Happy October! My favorite month of the year!
We have several projects in the works at the house right now, all in varying stages of completion. But the good news is we finally got the driveway sealed before the winter sets in and destroys it more than it already is! And to make a good story even better, while the driveway cures, we have to park across the street and piss off the guy across the street! DOUBLE WIN!
That may make us sound like nightmare-neighbors, but really, we tried.
This summer, the final nail in the coffin was when the jerk screamed at Travis in the middle of the street for 45 minutes in broad daylight about parking in “his spots” because he’d “lived there for 40 years and he’d earned the right to park wherever he wanted.” And we were “punk ass kids with no respect.”
Nope.
I didn’t mean to start off on a rant. I apologize… On with the show!
In the spirit of getting ready for the Halloween party, we’re trying to complete a few projects! Admittedly, I have been working on my Bruno scarecrow for a couple years now. I didn’t touch him at all last year due to our neglect of the entire holiday, but this year I really need to light a fire under my ass and finish him up.
I finally have all of the supplies together. His head is nearly done, and I will actually be making a sort of half-breed of Bruno and the Grumble. Both of which are from an amazing Halloween tutorial blog called Spooky Blue that Travis and I read. I have probably read every single post three or four times. I love this guy! His commentary is priceless:
“A scarecrow, hands on hips like he’s waiting for a bus to take him to Olive Garden where he serves nights while he works on his interior design degree at the community college isn’t scary.”
Also… to go in the graveyard in the front of the house, we’ve been working on building a mausoleum! We’ve wanted to build one since we’ve moved into our house and discovered we get a ton of trick or treaters, but we never had the tools to do so. So we’re about 75% done with that… here’s some in-progress photos!
It’s obviously far from done, but we have a little bit of time left before it has to grace the front yard for our party and for Trick or Treat. I won’t divulge all the details yet, but our little mausoleum will host it’s own ghost. We’ve been trying to come up with a name for our lady-ghost… It is hard work! She may remain nameless until she is placed in her home.
This will be a multi-stage project. We ran out of time to do much more than paint it this year, so we’ll get it to a state where it is just “good enough,” and then we’ll add more detail to it next year.
The year before last, we made The Reaper. He was super easy, just a bolt of burlap that we dyed black in our bathtub. Lord, that was a mess! The tutorial calls for mudding him in the end to make him rigid, but we needed to keep him collapsible so we could fold him up and put him away at the end of the season. So we followed the basic idea of the instructions, but really ended up making him our own.
Here is ours – Admittedly not the best photo, it was taken by a party guest. Plus we had been having trouble with his head collapsing, since it’s just a chicken-wire shape to hold up his heavy burlap hood.
And I did make this wreath last year. I bought several spools of 6 inch wide tulle ribbon, a foam wreath form, some plastic flowers and that adorbs little raven nested in there. I used a large piece of cardboard (about 16 inches square or so) and wrapped the tulle around it over and over again until I had used all of the spool. Then I cut the tulle at the top and at the bottom of the cardboard to make several strips in two quick snips. Then the hardest and most time consuming part from there was wrapping and tying the tulle around the wreath form to create the “ruffled” effect. You really have to cram them in there to make them look full and ruffly. I may make a better tutorial for this later.
On another non-halloween related note: I forgot to mention before, in September we bid farewell to our camper, Hell on Wheels. It was a bittersweet farewell, but I’m glad to have a driveway again. We will have a camper someday when we have the ability to travel more; Once Travis’ new company is sturdy enough to be mobile. When we were getting started, we picked gear that we could travel with so he can visit customers and go to conventions etc. We bought a laptop computer and a completely portable phone line.
We got one of these little gizmos that works on cellular signal, but you can connect a desk phone to it. As long as it has power, and a signal, you have a working phone! It runs for 3 hour in-use or 2.5 days on standby with the built-in battery. For $99 up front, then $20 a month with no contracts, it was a pretty sweet deal!
And in November, we’ll get to take his little operation on the road for the first time! Travis was invited to go to a conference hosted by the company that he works with. This will be our first major road trip of 2015!
We’ll be driving to Jacksonville, Florida for the conference, but on our way there we’ll be stopping at a place that I’ve been DYING to visit for as long as I can remember… NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE!
I’m serious, I’m in near shock at the excitement!! But before you go rolling your eyes at the thought of me Boot-Scoot-n-Boogie’in it up ’til the break of dawn in new pair of Tony Lamas…
Nashville isn’t just the place for country and bluegrass music anymore. Amazing musicians like Jack White and the Black Keys call Nashville their home too! We’re talking about the city where Elvis, Johnny Cash and Neil Young all recorded albums. And the home of Jack White’s Third Man Records’ Blue Room! Which is the only venue in the world to record live shows direct-to-acetate, producing a vinyl master in real time!
We enter code-red panic mode for party prep around the week of our birthdays (next week!) and we won’t sleep much from now until the day after the party on the 24th. After that we’ll be getting ready for our trip the beginning of November.
THEN comes the holidays, and we all know that Thanksgiving through the first week of January are usually a black-top blur with the holidays in full tilt! The thought of Christmas right now makes me throw up in my mouth a little. So let’s slow down and take this one day at a time!
P.S. THIS IS MY 50th POST ON MY BLOG! It’s only taken 2+ years, but we did it! Thanks for coming along for the ride!
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