Countdown to Halloween day 30: The Very Last of the Halloween Goodwill Finds Posts for 2015

Well... this is it folks! The last Goodwill Finds post of the 2015 Countdown to Halloween! I'm not too sad though, because there's always next year to look forward to, and with the end of the Halloween season I get to go back to looking for items in general that tickle my fancy. Halloween, like all good things, must come to a close. 

I have to say too, that I think for a post I wasn't sure I'd even be writing, since I just found all this stuff last weekend... I kind of saved the best for last. Here's a shot of the whole pile, (anything that was actually in with the Halloween merchandise was 50% off) so let's dig in!

First up this little folding screen-thing made up of three black cats. I kind of wish they hadn't done two pumpkins and a skull. Wouldn't a skull, a pumpkin, and a witch have been cool and colorful, and reminiscent of Halloween III? Either way, I think these cats are cool. Serene, majestic... almost stoic.

When I picked this up I thought it was a night-light, but then I realized it was actually an air freshener. I love that he's got an eye patch! He's practically a pirate jack o' lantern!

I think they sell the filling for these at Bath and Body works. I'll have to see if they have some pumpkin spice ones.

This was a surprise! I was really hoping to find the entire set of KISS band members in vinyl toy form... but all they had was The Demon, Gene Simmons! He's pretty much the one you want to find if you're going to find one though, so no complaints. Ever since seeing KISS on the Paul Lynde Halloween special this season, I can't NOT think of KISS as a Halloween band!

This is Ghost Rider's red-headed step-child, Vengeance! He's on one of those bikes that is supposed to have a ripcord to rev up the bike before you set it off on the floor. As an unabashed lover of s**tty 90's comics, there is a soft spot in my heart for ol' vengie here. He's one of the Midnight Sons characters, and he's basically Ghost Rider on bath salts. Plus the colors here are just perfect for the season!

I was pretty excited to find a McDonald's Halloween pail that features the McDonaldLand gang circa 1999. I was pretty chuffed to see that the lid is intact, the handle was on there... and this thing is in great shape!

While I'm not a huge fan of the pails as they creep closer and closer to modern day, THIS bucket features both Birdie and Grimace in that animated style they were doing for the "Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald" at the time.

I know next to nothing about vintage Halloween masks. Like how to even tell if they are, in fact, vintage. But these two masks just look way too old, and way too oddly familiar for me to leave them behind. I'm using the McDonald's trick or treat pail here as a model, which I think lends an appropriate level of eeriness to the eyes that I really like. This green guy is just absolutely gorgeous.

I should mention that both masks do actually have markings near the bottoms that should be telling me what the companies are that made these. This might make it easier for me to trace them to a specific time period... but unfortunately they are impossible to read. So... no dice. This devil guy's mouth opens up sideways I guess? Not sure. I love the use of blues and yellows here to make the red look crazy bright. Both of these masks stink like old Halloween masks should. Just smelling their weird cheesy gasoline odor takes me back to the Halloween section of Ames as a kid.

This is another interesting looking book about monsters that I may save for next year's Halloween Read Pile... or I may just read it now. Not sure. But "Scare Scape" by Sam Fisher looks like fun.

I was pretty excited to find this comic book, which is a cheap, indy comic done by creator "Madman" and is touted as:

"Eternity's Halloween Special" which I realize now is the name of the publishing company. "Lunatic Binge" is kind of fun, but kid of rough around the edges. We're talking super cheap end of the old indy comics pool here. It's mostly fun to own for the novelty's sake.

This was another fun find! "World's Worst Monsters & Villains" is another of those weird compendiums that collects monsters from movies, cartoons, myths, fairy tales, video games... whatever, and includes them all with equal fervor... and a equal lack of correct information.

But it's fun to flip through and look at! Here are some particularly monstrous entries in Cthulhu himself and something vampire-y called a Camazotz. If you're an RPG enthusiast like I am, these kinds of books are our bread and butter.

Well that's it kids! I'll be back one more time for this countdown with a final wrap-up post to see us out of the countdown! I won't be hibernating this year during November before my Creepmas and Christmas countdowns in December... so I'm not really going anywhere! Ummm... anyway...

I'll be back soon with more Goonie Goodwill Goodies! So until then, Happy Haunting!

Countdown to Halloween Day 29: Jack O' Lanterns!

Hey there everyone! Tonight I thought I would share one of the most treasured traditions of the Goodwill Geek's household. Jack O' Lantern carving night! We don't go all that fancy around these parts, simply picking out five pumpkins from Walmart... but it doesn't matter if the pumpkins came directly from the patch itself or simply from a shelf at the store... we make magic with them either way. 

