Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween! I hope that everyone has a safe and happy night. I am really going to miss treat or treating with my "kids" this year. I love seeing them in their costumes and watching them get excited when they get candy. I am sure that their parents will make sure to take tons of pic's for me, and maybe even do some video. (Hint, hint) Anyways, I hope all that reads this has a great time.
I found this article about picture taking. It has some great tips. I thought that some of you parents may want to read it to get the best pictues of your little ones this Halloween.
Tips for Photo Taking
The most important guideline is to know exactly what you want to be the subject of your picture. Then, when you look through the viewfinder of your camera, make your subject the most important thing in the frame and try not to show anything that distracts from it.
The second guideline is to try to capture the 'feeling' of the occasion too.For example, if you are shooting a jack-o-lantern, it's your subject. Make that clear by moving in close and almost filling the frame with the pumpkin. Keep the background simple so it doesn't distract from your subject. Hint: To make this picture even more interesting, include the faces of the kids or Dad or Mom hovering over it. Get down low so that you see their faces looming over the top of the pumpkin. Careful now, you don't want to cut any heads off, even on Halloween.
Now the second guideline. To capture the eerie "feeling" of Halloween, shoot at night using "ghoul" lighting. Rule One is to turn off your strobe!You don't want pictures with its cold, clear light. Rather, you're looking for eerie lighting that captures the "spirit" of Halloween.Hint: To capture the glow of a jack-o-lantern, don't light just one candle inside the pumpkin. Two or three lit candles will produce a far better picture.When you take a picture of your favorite goblin in costume, have a helper shine a flashlight from off to one side or from below, the way we all did as kids. This is "ghoul" lighting and it will produce wonderfully scary lighting in your pictures. The biggest mistake amateurs make is to shoot from too far back. So get in close and fill the frame. You don't have to shoot from head-to-toe. Rather, you're usually better off if you fill the frame with just the head and shoulders. And bend down low to kid's-eye level. Don't shoot from adult-level.Hint: If your kids wears a mask, take two shots - one with the mask on and one without so that in future years you'll be able to identify the little devil behind the mask.
The key to good Halloween pictures is to capture the spirit - the feeling - of the occasion. The spirit of Halloween is ghoulish fun and silliness. So for great Halloween pictures, know what you want the subject of each of your pictures to be, and make it important in the frame. Then add 'mood' that captures the spirit of Halloween by the ghoulish way you light your pictures or the silly way you pose your subjects.
Have fun and enjoy!

In the Works

I know that it has been awhile since my last blog. It's not that I have been busy, but I have in a weird way. I am still adjusting to working. I am so tired when I get home. Plus, I think my body is seriously fighting the flu or something. I have not felt right in weeks. (Now, before you jump to conclusions, no I am not pregnant.) I do not know why but getting up and going to work is kicking my butt.
Anyways............I am working on another blog. It just maybe a few more day until I get around to finishing it and posting it. I promise!

A New Look?

I have been thinking about getting a new look, not any time soon, maybe after the first of the year. These are some short styles that I found. I am not sure if I want to go that short. But, I have had long hair for 3 years and I am ready for something new.
I need help. I need opinions on what you thing would be a fun, new look for me. I loved having my hair short, but the up keep on it was expensive and I hated the growing out process. I am not sure .....maybe I will go with a medium cut for a while. But then medium can be a bigger pain in the butt than short hair. I don't know. Help me in choosing a new look. Out of the 3 pic's which one is your favorite? Keep in mind that I do like all 3 cuts, I will do a little modifying with each cut, for example, the middle one, I will not do the bangs that short. Blah, blah blah......

Old School

Today on my way home for lunch one of the radio stations was playing all these really great early 90's rap songs. It really brought my back to early high school years.
Picture it:
"Driving in big bro's black van. The one with the orange shag carpet all over the place. In the place where the back seat/bed would be is a huge speaker box with a few 10'or 12's. And playing on the radio is My Mind is Playing Tricks on Me full blast. That song reminds me of all of us going to the ghetto to get some 40's and going party hopping. The van is packed with friends and we are all having the time of our lives."
I love to remains about the good old days. Its fun to think about all the great times we had and all the people we met along the way. There was some great people, some not so great people, some very interesting people and some really good friends. In some ways I miss the old days of high school, in some ways I do not.
I have many more great memories of the high school years but I will not make this a super long blog. But, feel free to comment with some of your memories from back in the good old days. I would like to hear them.

