The Crickets Still Sing in October

October was definitely another busy month!

We started off October with a fun weekend getaway with a few friends. It involved costumes, the beach, Italian food, and not enough sleep. We had such a good time.

I did a Scentsy party for a friend and we had a blast!

We went to the corn maze with our marrieds group. We went last year and had a really great time, so we decided to do it again this year! Minus getting split up from part of our group and getting very, very lost, we had a fun night.

My mom, sister, and I had a girls spa day. It was the first time we'd ever done anything like that together and it was a lot of fun. We all got different packages, but we left feeling very relaxed. And we followed it up by having lunch at one of our favorite local Mexican restaurants. It was a good day.

I hosted a fall themed BUNCO night at my house. Every time I play BUNCO with my friends, I wish we could have a group again. But we tried last year and it was so hard to remain consistent with it. So, I think maybe we will have to try and do quarterly BUNCO nights instead.

The next week, we started a candidating week at church...and it ended with our church getting a new senior pastor! After about 18 months without one, we were all very relieved and excited. Josh and I are really excited about our new pastor and his family, and we are looking forward to getting to know them better.

We had a fun sushi dinner with my sister and her husband. We even ventured out and tried a roll none of us had tried before...and it was delicious!

And last night we went to a fun Halloween party that our friend throws every year. The theme was Classic Monsters and it was really fun to see everyone dressed up. The decorations were very Haunted Mansion-esque, which made a lot of us really want to go to Disneyland soon!

Can you guess what we dressed up as? 

A skeleton (notice the baby one, too?!?), a ghost (did you guess right?), a mummy, and Wednesday Addams

A mummy, a ghost, Blackbeard, and a skeleton

Other highlights from the month:

I had a couple of fun lunch/dinner/coffee dates with friends, as well as a few fun hang out nights.

My book club friends and I read an amazing book called The Invention of Wings. I highly recommend it. We had so much to talk about because of it during our chat and I'm pretty sure we could have talked about it for a few more hours. It was that good.

My husband would say one of his highlights this month was his favorite baseball team winning the World Series...and I suppose it's a highlight for me, too...because now that it's over, I don't have to watch any more games or listen to Joe Buck's voice anymore. Haha!

It rained all day yesterday. It was glorious. I told one of my friends that it finally felt like fall had arrived.


And since it is November 1st, I'm probably gonna bust out the Christmas songs soon. I did last year and I feel like I got to enjoy some of my favorite Christmas songs so much more. I will probably wait until Thanksgiving to start watching Christmas movies, but you never know.

I am looking forward to making some Christmas crafts this month, as well as doing all sorts of fun family and friend events revolving around Thanksgiving.


See ya later, October. It was fun, but I think November is going to bring some pretty awesome stuff as well.

Currently

Reading: I've been reading the Mortal Instrument series. I'm in the beginning of City of Glass right now, but I put it on hold as I've also been reading Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. A couple of my friends and I have started a little book club and that is the first book we picked! It's been really interesting so far. I love history and reading about true events, so it's been a really fun read for me.

Eating: After a few weeks of eating (and drinking) a lot of extra calories, I've been trying to get back into the swing of eating more healthy foods. I'm back to eating lots of Greek yogurt, cuties, edamame, avocados, broccoli, and fish. I'm still a huge green tea addict and drink it just about every day, if not more than once a day. Though I do have to have ice cream a couple of days a week. It's been a big weakness for me lately.

Loving: The fact that I've gotten to spend a lot of time with the people I love lately. 2014 has been a great year so far filled with friends and family. I'm missing some of my loved ones oh so much these days, but I'm trying to cherish the moments I do get to spend with them.

Watching: We binge watched Veronica Mars this past month to try and get through the whole series again before the movie came out. We ended up having to skip a couple of episodes and only watch a couple of partial episodes to get caught up before we went to see the movie with some friends. It was all worth it and I LOVED the movie! Now, we are trying to catch up on all of our regular shows since we didn't watch very many of them for a couple of weeks. We did, however, make sure to watch the Walking Dead each week. And let me tell you, that show makes me so tense!! I'm always so nervous about something bad happening to my favorite characters. I get way too attached to these peeps.

Looking Forward to: seeing Divergent this weekend! One of my sweet friends just finished reading the whole series a couple of weeks ago, and it was so fun for me to talk about it again with her. I love that series so much and I can't wait to see the film adaptation of it. Though, I am not really sure that I like the choices of actors to play my favorite characters...but we shall see when I see the movie.

Thinking About: How nice it is to listen to music again while I'm writing a blog post. I used to always listen to music when I blogged, but then I got into the habit of watching TV or having something on the TV so there was some background noise. I really prefer listening to music. I think it helps a lot more with my writing process.

Wishing: Oh man, for so many things! I am really wanting to be in a women's Bible study again. A friend and I have been talking about starting another one, but our schedules have just been so crazy these past couple of months. I really hope it will happen soon, though. I'm really craving that time with other women.
I'm also wishing I could bring all the people I love that are spread out across the country (and even in other countries) into one place. Maybe someday we will all have the means and the time to take an epic vacation together and spend some major quality time with one another. I would love that.
I'm also wishing I could be in Disneyland again in the near future. I'm so thankful that we were able to go so much last year, but now that they've finally re-opened Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, I'm having major withdrawals.

(The Currently blog post idea initially came from Danielle of Something Sweet though Ilene of Much Love, Illy is the one that always reminds me of it)

Old School

I have had the urge to listen to The Benjamin Gate for the last couple of days. But, every time I thought about listening to them, I was on my way somewhere and couldn't listen to them (I only have their songs on my computer). Today, I had the urge again, and actually had the time to listen to them. I had forgotten how much I liked them, back in the day.
I remember listening to them with my sister in high school. It brought back a lot of fond memories...
One of the songs really hit me hard in what I've been dealing with lately (what I wrote about in my last blog).
I don't think it was a coincidence that I had that urge.

P.S. The song is called Need, if anyone is interested in listening to it or looking up the lyrics. It's a great song.