Melinda Slade

I have some friends that have a Halloween party for all of us ‘older people’ and those of us that just don’t have kids.  I’m not one of the ‘older people’, I’m just one without kids.  If you believe that, I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona across from John McCain’s house I’ll sell you cheap. 

Anyway, when you don’t have a kid to take around Trick-or-Treating, it takes a lot of the fun out of Halloween.  We always have a blast at thier party too.  The costumes are great.  We have found a site online where you can get costumes that we all go to.  Now that we have been doing this for awhile, sometimes we just trade costumes with others and either alter them to fit what we want them to be or just use them as they are.

You can take a nurses costume and make it a cutie nurse or make it a nurse from hell without messing the costume up for someone else the next year.  It’s fun to see what everyone comes up with.  I guess what it’s really all about is a group of middle age-rs reliving their youth and that’s okay with me because I’m still a kid at heart.  I hope everyone has a Happy Halloween and a safe Halloween above all.

Well gas is finally coming down.  It got as high as $4.50, more or less around here after Hurricane Ike hit Texas.  The good part of that is there have been over 150 gas stations and ‘quick mart’ type places, fined for price gouging since it was hard to find gas for about 6 weeks or more after the storm hit.  It’s about time someone was charged with price gouging.  Honestly, I think the oil companies need to be charged too.  How can they make record profits if that’s not what they have been doing to us?  Can someone explain that to me?

The last time I went through the area, there were only 2 or 3 houses that had been foreclosed upon.  Now in the past three weeks, there have been 5 more and it’s not looking very promising for a couple more.  This ‘bail out’ isn’t helping very much from what I can see.

The banks need to renegotiate the bad loans they made with these homeowners.  They should have to lower their interest rates and set fixed payments that the homeowners can afford by extending the loans if necessary.  That’s the only way to boost the housing market right now.  That and making the banks quit sitting on the money.  They were too liberal with it before all of this and now they’re being too tight.

Either way, we as either homeowners or hopeful homeowners are the losers along with the banks.  With the ‘bail out’ now every American becomes one of the losers too.  But you what, that’s just my opinion and we all know what that’s worth.  Not too much, right?

I love my family, I truly do but they tend to be very judgmental and if I don’t do things the way they think it should be done, then I’m told about it and it usually ends up in a big fuss with me being looked upon as the ‘Bitch’ of the family.  All families and even friends disagree from time to time but if it’s something that tends to happen more than not, then you need to stay way from those family members or think about changing friends.

I’m a very lucky woman in that I have some wonderful, understanding friends that I wouldn’t trade for all the gold in the world, but I might consider it.  Just kidding.  The one thing I learned the hard way is to always make sure everyone that has touched your life in a positive way knows how much they mean to you.  I lost a dear friend to suicide and didn’t get to tell him what he meant to me.  I might have made a difference and it might not have but at least he would have known how much he made my life better by just being in my life.  So think about that and make sure even your family members know how much they mean to you but especially let your friends know.  They chose to be your friend, your family didn’t choose to be your family.

You know, we take advantage of the fact that we have friends way too much.  We automatically assume they’ll be there for us and help us when we need them and Thank God they are usually.  Friends are just an extension to our family.  Stop and look at how you treat your family and friends.  Would you want to be a friend to someone that treated you that way?  Probably not in a lot of cases.

I have always heard a little story about a man and his wife entertaining another couple in their home.  They’re in their living room having coffee when the other lady suddenly spills her coffee all over the coffee table.  The man of the house reassures her that it’s okay, gets up to get something to clean up the mess and all it right.  A couple days later, his wife accidentally does the same thing and instead of getting up to help clean the mess, he says “Look at the mess you made.  What’s wrong with you, can’t you do anything right?”

Now the other lady is no one to this couple other than a friend and he treated her with respect but when the person that is supposed to be his partner for life and he’s supposed to love, he pitches a fit and makes her feel like a total idiot.  Sure it could be the wife that does this too but the whole point to this is; why is it we treat others better than we do those closest to us?  I have a hard time understanding that.