This year is flying by.  I can't even believe it's already Halloween.  I haven't gotten our winter clothes out of storage because I keep thinking the temps are going to go back up.  They aren't.  The stores are filled with Christmas stuff already, and I don't even have a clue where to begin.

Today is sacred here in our house.  Screw doesn't miss work even when he feels like he's dying, but he has a strict rule that he lives by... he doesn't work on Halloween.  It's  his favorite holiday.  So, yes, he's off today.  The problem is, he's so sick he didn't sleep ten minutes last night.  Finally around 4:30am, I was so frustrated with watching him struggle, I just got up to begin my day.  He said I'm crazy, but I think he was finally ready to get some sleep, and I knew that he would probably drift off just in time for the alarm to wake him back up.  He has to rest because he will be so disappointed if he isn't well enough to enjoy this evening.  He gave me orders to make sure both of the cameras are charged and ready for the day, so I might possibly end up with video or pictures to show by the end of the night.

This is the first year that IzzyB has grasped the concept of a true Halloween.  It's her first year of not wanting to be a fairy or pretty princess or something.  But she had such a hard time deciding what evil being she would become, so in the end, she's a vampire witch.  Yeah, I know.  I should be worried.  I'm not.  I'm thrilled. 

The absolute best new show on tv right now is HBO's TRUEBLOOD.  Modern day vampires.  Every Sunday night I'm like a giddy little girl when it comes on.  I've long believed my favorite author, Laurell K. Hamilton, should have her Anita Blake vampire series made into a tv series, but after some thought, I'm not sure it could be done.  It's way too intense on every level.  And to water it down would be devastating to the story.

My house is sort of all spooky and Halloweeny all year because nothing gets me going quite like a good scary movie or book.  The kids swear the house is haunted, but the logical sane side of me says I'm not that lucky.

Tonight is special.  Tonight we pull out the the decorations, the fog machines, the thunder, the lightning, the spooky music, the costumes... tonight we entertain the neighborhood, and they love it.  We love it.  I let you know how it goes.

Never ever wage a war against your own heart.  Your mind will surely lose.

And when logic and reason wave the white flag of surrender, there's nothing left when the dust settles...  nothing but an uncomfortable peace treaty and a deflated red balloon.

Don't buy into the belief that your heart will offer you aid in the reconstruction of your sanity.  It's a setup.  It merely wants you to stop holding your breath because when you let down your guard and exhale, it gets to pump its blood freely through your veins once again.

It's all just a ploy to take over your world.  Don't fight it... remember resistance is futile and all that jazz.

If you allow the pain to just roll you, it will eventually ebb to a dull ache instead of the alternate plan... to snap your soul like a twig.

There will be no relief effort.  There will be no co-habitation.

Trust me on this... never ever give your heart the position to be the power behind the throne.  It has its eye on the crown, and it will stop at nothing until the kingdom is on its knees.

OH EM GEE... did we ever get our asses kicked this weekend!  I knew we'd lose, but come on!  I'm not sure I ever remember seeing coach Brooks' tail between his legs to that degree!  Oh well... I still love my CATS!  AFM, please oh please do whatever a scientist can do (since you don't pray, light candles, chant, or anything) to ensure you kick Tebow into next year this weekend!

We spent the weekend getting up our Halloween thrills and chills.  Once we're finished I'll take a pic.   He has outdone last year.  I didn't think that was possible.  It was.  He has a few more tombstones to add and some loose thing to tie it all together, and then we're ready for the neighborhood!  We've already had people stopping by.

He's so cute when he gets all caught up in it.  He loves Halloween.  He loves the excitement on the kids' faces as they walk down the sidewalk to get to the "Halloween" house.   He likes when the adults stop to compliment his work and ask him specifics about all the things he's done.  For one week a year, he's my oldest man-child, and I love watching him enjoy himself.  He works so hard.  He deserves a hell of a lot more playtime than he gets.

I'll get to the inside stuff today.  I help with the outside stuff, but it's mostly his responsibilty.  Good thing, too, because I hurt myself somehow everytime I help him out there.  Last night I fell and reinjured my foot as well as bruising up my hip.  I'm sore this morning, of course.  It's my fault, though.  If I hadn't been kicking things like furnaces and humidifiers with that foot, it wouldn't be so easily injured.

I haven't always been a kicker.  I'm not sure when I went from thrower to kicker, but apparently I have.  I haven't always released my frustration physically like this at all.  I think my subconscious forced me into it to keep me from going crazy by holding things in the way I do.  In my defense, I don't kick or throw things at humans or pets.  Normally it isn't even anger at someone that gets me to that point.  It's usually a broken object that gets it... or frustration over something misplaced or something in the way. 