Here's my oldest son going through the planning phase of his pumpkin.

Here's my youngest son. I have no idea what the deal is with this face he's making. The boys were SO excited to get started on their Jack O' Lanterns this year though! As soon as I came home with the pumpkins, they both helped me carry them in from the car and started begging to carve them out IMMEDIATELY. We had to wait a bit before we got started... so you can imagine it a bit of an agony for them.

I could watch this kid make faces while cleaning out his pumpkin ALL DAY. The dry heaving, the whining about how slimy it is... this is as much a part of the tradition, and my delight, as the pumpkins themselves every year.

Mwuah-Ha-Ha!!!

Here I am taking the top off my youngest son's pumpkin. He is just SHAKING with anticipation at this point. I realize you can't hear it, but we've got Halloween tunes cranking in the background.

My youngest son is way more willing to scoop the guts out of his pumpkin than the older one. Look at those faces!

A pumpkin in the process of being emptied out. Tools of the trade all around.

Then my daughter got into the action. She was very secretive about her design at first, but she's always willing to get her hands dirty when it comes to pumpkin guts.

I just love watching them all at work.

Now my wife's getting into the the action, working on her pumpkin design. Of course, my favorite thing in this picture is my older son's face. HAHAHA!

Bowls of guts all around (to pick out seeds for later...) we see the process of a pumpkin becoming a Jack O' Lantern.

This is the first year we've let the boys cut their own pumpkins, and they were SO proud and excited!

This is the most quiet and focused I have ever seen my youngest son before. It was almost eerie.

My daughter's design finally revealed... Oogie Boogie!

Here is my oldest son's Jack O' Lantern.

Here is my youngest's. I was very impressed with his work.

Here is mine! I love his big toothy grin.

Oogie Boogie came out amazingly well!

And my wife decided on the Chesire Cat, as a preview for her Halloween costume this year!

Here they are, lined up on the autumn-y porch. 

The lighting ceremony. The Jack O' Lanterns look almost as excited to be lit as the kids are to see them being lit!

Oogie Boogie looks even better lit up in the night.

This one just looks agonized and spooky in the dark!

I still think my youngest son's may be my favorite this year!

I like my pumpkin's grin lit from within even better!

The Chesire Cat looks even loonier!

And here they all are, lined up and grinning together on our porch in the night!

And of course, it isn't a proper jack o' lantern carving session without roasted pumpkin seeds afterwards! 

That's it for tonight kids! I'll be back soon with some more Grave Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Haunting!

Countdown to Halloween Day 28: Goodwill Finds, Brewer Store PLUS a Potpourri of Other Finds

Welcome back! I know it's going to be hard to top the incoherent ramblings about a random pile of comic books that was my last post... but I will try. This is the penultimate "Goodwill Finds" post of the season. I have one more planned for the day after tomorrow, but I gotta admit, I'm already getting misty at the idea of not reporting on all the Halloween-y goodness I've been finding this season. What makes it all even more bittersweet is that these items were all picked up the weekend before Halloween, and everything was already half off! Now, I'm not complaining about saving more money, believe me. But when they're trying to liquidate their stock a week ahead of the holiday itself... Man. 

Alright, enough jibber-jabber. Here's the pile-shot. Before we dig into it, I want to let you know as well that at the bottom of this post, I've added a few other miscellaneous items that I picked up here or there that I wanted to share before the end of the season, but didn't really have a good place to do it before. So BONUS material! Yay! This is a pile of stuff I picked up in the Brewer, ME store.

First up is this light-up skull wand. It reminds me SO MUCH of the lightsabers they make for roleplaying and the skull on the end is so cheap and classic looking that I HAD TO OWN THIS.

As if it's not enough that this beautiful jack o' lantern fella is beautifully orange and green... and as if it's not enough that the bendy limbs that end in leafy hands and feet actually support his weight... and as if it's not enough that there's a CAT ON HIS HEAD!!! He ALSO has one of those push-button bottoms that makes him play that spooky theremin-wannabe tune that all cheap Halloween toys play! I think his eyes are supposed to light up as well but they don't work any more. This is mildly disappointing, true but OH MY  GOSH I LOVE THIS THING.

