Category: halloween

The best holiday ever.

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good enough to print


Sunday night, eve of another week of work. I managed to get all the Halloween decorations up and operational this afternoon, from the witch to the graveyard, from the crank ghost to the coffin popper, even down to the little twinkly lights in the house fixtures. I’m completely satisfied that everything went up as easily as it did, and everything was 100% operational when I turned it all on. Every year, as my decorations multiply and get more complicated, I fear it’ll be the year I’ll get a taste of the real spirit of Halloween – and someone will wreck my stuff. Having put so much effort into creating it all, it would really be a bummer to have to try and rebuild. But, for now it’s up and it’s not wrecked – and this is actually the earliest I’ve ever got it up.

Before I get to the mediocre stuff, cruise on over to Keaton’s updated-weekly galleries to see her latest installment. Go ahead, don’t be shy… click right here.

Sharaun and I live right next to a local college, within walking distance even. For a lark, I decided to see what kind of evening classes are offered, and how much they charge. Turns out a class is dirt cheap, sub-$100, and they have a pretty decent bunch of classes. I’ve decided that, come spring, I’ll take a philosophy class one evening a week. I never got to take any philosophy classes in college – and it’s always been something I’ve been interested in. At such a price, I figured I might as well do it. Who knows, maybe I’ll be unwittingly equipping myself for a career as a deep thinker when the whole engineering thing falls through.

Time to head off to bed folks, we’ll call this good enough to print.

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hallelujah


Thursday? Already? Hallelujah.

Tonight Jeff and Ben and I did run-tests on all the Halloween gear. We tested the PicoBoo’s audio capabilities, as well as it’s controllable AC timing. We tested the air cylinder and solenoid, and even busted out the mega fogger and did a test with it (I love that thing). I kinda half decided I want to try again at building a fog chiller, this time something bigger and more powerful, hopefully something that can handle the mega fogger’s action. I love Halloween, and I think this new ceiling dropper prop (which was realized very quickly from the initial concept) is gonna be awesome.

Maybe none of you eagle-eyed grammarians noticed it yesterday, but I made a mistake in yesterday’s post. For some reason, I used the word “quaff” to refer to a person’s hair. At the time, the usage obviously sounded right to me – despite the fact that I know quite well that “quaff” means a/to drink. I think I was thinking of the word “coif,” which is also wrong (means a hat/skullcap). I realized I’d made the mistake about 10min into my dental cleaning Wednesday morning, and let me tell you – it was a trial of OCD-induced suffering to sit there just knowing people were reading my blog and likely noting the complete misuse of a word, knowing I wouldn’t be able to fix it for some time. I kept thinking about people going, “‘Quaff?’ C’mon Dave…” Horror. Anyway, I changed it to “mops,” which, I’m hopeful, is still an acceptable “colorful” term for hair. (Edit: In my defense, there is an archaic use of the word “coif” as a verb meaning to “muss with one’s hair.” So, I’m still off, but closer.)

And that’s it for tonight, that’s it.

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weekdays are torture


Sunday night and it’s back to work tomorrow (“boooo!” jeers the crowd). This weekend turned out to be an exercise in laziness, both purposeful and unplanned. Wanted to mow the lawn: didn’t happen. Wanted to go to Wal Mart and invest in some of those “energy saving” lightbulbs: didn’t happen. Wanted to say home and do nothing both Friday and Saturday night: did indeed happen. Overall though, I’m happy with it. Found some time Sunday to work on this year’s “late breaking” Halloween prop with Ben, even managed to take some quick footage and assemble it into this year’s first “teaser” video. I’ve added it to the Halloween Teasers gallery, so go check it out. Found even more time after doing the teaser to upload some new images to Keaton’s Gallery, so go check those out too. And then, read this:

Downloaded the new iTunes and let it update my iPod to firmware 1.2. Had some issues with the actual update process, as iTunes just stalled out on “updating iPod” indefinitely. I let it go for half an hour thinking it really might be taking that long, but soon noticed the iPod’s screen was showing the “do no disconnect” message. I unplugged the whole mess and Ctl+Alt+Del’d the iTunes process. Went through this twice before the iPod actually got updated, and iTunes never did stop showing the “updating the iPod” message… I just had to hard-reset the iPod and kill the iTunes task again. Then iTunes took approximately 300hrs to analyze all my MP3s for “gapless playback.” I hope gapless playback is rad enough to warrant that. Stupid Apple software.

