Halloween 2013 has now come and gone; I hope yours was a good one. This year, my family and I dressed in costumes from Harry Potter. My daughters were Ginny Weasley and Hermione Granger, my wife went as Sybil Trelawny, and I was Mad-Eye Moody, complete with wands that I hand-carved for each member of my family and a shillelagh (used in place of Moody's wizard's staff) that my grandmother brought back from Ireland. We got many compliments on our costumes. Good times.
The street that I live on has a reputation for doing Halloween right. Many of my neighbors stage elaborate haunted houses, there are driveway cookouts and there are numerous children living on the street so there are lots of cute little toddlers running around dressed up as pumpkins, strawberries, or teddy bears. However, we do have one problem: teenagers that come trick-or-treating with no costumes at all. This is where I become a Halloween Scrooge. I'm not saying that you have to go get a store-bought costume, but you have to make some sort of attempt at a costume. Wandering around with a Lakers baseball cap on saying that you are a basketball player does not count as a costume. Worse is when the teenager in question says, "I forgot to make a costume this year. Trick-or-treat?" I withhold candy in that case. "But Rob," you say, "aren't you afraid that someone is going to egg your house or worse?" No, I have no fear of that: I live next door to a cop. A tough Brooklyn cop who relocated to LA who is also in a cops-only biker gang. So, yeah, security is not too much of an issue. :)
Then there is the eye. I live directly across the street from my brother-in-law, who is a special-effects technician. He has a bay window that faces out to the street and each Halloween he puts up a screen behind the bay window and projects a video onto it of one gigantic eye looking around, similar to Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc. More than a few times every Halloween we hear kids exclaiming, "Have you seen the eye house?!" Good times. I, on the other hand, know better than to try to compete with something like that. I simply put up fake spiderwebs across my entryway with a sign attached to them that says "We are across the street."
Onward to Thanksgiving!
Take care,
~Rob
I like this guy. I think they should make him their new party member/lackey/pet. 😀
Now if our heros could draw those kobolds into a narrow gap or hallway, their numbers wouldn’t matter.
Let’s see: 75:5=15:1. Those odds are a bit steep. For now. Check again after they come out of the temple with lots of high level weapons and armor. And about five level more experience each…
I’m wondering if the Head of Vecna gag would work on Cheef.
As for me we get few kids at my house since all of the “kids” on the street have grown up and moved away,..add to that I live in a rural area with no street lights and lots of woods. What we do get is Teens out joyriding and egging and TPing houses. Over the past few years they have learned not to come to my Parents house [where I live on the back acreage in a small trailer] because according to the police report filed like 8 years ago there is a “crazy dude in a cape”. Basically I got tired of house being egged and such so I hid on our roof with my truck parked next to house. I had on bit of my Renfaire garb [all black] with a black cloak and a black leather mask with chainmail coming off the bottom,..also I had a sword and a caplock revolver [loaded with half charge of powder, a bit of powdered creamer, and bread]. I waited till them came to egg the house fired of a shot, jumped into the bed of my truck [only a 5 ft drop at most], fired again, jumped onto ground toward them firing. Now if you put powdered creamer in front of a load of blackpowder when the gun goes off the creamer will dissipate and catch fire due to its flammability when finely dispersed [like the chaff in a gain silo] causing a 2-3 foot flame to come out [this is how they do some of the “night fire shots” in civil war movies] . So these teens see a cloaked guy in all black running at them shooting flame from a gun,… they ran like Olympic Sprinters. Well they called the cops about the guy shooting at them,..cops showed up and questioned me and let me go because 1) im in an area that does not have a noise ordinance or a “discharging a firearm” law,..2) the cop knew they had egged other houses nearby,…and 3) he found the whole story so funny he could not bring himself to do anything to me. Given the fact its been a few years since the incident I may have to do it again one year soon,…..lol