Haunted House - Year 3

We put on our haunted house for Halloween for the 3rd year in a year and we had a huge turn out. Not only that, it was a bunch of fun for us too.

But first, Luann took this picture at work of a lady whom characterized herself as the original 'Hooters Girl'. Love the glasses...

Remember, if you want to see a larger version of any of these pictures, just click on it and it will expand to a larger size.

Here is the begining of our 'haunted house'. We tend to make it something of an open-air design because we don't want the parents to get too nervous when they send their kids into the 'unknown'. We saw more than a couple of parents walking down the side of the setup to make sure 'junior' made it through intact.

This is one of the new elements we put in for this year. Good 'ole inflatable Dracula here actually lays down every so often and the coffin lid closes over him. Then after about a 20 second pause, the coffin lid opens and he sits up. What is really neat is that it has lights inside the coffin and inside the body so you can see it real well at night.

And, here is part of our crew, helping out with the setup. It took us 4-5 hours to get everything into place.

And, here is yet another new element for this year... I like this inflatable spider because every so often, he would move his head to one side or the other. I can't remember how many times I saw a kid jump because this thing moved... Just like Dracula, the spider has lights in it so you can see it jerking around when it was dark out.

So, the sun is going down and the teenagers are starting to get into their costumes. They had a good time escorting the little kids through the haunted house area, giving out candy and scaring the older kids who thought that there wasn't anything worth screaming about. Until they were stalked by one of our concealed 'beasties', that is...

As a reward for helping us out and to feed our non trick-or-treater guests, Luann put together this little table full of goodies. We decided to use the catering services of one of our favorite Cuban restaurants up the road to make up the sandwiches for us.

Yeah, things are beginning to take shape as the sun sinks in the west.

The kids are poised for the fun as I'm kind hidden behind them as I'm busily setting up the projector for the slide show I used last year and the "Nightmare Before Christmas" movie we will show tonight.

Elena stopped by with her daughter Natasha, whom helped out with giving out candy to the kiddies.

Eventually, Karen showed up with her boys, Brendan and Kyler, so they could do some Trick-Or-Treating in our neighborhood. And did I mention her new boyfriend, Tony? He came along for some fun and we talked for a while about all kinds of things, like football and stock car racing.

Yeah, this picture was taken during a slow moment, which didn't happen very often.

Well, here comes some more visitors for some fun and (more importantly) the candy at the end of the driveway.

Here is a picture showing the crowds that lined up to have a go at the haunted house. They even pushed strollers through the door and kept right on heading towards the candy bowl at the back...

And then, there was the projection show with chairs lined up so parents could take a load off while their kids practically ran through the haunted house.

And when Melissa's parents stopped by, they decided to watch the show for a while.

Whereupon, Melissa finally showed up and watched the movie with them for a while.

If you click on this picture, you can see that there were people all over the place, and it was tough for cars to make it down the street with so many people coming to the haunted house and/or watching the show on the screen.

We even had a stilt-walker come down the road and he started messing around with the kids waiting in line to go through the haunted house. Nice getup.

And, this would be the last picture we took as it's now 10:00 PM.

This is about the time that the kids pretty much stopped coming by, so we decided to break down the haunted house. The whole setup has been designed so that it only took 1 hour to take everything down and pack it all away. By 11:00 PM we were done and everybody started heading home. Whew! It was hot and steamy tonight (but it wasn't snowing) and not everything went off perfectly, but we had so many people thank us for our hard work that we're planning on doing it again next year.

Halloween Party At Conni & Steve's

We attended Conni and Steve's Halloween party and had a great time. Here are a couple of pictures, I'll tell about it in a bit.

Obviously, Brad & Katrina came along with us.

This year, Luann decided she wanted to be a 'House Fly', so I made this getup for her.

Of course, it sure was hard to sit around the house, when you're this kind of house fly...

Ah, our hosts, Conni & Steve.

And here is Jennifer. She looks really neat in her pink costume. "Smile for the birdy!"

Karen brought her boyfriend Tony, along.

Just mugging for the camera. Look at those smiles!

The out-back area of Steve & Conni's Halloween party. I tell you, they go all-out
for this affair.

The screened-in area where people can sit and chat to their heart's content.

Everywhere you turn, there is some kind of Halloween-themed decoration.

Just sititng around as the evening begins to wind down.

Just a couple of thematic photos.

I see you down there!

Yeah, the kids are getting tired, time to go home and tuck them into bed...

It's A Small Matter

So, I've been doing better and have recovered somewhat from my high fever / sore throat / aches and pains episode and when we got home from work last night, Luann went to check the mail. Unfortunately, there was a creepy-crawly critter in the box when she opened it and she called me over to extract it. Since the mailbox can be fully opened up with a key, I asked Luann to bring the key from in the house and I would open it up and take care of the critter.

A couple of minutes after she walked into the house, I heard a high-pitched, chirpy-screechy kind of sound and looked up just in time to see that a hawk was flying about 6 feet up at the middle of the intersection and had just grabbed some kind of a small bluebird in mid-flight with one talon. This could be considered to be something of an amazing thing to see or experience, but since the hawk was now flying towards me with this micro-sized banshee clutched in it's one talon, I figured that things probably weren't quite so amazing to the little blue fella whom seemed like he was going to end up as hawk food this evening.

As this was passing through my head, the hawk looked to be having trouble maintaining hold onto his prey because he quickly lost altitude while he tried to get his other foot on the bluebird. At this point, the hawk was about 10 feet away from me and closing, so I made a quick decision as I stepped out into the street, waved my arms and shouted "Hey!". This produced the desired result, as it caused the hawk to 'flinch' away from me and drop the still screeching bluebird on the grass across the street from where I was standing.

