October 1, 2007 - The countdown is on!  I mounted a few metal halide lamps on the sides and front of the house to get yet even more light on the yard each night when we shut down the haunt.  These babies light up the yard like a parking lot!  This weekend I'll start pulling some stuff down and working through it all.  We'll also put up some of the audio wiring and air lines. 

August 2007 - Nasty winds & a toasty summer ate up the tarps that cover our toe-pincher coffin up on the balcony in the "off season".  Covered it back up this month.  Funny - For about 2 weeks there were small pieces of plastic all over the yard.  We'd clean them up, then they'd be back in a day or two.  We couldn't figure out where they were coming from.

November 7, 2006 - Don't believe in monsters?  Hmph.  So where's that missing sock?  That missing bra? "The dryer ate them."  Yeah, that's believable.   We have one or more monsters around here.  He/she/they eat batteries... (lots & lots of batteries), highlighter pens, (they leave the yellow ones and take all the colors), scissors, & scotch tape.    I used to think they would swipe large bills from my wallet, but now I recently realized that was my "guy" gene at work.  Just for the record - I found out that my best fogger (that ended up not working this Halloween (very, very upsetting)), is still under warranty.  Great!!  I was really bummed about this thing dying.  It was literally about 3 times as expensive as my other foggers, so the fact that it was dead was super disappointing, and really helped kill my spirits this year.   Conclusion:  I'm pumped for next Halloween already!

November 1st, 2006 - Uncle Alan, Auntie Beth, Jordan, and Jason, stayed one last day to help us take down our haunt.  Michelle stayed home from work, and Craig was here 90% of the day too.  We also kept Courtney & Andrew out of school for the day to help us get it taken down and packed, and to rest up from a long night.   This was AWESOME!  This many people keeping busy really made it come down fast.  Thank you all so much!!  I honestly don't know what I would have done without the help.  I just could not have done it with my bum back.  For those of you that know us... be prepared to be solicited for some help next year.  Oh yes.  We'll only ask for an hour or so, but now I see how awesome some help is, so I'll be asking for an hour of your time on November 1st, 2007 around 9am or so to help pull some stuff down, sweep up straw, bundle up cords, etc.  This gives you practically a year to come up with a creative excuse not to be here.

October 29th, 2006 - WooHoo!  Last night was the party.  What a blast.  There were tons of funny costumes, neat people, and plenty of drink.  My doc prescribed some fun pain killers for my back, so I decided it was only appropriate to wash them down with beers.   Thank you everyone who attended, and everyone who helped make it happen!  We put a comment book out front for people to sign and leave comments/messages about our haunt.  (We've been planning this for several years, and finally got around to putting it out...)  Comments are great!  We'll post them online in a few months when things slow down.  Our back lawn is now a dirt lot... It never does survive October.   Checking up on the props is always fun when I've been drinking.  Add my bad back, and some meds, and it's really fun.  Uncle Alan blocked off the garage back door to keep their puppy Barney from making  a jail-break, and put up a short fence on the side yard too.  To change the fog-juice for one of the machines, I had to 1) Put my beer down (Need 1 hand for the gallon of fog, and 2nd hand for flashlight 2) Carefully (bad back) climb over the fence  3) Avoid Barney's land mines while staggering around the side yard to the fogger (requires flashlight because it's dark)  4) Change fog fluid, and head back.  Sheesh.   I could have knocked myself unconscious back there, and nobody would have found me until morning.  Tonight is dinner & a show with Alan & Beth.  Looking forward to that.

