I'm a huge Halloween fan, and we've been making the initial plans for what we're going to do to the house and front yard this year. We've got some new stuff from the big discount Halloween store in town and are making plans for a new version of the graveyard combined with the new scarecrow/haunted pumpkin patch with skeletons and flying gargoyle thing we did last year. (It doesn't look as good without the spotlighting and the fog machine.) I'll try to get pictures this year too.

I love to decorate things and build stuff out of junk from craft stores and things lying around the house. This is why I had so much fun doing the door decoration contest at MediaWestCon. Earlier this month, we had a water leak in our yard from a city pipe, and they came and dug it up, fixed it, and left a large plot of disturbed ground near the curb, posted with yellow "danger" tape. We were going to light it and have a bunch of skeleton hands sticking out of it, but unfortunately the city came back and smoothed it out and put grass on top of it.

I'm reading The Dracula Dossier by James Reese, which is really good so far. It's basically Bram Stoker investigating Jack the Ripper, and is written in the same form as Dracula, as a series of letters and diary entries. The historical references and the way he writes Stoker, as a creative person who was struggling to find the right outlet, who had become badly disenchanted with a job (Henry Irving's theater manager) that he had once loved, make it really engaging. And I haven't even gotten to the scary bits yet.