Halloween Time Line

8:00AM - We rose early to prepare food. Not only are we having people here tonight to help with the Trick or Treaters, we have a potluck going on at church and Susan is preparing something for that.

So we race around all morning and get ready for church.

9:15 to 12:00 Noon - Church

Noonish - We have returned from church after a lovely Italian style potluck meal, so we are not hungry and can begin the set up. I've made a few calls to people who are coming tonight and now I am off to the store.

We spent the rest of the afternoon getting our props set up. Our friend Mark came over and assisted so it went pretty fast.

Our candy inventory is as follows:

468 Full Size Candy Bars

646 Fun size Candy Bars

520 Twizzlers

4:45PM - The first Trick or Treater arrives and we start lighting up the pumpkins. After the first, the throng begins to develop. The weather was perfect although a touch cool. We had over 1,500 pieces of candy starting with over 400 full size candy bars. Then about 500 fun size and ending with Twizzlers.

Here are some pictures.

Our neighbor to the west had a clicker at the door and counted over 1,400 kids. Our neighbor down the street to the east counted 1, 059. I'm saying it was somewhere in the middle.

Hee is a video of Susan as the Witch.

One final comment for Trick or Treaters. When you approach a house, and there aren't any lights on out front, DO NOT ring the door bell, knock on the door, ring the doorbell again, knock again. Get the EFFING hint! We are out of candy!

It is now almost 10:30PM and we are beat. Everything has been cleaned up and we will put everything away over the next few evenings.

Many thanks to our fabulous crew of helpers, Mark, Ron, Kelly, Don, Rob, Olga, Alec and Natalie. It would have been a nightmare without you.

So ends Halloween Twenty Ten!

Carving Savant

We are getting pretty good at carving pumpkins. When I say "We", I mean Susan. Pictured below is a pumpkin she carved last night. This picture was taken with the flash so you can see the pumpkin and the carving.

The next picture is the same pumpkin without the flash. It's amazing how no light sheds a whole new light on the carving. It's also amazing that I can turn such a wicked phrase...and all just before Halloween. It's positively Ghoulish!

Unfortunately, this is a really pumpkin and not one of our fake craft pumpkins, so this design will be rotting away in days. It's a good thing to have it captured here for all of InterWeb Eternity.

The day ended with our traditional Neighborhood Halloween gathering. We just stayed at one place this year and everyone had a good time and drank too much wine.

Now it is time to prepare for the main event!

Soggy Today

It has been raining all night and continues this morning. The forecast is not looking promising for the Halloween Trick or Treating Festival of Frightening Festivities. Some forecasts I have heard have said that it should stop raining around 5PM Sunday, but I think they are just being chicken shit and not brave enough to admit the truth.

Whatever the conditions, we will be out there dispensing the full size candy bars until they run out (Estimated to run out at 6:37 PM) and then the fun size candy bars until they run out (Estimated to run out at 7:58PM)and then the individually wrapped twizzler sticks until they run out (Estimated to run out at 9:02PM) and then we are done.

The rain is going to severely limit some of the motorized and mechanized decorational bedeckalments of horror we normally place in the yard. Rain will not be good for our flying ghost or screaming Zombie.

The other thing to get figured out is our ancillary party going on in the background of friends who come by to help us hand out candy to the throngs of urchins.

In other Neighborhood Halloween news, we ttraditionally have a neighborhood Halloween Party on the Friday before Halloween. It's usually the adults of the neighborhood who are into Halloween and are social. We normally do it at three different houses...appetisers, main course, and dessert.

This year, nobody offered up their houses so we have parred it down to one location, the B&B, and appetisers on Saturday night. We'll see what happens!

Forecasting for All Hallow's Eve

It is Thursday and the forecasts are beginning to come into focus for the Sunday Halloween Festivities. It seems it is going to be rainy. Like elections, Halloween turnout could be lighter because of the weather. But you don't get a candy bar after voting so Halloween is really nothing like an election.

