WIR 20241102 – Got Some Halloweening Up in Here
Mark it down — October 29th, 2024 was the first time I turned the heat on in my car. This is always a milestone for the year, since it usually means fall has officially arrived. It will continue to sputter in haphazardly for awhile, but hopefully temperatures aren’t going to get above 80 degrees too often from here on out. Unless it’s a bad El Nino year and then all bets are off.
At any rate, I had to turn on the heater that morning because it was cold. Cold being a relative term as I’ve been so fully acclimated to Southern California weather that my East Coast self snorts derisively at 50 degrees being cold. But I don’t care that I used to wear shorts in this weather, it’s cold to me now and I need a light jacket. So step off, young me. Go make decisions that I’ll have to eventually discuss in therapy.
In other autumn news, I decorated my patio for Halloween. Since I’ve downsized and everyone’s grown now, I keep it small and limited to my patio. I used to go all out for holidays, but I scaled back on that dramatically since all the fun is in putting the decorations up. I hate taking them down and since I can’t pawn it off on anyone else anymore, I help myself out by making everything quick to set-up and teardown.
This year, I got a Snoopy decoration. I’ve been a fan since I was a kid (one of my earliest pictures has me wearing a Joe Cool shirt) and now that I’m older, I find myself returning to the joys of my youth and Snoopy was definitely one of those. Peanuts and Halloween have been forever linked to me, because one the first Halloweens I remember going Trick-or-Treating was just after watching the Charlie Brown Halloween special on TV. I was walking around with a pillow case and a nice old lady dropped something in that felt heavy and I started crying because I thought she gave me a rock.
It was an apple.
Also, this was before parents started getting freaked out over nonsense like razor blades in fruit or poisoned popcorn balls or whatever. We used to get cool stuff. Now it’s trunk or treating. You don’t even run around your neighborhood or head over to where the middle class people live to get the good stuff. Just walk around to different car trunks.
I hope makes for happy memories for the kids, since that’s the most important thing. Thinking that your experiences are the examples par excellence is always a mistake and loses sight of the fact that kids have no frame of reference for what came before, so what they experience will eventually be their Good Ole Days that they’ll use as older adults to complain about whatever’s happening with the children of their time.
The wheel turns.
This particular decoration is Snoopy in his World War One guise, sitting atop his dog house to fight the Red Baron. It was a pain in the neck to put together since the metal framing didn’t really line up and the cloth covering is pretty thin and only glued to the wire frame, so it’s a lot more delicate than I thought it would be, but I got it together without completely tearing it apart and it looks pretty decent.
I also got some little hay bales and cheapo pumpkins with remote control tea lights to complete the ensemble. There is a fog machine, but my neighbors thought there was a fire and I had to turn it off before someone called the fire department. I came up with an idea to contain it, and I tried it out on Halloween night but it didn’t work. I couldn’t meter the flow, so I was rolling fat clouds right out the gate and annoying the entire area with my fog machine antics. I think I’ll have to make a micro controller to use as a timing device or maybe just use dry ice instead next year.
At any rate, the coolest thing about this little display is that it’s all controlled by remote, so I can just hit the “On” button and it’s all lit up.
Speaking of Halloween, I found my first ever Halloween picture. I must’ve been just a little over a year old and it shows my love for another long-running show, Star Trek. This is me sitting on the steps outside our trailer dressed as Mr. Spock. My sister will say I’m just waving at the camera, but I maintain that I’m trying to make the Vulcan Live Long and Prosper sign.
Finally, this year’s Trick-or-Treater Count: 2
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