Halloween Crafts

Over this month I am going to be doing a few blogs on different Halloween things. Hope that you enjoy them. Now, I know that all of you are busy but I thought you might want to do these simple crafts with your children.

Paper Pumpkin

Materials Needed:
Paper Plate
Construction Paper
Finger Paint
Glue

Instructions:Using the finger paint, paint the back side of the paper plate orange. Cut out eyes, nose, and mouth from black construction paper and glue it on the orange side of the paper plate once it is dry. Cut out a brown rectangle from construction paper and green leaf shapes. Glue these on to be the stem and leaves on the back, top edge of the pumpkin so it sticks out over the top.


Clay Pot Ghost
Make this cute ghost using a terra cotta clay pot and a few other supplies.

Materials Needed:
2 inch Terra Cotta Clay Pot
1 1/2 inch Wooden Ball Head
White Fun Foam
Paint
Clear Acrylic Sealer Spray
Glue (hot glue gun preferred)

Instructions:Wipe down your terra cotta pot with a damp cloth and let dry completely.
Paint the clay pot and the wooden ball head white. Put them aside to dry.
Once the paint is dry, glue the wooden ball onto the bottom of the clay pot (figure 1). Paint a face on the wooden ball (figure 2). Once all your paint is dry, spray it with the clear acrylic sealer.

Cut out two ghost arms out of white fun foam.
Glue them to the sides of your clay pot! Your ghost is now complete.

Have fun and enjoy!

Shacking Up is for Suckers!

Today so many people are shacking up together without any commitment and it usually doesn’t end with a happily ever after. People are quick to have a sexual relationship. Then if the sex is good enough, they decide to date. Then after a few weeks or maybe months, they decide to become girlfriend and boyfriend. But, then it seems like in 24 hours of deciding they are a couple they start shacking up together and not discussing the future at all. It just does not make any sense to me.
Last night, I was watching this show called “Buy Me” on HGTV. The episode was about this guy and his new girlfriend. They were shacking up and his one bedroom condo was not big enough, so they put it on the market and put down a legal contract on a little cottage out in the country. During the coarse of getting the condo ready and showing it, the girlfriend got cold feet and broke up with the guy. Well, his condo was not selling and he was still legally bound to buy the cottage. Long story short, he had to borrow more money and ended up with 2 mortgages. SUCKER!
The reason why they broke up was because they rushed into this whole living together thing and they were not on the same track of life. He was ready to move out to the country, get married, start a family and all that and she was only ready to keep focusing on her career and keep on shacking up. She said she just was not ready for marriage. On one hand I commend her for not doing something she was not ready for but on the other don’t you think that should have talked about all this before living together and jumping into legal contracts.
To me, this is the lesson we all should learn from them. Before you go rushing into legally binding contracts and rushing to shack up, maybe you should discuss what you both see in the immediate future and long term.
As you can tell I am not for people just living together. However, let me clarify just a little bit. Now, I do not think it is bad if you are engaged and have a date set and you are going to get married. Sometimes due to apartment leases, family things, schedules ect, it just makes more sense go ahead and live together before you are actually married. Let me take that just a little bit further just because you are engaged still does not make it OK with me. I feel that a wedding should be in the near future.
Now, before anyone gets mad at me, this is just how I feel. I do not look down on anyone that just lives together or has just an engagement with no wedding date in sight, to each their own, what ever makes you happy.
Bottom line, I think that if society as a whole started to take things a little slower and thought more about marriage and less of sex and shacking up then maybe there would not be so many children without daddies or mommies. But that is another blog for another day.
Thank you for letting ramble on………………what are your views?

History of Halloween

As many of you know Halloween is my favorite holiday. I did some research about Halloween to try to better understand the holiday. The following is an article that I found about the history and culture of Halloween. Enjoy!