To be honest though, the hawk didn't seem to be all that concerned with me because he landed in a tree above and to one side of where he dropped the bluebird. In other words, he might have dropped his dinner, but he wasn't going to give it up that easy! Well, he didn't realize who he was dealing with, because I stalked over to the tree right up underneath the hawk, pointed at him and yelled; "Get outta here!" Now, I didn't believe at all that this hawk had any idea what I said, but he seemed to get the point as he immediately lit out of the tree and flew down the block with alacrity.

With the threat gone, I turned my attention to the bluebird who had somehow ended up wedged into the bottom of the chain-link fence in the yard across the street. Somewhere in the middle of this, Luann had come walking up and was wondering what I was doing, figiting at the bottom of the neighbor's fence and all you can hear is this poor little bluebird screaming for his life, unaware that I was just trying to help him to live for yet another day. After a little poking and prodding, I was able to work him through the fence and as soon as he realized he was free, he instantly quieted down and immediately shot away from the fence.

When I turned around, there was Luann asking what I was doing.


Now, this story has a few emotional twists and turns in it and I do wonder if I shouldn't have meddled in the affairs of the avian world, but this situation brought to mind a story I had heard a while back...


It seems that an old man was walking along the beach one morning when he came across a little boy picking up starfish and tossing them back into the sea. When they came within speaking distance, the old man asked the little boy why he was throwing the starfish back into the water, to which the boy replied; "I'm saving them".

The old man scoffed and said; "There are literally thousands of starfish washed ashore along this beach. How can you possibly believe that what you are doing could mean anything?"

The little boy bent over, picked up yet another starfish and threw it as far as he could into the sea, then he said; "To that one, what I'm doing means alot!"

Many times, it's not the big things that we do in life that matters. More often than not, it's the action of doing something for others, even if it doesn't seem like such a big deal, that means so much to so many.

A Rough Weekend...

It seems that I wasn't feeling well when I left work on Friday and by the time we got home, I basically went right to bed. When I woke up Saturday morning, I had a temperature that was hovering near 104 degrees. After a while, the fever seemed to break and I was feeling a little better, but as the day wore on, the fever came back with a vengeance. It rose back up to near 104 degrees, and everything hurt, to include a massive headache. This continued on throughout the night, with Luann checking on me every couple of hours. She actually admitted that she couldn't sleep because she thought that things seemed so severe that I might not make it through the night.

Well, at about 6AM, the fever broke again and after yet another dose of Dayquil, I'm feeling like I went through Hell, but I'm still here...

Went To A Geoevent Tonight After Work

We decided to go to a geo-event hosted by Captain Biggins. It turns out that the location was at an Irish pub, and thye were hosting an 80's trivia contest. We had a bunch of fun playing the game and when the smoke finally cleared, Team Cachers came out the winners. Of course, the winnings were in "Pub-Dollars' and the only way to 'spend' them was buy things off of the menu. Considering that their menu is very good, that isn't such a bad thing.

While we were at the geoevent, geocachers SusanRon came by and presented us with a geocoin they had picked in their travels up north. It turns out, the coin is a memorial coin that my brother Jody had launched in Minnesota. Now we're going to have to take the coin to the places we used to go to when we were kids and move it through the Miami geocaches on Jody's list. This is going to be fun!

And To Think It Happened Right Here...

Well, a police manhunt / car chase ended right in front of our house. We heard the police helicopter circling overhead and when we went outside, there were 7 police cars scattered across the intersection at the corner of our house. Here are a couple of pictures I fired off.

We counted 6 marked cars and an unmarked one too.

All we could see was that they had this guy in handcuffs.

And then there was all of this drum equipment stacked on the grass next to this green Ford T-bird right by the guy in handcuffs. Not sure what it was all about, but the 'chopper' was still searching for something/somebody in the neighborhood. Not much else happened after this, so we have no further news to report. The cops then loaded the guy into a cruiser, the chopper faded off in the distance, and things slowly returned back to normal...

So, how was your evening?

A Cool Day For 'Caching'

We went out with Karen and Kylor and found 7 geocaches on this nice, cool fall afternoon. We started off by dropping the car off in a park where we have one of our geocaches, then started walking down the bicycling path that ends up in the park.

This is the first stage where we actually couldn't find it, then came back to look for it after looking for the other caches up the path, then we looked for it on the way back (found it!).

Of course, you know we had to photograph everything in sight.

You know, like a bee assaulting a flower...

But, we can't let that get in the way of our geocaching!

But, we had so many photo-ops too!

At this point, we were looking for a geocache and the only reason we were sure that it was here somewhere is because there were some artificial plants tied up into the tree. Can you see the plastic leaves?

And of course, Nature was curious about what we were doing...

Looking for and finding geocaches, of course.

At one point, we even came across these vultures and I wonder what they all found to be so interesting to their left? Roadkill, perhaps?

Even a butterfly was willing to hold still long enough for us to get a shot of it.

At this point, I was trying hard to get a picture of a bumblebee working on these yellow flowers.

It looks like I did ok...

Oh, did I mention we were looking for geocaches? Karen, Kylor and Katrina were doing great (it was a 'K' day, what can I say?)

They say it's bad luck if a black cat crosses your path.... What do they say about black vultures?

Ah, another floral display caught our eye!

And as we made our way through the park back to the car, I came across this hornet's nest where thay were hanging on for dear life because it was very windy. Not a great shot, but it shows that you need to be vigilant on your daily stroll.

And here we are at the final shot of the day. Our geocaching day was nice, the weather was windy yet cool, and Nature was out & about for us to photograph. A fine day indeed.