It’s Friday. We hope your week was better than ours. Be safe trick-or-treating this weekend.

The national Celiac Sprue Association conference is being held in Erie this weekend (more). VisitErie reports we’ll have nearly 300 attendees who will bring $250,000 into the local economy. Enjoy your stay in Erie!

If you missed Lory’s post about Car Care II yesterday, you should stop what you’re doing and read it now. It’s a great in-depth look at an Erie business.

It’s something we believe strongly in. If you can do business with a locally owned business, please do. We try to practice what we preach by hosting this website locally at EngageIT (who have been rock solid and we’ve never had an outage in nearly two years). We’ve got a business account at ERIEBank (though I’m sure they’d prefer we keep more numbers to the left of the decimal point). We give away gift certificates to places like George’s Diner, Steel City Sandwiches and the Stonehouse Inn.

A commenter left a great note on that post. Here’s a snip:

I can’t stand the idiots that frequently stand in line at TGIFridays, Olive Garden, BW3s or Max & Erma’s to eat manufactured food shipped in from Chicago. Everything is thawed from frozen and all their sauces come out of a can or bag. Most of our local restaurants are half empty of Friday nights yet serve some of the most delicious and very often locally grow/raised foods made with some love! Get a clue people! Support your neighbors!

We’re not saying every business that isn’t locally owned is bad – quite the contrary. They support jobs and people too, but this weekend, if you’re able, go to the locally owned place. Go to the Erie Sports Store. Eat at 1201 Kitchen or Lorie’s or the Golden Wok or Nunzi’s or Dabrowskis or Latinos. Buy Mike a Fender Telecaster Thinline at World of Music. Get a beer at the Cornerstone or some wings at the Park Tavern. Buy some ads on this website. That’s your homework for this weekend.

Halloween isn’t until tomorrow, but in Meadville, trick-or-treating was last night. I took my boys around and I saw one kid carrying two buckets full of treats. True story. I was about to commend her for her dual wielding skills when I heard her telling one of the people giving out candy she was also collecting candy for her brother, who was home with the swine flu. Seriously, she had a picture of him on the plastic pumpkin. Welcome to 2009.

Daney Wyant, of Erie and a student at Clarion University, stabbed LeVaughn Robinson in a campus dining hall during a scuffle they were having. Both men are facing assault charges. The taco pizza was unharmed.

We’ve blogged and tweeted a few times about Blair Corporation and their recall of several blankets. Forbes is reporting that the company is being sued for $30 million in a wrongful death lawsuit. If you’re wearing any sort of blanket, avoid open flames when possible. Here at ErieBlogs.com, we look out for you.

More news from Warren. United Refining has been fined $495k for violations in air quality in the area. Re-fining. Get it. I am on a roll today.

Erie Insurance reported their earnings yesterday. Net income per share-diluted was $0.69 per share in the third quarter 2009 compared to $0.07 per share in the third quarter of 2008. More numbers here.

China is going to build a $1.5 billion wind farm in Texas. Good news locally as GE is one of the partners in the project. More here.

Governor Edward G. Rendell announced today that the first installment of $123 million in federal Recovery funds for weatherization will begin to be released Nov. 2, part of $253 million that the state will use for this purpose. The Erie County Housing Authority is slated to receive $3.29 million as part of this program.

Sports

The Erie Otters of the Ontario Hockey League are proud to announce that 5,010 pounds of food was collected and donated to the Second Harvest Food Bank as part of the second annual Hockey for the Hungry Campaign, which concluded Wednesday night with a 5-2 Otters win in front of 4,222 people at Tullio Arena. The food was weighed in Thursday afternoon during a presentation at the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwestern Pennsylvania, which was the recipient of the food donations for the second year in a row.

Events

Allegheny College will take visitors on a journey to the center of the Milky Way galaxy, unveiling unprecedented mural-sized images of the galaxy’s core as seen by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The presentation, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 11 at Pelletier Library, located at the corner of North Main and East College Streets on the Allegheny campus. As part of the event, James Lombardi, associate professor of physics at Allegheny College, will discuss how the images were taken and what they imply about the center of the Milky Way.