Well, kids, Halloween’s gone and buried a week now.

All that’s left is a faint buttery aroma of stale popcorn and a piece of Grumble rope that I keep forgetting is still hanging in his tree. It’s been a popular topic of conversation as I drive by and say to myself, “I keep forgetting the piece of Grumble rope hanging in that tree.”

Our haunt, aptly titled “Anxiety Gardens at Spooky Hollow”, was a great success in that nobody got electrocuted, wind and rain didn’t cause serious damage, and no vandal was inclined to test the dark figure standing off to the side of the driveway. Silent. Watching. Louisville Slugger hanging indolently from a slack, gloved hand. Did it just twitch?

It only took a week to cram everything back into the garage this year, a personal record. Everything, that is, except the gray monolith of a mausoleum that still stands in the center of the yard. Mrs. Spookyblue has floated the idea of hanging Christmas lights and tinsel, a perfect Santa house, but I’m unconvinced. Maybe if we had a set of three plastic Magi and a camel to stage around it, and crèche for the doorway. To pull off the full effect, the Infant would require, of course, a bulb that blinks.

In any case, your old pal Spook’s been busy. Buried is the better word. But to offset the drudgery of the annual post-holiday cleanup, I’ve been tinkering with the website. We now have a (mostly) working photo gallery embedded into the blog engine. There are a zillion gallery plugins for WordPress, and I didn’t like any of them, so I built my own. WordPress themes are a dark magic, so what better subject to kick things off than our two resident crones Calamity and Infamy?

More pictures of haunt ’09 will be posted this week. After that, it’s time to finally tackle the huge project back-log.

Category: Halloween