A what from whose what?

There are a lot of questions that I didn't ask of my parents and, probably, an equal number of answers to which I did not pay attention.

I found this in a box of papers that we'd collected from my father's house. The box included my grandparents' citizenship papers, birth and marriage certificates, and passports.

The receipt is for the cost of administering ether as an anesthetic while my uncle was having a bullet removed from his arm.

Getting ready for Halloween

Basic Instructions: How to Deal with Trick-or-Treaters

What the cool morning brings

We have another frost this morning, a bit more widespread than Friday's. The bird bath has a skim coat of ice. As I lit the stove, I wondered when it was that we had to start buying book matches. Long after we quit smoking, we could still find free matches in hotels and restaurants. We still have a book from Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington DC, where we met after my mother's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. The wood, strike-anywhere matches, of course, are more fun. You can light them on your teeth (although hazardous if you have a droopy mustache), on your belt buckle, on the back of your pant leg (denim is best), and just about any coarse surface where you're sure to leave a mark.

I couldn't remember the Finnish word for matches and tried a couple of online dictionaries:

On the next site, I found a term, tulitikkulaatikko, which means a box of matches. The home page of this site shows a list of popular searches.

English-speakers are looking for Finnish equivalents of "i love you" and such.
Meanwhile, the Finns are looking for the English words for VoIP, booze, marry (or more colloquial descriptions of marital activities), and Happy Easter (!?).

Marley's unsettled by the gunshots from the hunters in a nearby pond. They're hunting geese, I suspect. Last week's police log had another report of gunshots in the area. It turned out that a farmer in the neighborhood was putting down some of the farm animals.

Dictionary

More than 10 years ago, the CEO of our small company asked to borrow my dictionary. I told him that I didn't have one, that I looked up definitions and spelling on the web. "That's crazy," he said. "A writer should have a dictionary on his desk."

In the meantime, the dictionary that I don't have on my desk keeps getting smaller: Webster's USB New World Dictionary - Gizmodo.