BOO!

As you can see, Andy and I survived the haunted houses- barely. Actually, we had a really fun time but only ended up going through four out of the five haunted houses we paid for. The reason for this was that the line was too long for the last one and we were sufficiently freaked out after the fourth tour. Now, going into it we knew that it was just a bunch of kids dressed freaky jumping out at us. Although, before we went through one of them the carnie briefed us by saying that the actors won't touch us,if we don't touch them. That made me nervous, so I countered with a timid "Am I going to want to touch them for some reason?" I guess some stupid kid went through with his girlfriend and tried to show-off by punching one of the actors in the eye. What a jerk. Of course, as I was going through I knew that half the kids had to be in Junior High because most of them were shorter than me and I'm pretty short! So here I am screaming and jumping every time a twelve year old comes near me! (That sounds about right. lol!) Andy didn't seem too terribly nervous until the last one. That one freaked us both out. He kept slowly side-stepping around corners (of course, I made him go in front of me!) and we both worked hard to anticipate every opening that someone could jump out from. Like that helped! I still screamed away(Andy did too). I would never make it in a high stress job in the FBI or police department. The nerves alone would kill me by 30! So, we finally emerge from one trailer with our stomachs in our throats to find a dark maze with all these Jr High ghouls coming at us. I kept telling them to go away which only made them more eager to follow us. Sigh. I ended up so disoriented in trying to find my way out that Andy and one of the ghouls had to show me where to go. Then I was thankful for our little stalker. We thought we were out of the woods, but no; there was still a trailer ahead. We were totally ready to go and I kept saying, "I really don't want to go in there. I really don't want to go in there." I have decided that I really hate strobe lights. Half of the hallways were lit with them, but this last trailer had a completely dark hallway which didn't make either of us very happy especially when this huge guy jumped out in front of Andy and all he could say was "You're a giant!" It was hilarious. After that, we ran into a monster who wasn't ready for us. He was busy looking out a crack in the wall, so Andy tapped him on the shoulder. That was pretty funny, too. We were almost done, but still had to endure one more spook which we both screamed like crazy over and ran out the door and all the way to the parking lot to go home. Some other highlights were my choice words at a kid dressed as Jason who kept following me around ("Get away from me. Get the @*%# away from me!!!"), my running dialogue of "Stay the hell away from me. Don't jump out at me. Don't follow me. Leave me alone." (I'm sure the actors were laughing at me. I was pretty freaked out.), the stupid kid who crept up behind me in line and made me jump more than anything else and the evil clown in a wheelchair that neither Andy or I could look at due to an intense fear of clowns. Of course, Lisa had to point out the fallacy in our fear of the disabled clown: "How fast can a clown in a wheelchair really go? That's not very scary." Ok, so she's right, but that didn't really matter at the time! All in all, we had a really fun time, but I think we did get it out of our system for a while. Lisa and Don are breathing a collective sigh of relief. So, thanks Andy for being my haunted house date.

Here's something really scary... While I was sitting here writing this, I heard a big crash outside. We didn't have a clue what it could be or if it had anything to do with our house. So, we went outside and found that someone had crashed into our neighbor's truck parked across the street from our house. I know that I am not the most gifted driver at times, but how in the world do you run into a parked car?! All we could figure was that the driver was speeding around the bend of our street (which is not uncommon, unfortunately.) and wasn't paying attention. Geeze.