The Think Tank

As always, there are a number of friends and families who are unable to make it to see the Halloween display in person, so here a quick run around Crestfallen Manor.  I tried to point out some of the new things we built, and the good ol’ ones that needed to be rebuilt this year.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/296573915[/vimeo]

We finished up the majority of decorating for Halloween tonight.  There are still a few things to do, and a few things that broke and need replacing (seems like about everything), but with a lot of rain in the forecast I wanted to get a video shot to show folks what things look like this year.

I built/rebuilt several things this year:  A new obelisk tombstone (I’ve wanted an obelisk in the yard for many years), a tall statue with a clock that I named Kronos, and I completely rebuilt the shed/crypt at the back of the yard, complete with a new engraved top stone and some fancy columns patterned after some pretty creepy ones in a French church.

We also added some drainage stuff to the side yard to prevent the flooding issues we had last year, as well as new lights in the back, because why not?  It’s not like we’ve got anything else going on.  All told I’ve been working on this pretty much every day since August 3.  It took a whole lot longer than I anticipated (as usual), but now that it’s done I’m pretty excited.

There are still a few things left to finish, but for those of you who can’t make it by the house this year, this video should give you a good idea of what we did.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/238713091[/vimeo]

Here is a time lapse video from Halloween night.  We had about 300-400 kids, and as the video says, we had help from a number of people which really made the night go a lot smoother.  Poor Shannon ran herself silly guiding groups back and forth all night.

All in all it was a great time and a lot of kids had a lot of fun.  I think that makes the night a resounding success.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/190973860[/vimeo]

It’s All Hallow’s Eve eve and Crestfallen Manor is ready to roll for the big night.  I’ve been planning on shooting a video walk-through all season, and tonight I finally got to it.  For all of you who are not able to join us tomorrow night, hopefully this video will give you a taste of what is happening.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/189576513[/vimeo]

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/150491769[/vimeo]2015 has come and gone.  We ushered in 2016 with a small party of great friends: John and Julia Heuvel, Dave and Reggie Nelson and Jim and Donna Thurlow.  It was a small party but that just meant that we had more time to spend with our friends, which is always nice.  It was an excellent party and a great way to ring in the New Year and I’m grateful to everyone who came and shared it with us.

As always, we did our annual fireworks display.  The timing was a little off, as the fuse on the cake-side of the board seemed to burn much faster than the mortars, but it was still a fun display.  I’m testing out a theory on how to keep the timing more in sync today.  Hopefully we can get it all worked out in time for Fourth of July fireworks in the summer.

For Christmas I got a shiny new Nikon D7100 DSLR, and I used that to film the fireworks display.  I hope you enjoy it, and I hope that everyone reading this post has a happy, healthy and successful 2016!