The Think Tank

You’re invited to our 20th Annual Great Pumpkin Carving Extravaganza!

“Some men see pumpkins as they are and ask why, I dream pumpkins that never were and ask “Why not”?

Where:
Crestfallen Manor
3634 NE 17th Avenue

When:
Friday, October 30th
6:30PM ’til ???

We will of course be providing homebrew, and the traditional corn soup with cornbread for dinner.

Tim, Joel and myself took part in the first ever Hood River Harvest Ride, a bike ride through the back roads Around the Hood River / Odell / Parkdale area. There were a total of four loops to choose from and riders could do as many or as few as they wanted to make the ride more challenging. We chose to do the main 28 mile Parkdale loop and 16 mile loop out to Panarama Point and back.

It was a good ride and turned out to be a bit more challenging than any of us had anticipated, but we had a good time nonetheless and I for one would love to do it again next year.

Since I was busy riding I didn’t take any photos, but Aleks took some at the event.  I’ll be posting those as soon as I get them.

You can get all the details after the bump…

(continue reading…)

Well, as always we are a little behind the curve on getting the Halloween preparations started, but at last they have begun!  We started putting up lights and what-not last night, and we should have that finished by tomorrow.   My goal is to get the lights and smaller, easier stuff up by the first of October.  Then I can start putting out the yard decorations and working on the projects I have for this year, namely:

• I need to fix the voice box for the Grave Jumper, since it kept flaking out last year.  I may even change how he works a little bit, so he works in better concert with the crypt I would like to make
• Make a crypt.  I’m thinking it will go at the end of the yard under the apple tree and will hopefully accommodate a floating ghost in the doorway and a perhaps a new and improved Grave Jumper.  I’m thinking maybe he will jump up off a chair or something.
• I want to build a number of poseable PVC skeletons to serve as the base of some props
• Gauntlets and Boots for my costume.
• New and Improved fog chiller for front yard with at least one constant fog machine (possibly requiring the creation of a constant fogger)

That’s probably all I can manage.  We’ll see.  Hopefully I will have enough time to make some more corpsfied hands and faces for some of this stuff as well.  We’ll just have to see how everything pans out.  I’ll try to keep the Halloween page updated as things come together.

Amazingly, Halloween is just around the corner. We haven’t actually started on working on anything yet as all the pesky hassles of life keep getting in the way, but we will soon be getting the house ready for All Hallow’s Eve!

Stay tuned for further updates!

I finally got a few of the panorama pictures created and added to the Gallery for my trip to Yosemite this summer. I used a program called Hugin, which is free and does a really great job of automatically stitching and creating panoramas from a series of separate photos. If you ever need to make panorama shots, I highly recommend it.