The White Hat Journal

Although a lot of things have opened up in Oklahoma and many places around the country, we are still staying away from most entertainment type venues, and only on a rare occasion go into a restaurant. So when it came time to plan what I wanted to do for my birthday, that left things pretty limited.

One thing we don’t have much of is time together. When combining Todd’s work hours with his commute, and most of my calls and zoom meetings being in the evenings, that leaves the weekends. As we all know those get packed with kids, other family members, church activities, and before you know it you’re passing ships in the night. So I decided that this year we would take the entire weekend, including our weekly date night and put off any household chores, yard work, etc. to watch movies together. Yes, I put off cleaning the house, so you know it’s serious!

I had already food prepped the week before by getting movie must haves: popcorn, kettle corn, a few boxes of candy – movie theatre style, the GOOD chocolate, and all the makings for a charcuterie board! There was even the obligatory seasonal pumpkin item: pumpkin madeleines dipped in white chocolate!

Alright, before you health nuts have a total heart attack, I believe in moderation. I don’t cut things out of my diet forever, and I don’t use celebrating as an excuse to go off the deep end either. We still had our plant-based protein shakes for lunch each day, along with our detox tea and we also did 30-40 minute Pilates workouts each day. We didn’t want to feel gross or over-stuffed with junk at the end of the weekend that was all about having fun and feeling great!

Of course we had to have a theme for our movie watching, and since it’s October, hopefully this is pretty obvious by this point (plus, I kind of gave it away in the title of this post….) Ok, if you’re still struggling, Halloween! but I don’t do horror movies or slasher films, making it fairly easy to narrow down our choices because there are tons of movies that are way too scary to make our list.

We own quite a few, borrowed several from the parents, and purchased a couple from different streaming apps. I was really disappointed in the free options across the board: Netflix, On Demand, Prime, etc. have almost all super scary stuff this year, so we wound up purchasing several “fun” Halloween movies, when in the past these have been available with basic subscriptions, without having to make an additional purchase.

Over the course of two and a half days we were able to squeeze in 10 movies. It probably could’ve been more, but silly us we like to sleep! There were of course a plethora of Vampire movies to choose from, we stuck to the Underworld series, but didn’t quite make it to the last one. Also included was Hocus Pocus, which neither of us had seen….I know I know that’s crazy to most of you, but it’s true! and I had no idea McGee was one of the main characters, albeit he was a cat for the bulk of the movie….., NCIS fans anyone? No? Ok, moving on…

Miss Perigrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, while not technically a Halloween movie, still made the list, along with I, Frankenstein and the not so well known Season of the Witch. We’ll do spooky just not horrifying and absolutely no creepy kids. That last rule is to never be broken! We had a blast and were able to truly relax so we could head into this week ready to tackle whatever comes our way.

Happy Fall Everyone!