October 28th, 2006 - Sanchez Family to the rescue!  Michelle's brother Alan & his family (Beth, Jordan & Jason) rolled into town last night for their 2nd year helping us pull off Halloween.  Thank goodness they're here!  Aside from making our weekend totally fun, their help is greatly appreciated.  Uncle Alan is a great builder, so he's taken on the lead of finishing up the decorating inside the house and entryway. Beth whipped up some cupcakes.  All of us went to the kids 2 soccer games today, and then hustled back home to get everything ready for the party.  Craig & his wife were here to help Friday night and Saturday too.  Man, awesome to have everyone here to help.  My back is worse than ever, so there's just no way I could have made it happen without their help.  I've decided my back will magically be better the day after everything is packed up and put away... I'm just being "tested" <grin>  The gremlins are back.  One of our 3 foggers is dead.  The 2nd one does not "cycle".  It just keeps pumping out fog until the heater cools, and re-heats, then does it all over again.  (This is a problem because there is just too much fog), and fogger #3 shuts itself down after running for awhile.  Overheating?? Who knows.  The Ghost Hosts eyes are jacked.  The mounting bracket for the servo that runs them broke, so they're a no-go this year.  Worm-Eater is messed up too.   I have a "No Field Repair" policy for Halloween now, so if it might take a serious repair, it ain't gonna get it until after Halloween.  The pressure mat for the air cannons got messed up last night, but that was pretty easy to fix.

October 24, 2006 - It's Tuesday, and one more day should get up the rest of the yard.  (That just leaves the inside stuff to take care of.)  These past 3 days have been really tough.  Our haunt is taking longer than ever to set up, and it's just getting harder & harder.  My back is trashed.  Not sure why.  I could barely get out of bed this morning.  About halfway through Sunday, Michelle asked me, "So, remind me why we do this?".   I ask myself that question every year about this time.  I'm going to have to re-think some of the stuff to make setup easier.  Fifi isn't too bad because I can mount her command modules inside her dog house.  Plenty of room, lots of wood to fasten to, and it's dry.  Poppa ghoulie on the other hand.  He's exposed, there's no room to mount stuff, and it's really tough.   I sometimes can't figure out what ends up being so frustrating and time consuming, but then I think about how much electronic stuff is actually out there exposed.  We have 9 motor driven things, 3 pneumatic driven things, and that alone makes for trouble.  Poppa Ghoulie alone has 7 different power outlets required to run him.  12 pieces of rebar are hammered in to the ground to hold him down.  He takes me close to a whole day to set him up.  Permanent mounting would be easy, but all of this stuff is temporary. <sigh>  Blah, blah.  I'll quit my bitching.   On a happy note, We had the Green Valley News come by this weekend for photos & interview.  That was fun.  Tons of people are driving by, waving, enjoying the haunt.   Lots & lots of kids in the neighborhood coming by to help and watch.  (Oh yea! - How could I forget!  *THAT'S* why we do it!)  Did I mention it's raining today?  No fun.  Weather report says Sunny for the next 10 days.  Hurray!  We'll keep our fingers crossed.

October 14, 2006 - Our party invites are OUT, and the party confirmations are coming IN!  WooHoo!.  Today it's raining like crazy, and we had some awesome hail too.  Click HERE for the video.   Halloween building is creeping along, but we're still on schedule for setup on October 21st. Should be fun!  We're happy to report the return of a witch to our haunt.  I found a cheap mask at Walmart (only $1.29) so I was inspired to re-build a cool brew-stirring body with to go with it.

Sept 8, 2006 - Hurray!  The bar is done!!  (Took about 2 months) Tough-ass project.  Now I can start playing with Halloween stuff.  There's not alot of time to do too much new stuff, so we're going to do just a few new things, clean up some old ones, and just have fun.  New this year will be "For Sale", some better entryway goodies coming into the house, return of the "Bat-Mover", finish the rebuild on Poppa Ghoulie, and also I volunteered to do the haunted house at the kids school this year.  Should all be fun!

Sept 1, 2006 - 60 days until Halloween, and I haven't started working on stuff yet.  We started building a bar for our living room 2 ½ months ago, and it's still going on.  What a project!  Very, very time consuming.  Believe me, I wish it was done, but it's just taking forever. I've never worked with real wood, or ever tried to make furniture, so it's been quite an experience.  I told myself I would not work on anything Halloween until this bar was done.  Click HERE for bar progress photos.

June 15, 2006 - Guess I had to hit summer before I started getting in the prop-building mood.  I ordered a few things to get stuff rolling.  Ordered 8 gallons of fog fluid (had 3.5 gallons left over from last year) - Rebuilt the stump-jumper into a "Box-Popper".   Started rebuilding Poppa Ghoulie to crouch lower and stand taller.  Sketching ideas on how to improve some of our other props.