Speaking of elections, I will be glad when next Tuesday arrives and we can stop listening to and watching of the unbelievable deluge of campaign lies, half truths, rhetoric and just plain Bullshit that we are subjected to every day. One commercial comes on touting what a loser bitch bastard Dino Rossi is and then it is followed by a commercial detailing what a scheming, scum sucking waste of skin Patty Murray is. I am quickly becoming lost and jaded because there is no room for the advertisers to tell what car to buy or beer to drink. I often think that Politicians believe we the people are stupid and easy to pander to, but when I see the campaign season kick in, I know they believe it.

Back to Halloween! I'm just hoping we can have a somewhat dry evening as five o'clock approaches. I'll keep the updates coming.

The Adventures of Franco & Cindy

I was out on Sunday running some errands and noticed a woman on a corner of Division and Foothills begging for money from the passing cars. She was 40 to 50ish with a thin hard face. On an adjacent corner, there was a guy doing the same thing. I have seen this guy before. He too looked close to 50 and hard. He stakes out these two corners and has been there off and on for over a year. He's pretty animated as he looks at you and holds up his hand gesturing for just a little bit....whatever you got...help a brother out!

I was puttering in the yard a couple of hours later when the same couple approached and asked if I wanted the yard raked. They carried this really crappy spindly rake that someone had cast off. I didn't really want the yard raked because there are a lot of leaves yet to fall. Then again, it is good to stay in front of the leaf deluge. So I offered Franco and Cindy $40.00 to clean it up. It took them about an hour and a half to get it done. It was a mess two hours later when the sky opened up and poured down hail and rain for about ten minutes.

I bring this up because I never give money to people begging on the streets. I am however, happy to help someone out who is willing to work for it. But I think I may have created a problem for myself. It seems that if you help someone out then they feel much more free to return to offer more help. I was stringing up some Halloween lights last night when Franco came by to see if I had anything else for him to do. I told him, "Sorry! Nothing today!"

"How bout tomorrow then?" he immediately asked.

I then had to do the thing I hate...be firm. "No! I'm not going to have anything for a while and I'll probably finish the clean up myself."

"Well, I can help" he asserted.

"I'm not made of money here. It'll probably just be my wife and myself."

I'm sure I disappointed him but I am confident I haven't seen the last of him. But he probably won't be by for a week of so.

So now it brings up the issue of helping these people at all. How much of an extra pain in the ass am I going to have to deal with now that Franco sees me as a possible meager meal ticket. It would be sooooo much easier to help the poor if they weren't so...you know...poor!

The Sixth Annual Pumpkin Carving Party

We have again successfully carried off another Pumpkin Carving Party and Competition. It was another wonderful evening with friends that we see too seldom. I think everyone had a good time and we accomplished the goal of getting most of our eleven pumpkins turned to Jack-o-Lanterns.

There was once again more than enough food and the house looks pretty good with a majority of our decorations out. In another week, it will all be over for another year.

It was a rainy weekend and it appears that is going to be the case through the week. It's still too early to figure out what it will be like on Halloween so I'm not going to worry about it. The only problem with rain is that it limits some of our decorations. And it is slightly more miserable to be out there handing out candy.

Here are some pictures of the event.








Our winners this year were Dave for the Funniest, John for the Scariest, Zak for Most Creative, Hailey for the Best of Show, and Katie for Most Inept Use of a Knife. You can see Hailey above working on her creation.

Finally, I have a one minute video to offer up of the Scary Halloween House.

Wine Whine

We have too many grapes and not enough grape places. I'm going to need to start the fermentation of the grapes in two buckets.

Wait! I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's step back a couple of nights.

Tuesday night, Susan and I set about the task of removing the grapes from the stems and and crushing them for fermentation. I had planned on renting a crusher from Jim's Home Brew but he doesn't do that anymore. So we had to do it by hand. That ended up taking almost four hours. It was quite the drudgery and suddenly made us appreciate making wine from a kit.

