Unpleasant Projects

As I often do in November, I have started to plan out what I want to accomplish for the upcoming Halloween.  I have a few props that need to be re-worked as they are either flat-out broken or else they are in very rough shape and are on their way to becoming broken.  Two such props are the Monster-in-the-Box (broken) and my cemetery entrance columns (looking haggard).

I have also started to organize my ideas for new items as well as the direction I want to go in for this year.  These are things that I will be keeping under wraps for now as I will better know what I can conceivably accomplish as time marches on, plus where’s the fun in spoiling the surprise. 

Halloween was fantastic this year!  We had great weather, help from great friends and had some good neighbors come through the haunt.

We wound up with about 150 trick or treaters in total.  We lost count somewhere after 100.  We had 100 treat bags stuffed and handed them out pretty quickly so my wife had to stuff more on-the-fly as more kids came up the walk.

There were a few problems along the way.  The monster in the box’s motor died three quarters of the way through the night and the kicking legs I had under my lawnmower stopped kicking almost right after I set them up.

Now comes the hard part… packing it all up.  I don’t mind the work it takes to pack it up, but I do find the whole process depressing a little.  It signals the end of my favorite day of the year and the beginning of the cold weather here in Massachusetts.  It will be cold from now until late April.

I can’t believe Halloween is tomorrow night!  I have just about everything set up and ready to go, but I am still yet to write and record the pirate skeleton’s dialog for this year.  I always seem to put this off until the last minute but this year it’s REALLY the last minute.  I guess I work better under pressure.

It’s been a hell of a hectic month trying to get everything set up on time.  My work schedule this year was NOT conducive to building many new Halloween props, but regardless I think I did very well.

With tomorrow likely being insanely hectic, I will do my best to take photos.  My wife and her cousin Laura will be helping out to finish setting up, so that should take some of the usual pressures off of my shoulders.  They are the best. 

Later, my friends Eric and Derek (rhymes?) will be around to help scare people.  It will be a grand old time.

Since I’m not likely to post again until after the big night, I hope everybody out there has a happy and safe Halloween!!!

We had an unfortunate incident over the weekend. The high winds on Saturday night literally picked up our canopy and blew it clear across the yard. It was anchored to the ground very well, so it was quite a bit of a surprise to have seen it careening over the back yard lawn.

The canopy was set up as a fortune teller’s tent, but with no tent I needed to come up with a cheap and somewhat simple “Plan B.”  To replace our delapidated canopy, I am building a 10′ x 10′ shack out of pallets.  Pallets are free from my place of work, so why not?  Plus, with some shredded burlap strung over it, it really looks very eerie at night.  Here is my progress as of this afternoon:

Beginning of the pallet shack

Unpleasant Street 2008 Flyer

I don’t know if I mentioned this or not, but this past summer I got a notice from the town of Pembroke informing me that my posting of flyers on telephone poles around my neighborhood went against the town’s bylaws concerning such things.  A copy of the towns laws were included with the notice as well as a phone number I had to call in order to work something out with the town of Pembroke.  According to them, my flyers made the town unattractive.

I procrastinated making the call.  Just this week my wonderful wife took some initiative and called them.  While the town won’t allow me to post flyers on the telephone poles (which, oddly enough other seem to be able to do without any incident) they would be fine with my applying for a permit which would allow me to solicit my neighbors to put signs on their lawns at a distance of no less than 10′ back from the street.

Screw that.  The permit is free, but for me to have lawn signs printed at a print shop would be expensive.  If I had the time, I would craft my own hanted signs out of foam, but that may be something for next year being that I really have to just concentrate on finishing the set up of this year’s haunt.

To still get the word out about my haunt, I’m going to query local business if they would allow me to post a flyer on their windows (another of the town’s suggestions).  I have one flyer in the hands of the local 99 Restaurant (where I spend loads of money annually) and will be hitting up the local party stores and a few other restaurants tomorrow.

This year was my first full-color endeavor.  I got the idea from HauntForum member RobotParts earlier this year when he posted a party invite he had done in the style of a 50’s horror comic.  He wound up not going with the idea, but I liked it so much that I decided to run with it.

With a title like that you would think I would be talking about zombies in this post.  Nope.

