Halloween 2010: The Recap

Well, here it is now, several weeks since Halloween...and I've barely blogged at all about the night itself. This whole season (and pretty much the whole year) has been the most hectic in my memory. It's been a non-stop ride...and SO much has fallen by the wayside in the process. My job decided to have inventory the weekend of Halloween, so all of October was a mad-dash to prep for that. Hours upon hours at work conspired to infringe on time I'd usually spend shopping for props, or working on set pieces for the yard. The saddest piece of news is that my poor ol' scarecrow is still in pieces. I actually worked on him several times throughout the year, but I always seemed to run out of time, or have technical complications that set me back to square one. I knew when we got a week out that it just wasn't going to happen again this year. The only consolation I take is that I actually DID get some work done on him, and that I learned a whole lot from my mistakes.



This was hardly an isolated incident though, with so many of my plans never coming to fruition, or turning out half-@$$ed. Halloween day itself I was scrambling to get things into place, and still had to cut corners left and right. Many things went off without a hitch, while others were...interesting. My fog chiller worked like a charm...but the wind kicked up to blow it away almost as fast as it came out! I had a group of punks steal several props from my yard the night before, but I actually managed to figure out who had stolen them and get them back in time (this was the first year I've had to deal with this, and it irritated the crap outta me)! All of this led to me rushing with my costume, which turned out somewhat decent in spite of the lack of prep time.



All of this made me fear that Halloween itself was going to be a disaster. Despite a week of cooler temps, the 31st the barometer shot back up into the 80's. I've dealt with hotter Halloweens, but I still would have liked things to be a bit crisper, the way they had been the previous week. Well, despite ALL of the crap you're reading here, I can say that my fears that I was starring in a production of National Lampoon's Halloween Vacation were unfounded. Halloween itself was actually a wonderful night. My son and his buddies got dressed up, and had a blast running up and down the street scaring everyone. My costume was actually well-received, with many teenagers and younger adults running in fear from me! The younger kids seemed to dig it as well, though they didn't seem scared at all! In fact, I had one little girl, about four years old or so, walk up to me and say "are you a vampire"? When I answered in the affirmative, she smiled and said "I like your teeth!". Now that is just awesome! In fact, I think that alone made up for all of the crap I had dealt with earlier in the day.



So, another year down, and no...it wasn't everything I had hoped for. Most of the pics we took didn't turn out at all (really need a new camera. Here's hoping Santa is generous this year), and many of the plans I had just had to be dropped outright. Still, I have to say that I am still happy with how things turned out on the whole. My lighting improved greatly this year, I successfully completed a prop I had wanted to do forever...and it only took about five bucks to do it (more on that in an upcoming blog), and, most important of all, the kids had fun! Oh, and so did I!