Halloween Wrap Up

As mentioned in the last blog, we were beat after a long night of servicing trick or treaters...and scaring them as well. Everything went well and the Axworthy Flying Ghost performed perfectly all night long.

There was one issue with it and I know how to solve it for next year. I plugged one of the fog machines into the same cord that the Flying Ghosts were on. The ghosts would occassionally slow down and sometimes stop. I think power was drawn off when the fog machine engaged. I'll just dedicate an extension cord to the ghosts next year.

I had a mishap earlier in the day during set up. I decided to try and tighten up the line on the Ghosts before setting it up for the evening. I knotted up a new, shorter spacer and while trying to attach it, the line broke. Actually, one of the spinner clips broke. The tight line pulled one of the rings on the spinner clip right out.

So as I was trying to replace the line, I got tangled in it. I must have looked pretty retarded stumbling around the yard, waving my arms at nothing. I ended up with a wad of fishing line that looked like Christmas lights that had been rode hard and put away wet. I think I'm starting to mix my metaphors.

In the course of re-stringing the whole thing, I put a nice sharp knife blade half way through the tip of my pinky.

So blood was not a problem for Halloween.

Anyway, we've spent the last couple of nights stowing all the Halloween stuff. We are almost done. I have to get up on the balcony and get that stuff down.

We had a good time up on the balcony last night. We put four pumpkins up there and our way of bringing them down is to park a garbage can on the sidewalk and try to hit it. I did well with mine but Susan totally missed. What a mess!

I was also using my leaf blower last night to clear off the leaves that have accumulated over the last couple of weeks. In the course of blowing, I uncovered some sort of little electronic unit. At first I thought it was a sport radio or something like that. It turns out that it is a Radar Detector. I stuck batteries in it and tried it out on my way to work this morning. I appears to work. So...SCORE!

We are now estimating that we had over 1,200 kids come through the candy bowl. My neighbors who use a clicker to count the number of kids ended up with 1,135 and they quit at 8:30. We went until almost nine and I'm pretty sure we had at least 65 come by in that time. The number is not really important. I have never seen a mass of Halloween Revelers like the group that annually shows up in our neighborhood.

Here are some pictures from the night. They are not great pics cuz I'm not a great pic taker. And I was busy with stuff. Nevertheless, here they are.

I'm starting to think I'll be needing to add a Technical Supervisor position in years to come. You have to keep the scary CD going, check the ghosts, keep the fog machines filled and scare the kids.

In closing, we would like to thank our many friends who showed up to help with crowd control and candy distribution.