlight was the hay ride -- especially the part where we got "stuck" in a trench. There were more actors than on the weekdays we attended in the past, that was nice.