Last night watched the Ghost Hunters marathon. My favorite episode is the one in Ireland at Leap Castle where Tango taunts The Thing until it punches Dustin in the face.

Also handed out a lot of candy to trick-or-treaters. The kids were very impressed with our decorations. Best comment was: "Is that a grave yard? Did somebody die there?" When you're under three feet tall, it's all pretty impressive.

I was also reading Alethea Kontis on Facebook, who was posting great pictures of Halloween at Sherrilyn Kenyon's house. I don't think there's a picture of it on there, but there was one kid who dressed as the house from Up, with balloons and everything.

The party last night turned out great. Here's some photos of the finished decorations:


These are the chocolate balls our friend Megan made. It's chocolate cake with a dipping chocolate coating, and they were so good. I just had a leftover one for lunch.


Vampire hunters' kit. (Later we added a bottle of Spice Island Garlic Salt.)

( More Halloween Photos )

For Building a Bat Cave, Stage I, click here.

It still needs to be dressed with more lights, bats, etc, but the basic structure is there. It's very difficult to get pictures of, and the flash seems to highlight all the gaps. In the darkened hallway, it looks a lot better. ( Finished Product )

Or, The Art of Building a Bat Cave for the Servantless American Family. Not that Julia Child ever built a bat cave, that we know of, but if she had, it would have been awesome.

( How to Build a Bat Cave, Stage 1, with photos )

We stopped here because we ran out of paper. Also, I got tired. I'll finish it off tomorrow, after a run to Office Depot.

We did some planning for our Halloween decorations this weekend. One of the places we went to was the Spirit Halloween store, which is neat because it has a lot of the large animated set pieces. They're insanely expensive, but it's very cool to see them in action. We got some ideas and then went to Michael's craft store to get supplies (thanks, heidi2524!). I think we're going to try to do a bat cave in the hallway. I've done stone and boulders with packing paper before, for the Hercules room at MediaWestCon, so it should be interesting. It's the "go big or go home -- oh wait, we are home" Halloween party.


Here's a link to the old Black Gate article on the 2007 Halloween Costume and Party Tradeshow

How often do other people have anxiety dreams? Lately I've been the Anxieticia, Queen of Anxiety Dreams of Anxietica. (These are dreams where you're specifically trying to do something fairly simple -- find a sweater, get to class, make a phone call, put your shoes on, open a door, remember where your phone is OMG, etc -- and you just can't, either through fumbling, interference, whatever.)


Couple of Halloween links, from Rick Klaw:

10 Awesome Homemade Halloween Costumes

and Historical Halloween House Tours. This includes the Ashton Villa in Galveston, TX, which is doing haunted tours this October. They have a little blurb about the house's history, but leave out the part about Miss Bettie during the 1900 hurricane, standing on the second floor balcony with a pole and a rope, trying to rescue people who were being carried away by the water. In better pictures you can also see the tiny little foot-high ornamental iron fence around it. That fence is actually over eight feet high, and was buried when they raised the island after the 1900 storm. They didn't bother to lift the house, just buried the lowest floor.

I put the first of the Halloween pumpkins out today. The big one goes in the bay window for now (we don't do most of the big outdoor decorations until closer to Halloween) and I was a little worried Tasha might be afraid of the giant orange thing next to her favorite basket. But not so much.




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We're still having our Halloween party this year despite impending joblessness, we just won't be going out to the Halloween store to buy a bunch of new crap to tart up the house. This is probably a good thing, as we already have so much Halloween stuff we're at full capacity for storing it.

Some previous Halloween photos. They really don't do justice to how the place looks at night, with the lights and the fog machine.




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Also check out eldritchhobbit's Halloween Countdown with spooky texts and media.

(Click the halloween tag below for more photos.)

( Halloween photos! )

( Gingerbread house kit -- don't try this at home )

( Gratuitous kitten pictures )

We went to the Renaissance Festival yesterday, and I got some pictures of it that I'll post tomorrow. Last night we watched the tape we made of the Ghost Hunters live special (most of it -- we watched the parts with the ghost hunting crew, Amanda Tapping, and Steve Valentine (Nigel from Crossing Jordon) and skipped anything with the wrestler guy. I thought it was neat that ghost hunter Steve commented that usually on the long live investigations, the guest (who up to this point has always been a wrestler from the stupid SciFi Channel wrestling show) usually leaves as soon as possible, but that Amanda was staying for the whole thing and seemed to be really enjoying it. She was hilarious with Steve and Tango, especially during one of their "OMG it's a bat" moments and playing "cornhole" in the fort's POW barracks. (I have no idea why they decided the game was called cornhole. It involved tossing beanbags into a bucket.) Steve Valentine really got into it too (the investigation, not cornhole, though early on he, Steve and Tango decided to form a band called "Stango"), was still there to the last hour, and carried the backpack for the thermal imaging camera.

Yay, Halloween! I'll definitely take pictures of our decorations and post them in a couple of days.

Another movie I caught while cleaning the house yesterday: Mr. Sardonicus, a William Castle film. Part of the plot involves having to exhume a relative because they realize he's been buried with a winning lottery ticket in his pocket. In the movie, this was very shocking. Maybe it's just me, being from this part of the country, but I've heard a lot dumber reasons for digging up a dead relative.

Bad thing: had to take Harry in to the vet this morning, because he's started to show some worrying symptoms. Hopefully it's something easily fixed.

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.

( Halloween Pictures )

I didn't get pictures of everything, unfortunately, and some didn't turn out.