Friday night I stayed at home alone while Sharaun went to some pyramid-scheme party. While the party isn’t the point of what I’m writing here, I think I’ll go ahead and mention how it seems to me like these kind of things are really on the rise. Maybe it’s just that Sharaun’s now at the prefect age to be invited to them as a target buying-audience, but it seems like there are pyramid-scheme parties for just about everything these days: makeup, children’s toys, housewares, baskets, food, candles, etc. Oh, and I know the term “pyramid scheme” isn’t PC anymore and that I should call them multi-level marketing… give me a break. (Note to my friends who are gettin’ their multi-level on, I still love you… no pyramid could keep us apart.)

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, I was home alone… and I took the quiet time after I fed Keaton and put her down as a chance to catch up on some of the week’s news I’d missed (work being fairly consuming of late, hence the spotty blogging last week as well). The major outlets were primarily consumed with the sex-toy highschool MySpace killer, but the indie guys were almost completely focused on the Military Commissions Act. Oh sure, I’d heard a lot about the “torture bill” over the course of the week, but the more I read the more inflamed I became. I decided I should probably read the thing for myself before I got too hot and bothered by potentially biased summaries of the legislation. So, I headed over to Thomas and grabbed a PDF of the final passed version of the text.

A lot of folks are up in arms over this legislation, and doubtless we’ll see some legal challenge brought against it in the courts as early as this week – I’m sure there were several groups working over the weekend to get their motions in order. Now, I’ll say right out that I don’t have much in the way of new or insightful information to offer about the bill, but you can go to any number of places to get some brainage on it if you’re inclined – here’s a good start. Anyway, I downloaded the thing and fired up my trusty laserjet printer (which made me realize, I hardly ever print anything these days) and printed off the entire thing. I stapled it together, and plopped the thing in the bathroom for some dumptime reading.

I’ll fill ya in once I’ve got the whole thing sorted, OK? Goodnight.

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i’m lovin’ on ya


Good evening my friends. I skipped another day of blogging last night, and it felt good. Today was insane at work, I was quadruple-booked with meetings and running on six hours sleep from a late-night cram session preparing a presentation I presented at 8am. Honestly though, it was a good day – and despite being so overbooked I found some time here and there to entertain some Halloween project themed non-work thoughts. In fact, I’ve been working hard on a brand new Halloween idea over the past week or so. Brainstorming and doing trigonometry to derive angles and physics to calculate loads. Anyway… let’s get to the junk.

One liners:

I’m sick of the word “diva.” There are like two or three shitty, shitty, shitty shows Sharaun watches on TV that use this word to the point it’s silly.

The new Killers finally leaked, trickling onto the internet only a respectable week or so before its street date – not bad. I haven’t had time to listen to it yet, but I’m anxious to hear if it’s really as bad as Rolling Stone says.

Sometimes, I sincerely think I’m “special.” I mean better than you.

Having been camping the past two weekends, I find myself wishing I could get away every weekend. Then, I think about stretching each wilderness-weekend by an additional day, leaving me with a four day workweek. This fantasy snowballs until I’m camping every day and not working at all.

I can’t wait for the day that Keaton can teeter to the door to greet me when she hears me arriving home from work.

I finally got a lead on an Oink invite, both worries and excites me. (If my lead falls through, anyone got one to spare?)

We’re thinking about taking the train to Oregon when we visit my folks for Thanksgiving. It’s a 15hr trip, but I’ve never been on a passenger train before and I think it could be rad.

I wasn’t going to ever mention Lonelygirl15 again, but I figured since Stewart brought her up on the Daily Show – it was an opportune time to mention that I’m totally still following the whole Cassieiswatching alternate reality game thing… though I’m beginning to suspect it’s some elaborate fan fiction…

Goodnight folks, I’m lovin’ on ya.

