For what it's worth, as long as it's cheap........

This will be a complaining, wining and rotten entry so if you don't want to read my ranting skip to the next one.

 

Words can't describe the mixed feelings I had. I'm in the living room putting up the tree wile the soon to be ex is packing up more of her stuff in another room. And she's got a lot of stuff. Didn't come with it all. She can spend on herself like no one I've ever met. I went with her one day and she dropped $200+ on yard sales. We got a 10x20 storage unit for her 6 months ago. She's filled it 2/3'ds of the way. Mostly with stuff she's bought sense. Oh well, enough said about that. She'll get her place in the woods and she can surround herself with all the stuff she wants.

 

It's almost fitting. This has got to be the ugliest Christmas tree I've ever put up. I modified a fake tree a few years back. Took all the branches off and made my own trunk. With less branches and being more spread out this tree ROCKS when filled with all my shaped ornaments. A real old fashioned tree look with out the real tree sap and mess. Nothing wrong with the tree itself. It's what's on it. Those small colored lights. Drooping strands of silver tinsel garland. And 248 clear plastic icicles. That's it.. Not a single glass bobble, bell or Santa. Just 248 icicles hanging there. About as pretty as a wet dog. If you go and turn your kitchen faucet on, that's about as nice looking as our tree. Cold, ugly and damp looking. And because I'm the only one that decorates it's the only thing Chrismasy in the house.

 

My Christmas shopping is done. All $600+ of it. The most I've been able to spend in the last 5 years or more. Be the last time I'll be buying for my wife and inlaws so I splurged a bit. I know most of ya'll are having a better time of it. And I guess I should be too. Every once in a wile a man has to be selfish and feel sorry for himself. My turn.

It is been a little to long.    I have been swamped with Halloween stuff and came down with the flu in the middle of it.    Feeling much better now!

I recently did major script updates to this site and many others.  So make sure to check them out.

One good, one not so good and still in the air.

There wont be anymore Wednesday auctions till next spring. I'll miss them. Got a lot of really good stuff cheap. Still have the Friday night ones I'll go to. Also plan on hitting both FreeCycles I belong to hard this year. Just can't seem to get enough cheap and free. LOL Going to start looking for clothing I can use for the corpses. Plan on making lots of ground breakers over the summer. Putting them is shirts will keep the amount of detailing I have to do down. Less work, more bodies. I like the idea. Also what to add more tombstones. I've got a bunch I don't use because they're to small. Maybe I'll spend the time on Wednesdays making stuff.

Bought two items for Halloween last Friday night. One is a 1968 pressing of Disney's Halloween album. The other is a very large spool of what I thought was tope material. Deb informed me that it's actually a fibrous material used to back hand embroidery. This stuff dissolves. Oh well. now I have a few hundred yards of this stuff. Was going to use it like cheese cloth and make props to sell on Ebay. Now I don't know what I'll do with it. Might still try props but will have to see how well this stuff will hold up.Guess I should of looked at it before I bid. I'm sure I'll find some use for it that's worth the $3.00 I spent.

The soon to be ex wife and I are getting ready to decorate for Christmas. Probably go over board like we always do. LOL The hard part will be dividing the stuff up. I've collected ornaments for years before we got married. I keep telling myself it's only stuff. Stuff can be replaced. But that don't always work. There is stuff I wont part with, the rest is up to fate.

You are your past. To change now is to change your future......

Everyone has skeletons in their closets. But when you have skeletons in lots of other peoples closets it's easy for you past to catch up with you. Such is the case of our friend and fellow prop builder MadMax. It's unfortunate that the person we know isn't the person he was years ago. What he did for the forum and brought to the community is the MadMax I know. Extremely innovative, creative and always answering questions. A person who's posts added value to the forum. Impossible to replace.

I'd just like to say if you ever get a chance to read this, Thanks dude.

You don't learn much listening to yourself talk....George Cloonie.(sp?)

For a long time now I'd given thought to spreading my how-to site into a collection of smaller sites with a central hub. This would give a better chance that some of the site would still be on line by the end of October. But then it hit me. I get lots of hits Jan. through Aug. By September my site usually goes off line around the last week. Then in October by the middle of the second week. I don't need to put myself through all that extra work. I get serious prop builders all year long. By October I get 'Halloween Fans'. Kids looking for things to see. And the 'time to get started' folks that wait till October to make props. I'm not going to say I don't appreciate these folks. I do. But I like the folks that start in Jan. better. LOL

Bought another computer at an auction yesterday. Paid a whole .50 cents for a 13 inch monitor, keyboard, two unpowered speakers and the guts. Win. 95 with 25 megs of ram. Didn't get it for it's processing power. It's one more working power supply. Hopefully when everything settles down and I can get some normalcy to my life again I'll dig into animation for next year.

