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11/08/2007
Halloween is one of
my favorite times of the year! Summer is fun and all, but I'm not
all that fond of the heat, and I only work at one job during the summer,
so I don't have as much money. By Halloween, I'm back to working
both jobs, and making decent money, and the weather has cooled down some
so I am more comfortable.
Perhaps more important is that Halloween is a time when kids
have great fun. While it is commercialized, it hasn't be dragged
into the great mess that Christmas has. The holiday also has some
historical significance, and it is a time when the adults can have as
much fun as the children do.
I work at night, and often wind up working on Halloween.
Because of that, I don't always bother to decorate. This year I
was lucky enough to have Halloween off, and my youngest daughter,
Krystal, encouraged me to decorate for the holiday, so I did.
There were a pair of feet, a pair of hands wearing shackles, and a skull
arranged in one of the bushes in front of our house. We had cob
webs all over the front of the place. There were witch lawn signs
with lit up eyes, a skeleton lying in the garden, and four carved
pumpkins on the porch. I had glow in the dark cob webs in front of
the living room window, with a black light helping them to glow.
There were two strobe lights adding to the effects, and creepy Halloween
music.
On top of that, there was the tomb stone. The tomb
stone is a prop that I made for Halloween about 18 years ago. It
is pretty much life sized, and looks reasonably authentic. There
is a crack in the front of it. When it is working right, red light
shows through the crack, and fog rolls out of it. Well this year,
no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the fog to work. The
fog was delivered by a cool air humidifier, through a vacuum cleaner
hose to the back of the tombstone. This year, it just wasn't cold
enough outside for the humidifier to make visible fog. In addition
to that, some of the plaster that I made much of the tombstone from had
chipped and cracked, and it just wasn't looking it's best.
Finally, I had a fog machine set up. It delivered it's
fog into a pine bush in front of my front window, and the effect was
pretty decent. Unfortunately, all the trick or treaters spent
their night on Parsonage and Pine streets, and we only got around ten
visitors the entire night. |