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let’s go barefoot


Monday night and I’m mad it’s already 8:30pm and here I am just getting started writing, more mad because I’m doing my best to ignore the pile of dishes that I should’ve done first anyway. Sharaun’s at yoga and I put Keaton down about 40min ago. She cried for a minute, and then commenced to cooing and burbling the sweetest babytalk over the monitor. The sounds were like sirens calling a sailors to the rocks, making me want to go in there and talk right back to her or pick her up and swing her around. Sometimes, when I woosh her around in the air in a game where I pretend she can fly like Superman, she pulls her head tight into her body and her little neck ceases to exist. When she smiles like that, the arc of her smile is mimicked in her compressed rolls of chin – making an irresistible compact Ram-Man looking ball of cute. That’s an awesome baby right thur, I’ll tell y’all that…

Hey, wanna chuck this crap in the dustbin and head to the forest? We can bring some food and park the car and go barefoot. Let’s do that, huh? Let’s go barefoot. Because, you know, I get tired of this sometimes, the same desk and the same feigned interest and the same the same the same. So let’s just drop out for a week, put what we need in the car and drive away. We can stay as long as we want, we can wash off in a cold river and wake up to our breath steaming from our nostrils. We can sleep whenever we feel tired and scream if we’re happy. What you gonna say you gotta do, anyway? Ain’t nothing you got here you can’t get there, and ain’t nothing gonna come crashing to Earth while you’re away. Seriously, it’s not even gonna be a thing or anything. Let’s go barefoot.

Spent some time yesterday drafting up the Evite for the annual Halloween party. This being our 4th year running, I was able to lean on previous years’ invitations as templates. I can’t believe we’re closing in on that time of year again, and it only serves to make me worry that I’m running out of time to finish my wolf prop. If you asked me for a progress percentage, I’d have to peg it somewhere right around 50%. I still have to dream up the mechanization – and I’ll admit I don’t have any solid ideas on adapting that old ice cream machine motor to drive the wolves baying heads. I’m confident it’ll all come together though, it usually does. Won’t get much time to work on it this coming weekend, as I’m striking out again on another camping trip with some buddies – this one, however, being more rugged than last week’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink car-camping outing. In a combination 4×4/camp/hike, we’ll be taking some vehicles offroad in honor of Ben getting hitched. With full GPS-enabled tracking and some gorgeous old-California gold country, it should be a blast.

Hey people, hey people c’mon! No, for really. Check out that “blocked spam” counter over there in my sidebar there… I’ll wait… you check it out yet? Do it! OK, for real y’all, as I post this that counter says 99,282 spams have been blocked. I might turn 100k by week’s end. Each one of those spammies means a MySQL transaction that my host has to handle, because each little nasty actually goesinta the database, even if it will later be deleted. I think this is part of the reason my blog goes out lunch sometimes, y’know… just flakes out when it gets overworked. 100k spams, think about that… and that’s not even from sounds familiar “day one” either, I didn’t install Akismet until I was well over a year into writing (up until then I didn’t need Akismet). Dang.

Goodnight.

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neanderthal-moot


Thursday night. The ladies, including Sharaun, went out to have some drinks and talk about shoes and calories and Suri Cruise and shit like that. Meanwhile, back at the Bat Cave, the women suggested the abandoned men come together and have a night of bonding they could call their own. Man bonding, however, doesn’t really involve talking. Just TV watching, a case of Budweiser Select, and a 40-pack of Pizza Rolls. That, and, dad was left to get Keaton down – so I’d wager the women were able to cut loose a little more than our neanderthal-moot. But, let’s get serious y’all, how fun can cutting loose be when it’s comprised of Appletinis and gang-gossiping?

Is it me, or is Halloween now much more merchandised than I remember it being as a kid? I’ve been obsessed with Halloween since I was a kid, but I don’t remember it being anywhere near as commercialized as I see it today. Nowadays, come September, Halloween mega-stores pop up all over the place. They’re full of high-dollar assembly-line form-pressed scare-wares, fake blood and costumes galore. We had nothing like this when I was a kid. We went to Kmart and walked down the one costume aisle; the same aisle where, if you were lucky, there’d be a squeeze tube of fake blood left, and maybe a spraycan of hair color. Don’t get me wrong, I love the new Halloween, love the “made in China” 500% markup props strewn about suburban lawns.