May 15, 2006 - No building just yet.  For some reason, I'm just not in the mood to build anything this year.  This will probably pass.  :)

October 1, 2005 - Well, it's been more than a year since I've updated anything, but hey, at least I'm doing it now!  This year the Halloween building began in June.  I was determined to get a few of the bigger projects done early this year.  This year I began using true commercial grade pneumatic cylinders (Bimba) instead of the home-made jobbers I've made in the past.  Wow!!  What a difference!  Way more control.  Much easier to work with too.  (Not cheap though.)  This year I built a full size coffin, which has corpse hands that lift the lid (like in the Conservatory in the Haunted Mansion at D-Land), a "stump jumper" (a dead guy pops up from within a tree stump), a tipping tombstone (tombstone tips to one side with a corpse peeking up from under neath), and more.  I overhauled the Ghost Host, replaced Fifi's home-made pneumatic ram with a Bimba NR, and re-did my sound effects CD from 5 years ago.  There's so much I'd like to do... just not enough time and money to do it all.  I'm really on the ball this year.  My time management has been great.  I have a schedule of what I have to finish and when, and it's really keeping me focused.  I'm especially excited to be going to Knott's Scary Farm in California with folks from "Creep Crafters".  (Creep Crafters is a club of other Halloween junkies like me)

September 21, 2004 - Finally messed some with a "Ghost Projector".  I had purchased one of those cheezy Holiday Projects a few years back with intentions of hacking it and building a projector with rotating mirror to make ghosts fly up the side of the house.  Looks good so far.  More news as I get father into it!

September 19, 2004 - Spent the day modifying the Hitchhiker rigging.  What a job!!  Just to widen the main frame and move some of the pivot points was a whole day project.   Works great through!

September 10, 2004 - We finally gave the website a facelift.  We've just been too lazy to take care of it before now.  Enjoy!

September 2, 2004. - Halloween is less than 2 months away!  I've already shifted into gear, and now pretty much every weekend until Halloween will be spent drilling, cutting, painting, and the works.  We've come up with some new and fun things for our haunt this year.
* We'll be retiring our first pneumatic prop, the Grave Riser, and replacing him with a wild zombie dog that attacks from the depths of a dilapidated dog house.
*We'll be adding a trio of hitchhiking ghosts to the scene.  As of September 6th, these have been built and are ready to go.  These will be much like our crowd pleasing upstairs ghost.
*The bats return!!  We'll be bringing back our "Flying Bats" on the new and improved "Spook-Mover" 4000.  Last year we did an Axworthy Ghost instead of the bats, and it sucked.  Welcome back bats!
*Some improved movement in the yard this year.  We learned our lesson from the nasty wind we had last year, so this season we'll have some more reliable mechanics running our moving props.
*More (& better) fog!  We ordered new pumps for our fog machines this year (since they seem to clog every year over the summer) and we even picked up an extra fog machine.  We also devised a 3 chamber fog chiller with over 75 feet of copper coils and 3 water pumps to cool our fog.  Should be low to the ground and just right!

August 2004 - Halloween building is underway!!  We've already started with some great new projects!

October 29, 2003 - Well, this year was a bit of a handfull.  We've been plagued by wind, misbehaving props, clogged foggers (2 of our 3 were shot, and we didn't test them until October 29th) and we've definitely had our fill already.  Our new cemetery entrance gates look great, but we've had "accidents" twice now and they've needed some time consuming repairs each time.  Not fun when time is a premium.  Wednesday the 29th was "Judging Night".  It was a windy day, and a few of our mechanical props were messed up from the wind blowing the fabric of the prop clothing into the mechanism jamming it up.  More time.  Less good stuff to look at.  This is a real bummer.  I think we may have lost our chance to place in the contest.  Our fog/smoke also looked lame with the wind blowing it away. <sigh>  No fun when it doesn't look good.  Our ghost mover (formerly the bat mover) was a flop.  The motor was just too fast, and the ghost looked stupid in addition to disintegrating as it rounded the turns,  so we scratched that prop.