The Think Tank

This yeas big project for Halloween is to rebuild the columns and gate at the front of the yard.

Keep reading if you want want to hear all about how we made these, and all the cool little features we put into them!

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Mom, Maure and Shanon gave me an early birthday present a couple of weeks ago: a new Traeger smoker! We wound up getting the Tex Elite 34, which is really bigger than we needed but during the annual Costco sale it was the same price as the 22″ version so that seemed like the thing to do.

Right out of the gate we smoked a chicken and then a few racks of ribs, all of which turned out pretty tastey. The last week I decided we should make pastrami, which is just a smoked corned beef, in honor of St. Patricks day. Corning beef a process which takes at least a week and since I got the idea too late to corn our own, we started with a store-bought corned beef. I wasn’t able to be home to smoke it, so mom took the controls on Thursday afternoon and smoked one one meat cut of meat!

We brought it with us to Grays Harbor for an Archery tournament and holy moly, was it good! I had Reuben sandwich for lunch and then we had pastrami, fried cabbage and mashed potatoes for St. Patty’s dinner while we watched the Blazers beat down the Detroit Pistons. It was a great meal and the 12 win in a row for the Blazers, so it was a great holiday all around!

Shannon and I arrived in Las Vegas today for the annual Vegas Shoot, the largest indoor archery tournament in the world. Breaking with tradition we are staying at the host hotel, the South Point Casino and Resort. Since this isn’t he host hotel, we skipped the car rental, which makes the money work about the same as every year.

Mom asked to see a photo of our room, so here it is.

For those of you with smartphones, you can track our progress through the shoot by downloading the The Vegas Shoot app and searching for the name of the archer. Or, for those of you who do not have a smart phone, you can follow the action at this link.

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]

We put up some cool new lights in the backyard, just in time for the Halloween season!   They’ll be very helpful for casting just enough light in the Ghoul Scouts for Halloween night, as well as being superb for parties, just throwing darts or cooking on the grill.  Plus they look cool!