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Oh what a week it's been. We got married last weekend. Kenny was a chainmail-wearing knight and I was a princess. It rained cats and dogs, and some of the roads were flooded, but it was a beautiful ceremony nonetheless.
We only got about 20-30 TOTers, but it was only 28 degrees here with snow and ice on the ground and a lot of trees and branches down on the sides of the roads. Maybe next year will be better. Our yard display didn't get many additions. One new tombstone, two bluckies as "last year's TOTers that didn't dress up", and some new lighting, and a fog machine. We rearranged the graveyard, placing part of it under a spooky old spruce tree. We had red lights by the door and a blue strobe by one part of the graveyard and a green strobe by the other part. I also strung orange lights around the deck and wrapped around the clothesline that goes over the graveyard. I hid the fog machine under the deck, so it was blowing through the graveyard and toward the front door.
Our party was on Saturday. It was a blast. I made lots of good food, good drinks, and got to hang out with friends I haven't seen in quite a while. We had a huge bonfire, burned a whole tree that fell down last winter. Good music, great decorations, and my rec room actually looks like a living space again instead of a storage space! I even got a black xmas tree from walmart and decorated it with spiders, skellies, a string of flicker bulbs, and webs.
All in all, it was a good year with a few set-backs, due to lack of time and money, but we had fun. Now it's time to clean up, take a break for the other holidays, and spend some time with our families. Then it's time to start gettting ready for next season. I just have to remember to write down all of the things that worked and didn't work this year for reference next year. Hopefully I'll get the tools I want for xmas, so I can actually build some of the stuff I've envisioned.
Oh, and I learned something about frozen pumpkins and dremels...they make a HUGE mess! I was covered with pumpkin from the waist up and the counter and cabinets were all orange! It was so funny!
I started my yard set-up last week. I got all my tombstones set up, some skull stake lights, Grim's at the patio table, scarecrow's out, groundbreaker is up, and bat is hung. I'm waiting to put the smaller stuff out until the week of Halloween since it gets really windy here in the fall. I still have two bluckies to put out too, plus make JOL's , put moss on some tombstones, webs need to be hung, lights and fog machine have to be set up, and other stuff I can't think of right now. Still no pics of anything, I need to buy batteries for my cameras, hopefully I can get some this week.
I finished my costume today. My job wouldn't let me work because my foot was too swollen to get anything but flip-flops on, so I went to my parents house where my sewing machine is set up. I'm a witch this year...I guess a spider witch since there are purple and silver webs on everything. I had to make a cloak today. I got a really nice metallic spider web fabric from Joanne's and lined it with heavy black fabric. It's actually reversible too! Sorry, no pics. My batteries are all dead and I have just enough money for gas and milk til I get paid again. I might try to start setting up the graveyard this week if my foot feels better. I also collected some interesting seed pods from my yard for some of my potion bottles. I'm so far behind it's crazy, but it seems like so many of us are in the same boat. Darn real life and responsibilities getting in the way of our holiday! It's a good thing I'm on vacation the week before and the week after Halloween!
We had a disaster last weekend. We had just spent half our savings on a new computer, and two days later, our water pressure tank sprung a leak and flooded our utility, laundry, and storage room as well as one of our closets and part of our bedroom. We had to use the rest of our savings and the credit card to get it fixed. We also had to do a lot of cleaning and laundry...I just finished a few minutes ago. We had to throw out almost everything in storage, but we managed to salvage a few things that are now being transformed into Halloween decor. Thankfully, all the Halloween props and decor are stored upstairs in the spare bedroom. I found six of those battery-operated candles people put in their windows at Hexmas. They all work, just need batteries and bulbs (maybe flicker bulbs). I just spray-painted them metallic black and they are outside drying. I also found a light up Hexmas village church that I think I can repaint to make it a haunted church. Since we spent so much money and time on the clean-up, I won't be able to complete some of the projects I wanted to do this year, but I'll work on them for next year. I wanted to build some kind of display table for my spookytown collection, but that won't happer in time. Instead, I'm going to talk to Kenny's parents to see if I can set it up on the fireplace hearth upstairs. It hasn't been used in two years anyway, and has two electric outlets next to it. My mom gave me nine small pumpkins a couple weeks ago that have been sitting on a broken gate in the flower bed. I got the burlap sack they were in, so I'll add that to my scarecrow. I need to make a new head for him too. Someone whose footprints went to the neighbor's driveway stole the skull off him last winter. I never asked them about it because they always plow our driveway for free. It was most likely their teenage son and his friends. They tend to be mischief-makers. I guess I should go check on my candlesticks to see if they are dry enough to move.
