It's coming up on Halloween and we don't celebrate anymore. I used to decorate the house and the trees were webbed. We even set out stuffed people one Halloween with the umpteen pumpkins the girls had picked with me after we had our hayride and they dumped us in the fields. That was when we lived in a house on Long Island and raking leaves and buying pumpkins were fall activities for me. We even had a Halloween party one year with our backyard as a spooky place and one whole room of our house was also creepy. Halloween was a huge holiday for everyone in our house except, of course, my husband, who tried to avoid all the festivities and came home late from work those days.
My older daughter loved to dress up and I made her some crazy costumes. One was so bizarre. It was a half man half woman. I sewed together half a pair of pants with a skirt on the other half and we made her up with women's make up on one half of her face and the other had charcoal as a beard. She wore a shirt/blouse and two different kinds of shoes. She loved it.:) My younger daughter was content to get a costume from the store each year and the two of them would go off hand in hand to trick or treat in the square block area that was our neighborhood. I went along with them until they told me they were too old to have their mommy with them.:)
I was always afraid that they would come back with eggs all over them from the older kids who egged each other for fun! But they managed to avoid that and came home with their Trick or Treat bags filled with candy. Then I would not let them touch any of it until I went over it and checked to make sure there were no razor blades or open packages. Then I divided it into two different containers for them. They were then allowed to have only five pieces of candy that night. They didn't know that while they were Trick or Treating the neighborhood kids had come by and I'd given out the candy we had. But in between I was munching on the candy. Halloween was the best, because the guilt you felt all year about eating candy disappeared and you could eat as much as you wanted.:) Except the morning after came and I realized I had eaten half the candy!
Anyway the reason for all this Halloween stuff is I have put one of the most loved cartoons on the blog for your enjoyment. I'm going to try to change the movies until Halloween. Click on the banner and you will be able to see "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown". Hurry, because this will only be here for a short while.:) Just a little gift for all you guys who have to wade through all my meanderings and still keep coming back!
Also want to say that my second show for Blog Talk Radio, Red River Writers Live Tales from the Pages was so much fun today or should I say two days ago.:) My two guests, Elizabeth Spann Craig and Karen Hunter had so much to offer. What I loved was the great discussion we got into when Karen and Elizabeth and I just got together and talked. If you didn't listen you can click on the Blog Talk Radio icon here and go straight to my program. It is now in the archives and you can hear it at your convenience. I was very lucky to have Karen Hunter as my guest and I thanked my friend Nicole who suggested her to me. I think you will love this program because listening to Karen Hunter is just so interesting and fun. She even made me feel comfortable for one of the first times on the radio. After all this was only my second show.:)
Of course, during the show the first half was calm and silent where I was. Then Karen got on and in the middle of her interview my entire family came home. My husband not realizing I was not just on the phone, but on a radio show talking to I hope hundreds of people, asked me questions and wondered why I wasn't answering him. So he decided to put on the paper shredder and I could barely hear. Then my daughters came into the living room and one started spraying the windows for Asian beetles or as we call them "lady beetles" that are infesting our area. They were swarming in front of our door, but we used Raid and many of them died. But then they came back so we sprayed this people friendly spray in the house and I could stop vacuuming them up every few minutes.:) They're not mean bugs or even ones you need to fear, but somehow any bug that is swarming starts to become a problem. Way too many of them. I kept thinking about that house I went into one year when I was recruiting families to be host families for exchange students. One whole wall of their study was covered with what I thought were lady bugs, but they must have been these "lady beetles". If they get into your house and lay eggs that is what can happen. Yuck!!! So we sprayed and we'll pray they are kept out of our house. They deserve to live outdoors, but don't come into my house. That's my credo for bugs of all kinds.:)
I couldn't move out of where I was because I would be in the room with the bug spray that needed to dry to be safe. I hope that you can't hear the shredder in the background, but if you hear a strange noise you will know what it is.:)
This is continued for today in the next blog post, because of circumstances beyond my control. An explanation in the next post for anyone who wants to read it.:) By the way, isn't that the cutest ghost you have ever seen on the top of this post?
That reminds me to tell you that this week I will be doing my second 
ared women in the town in the church. The second occurs a few days after her death to one of the parishioners. Was someone bumping off the churchgoers of this town or was it a serial killer on the loose? Or was there something political involved here? The dead woman has so many enemies it is hard to see how she was able to stay alive this long.
