It’s Halloween, pretty much my favorite holiday yet I am hardly celebrating at all.   Halloween will pass me by like any other day this year.  No costumes, no candy, not even a carved pumpkin.  It’s ever so sad.  Our lives have been too busy to even notice the holiday approaching and I realize that even my favorite moments have passed me by.  We are too busy in our office to dress up or pass out candy, of all the places I would have imagined I could dress up at work- this was it.  Something must be done!  Halloween has always been special in my heart because my family and I were all involved with a haunted house produced by the local theater from the time i was around 9 until i was about 17.  Our entire month of October revolved around dressing up as ghosts, being a part of a “living wall”, operating corpses, and one year I was even Miss Muffet.  Of course in our version I was a very dead Miss Muffet who was tragecially bitten by a some sort of deadly spider I suppose.  When I look back, I suppose the haunted house was full of all the cheesiness that you would expect from a local haunted house.  However, the fact that my entire family took part in this tradition is flippin cool.  All I can say is that my love of Autumn was only amplified by spending October with theater lovers in a haunted house.  And yes, perhaps it did bring a smile to my face when our church would have rather I been at their “Alternative Halloween” but I was too busy working at a haunted house with my dad who was dressed as death….  I guess there’s just always been a part of me that had to prove that I wasn’t a heathen for celebrating Halloween.  So in short, I love the holiday, and I am sad for basically missing it this year.  There’s always next year. 
 

OK, so we went to a seminar in Indy this weekend that was a-mazing!  We saw Brad Sugars speak at a seminar called “Billionaire in Training”.  Ok, ok you can stop laughing now I know it sound ridiculous!  But really, it was so much more.  Brad is a billionaire and I am certainly not the type to pursue such a feat as becoming insanely rich.  In fact, the idea does not appeal to me but as we were invited to this event, I gave it a go and went with a positive attitude.  My idea of money has greatly changed over the past year.  I used to despise people with lots of money and had fits about supposed Christians who drove BMW’s.  The thing is, what would I do if I had lots of cash?  I dream about secretly paying of medical bills and debts for deserving people.  I envision installing solar panels to power all of Sudan.  The good that could be done is endless.  When I think about money I don’t ever really think about buying a big hosue or cars or whatever, I always think about how I could help others.  When speaking on the subject of wealth to our pastor briefly the one thing he said was how it concerns him that money changes people.  But what if I’m different?  What if no one ever knew that we even had all this money?  So often there are ‘bad people’ with boat loads of money & we get the idea that all wealthy people must be that same way.  What if a Christian had a truck load of money & really followd God, it could change the world.  I am afraid of the idea to an extent but I am trying to push out those feeling by remembering that we will follow God & won’t be changed.  Becoming wealthy is just something everyone around us fears and has never attempted.  I can handle being a minority, I feel as though I have been most of my life anyways.  The reason we don’t hear about wealthy Christians is probably because if they are out there, they aren’t flaunting it so we’ll never know. 

Yea, so I’ve been afraid of spiders for pretty much as long as I can remember.  Watching the movie Arachnophobia as a child was probably all but helpful.  Whether they are small or big hairy or not, they freak me out.  Now fall is my favorite time of year, except for the spiders.  They have been taking residency in our house for about the past two weeks.  BLECK!  Of course it’s those gigantic wolf spiders and they are everywhere!  Now, I know that I have a little more than a slight fear of the little creeps for many reasons.  A picture of one freaks me out, and forget trying to kill one.  When I was younger I used to have night terrors where I would wake up in a panic attack brushing off my bed & hair furiously.  Nice, huh?  I have a theory that they are seriously out to get me.  I have been waking up repeatedly over the past week from dreaming about spiders in my bed, on the floor, all over the house… etc.  It’s a rather restless sleep I have been getting.  So what’s up with that?  This morning I went to get my sandals out of the closet & there was a massive spider right next to them- what are the chances??!! Really!??  Now, if I do encounter one I do ‘try’ to kill it, but only from a distance.  Also, I obsessively must make sure it is dead.  My husband flushed one the other day- no good.  Now I am waiting for that one to mutate and climb back out of the toilet!  Wikipedia says hypnotism can help… I’m considering it, because this getting ridiculous.  So happy fall… or not so happy.