The Think Tank

Headin' back up

I was going through the pictures from last year’s snow storm to find an image that I could use for the invitation for our Annual Holiday Open House, and in so doing I came across a clutch of photographs that I never posted at the time.   They are mostly candid shots from around the neighborhood, taken the week before Christmas 2008.  Some of them are pretty darn cute if I do say so myself!

If you want to have a look-see you can follow this link to check them out.  They are mostly on the last couple of pages.

Pray for more snow this year!!!  I don’t care if you like it or not, you still have to do me the solid and pray for it!

In the immortal words of Charlie Brown: “Well Linus, another Halloween has come and gone.”

In many ways I feel like this was one of our best years, even though we did suffer several malfunctions and breakdowns in the first couple hours of the evening.  (These really ticked me off, as I tested the crap out of everything this year to ensure that this wouldn’t happen.)

Mike and I dressed up in our usual garb and tried to blend in amongst the reapers in the front yard to scare the kiddies.  Karl wasn’t able to come this year because he was on a hunting trip, unfortunately.  And Mike actually carried most of the weight for the first couple hours as there kept being little mishaps I had to tend to and fix.  He stayed until probably eight O’clock, but then Mairi decided she had had enough of this whole loud, spooky Halloween business, thank you very much, and it was time to go home.  I clearly need to have a talk with that kid and get her head in the game.  No niece of mine is going to be anti-Halloween!

Shannon and Justin and Elisha all helped as well, leading groups of kids through the tunnel and back to the candy, often having to convince them that nothing was going to eat them along the way.  As always, a good number of the kids – even some from the neighborhood who have come down every day to help me put the display together – simply refused to go back, so we had a bowl of treats up front for them.  We’d always try to convince them to go back first, but if they refused or lost their nerve before the end, they still got their candy.

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The last minute preparations are done and the little ones are starting to trickle in. For the first time in a very long time everything i wanted to have in the display this year appears to be up and running!

Time to get my costume on and get this shindig started!

Hope to see you all tonight…

Happy Halloween!!!  It’s currently just a little before 5AM and we are just finishing up with the Pumpkin carving for the night.  Which is not to say we are finished yet: we still have two to go.  Honestly, I’m not sure if they are going to get done or not.  Hopefully, but I’m pretty tired right now and there are several things that still need to be taken care of for tomorrow night later tonight.

The pumpkins look awesome!  Thanks to everyone who came out and helped carve!  I think this is definitely one of the best crops ever!

I hope that everyone who reads this will be able to make it over tonight for All Hallow’s Eve as I think it should be one of the best ones yet.  And if you can’t make it, then I hope you have a great night and that all of your Trick Or Treat wishes come true!

Several years ago I found some inexpensive fog machines which would continue to produce fog as long as the button was pressed.  This was a great improvement over my other foggers which only operated for 40-50 second bursts and then required several minutes to reheat.  The foggers worked great for the practice runs but crapped out during the middle of Halloween night.  The next year I returned the faulty units and purchased some new ones, which worked fantastic for Halloween night – especially in conjunction with the  fog chillers we built.  The constant output produced a think ground fog when the wind was still, and refilled the yard very quickly between gusts if it was blustery.

I looked at buying higher end models, but the cheapest constant fogger I found was $250 and I didn’t want to spend that much.  So I decided to pull the apart and see if I could fix the ones I had – after all, they were broken anyway, what more could I do them?

Two of them seemed to have bad power supplies or transformers, and one of them tried to work by the motor sounded funny and did not produce much smoke.  I solved that problem by transplanting the motor from one of the other units, which gave me one fully functioning fogger.  I later learned that the motor from that one was actually OK, it was the pump housing which was making the noise, and I was able to correct that with a little bit of liquid graphite on the impeller.

Now I had two working units.

The next one I ripped open seemed to have a bad transformer.  I tried to get one at Fry’s but they did not have the part I needed.  Fortunately my friend Jim – who also helped me with Crypt Keeper voicebox – was able to get me a transformer that fit my needs.  It was actually a wall unit instead of a wired transformer as was originally in there, but aside from looking a little funny it works perfectly.  That is all I really care about any way.

The third fogger  had a bad transformer as well, but after I replaced that tonight I discovered that it also has something wrong with its motor: it spins, but not fast enough to effectively pump any fluid into the heating element.

Given that we are going to start carving pumpkins tomorrow and are basically out of time, I will just use the two resurrected foggers and call it good.  Fog Machine C can get fixed in time for next year, and we can really smoke out the whole neighborhood!