October Bullet Journal Layout

My theme for October is SCARY!

I absolutely love horror movies and haunted houses.  I don’t know how it happened, but for some reason, since I first started dating my husband over a decade ago, I stopped doing a few of the things I enjoyed most in the fall.  It’s not like there was any real reason that I stopped, just that there were other things we both enjoyed doing together, and I didn’t share this interest with any of the rest of our friends.  When I first met my husband, we didn’t really watch scary movies together.  I feel like maybe he didn’t really like them, or at least not the ones I wanted.  More recently, he expanded his movie watching to include more scary movies, so I’m starting to get that fix again.  My favorite horror movies are ones with fun special effects.  Watching scenes like the arrow coming up through the bed in Friday the 13th, or the decaying woman in The Shining make me feel as though I’m watching a magic show.  I love finding out how it was done and appreciating the art that went into it, and I appreciate when I can’t figure out how they made that particular effect happen.  There is something much more visceral about watching scenes where the blood, guts and gore are made of real things.  When the horror is created digitally, it just does not have the same wonder.

Last year, I realized that I had not been to a haunted house for YEARS.  I used to work at several haunted houses when I was a teenager, and I loved it.  My husband still didn’t think that he’d have fun, so I found a few friends and family members to go to some of these places.  I really wanted to make up for lost time.  I ended up going to every highly-rated haunted house near Pittsburgh.  It took every day that I had off for almost a month, and I had a GREAT time.  I think my favorite was the West Virginia Penitentiary.  I think they were my favorite because they had a great, interactive staff, lots of interactive items in the dungeon, and they had a second tour of the historic part of the jail.  Our tour guide had worked there for years when the prison was still active, so he had some unique stories.  It is almost unthinkable that such a place held people during my lifetime.  At the end of the haunted attraction, they had a zombie shoot set up with paintball guns and moving targets.  It was a really unique experience and it was worth the drive.

I really wanted to capture all the fun I had last year when planning my October this year, so I was thinking about all things spooky when I did my weekly spreads.  I hope I use them as much as I did last month.  I had time to make them a little more intricate than my September layout by pre-drawing them.  The worst part is that Halloween doesn’t actually fall in my four October themed weeks!  I might end up adding a fifth week to October’s theme for this special case.  ^_^

I ended up going back to the circular chore wheel again.  My weekly and monthly chores don’t seem to fill it properly any more though, so maybe next month I’ll try out my September layout again.

I added a few items to my habit tracker.  I want to add some more fresh vegetables to my diet, I want to get onto a certain sleep schedule, and I need to empty my freezer to defrost it.  I added a bed time and an alarm time.