I used to like geese.

Torsten and I did not really do anything to celebrate Halloween last night. Our building has a genius system where people who want trick-or-treaters pick up a Halloween decoration at the front desk and hang it on their door. Then the kids in the building are only supposed to go to the apartments that have the Halloween doors. It's a win-win situation because it's efficient for the kids and people who don't have candy aren't bothered with tons of kids knocking on their door.

Surprisingly few apartments seemed to have the decorations on their doors, at least on our floor, but I passed some trick-or-treaters in the hallway last night with huge grocery bags bulging with candy, so it looked like they were making out okay.

Torsten and I did not decorate our door, in part because I didn't really want to have extra candy lying around the house and also because I had a volleyball game and Torsten was really busy at work.

So how was volleyball, you ask? Well, the game itself was good--we won 3-0. But the most exciting part actually occurred before the game. We were walking into the gym when a line of geese flew overhead. The scene unfolded like this:

Me: Look, geese!
My coworker: Aww. Fly south! Fly south!
Geese: [splat] [splat] [splat] [splat] [splat] [splat]

Yes, that's right. The pretty geese flying south for the winter pooped all over me. And all over the sidewalk. But miraculously, not one of my coworkers got a single splatter on themselves. I guess I took a hit for each of them--I had six charming yellowy brown spots on my shirt. Unfortunately, they were not all visible from the same vantage point, as I had them on my front, shoulder, and back, but I took a picture of a couple of the biggest ones. (This was after I had scrubbed my shirt with water in the bathroom.)


Oh, you'd like to see one of the spots up close? All right then, if you insist.


Sorry about the shadow of the camera, but I think you can get a sense of what they were like. Although you are missing the, shall we say, 3D effect of whatever half-digested food they'd eaten that I scrubbed off in the bathroom. I'm sure you're sorry not to have visual evidence of that. And also, did you know that goose poop smells? Because it does.

But hey, they say getting pooped on by a bird is good luck, and this was the first time we'd won 3-0, so I guess I took one for the team. But still. Torsten says that his mother is going to cook traditional German goose for us when we visit next week, and I had felt slightly guilty about that, having never eaten goose before, but now? Now I will dig in with a vengeance.