Normally I (and the Spouse) take the day after Halloween off work so we can take everything down. We feel it's part of the magic for it to be out there for the entire month of October, then POOF! By afternoon on 11/1 - Gone. I had thought about leaving it up Sunday, then taking it all down Monday. But with this year being all wonky with furloughs & lay-offs, if I take any more time off work it'll be unpaid..... so the cemetery came down on Sunday!
I was up early and thought I'd go out and get some pictures in the sunshine.
Then I thought maybe I'd take the blowmolds to the back yard.
Then maybe.... start picking up extension cords.
And so on. You know how that goes!
In the past, we'd be up relatively early to go get coffee & donuts from Tim Horton's, then we'd get started. About an hour or so after I started, he came out and joined in. Then we decided we'd gotten so much done, we didn't want to stop and eat, so we both had a leftover full-sized candy bars and finished up.
The entire cemetery was down and if not put away, at least out of sight in the back yard, by 11:30 am.
These guys were new this year - a gift from my Secret Reaper.
They have some cool light effects.
We didn't get a chance to carve any pumpkins this year, so I asked the Spouse to grab one or two when he was at the store. He came home with 5 pie pumpkins, but that's OK! Judging by the carnage on the front walk - the squirrels / groundhogs / whatever are still enjoying them!
There is a knife sticking out of this one on the picnic table....
So the 'theme' this year was "Family Reunion".
I'd had the thought of dressing each skeleton up to represent someone in my immediate family - down thru the nieces & nephews!
But some of them would have been hard to do so the skeletons just stayed naked.
This guy would have been the Spouse, with his haunted ham radio in the shack.
But the 6 1/2 foot skeleton is too big to fit inside the shack!
This is the skeleton I bought with the thought of being Chuck 3.0. Since he wasn't promoted to such a lofty position, I promised I'd do something special with him in the cemetery. I was driving thru the neighborhood one night and someone a couple doors down had this piece of lattice out by their trash can and I thought it would be a nice ladder. Along with the lizard skeleton, it's kinda fun.
Reminder of what this means - our daughter, aka the Spawn, wasn't very lucky with her first 2 cars.
One was a Ford (Lorenzo) and the other a Pontiac (Gertrude). She totalled them almost exactly 1 year apart.
So I had gotten some 2 part epoxy to make repairs on the some of the skeletons. It worked fine on all of them except on this guy's neck. I may have to finish decapitating him and just try to reattach the skull.
I like how these new headstones came out. This is exactly what I had in mind for them and the "his" and "hers" is the perfect height over the skulls.
Of course I had to have my helper!
In memory of my Beagle, Jack, who crossed the Rainbow Bridge 2/2019
Taken around noon on 11/1.
It started out sunny and cool, then it clouded up and we had to work thru rain & snow but we got it done!