My sister Kim has a pet tarantula named Zelda. Zelda molted about three weeks ago and left a fully intact exoskeleton for Kim to find. Our dad took the shell to work in a tupperware container and kept hiding it in people's desks. Then Kim brought it to work last weekend and hid it in the tint machine. She still has it and is saving any more she gets for my witch's kitchen. Wouldn't it be perfect to set on the shelf next to some potion bottles? It's a little bigger than a baseball.
Sorry I'm off topic, but I had to get this out. I found out late last night that one of my dogs, Dallas has passed away. At the end of July, she was diagnosed with a large cancerous tumor and given up to six months to live. Dallas lived with her Daddy after he and I broke up because she was dog-aggressive and my parents have two other dogs. We adopted her from a local shelter where she had been left by several different owners. We finally provided her with a loving forever home. Her Daddy left me a message with her picture, but he is not home from work yet, so I don't know if he had her put to sleep, or if she went on her own. I loved Dallas as if she were my child, and I am going to miss her terribly. I plan to make a permanent memorial marker for her to go along with the markers for my two geckos that passed away last year. At least I know that we have given her a much better life than she had in the shelter and she is no longer in pain from that awful illness.
On a lighter note, I have been trying to work on some Halloween stuff on my days off. I have a rough idea of where everything is going to be set up outside, and no idea where I'm putting everything inside. I started making some creepy trees to go with the Spookytown village and have quite a collection of interesting bottles for my witch's kitchen. I still need to fill and label them though. I have a few ideas and keep my eyes open for more. I'm trying to get my bathroom renovated before the big Halloween party, I'm about halfway done painting and still need to tile the floor. I found out from one of my managers that pallets can be given away for free, so I may be grabbing a few to make a cemetary fence if I have time. I have a page-long list of to-dos that keeps getting longer! I'm really excited about this Halloween though...it's extra special for me. We are having a party on Halloween and inviting all the friends and family to hang out, have a good time, and maybe go TOTing. Then we are getting married Nov. 1st. We were going to do it on Halloween, but my mom kept giving me a really hard time about it and I just got tired of fighting about it. She didn't have a problem with the Halloween part, it was the Friday part. She's worried that my brother will have classes and my dad will be stuck at work. Both valid points, so I compromised. We're doing it backwards. Party first, formalities later.
I went to Michael's last Sunday...their Spooky Town stuff was 25% off. So of course I had to get a few pieces. I picked up a few glass bottles for my witches coven too. I also went to a few local antique shops on Friday. I got the perfect shelf for all my potion bottles, two old glass bottles, and a couple of books from the 1800's. I need to pick up a new memory card for my camera, but as soon as I do, I'll take some pics and post them.
Tags: Spooky Town Michael's
My brother was in the attic at our parents house looking for our camping gear. It needed to be aired out before using it next month. My family has a habit of storing everything in rubbermaid totes and not labeling them, so he had to open each box to see if it was one that we needed. I'm not strong enough to pull myself up into the attic crawlspace, so my job was to stand on the ladder and take the boxes down once they were pushed my way. I was putting one of the boxes in the living room when I heard my brother yell AAHH. I ran to the opening to see if he was okay. He was just startled because he opened a box and saw a skull looking at him! The lighting is horrible up there and no one knew there was any Halloween stuff around. So of course I told him to bring it down so I could check it out. The box contained two life-size skulls, Boris the talking skull, two small plastic cauldrons, one of those rotating shadow-makers, two of my old costumes from high school, a witch costume for a dog, and a few other small items. It felt like Christmas digging through that box! Boris has a short in his wiring somewhere, he only works when pressing the test button, so I need to take him apart to fix him. The shadow-maker needs a new light bulb. I stuck the old one in my purse so when this stomach virus goes away and I can go back to work, I can just match it up and get a new bulb. I also put the witch costume on our middle-sized dog Bella and she loved it! She was walking around wagging her tail and smiling. Then everyone started trying to take pictures of her and she got scared so I had to take it off and put it away.
Kenny and I finally picked a date...and we're getting married on Halloween this year! I want to go trick or treating after the wedding though. We're doing a Rennaisance theme wedding, maybe with some spookiness to it. Anyone have any ideas to add touches of our favorite holiday without going over the top? We have an extensive sword and battle-axe collection and we plan on wearing period-appropriate clothing.
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