Either way, it's Monday morning.  I can't walk, I'm going on about three hours sleep, and it's time to wake up the sleeping monster.  Yay me.

This is absolute perfection as far as a typical Autumn day should be.  Yesterday's rain has subsided, and it's a cool breezy morning forming outside.  The sun comes and goes just enough to keep the wind from being too cold.  The colors outside my kitchen window are glorious.  I love the shades of Fall.  Yes, there are the streets and cars and electric lines and houses.  But there's one little spot that, if I focus on it just right, I see nothing but the leaves.  It makes me feel alive to feel the chill roll across my skin. 

Ooh... and there's always football.  We play Florida today, and I'm not holding out much hope for us.  At last count we had more than a few players missing practices with ankle sprains, knee injuries, etc.  We've lost Derrick Locke for the rest of the year.  I feel sorry for young athletes when they get injured.  I know it's a scary situation for him.  The positive note is last I heard Justin Jeffries might actually be back, but I don't remember if he'll be playing today or not.  Either way, we're struggling.  But hey, eight years ago if you'd mentioned the UK football team, the reply would have been, "Kentucky has a football team?"  So the fact that we're even on the radar is extremely positive!

Fall festivals, football, Halloween, warm blankets, roaring fires, good books, comforting coffee, hot chocolate, the smell of things baking in the oven and simmering on the stove...  People can stop and speak on the sidewalk because it's no longer too hot and it hasn't gotten too cold yet to stand outside and be social.  Neighbors wave to one another as they rake their yards and set out pumpkins carved by their laughing children.

This is the time of year when there's a break in responsibility.  It's right after the busy summer, filled with vacations and back to school activity and right before the holiday rush begins.  It's different than Spring because Spring is filled with anticipation of the activities to come.  Fall is filled with the deep breath you've finally gotten the time to take before everything starts again.

And if we're really lucky, we also have the time to actually stop and exhale.

I was going to write a ranting post about my redneck sister-in-law and link to the post I wrote about her when she managed to steal my emergency room records a couple years ago, but I can't find it.  She was here yesterday, and it always takes me a couple days to recover from her.

What I did find were posts that are far more interesting than the lame crap I write these days.  I think maybe I need to add one of those links to favorite past posts in my sidebar.  Someday.  As soon as I figure out how to do it.

Not that I think I've ever been particularly interesting.  I just seemed to have more to say back then, or at least had the ability to add a little wit to my so-called life.  The bad thing is, I must have been taking some crazy drugs or something because the posts are in as many different colors as you can imagine.  I remember the template I was using, I just don't remember where my brain was or why it wasn't working.

I wish I had my old blogs.  I'd love to read back over the past eight years to see how much my world has changed.  It's easy to look at it on the outside and know it's a completely different life, it's the inside I'd love to compare.  Have I grown as much as I believe or am I just fooling myself?  I think I've come full-circle in so many ways in my life, and in others I'm still struggling to figure out who I am and where I'm going.  I'll be thirty-seven years old in a couple months.  I keep praying I'm just a late bloomer.  Yeah.  That's it.

But then, do we ever really want to reach a stopping point?  I don't think I ever want to get there.  Shouldn't we always be growing, improving, learning?  It's a confusing life.  Maybe that's why I want to walk down memory lane... because sometimes moving forward is scary.

Who the hell places a smoke detector directly in the heat path of a fireplace?  Why would you do that?  I understand the idea that you need one near a fireplace.  Obviously that would be a likely place to have an accidental fire, right.  But why would you place one so that it sounds off every single time you have a fire in your fireplace? 

The longer we live here, the more sure I am the previous owners were crazy.  But it doesn't matter now.  It's all good.  I'm calm now.  I wasn't when the smoke detector went off at 5:10am just because I lit a fire in the fireplace to keep from freezing to death.  It was loud and obnoxious and it scared the crap outta me.

But I fixed it.  It's not barking at me anymore.  It's lying in several pieces in the hallway floor, but it isn't barking at me anymore.

It's a nice crisp Monday morning.  The outside temp is in the lower thirties (F) with a frost advisory.  The absolute perfect fall day slowly opening here in southern Kentucky.  I would be on top of the world ready to enjoy it... if I could stop my teeth from chattering long enough to take a sip of coffee.  Oh yes, it's nice and frosty outside.  And it's nice and frosty inside, too!  That wonderful repair to the central heat and air unit apparently was a nice shifty repair.  Wouldn't you know it.  So I'm stuck here with no heat until I can get someone to come look at it and bankrupt us to fix it.

