Halloween Countdown Day 29: All Through the House, All Through My Head...

The day is almost here folks... Halloween is the day after tomorrow. This fall has been a... leafy one to put it mildly:

And the colors (when it wasn't raining) have been beautiful. Crunchy leaves on the ground, covering the lawn. It will be time to collect all the toys off the lawn soon and stow them in the garage for the winter. Sigh. 

Right now, the trees still retain some of their beauty, with fiery oranges and golds overhead. 

The views around here are amazing. They make for stunning late-afternoon walks. 

Until ZOMBIES ATTACK!!!

Halloween season seems to rekindle my daughter's interest in special effects make-up every fall. It usually doesn't last very long after that... 

But... while she's hitting it... she's hitting it. 

She attempted some new stuff this year. With results she had mixed feelings about. 

I was pretty amazed by some of the results she achieved. She does most of this with toilet paper, vaseline, fake blood, and her usual cosmetics. 

This was a particular favorite. I take a lot of pride in m daughter, not because of her morbid interests... but because she's so GOOD at sharing her morbid interests. I want her to be passionate about something. She seems to really enjoy herself when she does this stuff.

We dressed up the house too. 

My wife bought rust-colored mums for the porch. The porch we had to rip apart and have rebuilt this past week, so I'm glad I got a few pictures while we could. Not having the porch to decorate properly felt like it stole some of our Halloween away.

Here's old Skully in the window of our front door. Love this guy. Soon it will be time to pull him back into the cave where he lives the other 11 months of the year. But he'll get to look out the window on the BIG NIGHT at the very least.

Here's our "Thriller" skeleton. Thriller has become my youngest son's favorite Halloween song this year. He has a speech impediment so he sings it "Cud-did-did Driller! Driller Nigh!" Which I find endlessly entertaining, even after the 20th or so time we've heard the song this season. 

More window dressings. My vintage Halloween cat cut-out is still a favorite Goodwill find. 

The bookshelves in the dining room get the most treatment inside the house (besides the shelves in my cave) with a few different little themes going on for some of the shelves: the haunted apothecary, the Halloween Cemetery/Village, the multi-colored pumpkins, etc. 

Because we moved the hutch out of the dining room area for more space, we now decorate the picture window in there instead. All kinds of fun stuff there. 

And we dressed up the chandelier in autumn leaves this season as well. These will probably stay up until the christmas decorations go up, although the skeletons, bats, eyeballs, and the like will all come down after Halloween. 

Here's a look from a different angle. 

There's more stuff like these lanterns all over the house, but I won't bore you with every last detail. That skull lantern is a favorite of mine though. 

There's even a pint-sized Dracula creeping in the trees out front by the mailbox. 

And this guy, hanging out above it all like he knows something we don't... and maybe he does?

Here's an autumn-themed cupcake-cake that my wife made for a friend's daughter. There are a bunch of cupcakes under that frosting, and the owls are cake-pops. She stresses out SO MUCH over every cake, but I love the way this one came out. 

Speaking of treats, my boys are still munching on the apples we picked from our trip out to the Treworgy Orchards and Corn Maze.

The also carved their jack-o'-lanterns. My youngest here got a lot of help from mom with the design.

My older son designed this guy all on his own, I did the cutting for him, and he helped poke out all of the pieces. 

HEre the are together, sitting next to a bowl full of pumpkin guts (which makes my older son gag to scoop out, so he does a couple of scoops and then hands the spoon over to me... slacker.)

And here they are, lit up in the night. A couple of fiery freaks!

Speaking of guts, here are the seeds, nicely toasted and ready to snack on.

We also did a lot at the library this season, with my wife volunteering to do some story-times. This was one of the crafts she had the kids do, a tissue-paper "stained-glas" pumpkin.

Here I am at the library, reading Here They Come! by David Costello, one of my absolute favorite Halloween books to read to my kids. 

Another craft they did were these leaf-collection wreaths.

And these masks for playing dress-up!

Spooky!

There was some commercialism mixed in with our homemade Halloween, oh believe me. I drank WAY more pumpkin-mocha coffee from Dunkin Donuts, and the chocolate-frosted pumpkin doughnuts were INSANELY good considering I don't usually care for their doughnuts.

My wife found this ridiculously hilarious. I found it kind of sad.

But my sadness soon burned off when I tried on this wig and glasses ensemble at Target! 

I found a rockin' wig for my wife.

Eye see you! 

NOT a look that works for my wife...

And our young son, Malachi. He says he wants me to come and Walk Behind the Rows for a moment... I'll be right back... 

Even Groot got in on the action! Here he is growing himself a Halloween costume.

And a birthday present from myself to myself consisted of these two Halloween icons. How I adore Funko. 

So, too soon the Tricking and Treating will be done with, and all of these orange and black decorations will go back to sleep in all the attics (or just get moved back into my cave for now) around the world... and the stores will dress for Christmas and we will forget the impish fun that Halloween gives us every year... until next October (who am I kidding? Next September.)

