Halloween 2013

Let me begin this post by saying that Brooke likes Halloween.  A lot.  As in, one of her goals in life is to be able to build and run her own haunted house.  We had plans to make some really awesome Halloween costumes this year.  However, with getting a new job, moving and all of the associated craziness there, we didn't really have time to work on them.  I won't say what they were going to be in case we end up making them for next year.

Instead we went with an old standby, one which we used the first Halloween we were together:

 Abe Lincoln and Cinderella!

These costumes stem from the fact that Brooke really does look like Cinderella (and happens to have a Cinderella-style dress from her cliff diving days), and the fact that I can pull off a relatively convincing Lincoln.  I grew out my beard for about 6 weeks for this.

I know I did the same costume last year, so I promise this will be the last time I'm Lincoln.  However, this was the first time anyone at my new job had seen it, so I feel justified.  I didn't win the costume contest, but I think that's because they didn't have a dead historical figures category.  I couldn't quite compete with the guy who wore an actual pumpkin on his head.

Our ward had their trunk-or-treat on Halloween, so after getting all decked out, we went over to the church to hand out candy.  Brooke grew up with this interesting tradition (they do things differently in Iowa), where you had to tell a joke at each house you went to before you could get any candy.  She made the kids at the trunk or treat tell jokes for their candy.  Many of the kids seemed pretty confused when she asked them if they had a joke, but eventually she got jokes out of most of them.

She also won all the hearts of the girls in her primary class by dressing up as a Disney princess.

After the trunk or treat we went back home and handed out more candy while we watched movies.  We bought way more candy than we needed.  We had heard that this neighborhood gets a lot of trick-or-treaters, but either other people's definition of "a lot" is different than ours, or we missed the biggest crowds when we went to the trunk or treat.  Also, Brooke got a bunch more candy the day after Halloween for 75% off.  Her mom would be proud (about the deal, not the amount of junk food).

It's been a good week.

I am grateful for finding lost things

Halloween is over! That means a lot of people are doing thankful lists on Facebook now. I saw them this morning and thought, "That's nice." and then I moved on.

Specifically, I moved on to trying to find my driver's license. I tried to use my credit card on Monday and my DL was magically not in my purse. I could have said I lost it on Monday and then tried to retrace my steps from there, but really I have no idea when I used it before that and had pretty much no time frame to go on. I was supposed to meet someone at 10am today, and the clock was slowly (quickly) moving past that. Still, I was feeling fairly chill about things, but I definitely put in a few prayers. After 45 minutes of searching, I called my friend and she came to pick me up instead.

When I arrived back at home, I resumed my search. As I ruled out more and more places, I felt more and more frantic, and of course my prayers took on a more frantic note, too. I have specific reasons to need my license soon, and I didn't really want to spend a whole day at the DMV trying to replace it. However, I kept feeling like if I would just clean up the floor right around my bed, I would find it. My panic mode search system went like this:

1. Hang up a sweatshirt from off the floor by the bed.

2. Eat Halloween candy.

3. Look in a stack of papers in the living room that came out of a box of things from two years ago.

4. Eat yogurt.

5. Let the dog outside.

6. Recheck some coat pockets.

7. Check which local DMV offices have available appointments within the week (none of them).

8. Hang up another sweatshirt from the floor by the bed. (It gets cold, okay?)

Clearly, this was going well. After more of this productive cycle, I finally buckled down to really finish hanging up that sweatshirt collection, and as soon as I did, lo and behold! My driver's license! Luckily, I was already kneeling because I was going through things on the floor, and my thank-you prayer was just about as giddy as I had been frantic before. I wanted to tell everybody how blessed I was. So I pulled up my Facebook page and thought about how sometimes God likes to trick me into doing important-for-me things that he knows I'm not paying enough attention to do on my own.

I am probably not going to post a thankful thing every day, but Extra Gratitude Month definitely has my attention now. Thanks to my lost driver's license, I'm focused now on counting my blessings. The re-centering was needed, and that deserves another thank you prayer.