One of the projects for the Mad Scientist’s lab was a brain and some eyeballs in a fish tank.  The brain is to be “connected” to an oscilloscope showing that the brain is still “alive.”

This was a fairly easy project that only had one real hurdle… finding a way to suspend the brain and eyeballs in the water.  You see, the brain and eyes I used float, which was a problem.  I overcame it by cutting a sheet of thin plexiglass that was the same size as the footprint of the tank.  I then drilled a series of small holes into the plexiglass that I then fed fishing line through.  I tied the brain and eyeballs to the fishing line and glued the plexiglass to the bottom with some aquarium sealant.  When the tank is full of water, the fishing line prevents the brain and eyeballs from floating all the way to the top and therefore keeps them suspended in the tank.

Here are some photos of the completed project:

Brain in Fish Tank

Close up of Brain

I don’t reall know who Murphy was and why a “law” was named after him, but I hate him.

I intended to spend an hour or two assembling some new LED spotlights this morning and then move on to other things this afternoon, but instead I have already spent two hours dealing with Murphy.

To start, I couldn’t find my side cutters.  I can find my big wire cutters for electrical projects, but they’re too big and clumsy to use on a small project so I need my small side cutters.  I had to make an unplanned trip to Lowe’s to get a pair.

It gets better.  Lowe’s doesn’t seem to have smallish cutters except for in a set with other pliers and cutters.  All I want is a pair of cutters.  Not pliers… just cutters.  Rather than trek 5 miles to go to Radio Shack, I just put down the money for the set.

Next… I get home and put my solder tip to the circuit board to solder and the solder won’t melt.  Great.  My iron is busted.  I’ve always had a little trouble with this iron where it sometimes won’t work.  All that I have ever had to do is just unplug it for a few minutes and plug it back in and it would work again.  Well, not this time.

I finally bit the bullet and opened it up.  Being the problem was intermittent, I knew it had to be something stupid like a bad solder joint or a disconnected wire.  It turned out that when my iron’s control board was assembled, a wire was soldered and the end wasn’t cut flush, so the end of the wire was laying across a copper trace essentially shorting the circuit to ground.  A quick cut (with my new cutters) and all is good again.

Now, back to the action.  Hopefully Murphy will stay out of my business this time or I may have to hurt him.

I made some more progress setting up this weekend.  Yesterday (Sunday) I started setting the Mad Scientist’s Lab up.  I set up a table with an oscilloscsope and a bleeding head in a jar (I got from Spencer’s a few years ago).

I also built a stand for the 20 gallon fish tank that I will be putting a brain and eyeballs in.  The challenge here is that the eyes and the brain float, so I need to anchor them to the bottom some how.  I’m thinking of tying them down with fishing line to a sheet of plexiglass that will be glued to the bottom.

Finally, I managed to start setting up the back deck as a pirate ship deck.  I put out all the crates and barrels and will be (hopefully) setting up the skeletons this week too.

Yesterday I “pretended” to be an electrician.  I added five new outlets inside the shed so I don’t have to run extension cords all over the place.  The mad scientist’s lab I’m setting up in there requires electricity in more places than any of my past themes have so rather than run unsightly extension cords everywhere, I took the one outlet in there and wired five more outlets off of it.  Now there is an outlet on each wall of the shed with two on the one wall I expect to use the most outlets on.

Now I can really start to set up in there.  hehehe.

Earlier this week I started to set up this year’s mini-walkthrough in the back yard.  If you’ve never been to my yard haunt on Halloween, the mini-walkthrough consists of three sections:

1. The Back Deck - Which contains a scene.  This year the scene is a pirate ship deck.
2. The Pathway - Walking down the deck’s back steps leads to the walkthrough area.  This year, there will be a tent with Gypsy stuff in it, and outside the tent leading up to the third section is a pathway constructed from old wood fencing that will be littered with spider-related items (as well as a scare at the end)
3. The Shed - The final part of the walkthrough is a themed scene inside the shed.  This year it’s a mad scientist’s lab.  The mad doctor in question has been experimenting with bringing the dead to life… with mixed results.

Last year’s pathway was a series of posts with a rope running along them to keep the audience in line.  This year it’s made from old wooden fencing I have kept over the years which should create a more claustrophobic feeling.

Progress thus far:

Back Steps

Pathway