Halloweenage

Happy Halloween boys and girls! As you can see by the picture I finally got my Halloween decorations out. Yes, this is the extent of my Halloween decorating, two little porcelain figurines. Don't let this give you the idea that I don't like Halloween, in fact it's by far my favorite holiday and as far as I'm concerned you could get rid of all the other holidays and just make Halloween last a month. I'm just not much of a decorator, unlike some other bloggers that I could mention. So I've decided to decorate my blog with these two figurines as well and also put on my Halloween costume in my profile pic. This costume that Spidey and I call "The Dargon" has seen many Halloweens and many variations (this one is Voodoo Dargon) and will always be my favorite of all the costumes I have worn because I love and collect dragons.

It has not always been the case that I have not decorated extravagantly for Halloween. I remember a few years ago when we nailed a Blair Witch effigy to the front of the house, hit it with an inverted pentagram laser, used our karaoke equipment to blast loud scary music out the windows, used our fog machine to lay down a good ground fog, and had a fire barrel burning in the front yard. We buried my friend "N" in a pile of leaves and he would jump out every time some little goblins would come by. My stepson would come running out from behind the house revving a gas powered weed whacker (we didn't have a chainsaw), the rest of us hid behind the bushes lying in wait to give the little munchkins a good scare. The children that were brave enough to come to the door received their well-earned rewards, but you know you've done well when you see kids running past your house in terror, too afraid to stop even with the temptation of getting candy.

The only sad comment I have on Halloween is the number of children that I get here seems to be way down from what it once was. This small town that I live in has never produced the high numbers of kids that some other places that I have lived has. Last year I only got 23 children (yes, I keep track), which is a lot less than I remember coming on previous years. It's possible that the low numbers were caused by the fact that my house had been empty for nearly a year and I had moved in a mere two weeks before Halloween. I tend to think that the more likely reason for the low turn out is because my neighborhood seems to be "growing older", with most of the children I see being teenagers, too old to be as "uncool" as to dress up and go out trick-or-treating. I miss my first house that I owned that was at the other end of the county and was in a prime trick-or-treating neighborhood where the children would be bused in by the vanload and I would receive upwards of 300 children. At that place, even with the worst weather, like we had one year, with sleet, snow and rain, we received 160 kids. I will still be hopeful that this year there will be a better turnout than last year, but that's not likely to happen if the poor weather we've been having doesn't change soon.

On a different note, I want to apologize for being a.w.o.l. from bloggerland again. The last two weeks have truly been the weeks from hell. I seem to have developed a new trick, "panic attacks", that I have never experienced before, and don't think they are related to my seasonal depression, though I don't know what is causing them. One of these attacks happened while I was at work, which caused my coworkers to send me off to the hospital where I was diagnosed as having "stress induced anxiety attacks". I can't point at any one thing in my life that is more stressful than my life normally is and my best friend seems to think it's all the crap I've gone through in the last couple years finally catching up with me. These have been especially hard on me since I have always said that "I eat stress for lunch" and I have been described as "cool as a mountain lake". I haven't had one in 4 days and I hope I have seen the last of them because they really are quite annoying.

Another unfortunate incident I had the other day was I hit a deer with my van on the way to work in the morning. I was driving across the one dark, lonely road I take every morning when a vehicle coming at me blinded me from the fact that there was a small doe standing in the road. By the time I got hard on the break it was too late and I thumped the deer in the rump, breaking my passenger side headlight and bending the corner of my hood down slightly. I am the kind of person who will swerve to miss animals in the road (I warn people of this when they ride with me) because I believe that critters may not have the intelligence that we have but that they do cherish their life every bit as much as we do, maybe more. This time though with the car in the other lane, her in the road, and another deer on the side of the road, I had nowhere to swerve to. Though I gave her a pretty good smack in the ass, I hope she survived it, as I haven't seen a body along side the road where I hit her. This has been a bad year for hitting animals as denoted by the very first blog I wrote back in April.

I hope you all have a marvelous Halloween filled with goblins and I will try to make it around to everyone's blog to let them know I'm still alive. I'm sorry that this is such a long post but I am making up for two weeks absence and hope to post on a more regular basis now providing everything in my life manages to stay in control.