I started this years planning wanting to do a freak show carnival inspired by a fellow Halloween forum member. DR Slicsill ( remember your name but not how to spell it. sorry dude.) Thought it would be a great way to tie in with the dead clowns I made last year. Then I wanted to do a reanimated clown laboratory and circus. Kinda like Frankenstien does clowns. That didn't happen either. Got a few machines glued together and even one cool old scope from a forum member. That's as far as I got with that. Then I bought a bag of really big stuffed animals real cheap at an auction and thought,

"Dead clowns and Evil toys"

No better combination on earth to give nightmares. I cut the head off of one stuffed dog. And that's as far as I got. Fun, but not very productive. LOL

Not going to make plans this early for next year. I think I'll make it up as I go. Do I have an ultimate haunt? Sure, I'd need 7 more folks to help man the thing. And at the rate I'm going 40 more years to build it. LOL The real thing to remember is everyone had a blast with the new and old stuff this year. despite all the personal set backs Halloween turned out really good. Looking forward to next year. Like you, I have no idea what it's going to look like.

220+ SPAM ON ONE BLOG ENTRY ALONE??????

It's a shame because I liked being able to talk to folks who have things to say. But after getting 2121 coments, 99% of are SPAM, I turned off this blog option.

Life is what happens when you plan on doing something ells.

Had a blast this Halloween. A good turnout and lots of compliments. Did something new this year. Added light and lots of it. Folks saw things I've had for years for the first time. I honestly think I could have had nothing new to show and folks wouldn't of known it. Some of the new stuff I had was made last year. The corpsed clowns, circus themed tombstones and all the ground breaker coffins. Rained last year so I wasn't able to set up the out door walk through. This year I added a section of graveyard fence, 9 black crosses, 60+ feet of rusty chain and two five light 5 1/2 ft. tall candelabras. I also put a makeshift dress on one of the stand up corpses and made me a woman. LOL  Thanks to a friend of mine with a nice digital camera I was able to put pics on the web site. I have film getting developed but it would be a wile before I could get them posted.

Best laid plans of mice and men. The things I didn't get done. I have lab equipment in my basement. Unfinished and getting dusty. The plan was to have a clown reanimation lab in the middle of the graveyard. Then make my first animated props, reanimated clowns, for the clown graveyard. I also wanted to have an evil toy display. I got as far as cutting the head off of one stuffed dog. Planned on this display leading into the dead clown graveyard.

Life in space..... It's surprising how having the bottom drop out of your personal life effects everything you do. I can't tell if I'm free falling or floating. But I'm damn sure I haven't hit the ground yet. First off my brother gets sick and disowns my mom and me. Haven't seen or heard anything form the guy. I do know he's hitting the bottle again. Hard. None of his friends are talking. I've stood outside his home knocking on the door knowing his there. Stopped doing that. Then my wife decides she wants a divorce. Been helping her pack things up for a few months now. Ya, I know that sounds weird. We've already decided  who gets what. Will get one lawyer for the both of us. Nothings getting contested. My father-in-law, who's been more of a dad to me than the drunk I grew up with, had back surgery. He's doing fine now. Still wearing a harness. He'll be in that for three more months. Then, three weeks before Halloween my mom has a stroke. The good news is she's fully recovered. I spent the good part of 4 weeks living at her condo. About a 45 minuet drive from here. Still got the Halloween display up. My mom was totally supportive of it. The one bright spot through all of this? I was contacted by someone who's putting together a book on home haunts. Told me it would be a few years in the making and wanted to know if I'd be interested in participating. Hay, at first I thought this was a joke. Even told him so.  I've seen pictures of displays done by folks on the Halloween forum that blow mine away. Turns out it's not a joke. I'm not going to get excited about it. I'm being concidered. It's not a done deal. I'll know some time next year if my haunt gets pictured. Told the guy about the Halloween forum and even turned him on to a few haunts.

Haven't been to the blog site for a wile now. Noticed that I have 2121 comments left by folks. So I went to check it out. Didn't find them. What I did find is a few spam. So just how gullible do these folks think everyone is? Trash is trash. Fortunatelly there's more good folks on line then trash.

Whoohoo.  Download.com accepted our Halloween Toolbar for download. 

