Halloween On A Budget

Halloween has to be one of my absolute favorite holidays. I love decorating my condo for the holiday, the pumpkin carving, the treats, the smells, the themed parties, costumes, Trick-or-Treaters, Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte’s…just EVERYTHING! All this can add up quickly though and everybody knows about the economic depression going on so there isn’t a lot of money to be spent on things that aren’t necessary. However, all this can be done on a budget and do-it yourself costumes.

Some of this really isn’t out of the ordinary for me though because when I was young mom and dad and we kids would always make our costumes. We have five kids in our family and imagine spending just $20 bucks on a store bought costume for each kid would add up to a quick $100. Plus, store bought costumes were never as creative as we were. In fact, my worst Halloween costume came from one bought at Wal-Mart...Hold your breath for this one…I was Barney!!! Yes that singing purple dinosaur. I think back and when I even look at pictures I ask myself how on earth could my parents let me do that to myself. Good Grief! Anyways, back to the homemade costumes. I was Pocahontas, a vampire, a mummy, a blind ref (haha), a camouflaged hunter one year when it was freezing cold, Goldilocks, a Flapper girl, Cruella DeVille, and many more I am sure I can’t recall. Here is a costume contest that my boyfriend Micah actually entered for his costume of Aladdin. He always has the best costumes but go figure he is an engineering student so he should. He was ‘flying’ the magic carpet but the feet you see aren’t actually his because he is standing on 6’ painters stilts. His friend Caleb was the Genie and he actually shaved his head and glued a fake ponytail on the top of his head to really look the part. He as well was standing on painters stilts. He didn’t make the cut with his but you can see how creative some of the other contestants got.

Halloween parties have to be one of my next favorite events for the holiday. I love to decorate for them and also being able to see everyone else’s costumes is so much fun. Here you can get pointers on how to make very cool, creepy, and inexpensive Halloween decorations for your party. Who doesn’t love a bleeding candle or a coffin as your coffee table or even bats flying out of your fireplace. A place that I found to have some of the best decorations for inexpensive down here in Baton Rouge was the Dollar Tree. Sometimes dollar stores are a hit or a miss with the quality of items you are buying but for $1 each I got some really cool skeleton mugs and fall garland and some other miscellaneous items that will look great all put together. This segment from Good Morning America was very helpful if you want some ideas to make your Halloween party still the best even if the economy is a bust your party doesn’t have to be.

3 Die in Detroit Marathon

This last weekend was the Detroit Free Press/Flagstar Marathon and three runners collapsed and died during the run. I first off do not know how people even survive the first 10 miles let alone a 26.2 mile race. I wonder why you don’t hear of more people collapsing and dying during these things especially when you consider the age of some of these people. In fact the oldest marathon runner just ran a marathon in Toronto on September 25, 2009 and his age you wonder….98 YEARS OLD!!! I really can’t even put my mind around that one. How on earth is that even possible? Most 98 year olds can barely walk or even do much by themselves let alone run a 26.2 mile little jaunt down the road! That’s crazy.

The three runners that collapsed this last weekend in Detroit were the ages of 65, 36 and 26. Daniel Langdon was 36 years old and collapsed between the 11 and 12 mile markers. Rick Brown, 65, collapsed almost in the same spot as Daniel Langdon had went down only 15 minutes after him. What is it about that particular spot? I don’t know but I sure would have been a skeptic and maybe a little superstitious when I ran by there and not only saw one person collapsed and getting medical attention but two people getting medical attention. 26 year old Jon Fenlon collapsed shortly after finishing the 13.1 mile half marathon.

What I am wondering is how could they have passed away so quickly with 6 medical stations and emergency personnel standing by. They got medical attention within seconds but it was still too late. Some wonder if it was the 28 degree weather they started running in the morning and only got up to 41 degrees that morning while most runners where well into completing the race. That’s freezing cold if you ask me to just run miles and miles and miles in.

I think that the hosts of this race will have to work on their publicity for this race for the next year because some may be scared away in the fact that 3 runners passed away the year before. There hadn’t been a death in this race since 1994. They could add to their already existing Facebook groups and make them stronger because they only have 3,068 fans and 19,000 runners, and tweet more about when deadlines are due for registration and other events going on, post YouTube videos of past contestants talking about how the race was. They really need to spread the good word out there about the race. They had 19,000 runners this year and that number could go up by a couple thousand if they really work on their use of social networking. Dedicated runners will travel all over the country to run in different regions of the country and experience all types of weather. You don’t consider Detroit, Michigan has a vacation getaway and having one event bring in thousands already would be great for the city if they could bring in even more. They could add other events leading up to the race and have events for families to partake in as a whole. They really could turn a weekend of just a 26.2 mile race into something more like a family getaway or a relaxing weekend…I guess if you think running is relaxing…and some do that is why they endure this great race.

"drive-through daiquiri" style

Obama visited New Orleans today (Thursday) and it wasn’t all smooth sailing for him. It was the first time he has visited the Gulf Coast since he took office nine months ago. He spoke at the University of New Orleans and was welcomed with a rowdy crowd. He had to fire back at critics who told him he had done little since he has been in the office. He quickly shot back “I am just getting started!”

Obama is in the heat lately for a lot of things and I am sure he knew that he was going to an area that had been hurt by Katrina so badly. There are still roughly 1,500 people in Louisiana living in temporary housing. When I read that number I could not believe that. My boyfriend Micah was living in Baton Rouge when hurricane Katrina hit, it actually hit New Orleans on his birthday August 29th. He told me that it was absolute chaos around the state. He actually drove over to New Orleans to do what he could to help a few days later and what normally takes about 60 minutes to drive took them 5 hours. Now that we are back in Baton Rouge he can’t believe all the people here and the different ethnic groups that are around here. When Katrina first hit they said at the high point there were 90,000 that were living in temporary housing, and a lot of them came to Baton Rouge.