The picture of this rubber proton pack makes it look much bigger than it actually is. Think like.. a baby Ghostbuster... or a dog... I'm not even sure what this originally went to. The pack is on weird, like fake leather straps... and even weirder, the thing opens up on the side that would go on your back, like you can put stuff inside it. Maybe it originally had a foam insert? Or... you can use this thing as a purse maybe? I don't know. I just know it's a freaking proton pack and I wasn't going to leave the store without it.

I've maybe mentioned that my son is going Goosebumps crazy all of a sudden? So I of course brought home four of these books. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for "The Blob that Ate Everyone" specifically for myself. I'm starting a Blob collection. I don't have to justify myself to you.

Even though that's pretty much what every single line of this blog actually is. Just one big justification of... well pretty much everything I do. Let's not examine all this too closely. Let's move on.

I picked up a fun looking cookbook called "Gross Grub" that has all kinds of disgusting looking food inside. There are all kinds of fun recipes inside... although I don't think I'm ever going to be able to make convincing-looking tongues out of meringue like they do in the book. I might take a stab at it someday though. If I do I'll post pics here.

Finally, I found a couple of anthology horror story books. I think one of these may be a last minute squeeze-read in the ol' Halloween Read Pile. I need a book I can finish in just a couple of days so I can be reading my final book by Halloween. So one of these might work. "Bones: Terrifying Tales to Haunt Your Dreams" is actually one of those two-sided, flip-over books where there's a whole other book on the other side. In this case it's the book "Bites" that I read as a part of my Halloween Read Pile last year. I didn't like that one very much, but that's the magic of anthologies. You never know what you're going to get. Or maybe that's a box of chocolates. "Nighttime: Too Scared to Sleep" is an collection of stories by Todd Strasser... whom I've never heard of. This one may actually be the winner though. Because it's only about 90 pages long and I am really intent on hitting 31 books before Halloween gets here. So... yeah. Quantity over quality and all that. 

All right! That does it for my trip to Brewer. But that wasn't all I wanted to share tonight! As I mentioned above, there were a few odds and ends this season that I wanted to wait and see if there was a post (like this one...) that needed some... beefing up. So, even though these items are all from assorted other trips to Goodwill, I thought I'd collect them together here just to show them off. 

I found this AWESOME framed poster of Mel Brooks's "Young Frankenstein" at the Ellsworth store awhile back. they actually had a whole bunch of other Gene Wilder posters there as well, but this was the only one that interested me. Had they had "Haunted Honeymoon" I would have been all over that too... but it was not meant to be. This is actually hanging u in my living room because I don't have this kind of wall real-estate in the cave anymore.

I made several rules about collecting cassette tapes that I promptly broke for various reasons. I swore I would not collect stupid looking cassettes ironically. Broke that rule. I swore I would not collect novelty tapes just for the sake of owning them. Broken as well. I also swore I would not buy cassettes based on cool cover art without knowing anything about the artists. So this is an example of that rule being broken... and why I should have stuck to my guns. While "October Project" is a KICKASS name for a band, and a creepy kid in a paper bag jack o' lantern mask is KICKASS AS WELL... the music on this cassette is just so not kick ass it hurts:

So I don't even know how to describe this genre of music other than "bait-and-switch."

I also picked up this dvd of "Trick Or Treat" (not to be confused with "Trick R' Treat" which I discussed just a few posts ago) about the undead rocker Sammy Curr. Watching this movie has been on my to-do list ALL MONTH and I just haven't gotten to it. Not sure I will before Halloween gets here either. I wanted to watch it back to back with "The Midnight Hour," but the night I watched that I ended up watching "Late Phases" on Netflix instead. I regret nothing. Maybe I can still squeeze this bad boy in before the season is over... even if I can't, I may not be able to wait for next Halloween to check it out. November is notorious for late Halloween viewing around here (December and January can be too, depending on what movies I receive as Christmas gifts...) so it's not impossible.

Finally, I just wanted to show off the Mega-Bloks Black Pearl that I got in a 3 dollar grab back in pieces. There are a couple of pieces missing... but I would estimate that this thing is like 80-95% complete. I JUST watched "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" with my kids, as my older son was very curious about them. He desperately wants to see the other two now, and I'm more than happy to oblige, as soon as I can track down copies of them. I don't hate those movies by any means.

I've gone into great detail as to why skeletal pirates are such a MUST for Halloween in the past, so I won't your time or mine by reiterating here... but I think this thing is just amazing to look at. I'm totally going to load it up with skeleton pirates.

Alright, that's it for tonight kids! I'll be back soon with more Grievous Goodwill Goodies soon enough, but until then, Happy Haunting!