Check it out:
http://www.download.com/Halloween-Toolbar/3000-2379_4-10572668.html

Didn't get to work on anything this weekend it was so hot and humid I just couldn't stand to go out. Tim worked all weekend so I there was no way I was taking Jake out in the heat. I did manage to move props up to shead that I have completed. Don't want everyone seeing my surprizes for this year. Sure hope I can download my pictures later, I do have some of Johnny Appleseed, just no time to go to Mom's and download. We need a new computer at home but keep putting it off until Jacob gets bigger. He trys to reformat mom's all the time, I can just imagine what he would do to one he could sneak and get access to alot.

Planning what to do in the party area and it looks like I am going to have "Madame Crowley's Psychic Readings" for everyone while they wait on the trail to begin. Looks like hot dogs again this year, cheapest way to feed everybody. I got "Madame Crowley" tarot cards off ebay, Ms. Cleo tarot cards at that! for $6.00 total, can't beat that!!

I'm sitting here thinking of all that has to be done and all that is on my plate.  Here's how I see it:

1) I need to write to the businesses on the three corners about a block from me to get them to agree as they did last year to donate their parking lots for our haunt.  Due to zoning, this is the only way we will be able to have our haunted attraction here.  I need to stop procrastinating and do that this week.  In fact, I AM going to do that this week.

2) We are going to be airbrushing our makeup this season.  That means less masks, less messy grease makeup and happier actors.  I purchased a Paasche Airbrush along with an airbrush compressor from Harbor Freight.  I've had it for a week, but have only practiced with it once.  I need to get a wiggle on learning how to use this as August 30th we will be debuting our creature makeup to thousands of baseball fans at Raley Field.  I have yet to receive the airbrush makeup I ordered, but he said it should have been shipped the last part of last week.  If I don't receive it in a few days, he will definitely be hearing from me.

3) Speaking of Raley Field and not hearing from someone...

I've left several messages for the head of marketing of the Sacramento River Cats, our baseball team.  He and I had agreed that I would call him the first of August so that we could finalize our plans for August 30th.  I've left him two messages last week and he has yet to return my call.  I'm getting a bit concerned....

4) The two avenues we thought would be certain to bring us a bus to put on our haunted trail have gone cold.  One has completely closed and we doubt the other avenue will come through.  So, I'm doing all I can by putting up ads in hopes that someone will have a bus that they can either loan or donate to us.  We begin building August 26th and we must have the bus in place by then or forget it.  Once the walls go up, it will be impossible for any vehicle to pass to get to the back for the trail.  I'm getting so desperate that I'm even thinking about having my son in law park his big klunker of a car to replace the bus.  We will have the front, side and back windows concealed by black material and view the from the backseat to the front concealed by a black curtain.  Each person will have to crawl in the back seat and exit the other side.  A monster will be in the front seat behind the curtain, of course.  This could be a great scare since it is in such close scaring quarters.  However, it will definitely slow down traffic and I'm not sure the fire inspector will approve it.  Oh, well.  We'll see.....

5) We bought 600,  22" glow necklaces as a fundraiser to get items we need for the haunt.  We have yet to be successful with selling them.  I'm going to our drive-in on Tuesday and see if they will give us permission to sell them there.

6) As I mentioned earlier, construction begins August 26th.  The haunt will go up much quicker this season as we dont' have to build the walls this year for the expection of a few and we have an actual construction team this time around.  Two guys on our crew who build for a living have friends they say owe them favors and will be happy to pitch in and help.  Wooohoo!  I'm hoping they will have it up and solid in four days.  That comes out to two weekends.  That will leave us with four weekends to get all scenes, decorations and tweaking together before Media Night on October 6th.

There's so much more on my plate that I could write about, but I'll keep it for another day.

So, how has your day gone so far?

PEACE

Emp

I have been surfing the net trying to organize my ideas and maybe find some new ones. While looking at a haunt in MI I got upset and had to get out of it. I know different strokes for differnt folks when it comes to haunting, but ****...these people had a room with babies stabbed and eaten, blood everywhere and pics of what looked like dead children that had been mutilated. I couldn't take it. To me that is not scary but disturbing as I have had to fight so hard to have my child and have fought so hard only to lose some. Ah well, I won't dwell on it.

I am rearranging, reworking the trail, trying to make it work and be scary. I am probably putting too much into it, the woods at night are scary anyway.

I have been busy...busy...again/still.

Recently launched http://www.SinisterSpace.com Social Community for the Halloween, Haunt, Goth, etc communities.

Spending time working, dealing with community issues, enhancing things and doing what I can.

My girlfriend makes sure I take a little time for relaxation too.