One hundred pounds of mashed up grapes will not fit in my standard six gallon fermenter. So I am going to the Depot today and purchasing one of their five gallon orange Depot Buckets to divide the grapage into. It will require a small modification in order to add a vapor lock but that is no big deal.

Another item I have been ignoring is our batch of Blueberry wine that we started a couple of months back. It has been patiently sitting there doing it's aging thing. I think I need to do something to it, at least rack it to a fresh fermenter, but I haven't made the time to do it. This may be the reason our wine comes out so good. I don't pay close enough attention to it and it has to fend for itself.

In the meantime, we are in the midst of a high tension Susan Cleaning Frenzy as we approach Sunday's 5th Annual Pumpkin Carving Contest/Partay. Halloween is just over a week away and we are woefully prepared...except for candy. We are covered there! Of course, you can't have too many candy bars.

If You Guessed...

We have just returned from a quicky road trip in honor of our Sexth Wedding Anniversary. We drove to Prosser, WA to taste some wine and bring home some grapes for Home Wine Making. We were successful on both counts. We were a little too successful yesterday with the wine tasting. Upon returning to our room, Susan slept for four hours. It might be more accurate to say she passed out but that sounds so harsh.

Anyway, we bought 12 bottles of wine from a variety of wineries, some Cougar Gold cheese, and 100 pounds of Zinfandel grapes. We are going to try and process them tomorrow but it is going to be a busy week.

When we got home, the house was quite chilly and this meant it was time to end the Furnace Contest. This year, we blew the record out of the water by eight days. Officially, the boiler was lit at 5:00PM on Monday October 18th, 2010! We are now awaiting the warming of the radiators and thereby, the warming of the house. I'm taking everything up to 70 degrees tonight in order to bleed any more air from the radiators and make sure there are no leaks.

Leaks are bad. Almost as bad as no heat!

Furnace Ready but Still Off

The furnace is ready to go. I filled the system last night, checking for any possible leaks along the way. I started to re-attach the last radiator but decided at the last second to leave it out of the system for this year. If we really have trouble heating the TV Room, I may have to reconsider. But we spend so little time in there compared to the kitchen, it just doesn't seem to make sense to worry about it for now.

The gas is still turned off so the Furnace Game is still in place. I hope to go just a few more days and really blow the record out of the water. Every day it is powered down is another day to save money for beer.

The Start of Halloween House

While Ron and I were working on the carpet last Sunday, Susan went to work on Halloween decorating in the house. I finally got around to addressing the issue on the outside last night. I haven't gotten very far. Just the lights around the porch. Of course, our plan is that it grows as Halloween approaches.

I was very impressed with myself while I was stringing the lights. I put them away last year in a very orderly and neat fashion, totally contradictory to my normal disposition. It was a breeze to pull them out and unravel them and put them up straight away. It is as if I am finally becoming an adult. At least as far as Halloween toys are concerned.

The first sign that the Furnace Game contest is coming to a close occurred this morning. Susan asked when I planned on turning on the heat. I'm hoping to make it through the weekend. That means just three more days. That also means I better get that last radiator attached and ready to go.

Here Come da Chill

I am half way to having the radiators connected. I did the easy one last night. Tonight, I will break out the torch and sweat the pipe on the other radiator and then I can fill the system and crank it when needed. As of now, it's not needed, even though the mornings have been very chilly.

It was a very bright and sunny day yesterday and the temperature didn't even make the 60's. Fall is definitely here.

I received the new power bill from the Washington Water Power peoples and through some intense ciphering and adumbrational calculatorial vaticination (I have a thesaurus), I was able to more or less come up with a vague guestimation that it costs approximately $30.00 to operate the hot tub for a month.

I don't know if that is good or bad. Thirty bucks seems like a small price to pay for the wonderful soak I enjoyed last night. I guess we need to use it more to lower our per soak cost to usage ratio. I shall be commissioning a study to more precisely nail down these figures.