The husband says it isn't that cold in here with the inside temp showing in the mid-fifties (F), and while feeling that temp outside would probably only make me smile, it isn't supposed to be that cold inside your house!  He, only half-jokingly, asked if I'd taken a specific med that makes me feel hot and sweaty.  Trust me, if there was a drug in this house right now that would warm my bones, I'd be taking it.  Don't think I didn't notice how snuggled underneath the covers he was when I had to pop out of bed a while ago. 

It didn't add anything positive to my mood when I happened to look up and notice my peeling ceiling in the bathroom, either.  We keep putting it off, but something has to be done.  Who wants to start major home repairs just as the holidays are beginning?   Hello?!  Christmas is coming with four kids in the house!

The yearly Halloween decorations will go up this week, hopefully.  The neighborhood kids decided that inside our garage was the perfect place to play so I have no idea how many of the decorations are damaged that we'll have to replace, but hopefully not too many.  I love the scene once they're up, but I hate all the work that goes into it.  Fortunately for me, the other half is extremely particular about his tombstones and such so he does the majority of the work himself.  You aren't going to hear me feeling left out on this one.

How can I feel so completely underwhelmed when the reality is I'm absolutely overwhelmed with things right now?  I don't know how to explain it.   I want to do things, but my attitude is fuck it.  How is it that I feel both at the same time?  Oh, and how do I force out the fuck it and grab hold of the wanting part?

Yeah.

When I was in high school, by my senior year I only needed two credits to graduate.  One was the required fourth year of English and the other, because I was completely out of my mind, was an advanced math class that made me vomit before every test.  To this very day, I break out in hives when someone comes to me with a math problem.

Up until the year before I entered high school, our district would allow seniors to attend a half day if they only needed two or three classes to graduate.  They could attend school  until lunch period and then go home if they had the transportation to do so.  However, naturally, just as I was hitting the front doors, it was changed to a full day of mandatory classes... like it or not.

So, I filled up the rest of my day with whatever I wanted like a fourth year of French which translated to an hour of nothing since the French teacher created the class just to keep three of us from being bored.  Up until that year, there had never been a French IV class. 

Also, our high school was directly across the street from the county vocational school.  Seniors were allowed to apply for certain classes offered there.  I applied and was accepted to a health careers class.  I figured it was the best way to spend my afternoon since I was planning to attend nursing school in the fall.  This class pretty much translated into the same thing the French class did, except we did learn how to make a hospital bed, check a blood pressure, and fill a plastic pitcher with ice.  Our second semester was graded by volunteer work at the local hospital.

Along with the health careers class came yet another club I could join, HOSA - Health Occupational Students of America.  And every year there was a huge state HOSA conference and competition.  I quickly realized this was the most important thing to our instructor.  Her students were not only required to compete, they had to win.  It was personal for her and the other instructors across the state.  I think they were the most competitive people I've ever known in academics.  Like really smart football coaches.

So we entered categories like a medical spelling bee and a speech contest.  We didn't get to volunteer for it, either.  She chose who would compete.  I was positive I'd be chosen for the speech contest.  After all, I was great at speeches and presentations.  I'd been giving them for a club, assignment, or competition all my life.  When she called the name, it  wasn't mine.  I was in complete shock.  I'd  never been overlooked before!  What the hell was she thinking?!  She had called out all the categories and not chosen her president for a single one!

And then she looked at me and smiled, clearly seeing how offended I was.  Then she said, "...and you will be competing in the extemporaneous speech contest.".  As freaked out as I was, I couldn't show it because I didn't know what "extemporaneous" meant, but I didn't want her to know that.  I guess she could tell because she began to explain that while we would find out the topic for most of the competitions within a couple weeks, for mine, we would not.  She informed me that I would be taken to a room with the other contestants, given pen and paper, and then one at a time we'd be given a topic.  From there I would get five minutes to write a three to five minute speech, and then I would be giving that speech in front of an auditorium filled with doctors and nurses and other health care workers.

Before I could respond, because I was busy trying not to swallow my tongue, she added, "Do you know why I chose you for this?  Because darlin', I know you can bullshit the best of'em."

We went on to place first in a couple of the essay categories.  We placed in the spelling bee, but I can't remember which one.  We got second in the prepared speech, and when they called my name as the first place winner in the state for the extemporaneous speech category, she cried.  Apparently  our little chapter had never placed in that one before.

I thought about that weekend yesterday because I'm watching my senior son prepare for awards and such.  It was such a fun weekend.  To this day, I'm not so sure it was a good thing to have a teacher who knew I was full of shit and was able to take complete advantage of it!  I don't even remember what the speech was about.  My mother kept it for years along with the trophy.  I don't think she still has it. 