A lot of victims are wondering where their relief is and so who better to blame it on than the president. Obama reminded the people who attended his speech today to think back to what he said about change in his campaign speech. He reminded them that he said “Change is hard…and big change is harder. I wasn’t kidding about it being hard.” However, there have been some good things that have happened for New Orleans since Obama came into office. There have been 76 disputed projects resolved in Louisiana and more than $1.4 billion in aid sent to Louisiana and $160 million to the residents of Mississippi affected by hurricane Katrina and Rita that hit only a month after Katrina. The emergency agency also said that $1 billion from the stimulus program has been targeted for New Orleans. After reading all these good things and the ginormous amounts of money that was sent to these people I am wondering what they possibly could be yelling about. I know that since I wasn’t down here during this horrific time I look at things a bit differently I am sure then they do.

I guess the residents of New Orleans thought that they deserved more than a “drive-through daiquiri” a little pun by Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana because a little thing that his HUGE in Louisiana is drive through daiquiri shops. He was referring to the fact that Obama was only in New Orleans for 4 hours today before he flew off to San Francisco, California for a fundraising event.

Titanic 100th Memorial Voyage

Think way back to when you first saw the movie Titanic? Who did you see it with? How old where you? What did you think of it? I can remember going to the movie theater for my first ‘unofficial’ first date to see Titanic. See I wasn’t allowed to ‘date’ until I was 16 and I think I was somewhere around the age of 11 when Titanic was released in December of 1997. I can remember seeing the movie and thinking how awesome that would have been to be a passenger on the cruise ship nicknamed “The Unsinkable.” Of course, I would have wanted to be one of the more elite and higher class passengers that were guaranteed a rescue boat once the ship started sinking. Heck I would even have taken being Kate Winslet and spending your last times on the ship with Leonardo DiCaprio :)

You and I may get our wish to be a passenger on the Titanic. There is going to be a Titanic memorial cruise in 2012 to mark the 100th anniversary of when it sailed its doomed voyage. The ship will depart on April 8th just as maiden voyage did in 1912. It will depart from Southampton, England and arrive at the spot in the North Atlantic where the Titanic sank on April 15th. There is going to be a memorial onboard on the exact same spot where the Titanic sank between 11:40 p.m. on April 14th to 2:20 a.m. on April 15th. It will then stop in Cobh, Ireland just as the original Titanic did after it left Southampton, England. The next stop will be to Halifax, Nova Scotia where the passengers can visit 3 cemeteries where the victims of the ‘unsinkable’ ship were laid to rest. The memorial voyage will finally make its way to New York City.

When I was reading up about this memorial cruise I was thinking this will probably cost someone an arm and a leg to be apart of this trip but actually it isn’t. The ship that is making the memorial trip is named Balmoral which definitely isn’t as great of a name as Titanic. It will hold 1,350 passengers and a crew of 510 people with 710 cabins. Alright back to the price of the ship, I’m sure your sitting on the edge of your seat wondering. Well the 12-night trip started at $3,900 including taxes for an inside cabin. But don’t think that you will be getting one of those because all of the lower-grade inside cabins are completely sold out. Some of the suite categories are completely sold out as well.

Optimism back in the pockets of the USA

The nation’s unemployment rate is at 9.7% as of September 2009 and I definitely feel it. When I was living in North Dakota just up until this last May, I didn’t really feel the hurt of the economy and didn’t think much of it. I feel as if living up there I was a bit isolated to the ‘big picture’ of the hurting economy. Boy did I feel the effects of it once I moved down south though. Just when we were looking for a place to live, there were loads of apartments and condos for rent and plenty of houses for sale. I was worried that when we got down here, all the good places were going to be snatched up and we would be living in a crummy place. Little did I know that there were plenty of ‘nicer’ places for rent…because nobody could afford them!!! Then came the huge task of looking for a job. That was a task in itself and was very daunting. I was trying to get a foot in the marketing business since that is what I will be graduating with and absolutely nobody was hiring. I either heard ‘NO’ right away or try back in a couple of months. Meaning, maybe in a few months the economy will be better and we can afford to hire and pay you.

The Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on September 15th that the recession is “very likely over,” but he warned that the recovery isn’t likely to create many jobs. When I read that in USA Today, I felt no hope for my job future after school. I waitressed and/or bartended myself through college and there was nothing wrong with that. It was sometimes slow money and then some nights I could make a fortune…at least to me. I fear that I will be still waitressing or bartending after school and not do anything with y degree for awhile. After high school, you think you have it all planned out. You will go to college for 4 years (5 in my case), meet Mr. Charming, graduate, get a fantastic job, and get married. You don’t plan on having your country at war and the economy in a huge depression.

There is hope, however, the more news I watch and newspapers I read I see articles of companies hiring back some of those people that were laid off. People started to get smart with their money and saving up instead of spending it on things that weren’t really needed. The government is helping out for example take the Cash for Clunkers that ran for a few months giving people money to buy a new car by trading in their old one. There was also the First-Time Home Buyer Tax Credit stimulus package that gave you $8,000 credit on your taxes if you bought a new house after January 1, 2009 and before December 1, 2009 and it was our first time. They are trying to stimulate the economy and give it a boost which will in return help everyone.

They say time heals all, well I hope 7 more months (until I graduate) is enough time to open up some more jobs so that I can snag one of them up and use my degree for something good.