That's all I've got for tonight kiddos! We'll see what I can scrape together for tomorrow night, and then at some point I'll be back with more Gremlinesque Goodwill Goodies. Until then... Happy Haunting!

Halloween Countdown Day 1: The Geek gets Freaky!

I thought I would really kick off my Halloween Countdown with a bang!!! The first day of October deserves nothing less! As I mentioned a while back during one of my new "Catching Up With the Geek" posts which are totally going to become a regular thing... my daughter has a new love of special-effect make-up spawned from her watching the show Face-Off on SyFy with her grandmother. I've been watching a little bit of it with her lately as well, but mostly just the really interesting chunks of the show. 

ANYWAY... I volunteered back in mid-September to be a test subject for her, since she seems to think that she is terrible at doing make-up on other people, and can only really do a good job on herself. I waited and sat on these pics until now because I wanted to feature them during the Halloween countdown. This... is my story. I went into the make-up chair with more than a little trepidation:

Be gentle.

I regretted my decision to be her guinea pig almost as soon as she told me that I needed to wear a shirt "I didn't care about" and then put an old pink towel across my lap... "for all the blood." I kid you not, those were her EXACT WORDS. I had already liberally used a cheese-grater on my thumb-knuckle while shredding cheese for tacos earlier that evening... so I thought I had seen my share of blood for the day. Not so dear readers. Not so.

"Hmm. We should really paint the ceilings in here...
and I need to buy toilet paper. Is that a spider?"

She started off by gluing a wad of toilet paper to my face and then painting a bunch of stuff over it. It surprised me, the thoughts I had while staring at the ceiling... my daughter painting toilet paper onto me. We plugged my iPod into its charger/speaker and blasted some mood music. She initially asked if we could skip Tom Waits's "Murder in the Red Barn" but I told her no. She needs to learn some frigging culture.

The Noxema Girl I ain't.

The Cramps were uh-huh-huh-huh-ing their way through "Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon" when she finished the burn-wound on my cheek. Rob Zombie started screeching into "Werewolf Baby" as she began the process of gluing a piece of latex glove over my left eye. 

Nope. There's nothing in your eye. At all. 

We made it through Horrorpop's "Hitchcock Starlet", The Squirrel Nut Zipper's "The Ghost of Stephen Foster" and Captain Clegg and the Night Creatures' "Transylvania Terror Train" before the eye was finished. Man that sucker itched the WHOLE time. But I was a good little guinea pig. I only whined a little bit. I imagined I was experiencing something akin to phantom limb syndrome... except I still actually had my eye and I still actually could have scratched it if there wasn't all this STUFF on it. So it was totally different.

Southern Culture on the Skids howled through "Werewolf" while my daughter applied a scar to my other cheek. Then Voltaire started in about how much he loved eating "Brains!" which I thought was rather appropriate, considering my daughter was zombifying me. 

Not sure why I'm eating this brush.
Maybe because I'm a zombie.
OR maybe just because the artist isn't paying attention due to photo-op.

I think the longest part of the whole process when when my daughter decided I didn't look "dead enough" so she had to pale up my face, darken my lips and add shadows to other parts of my face. It felt like FOREVER, considering one of my eyes was sealed shut. Luckily I had the Creepshow singing "Grave Diggers" The Bubblegum Hearts singing "The Ghost of Vincent Price" and the Aquabats "Attacked by Snakes" to get me through the final stages. All in all the process took just under an hour, and we rocked almost all the way through. 

Like looking in a mirror actually.

Here she is showing off her preliminary "potato head" (her words not mine) sketch of her plan, and then her finished result. Personally I was very impressed with her work (I mean the make-up. The sketch we killed with fire afterwards... Kidding! I kept it in my cave as a souvenir.) 

Here's a bit of a closer shot of the finished product... again, I feel equal parts pride and revulsion when I look at this photograph... and I feel that is the correct set of emotions to have welling up inside me at this time. 

I had my wife take some action shots. As she snapped this one she accused me of being "such a kid" to which I replied "That's why you married me!" ... to which she had to simply shrug and acquiesce. 

More action shots here... and as all monster-makers in all stories everywhere eventually learn... my daughter also learned: your creation will ALWAYS turn on you!!! Her brains were... less than filling to my disappointment. I'm not saying she's an airhead... but she is a blonde. 

Mrs. The Goodwill Geek thought I was sexy as HELL. She's into big dead kids. She's freaky like that.

Can't even begin to tell you how nice it was to do this with my daughter. That's it for tonight boils and ghouls! I'll be back soon with some Ghastly Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Haunting!

Be sure to check out all of the great blogs participating in this year's Halloween Countdown! You can do so by clicking this link, or clicking on the Cryptkeeper 2013 banner on the sidebar to the right! Also, check out the "Blog-O-Ween" Halloween Blog collective, again by following this link, or through the badge on the sidebar! Thanks!