Spooky Halloween Pics

I'm behind, as usual, on posting. I've been pre-occupied recently with school, and Tom's business. Finally I have all the books for the business organized and entered into an accounting software program...that took me a very long time because I had been putting it off. I've also worked on the website. I had some pictures on there before that were way too big, so I was able to re-size them, add a few more pages, and a few more pictures. It still needs a lot of work, but I think it's getting better.

The beautiful Fall Colors around here have already begun to disappear...but thankfully we've been enjoying some unseasonably HOT weather recently...in the 70's!

For Kyle's Birthday he wanted to dress up in a Halloween costume that my brother Ken used to wear...although I think this was actually a combination of two different costumes. Kyle LOVED it.

We went to a local horse ranch because they were having some Halloween festivities. I thought for sure a lot of kids would be in Halloween costumes, but Kyle was the only one! Reeve chose not to dress up. Kyle said he loved scaring everyone, and it was a great intro into announcing that today was his 6th Birthday.

There was a very cool hay maze there. Kyle scared a lot of folks in there. It was kind of dark, and I did get lost several times!

We took a horse drawn wagon ride to a pumpkin patch. The driver got a kick out of Kyle and let him drive the horses, Lady on the left and Ruby on the right. He said Kyle did a really good job...despite his scary outfit and super-long black finger nails.

There were a lot of good sized pumpkins there, and the kids got a kick out of walking through the pumpkin patch to pick them out...man they were heavy!

After the pumpkin patch we took a walk to the corn maze...oooo...spooky!

Reeve was not impressed with the corn maze...I must admit the hay maze was better.

The last thing we did was suppossed to be a "pony" ride. Well they gave Reeve and Kyle safety helmets and then handed me the reigns to a HORSE.
They said I could walk them around for as long as I liked...sounds like a pretty good deal...right? Well this horse immediately sensed I knew NOTHING about horses and proceeded to shove me around to where he wanted to go which was an ATV with a cart on back full of hay and a cat!

I complained to the nice horse people that the horse wasn't listening to me and didn't want to walk, but wanted to eat. One guy yells to another guy, "Hey Earl can you teach this lady how to handly a horse!" Then Earl shouts back to me, "Yeah, Lady you just yank him to where you want to go." Ugh! Kyle graciously got off to let Reeve have a turn...I tried to yank the horse I really did, but to tell you the truth I was afraid of him too! He was strong and I think he enjoyed head-butting me out of the way. Thankfully Reeve agreed to end my torture, and we went home.

A couple of days later we carved our pumpkins. This year we printed pumpkin designs, taped them to the pumpkins, used a little sharp nail to make the outline on the pumpkin, and then carved on the dotted lines. It was fairly simple and I thought they turned out really well. The kids each carved their own pumpkin all on their own.

Kyle chose a scary Pirate.

Reeve chose a hooting Owl.

And I chose a wicked witch.

Election in the Town of Fountain

I worked at our Township polling place yesterday, and I had a lot of fun. Prior to yesterday we had 337 registered voters for our Township. Yesterday we registered 38 new voters... a mixture of young first time voters, voters who hadn't voted in a very long time, and new residents. Of the 375 registered voters 286 came out to vote (8 via absentee ballot) yesterday...that's a staggering 76.27% voter turn-out!

We have one machine for voting or you can use a paper ballot. 112 folks used the machine and 52 voted for McCain, 53 voted for Obama, and 7 voted for a 3rd party candidate. 174 folks voted the paper method and 77 voted for Obama, 94 voted for McCain, 1 person did not vote for President, and 2 voted for a 3rd party candidate.
We had one person who tried to vote twice...it took us about 10minutes to try to solve that mystery. We tally the number of voters and at the end of the night that tally has to match the number of votes...pretty straightforward.

Well we tallied 286 voters, but had 287 votes. After counting and re-counting, our Cheif Election Inspector thought to check the paper ballots for the poll workers initials. We have to have 2 poll workers initial each ballot. In the past poll workers had pre-initialed the ballots, but thankfully there is a law now that states they have to initial the ballots in front of the voter. Sure enough we found one ballot that had no signatures! That person voted only for Obama, and we threw that vote out...naughty sneaky person can't fool us :-).

So McCain won in our Township 146 votes to Obama's 130 votes.

Tallying up the vote was extremely interesting to me and my fellow poll workers (4 of us worked last night). There were 3 Candidates running for Congress, Ron Kind (D), Paul Stark (R), and Richard Barrett (Libertarian). Around 10 folks that voted for John McCain also voted for the Democrat Ron Kind. Ron Kind won in our Township, but unfortunately I do not remember by how much. We also had a Democrat, Tom Crofton and a Republican, Ed Brooks, running for State Assembly. It was fairly evenly split among those 10 McCain/Kind voters who either voted for Crofton or Brooks.
We saw a lot of new faces coming out to vote, and a few characters.

The two "extreme" voters were both voters we registered yesterday. One man had on a T-shirt that read "I like this bush...not this Bush" The pic under "I like this bush," was of a woman's "ahem" area, and under "not this Bush" was the President. Can you say uncomfortable? The man kept pointing his shirt out to us and saying "I betcha can't guess whom I'm voting for." A fellow poll worker told the man "we really don't want to know."

The other extreme was a young boy who just turned 18 last month. It was a hot day here yesterday (74F) and he was wearing a cut-off shirt. He had a huge tatoo of a 6" rifle on his right shoulder that said "Country Folk Know How to Survive." There was a large concern in our Township that an Obama Presidency would create stricter gun control.

Anywho...it was a smooth night for tallying the vote. I thought for sure we'd be there until past 11pm, but we were all done and out the door by 10:30pm...just in time for me to get in the car and listen to John McCain's concession speech.
When I came home Reeve and Kyle were in bed, but both awake, and anxious to know who had won. I told them McCain won in our Township, but it sounds like Obama won the Electoral College vote. They stayed awake talking for a bit, but went to sleep soundly.