Ch. 1 - Halloween
I have to confess, I rarely attend ward socials. I generally have a fun time when I go, but by Friday night I'd mostly rather stay home. Only this year for Halloween, I felt obligated. Why? First off, I was assigned to clean the building with a lovely older couple the week before - they're new to the ward, and she's just been called as the Activities Chair. She spent most of the cleaning time telling me how worried she was about the activity, quizzing me on what we've done every other year so she wouldn't offend anyone by doing it "wrong," and running ideas by me to see if I thought the ward would enjoy them. After that, how do you not go and support her? Plus, Heidi was here, and my ward just loves her. So I said we would be there.
Then it turns out that my charming young women got Heidi to agree that we'd go in costume. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures. Heidi went as a football fan - she wore a plastic hat that looked like a football and had a football whistle. I got a little carried away once I quit grumbling about it and went as Pebbles Flinstone, complete with a dog toy bone in my hair. Much of the ward dressed up - the bishop was a lion until he about suffocated in the costume and went back to being the bishop, one of my young women was the Grinch, and we got to see the little kids all decked out. (I'm on the edge of the ward, so I don't usually get any church kids for trick-or-treating.) We had a good time, even though we got coerced into running the "cupcake walk" game for the kids. They had 20+ chairs set up, and we probably had 6 kids max at any given time. Fortunately, Heidi was very adept at figuring out which chair actually had a kid in it and then lying about the number she pulled. And we were well fed, potluck style.
Saturday night was actually Halloween, but we had a young woman from a part-member family get baptized that evening. We still managed to get rid of all the Halloween candy once we made it home - and we only helped ourselves to a little bit. One of the times Heidi answered the door the (we presume) mother of the little kids was trick-or-treating as well, and had to take her cigarette out of her mouth to ask for candy. I have to confess, I've never had that happen before. But we ran out of candy before it got too late, so we avoided the teen-aged trick-or-treaters for the most part. The only bad part of the night was trying to keep Aubrey from running outside every time the door opened!
So this wasn't really all that exciting, at least without pictures, but it was a fun holiday. Still, I have a certain standard of entertainment level I try to achieve in my blog posts that I feel is lacking here - so I'm throwing in a story about feeding the missionaries even though it has nothing to do with Halloween.
The bridge near my house has been down for repairs for roughly 6 months, and that is by far the closest way into the neighboring town. Usually when I feed the missionaries it's a quick 15 minute drive (round trip) to pick them up there and bring them home (saving their miles and all, you know). Only with the bridge out, the main road options are now more like 30 minutes each way. There is an old back road (so back road it's not even marked for a detour) that cuts it down to about 15 minutes each way - but that's still a lot of time to pick them up then take them back after dinner. So I thought it would be easier to just take them out to the little diner in Mannford instead. We left my house to meet them for dinner about 5:00, already running a few minutes behind, only to find that there was a train stopped dead across the tracks on the back road detour. We waited about 5 minutes and that train did not move an inch - and that's when we thought that just maybe all those cars going the other direction had also found the way blocked by this train and turned around. So we thought we'd better cut our losses and try a different route. Since we were suppose to be there already, we called the sisters to let them know it would be more like 5:30, then headed out on the long way around - only that direction was now delayed by road construction! So we waited 3 or 4 minutes till it was our direction's turn for the one open lane, and ended up being only 5 minutes late (or 35 if you count the original time.) I found the whole thing quite frustrating - but the sisters put their unexpected 3o minutes to good use visiting with a less active sister in the area, so I suppose it was all worth it. :)
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