The really sad thing is we did better that year than her chapter had ever done before, and then about a month before the national competition she became seriously ill, and we had to cancel our trip.  So no week in Orlando, Florida and no showing the rest of the country my unbelievable ability to pull useless information from my ass in an instant. 

Maybe my disappointment is why you guys are stuck with me doing it here.

The first of our semester parent/teacher conferences went really well.  The two teens are thriving and keeping their grades way up.  Their teachers all love them and claim they're active, bright students.  Which has saddened me a great deal.  Why?  Because if my son is still the straight A, bright, respectful student he has always been, why is he suddenly being singled out while walking down the hall from class to class?  Why did his second period teacher have him called into the office on suspicion of skipping his class?

Maybe because he no longer wears Abercrombie but has opted for band t-shirts and a lip ring?  Possibly because his second period teacher is his disgruntled former football coach who is still pissed he's not playing this year?  I  know I warned him this might happen, but to be honest with you, I never really expected it to go this way.  I honestly thought we've progressed more than this.

Nothing he  wears is offensive, his jeans fit him properly, he ties his shoes.  He showers daily.  So what is the freaking problem?  They made him go into the bathroom and wash his hair because they said it was spiked, and spiked hair isn't allowed.  It appears gang oriented.  First, there are no gangs in that small school, and second, he has a flipping military haircut.  Those spikes were all of about half an inch high.

All accounts are that my man child was very respectful during the confrontation and did what he was told without question or attitude.  The accusation of skipping class?  During first period, the senior superlatives were called out for a meeting and yearbook photos, so he did arrive late to second period.  However, after being questioned, the coach had to admit that he suddenly did remember seeing him come into the room shortly after the bell because the kid asked him a question on his way to his seat!

Yes, I warned him he might be treated differently once  he started down this "punk" road, but you know what, that just isn't good enough for me.  My claws are sharpened, and I'm more than ready to take on the entire district if he's singled out one more time without proper cause.  I've agreed to let it ride for now only because nothing has happened.  He hasn't been written up or had any sort of punishments unfairly handed to him.  I'm studying up on the student handbook.  So far, I can't find a single rule he's broken.  Several other really minor things have happened, but they're all adding up to one big thing.

He doesn't want me stepping in just yet, but I can tell he's about to lose his temper with the situation.  His tone carried a definite bite when he told me if he wore a baseball cap backwards and had a Skoal ring on his jean pocket, this stuff wouldn't be happening.  Before I let close minded rednecks ruin his senior year of high school, I will bare my teeth and make a complete fool of myself.

I don't think our children are perfect, but as I said, no one complained during the conferences.  He even has a couple teachers that he had last year.  According to them, he's still the same sweet guy he has always been. 

Apparently this is mostly coming from this new female vice-principal.  I've been in a bad mood for about a month now.  She really doesn't want to take me down this road.  One of us won't be walking back.

Last weekend flew by because of the good times we were having with our friends, but the rest of this week has slowed to a crawl.  You'd think I'd be happy for the slow down considering how busy everything always is around here, but it feels like more of a dragging things out than slowing them down.

So last weekend we took our city slicker friends to the World Chicken Festival where they "oohed" and "aahed" over the world's largest skillet and getting to meet Colonel Sanders.  We sat up late drinking coffee and laughing our asses off at the absurdities of the world.  We made major decisions about how we want to be honored when we leave this world, and G and I have decided we may be with the two weirdest men on earth.

We took them to see the Cumberland Falls where we climbed rocks with the kids and avoided snakes and spiders and tried our best not to fall and bust our asses.  We moaned about our ages when the kids made fun of us for not being able to keep up.  The kids had as much fun as we did.

We gave David a birthday party on Monday in our own special way.  Translation:  We got him a giant Spongebob cake, fed him ice cream, made him beat a pinata, and kicked his butt in a silly string fight.

Screw had to work on Monday and G was sweet enough to give David and me some time to ourselves.  We chased a blue heron for about an hour just to get the perfect picture,  We drove around and talked about the good old times and promised it wouldn't be another four years before seeing one another again.

The time with them was just what Screw and I needed.  We rarely get to hang out with grown up friends.  We miss them already.

I could provide links to the things I mentioned above, but the only real link I need to give you is to David's Flickr account.  He has a gift with that camera of his.  I grew up here, and I have never seen this area captured with more beauty and character than what he caught this  past week.  As of last night, he had only just gotten started wading through the hundreds of pictures he took, but the few he had up were amazing.  I want him to come back during the first full moon he can so he can capture the moonbow* on film.  I just know it will be breathtaking.

*We are now the proud owners of the world's only moonbow.  Formally we were the site of one of two, but due to cutting down forests surrounding the other one in Africa, it has since disappeared.*