Furnace Game

It is getting very close to the time where I will have to turn on the furnace. It was pretty chilly this morning but fortunately, there was carpet on the stairs to swaddle our feet and keep us warm.

According to my records recorded here in the blog, I have beat last years record of October 7th and the all time record of October 9th. While I am pleased to have broken the record thereby saving us money on heat that we can now spend on beer...I am a bit distressed to realize that the heating system is not yet ready to be turned on. I have two radiators that still need to be reattached. One is a piece of cake and will install easily. The other requires my torch and solder, which I think I can do but it remains to be seen.

Here are some more stair pictures.

Another Project Bites the Dust

I had no idea what to expect as far as putting in the stair runner. I didn't know how long it would take or what we needed for tools. Fortunately, I was able to once again call on Floor Guru Ron to guide me through these troubled waters.

As it turns out it was easy. We finished the whole thing in about three hours. The only item we needed was a power stapler, which I rented from the local hardware store for about 15 bucks. That turned out to be the best investment ever as we tore through getting this carpet down.

Once Ron noodled it out, it went really fast.

Here are the associated and obligatory pictures to go with my flowery prose.

We got the little brass keeper bars in place and everything looks great. The carpet adds a lot of sound dampening to going up and down the stairs. Did I mention it looks great?!

I have a little piece of quarter round to add to the bottom step shown above and then the stairs is a completely completed completion of a job.

I'm thinking it will take me about two years to get that quarter round in place.

Leaf Roundup

Mark today as the official start of the Fall Leaf Roundup. Upon returning home ths evening, I broke out the LeafVac 5000 and ran it over a few spots in the front yard. The leaves are just now starting to turn and so they aren't very thick yet. The trick is to keep on top of the damn things. A few minutes each night or as needed and I will conquer these pesky little vermin.

The weather is still hanging in there to allow me to keep the heat off. I still have to get two radiators reconnected, which I will do this weekend. Also, we hope to get the carpet runner installed on the stairs on Sunday as well.

And a quick reminder, we are just over three weeks away from the biggest day of the year on Corbin Park. Get your ghouls ready...it's Halloween!

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass

For those of you who like to rail against giant multi-national corporations and greedy multi-Za-Gillionaires, let me tell you about one who is different. By day he is a wealthy Wall Street Financier. By night he dons a cape and cowl and stalks the underbelly of Goth...wait! That's the wrong guy.

By day he is a wealthy Wall Street Financier. By night, he dons a banjo and fancies himself a bluegrass fan. His name is Warren Hellman and he just put on one of the best three day concerts I've been to.

Susan and I flew out on Thursday to San Francisco. We stayed with our friends the Thompsons and we enjoyed the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park. There were 82 acts on six stages over three days. Let me see if I can list the acts we saw this weekend.

Emmylou Harris, Earl Scruggs, Jerry Jeff Walker, the Avett Brothers, Hot Tuna, the Indigo Girls, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Elvis Costello, Nike Lowe, Sarah Lee & Johnny, Patty Smith, Robert Earl Keen and Hazel Dickens. Others there that we didn't get to see were T Bone Burnett, Randy Newman, Joan Baez, Blue Highway, Rozanne Cash, the Del McCoury Band and a bunch more.

Today's paper said there were 600,000 over the three days and there were 350,000 yesterday. I believe that. It was so packed yesterday there was no space on the lawn that wasn't a person. It was really amazing.

This three day festival was free for everyone except Warren Hellman. He paid the whole bill. It's the tenth year he has paid the full bill and this year he set up an endowment to ensure there will be at least 20 more to look forward to.

It was funny to me that most of the people attending this festival are left wing tree hugging greenies with no desire to associate with corporate big wigs.

A fun time was had by all. By the way, I'm certain I have a contact high from all the reefer that was circulating. I saw more spleefs than I have in 20 years and one was as big as a small torch.

How 'bout some pictures?!

Finally, here's a panoramic video of the Arrow Stage on Sunday when it was perhaps, the most packed in.