Halloween 2005 was brought to you courtesy of... Satan????

Oh, wait, sorry, my mistake.  'Tis merely me lady wife, MistressEvil.

No costume for me this year... I put on my vampire fangs, but they only lasted until the pizza was ready, and after that, I was too busy to put them back in.

Well, it was the second year in our new house, and everything came together really well this year... not in the least part because of our new roommate Vicki.  Vicki does custom LED lighting, and took charge of most of the lighting for this year.  It turned out awesome.  As usual, click on the pictures for a larger version.

We had 184 Trick-or-treaters this year, which seemed a little down from last year.

In addition to the lighting, she bought two of those ultrasonic misters they sell at Spirit, and set those up with an old cow skull we had.

Alas, Mr. Thrifty seems to have fallen victim to the local arachnids.

Here are some daylight views of the setup.  Since we have a corner lot now, we have a lot of ground to cover.

My one big new project this year was my Monster Mud Tree, the design of which I stole shamelessly from Uncle Binley's plans here.

Yay!  This year my headless football player flailer finally flailed.  Thanks to Allen's Flailer plans, and Scary Terry's how to on using windshield wipers.  Actually, the flailer only flailed for a day or two, then something slipped in my mechanism and then he more "twitched".  The effect of the hand just twitching a couple of inches was much more effective than bending to a whole 90 degrees then coming down, so I chalked it up to serendipity and left it like it was.  A more detailed how-to will follow when I get motivated.

I had a mask on a fan looking over the fence... it sure caught people's attention.

About two weeks before Halloween, I heard some kids in the yard late at night.  I hadn't put out anything expensive yet, so I just grumbled to myself, "I hope they don't break anything"

Next day, when I went out in the yard, I found... donations!

The T-Rex and the "Monster Truck" in the pictures below were left in our yard.  The skeleton was our addition.

The fog chiller worked well this year, although I really need to build a larger one. 

New this year... MINIONS!  One of the kids from across the street and his friend came and sat in our yard all night, scaring the heck out of the kiddies.

I also took one of the spider thrifty's from Anatomical.com, and added it to the flying crank ghost frame we made during one of our CalHauntS NorCal meetings.  The basic inspiration was Allen's Dangling Crank Spider, but I just winged it when it came to running lines for the movement for each leg.

The pictures below highlight the fantastic lighting job by Vicki.  She'll have a website up soon with her work, and when that happens, I'll put a link to it here.