Halloween is an annual celebration, but just what is it actually a celebration of? And how did this peculiar custom originate? Is it, as some claim, a kind of demon worship? Or is it just a harmless vestige of some ancient pagan ritual?
The word itself, "Halloween," actually has its origins in the Catholic Church. It comes from a contracted corruption of All Hallows Eve. November 1, "All Hollows Day" (or "All Saints Day"), is a Catholic day of observance in honor of saints. But, in the 5th century BC, in Celtic Ireland, summer officially ended on October 31. The holiday was called Samhain (sow-en), the Celtic New year.
One story says that, on that day, the disembodied spirits of all those who had died throughout the preceding year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. It was believed to be their only hope for the afterlife. The Celts believed all laws of space and time were suspended during this time, allowing the spirit world to intermingle with the living.
Naturally, the still-living did not want to be possessed. So on the night of October 31, villagers would extinguish the fires in their homes, to make them cold and undesirable. They would then dress up in all manner of ghoulish costumes and noisily paraded around the neighborhood, being as destructive as possible in order to frighten away spirits looking for bodies to possess.
Probably a better explanation of why the Celts extinguished their fires was not to discourage spirit possession, but so that all the Celtic tribes could relight their fires from a common source, the Druidic fire that was kept burning in the Middle of Ireland, at Usinach.
Some accounts tell of how the Celts would burn someone at the stake who was thought to have already been possessed, as sort of a lesson to the spirits. Other accounts of Celtic history debunk these stories as myth.
The Romans adopted the Celtic practices as their own. But in the first century AD, Samhain was assimilated into celebrations of some of the other Roman traditions that took place in October, such as their day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, which might explain the origin of our modern tradition of bobbing for apples on Halloween.
The thrust of the practices also changed over time to become more ritualized. As belief in spirit possession waned, the practice of dressing up like hobgoblins, ghosts, and witches took on a more ceremonial role.
The custom of Halloween was brought to America in the 1840's by Irish immigrants fleeing their country's potato famine. At that time, the favorite pranks in New England included tipping over outhouses and unhinging fence gates.
The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for "soul cakes," made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul's passage to heaven.
The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree's trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.
According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.
The Irish used turnips as their "Jack's lanterns" originally. But when the immigrants came to America, they found that pumpkins were far more plentiful than turnips. So the Jack-O-Lantern in America was a hollowed-out pumpkin, lit with an ember.
So, although some cults may have adopted Halloween as their favorite "holiday," the day itself did not grow out of evil practices. It grew out of the rituals of Celts celebrating a new year, and out of Medieval prayer rituals of Europeans. And today, even many churches have Halloween parties or pumpkin carving events for the kids. After all, the day itself is only as evil as one cares to make it.

Party Time!

Michael and I had the greatest time last night! We went to Mako’s, which is a club in downtown Atlanta. We have been there a few times before but this time I think was the most fun.
Mako’s is crazy, the waitresses wear little hot pants and tiny shirts and the guys wear only a kilts with boxer breifs. They also take tanks filled with air, not sure what it is, but it makes it foggy, and they fill the bar area up with the fog and they take shredded napkins and make the fly up all over the bar. It looks like it’s snowing. There is also a girl that swings and gives special dances for those that are will to pay the cash. The DJ’s do a good job and keeping the crowd entertained, doing and saying crazy things.
When you get there you are given beaded necklace and they give you a free shot. Which is some kind of mixture that they make up, it tastes pretty good. The DJ kept having the shooter girls get up on the bars and give free shots to any one that wanted one, they just pour it right into your mouth. Last night, they did bachelorette musical chairs. It was about 5 girls and for those that got a chair when the music stopped got a free shot of what ever they wanted, the girls wanted Grey Goose, yuck, straight vodka. Another thing that they do there is body shots which is where they take the girl or guy and lay them on the bar, and they lift up their shirt and put a lemon wedge their mouth. Then bartender pours the shot mixture on their stomach, then licks it off and gets the wedge out of their mouth, it looks like the are kissing. They also so other stuff but the change it up with ever person. Before it is over they give them a shot. It’s really fun to watch. Sometimes people so beer bongs and other stuff like that.
I am sure that I am leaving stuff out but I had a few too many beers and shots to remember everything. Oops, my bad. Been having a rough recovery today. Its been a while since I had that much to drink in one night. O-well, we had a great time that is all that counts.
I can’t wait until someone comes and visits us so we can take them to Mako’s. Hint Hint!