Halloween Weekend

Halloween isn't a holiday to get me excited. I enjoyed it well enough when I was a kid, but I just don't find much to enjoy now. I never really was big on costumes, and with Abby dressed up as a princess almost every day as part of play time, the only major difference was that Emily did up her hair.

We took the kids out to the church Trunk-R-Treat with our neighbors the Vaughans and had fun seeing everybody. I wasn't feeling the best, so they dropped me off at home to hand out candy while Emily took the kids around to the neighbors. Between our 9 trick-r-treaters, I mostly read a David Eddings book called The Diamond Throne (entertaining, 4 stars, but I would recommend the Belgariad and the Mallorean over this series, although fans of those will probably like this as well). The kids had fun and now we have tons of candy to try to use as leverage to get them to cooperate.... :P Aren't we nice parents?

I woke up Saturday not feeling the greatest in the world, but despite my sniffles and slight headache, Emily encouraged me enough to go to an Eagle project for one of the boys in the ward. The Eagle project was to clean up an overgrown garden area over at Frontier elementary. By the time I arrived, the weeds had been largely removed and they were just pulling up the last of a set of rail-road ties that had been put in as terracing. The main job remaining was to remove one very large stump and a couple of small ones. I started to work on the large stump, but then we realized we only had one axe, so I ran home and grabbed mine. It was still a huge task- we had several adults focusing all of their attention on this stump, and we still didn't have it out by the time I needed to go two hours later. I had brought over Abby and Aaron to play on the playground, so by then they were cold and wet.

Later, we went over to my parents house and watched BYU narrowly avoid defeat and my Broncos run all over New Mexico State.

I'm not sure if it was working in the rain, or just that the cold had kicked in, but as the day progressed, I got worse. By Sunday morning, I was fairly miserable, especially with the sore muscles from trying to hack out the stump from the day before. Getting some extra rest and sitting in a bath tub of hot water for a while helped me get back to feeling like a real person again. Here's hoping that the rest of the family can avoid it, but I'm not counting on that.