Heck, I remember my brother and I stuffing a pair of dad’s old pants and a long-sleeved shirt with newspaper and old towels. We’d cinch a masked basketball to the stuffed torso, smear the whole thing with fake blood, and hang the whole thing from the basketball hoop. It looked great, right down to the tied-on shoes pretending to house feet. We’d stuff another dummy all broke-bodied into a plastic trashcan, not have light on either when the big night of trick-or-treating came around, and be absolutely giddy about the whole thing. I still like that “pioneer” style Halloween moxie, still like trying to create my own tombstones rather than buying the bulk ones from Target. To end this mess: I’m just glad Halloween is gettin’ the respect it’s so rightly owed.

Tomorrow if Friday, God-blessed Friday. I’m leaving early too, to head out to the coast for a weekend of camping. Since it’s family-style car camping, the normal rules of “primitive” camping are thrown out the window – and we’re free to haul in the big tent, air mattress, and coolers full of beer. Not only that, I can bring the iPod and portable speakers, and Erik’s bringing a small black and white TV so we won’t be college football deprived. I’m looking forward to huddling around a daytime fire to cut the chill, perpetually sipping a beer, and squinting to watch the action on the pitch. Good times.

‘Night.

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it and the was


Wednesday night, and the sparse entries continue as work has been somewhat of a wringer lately. Less time to capture random thoughts into the cellphone as that night’s blog ideas, or something. Or less desire to sit here writing them. Something like that. Going camping this weekend over by the sea, that’s called “coastal,” y’all (not “coastal” like the Florida slang-for-cocaine “coastal,” but real-life on-the-coast coastal). Supposed to be pretty chilly and windy, somewhere in the 40s. Guess we’ll have to huddle-up in the tent at nights. I’m looking forward to it as a slight getaway, and hoping it gives me that release. Moving on…

Sharaun and I have decided to pull out all the stops for our first Keaton-havin’ Halloween party. Not really for the party, but for us… as we’re planning to fly my folks in as babysitters. I just didn’t feel comfortable pressing forward with the planning while the question of who’d be watching Keaton lingered. Knowing my folks’ll be here and with her that night makes me feel much better about planning my yearly apex of personal debauchery. Although the party is actually pretty mild as parties go, I feel better with Keaton in good hands. Plus, my folks are planning to stay a couple extra days to hang out – and I’m glad they’ll get this “tweener” time (between regularly scheduled holiday visits) with Keaton. She’s changing so much, I know if I only got to see her every few months it’d be a different little person each time. For that reason, I wish we were closer to our parents. That, and we wouldn’t have to buy plane tickets to get grandparent-babysitters for our Halloween bash. Nah, I’m just effin’ with ya… it’s really the sentimental one.

I’m so excited for Fall and Winter to officially be here, for all these, and more I likely couldn’t think of, reasons:

  • Seeing Keaton in thick, snuggly, long-sleeved shirts and warm comfortable pants for the first time ever
  • Turning on our fake gas-powered fireplace
  • Grey rainy days spent inside wearing sweatpants
  • Halloween (Keaton’s first, by the way)
  • The smell of the air on a cold, dew-damp morning
  • Taking Keaton’s first pictures in a pumpkin patch
  • Not having to mow the lawn for months at a time
  • New albums getting “stuck” as wintertime albums in my head
  • Keaton’s first Christmas

Yeah, it’s gonna be awesome.

I was thinking the other night about how it’s sometimes hard to find certain bands on filesharing networks/sites. I’m talking about bands with very short, non-standard, or ridiculously common elements to their names. Most search engines have trouble with strings like “and” or “it” or roman numerals and symbols. I think it’d be funny to see and up and coming band “obscure” their work from easy filesharing-fishing by naming themselves “It and The Was,” their album as “I Be,” and simply naming their tracks as incremental roman numerals, I, II, III, IV, etc. Try weeding out the results for something as search-string un-friendly as that.

Goodnight folks, I love ya.