The Haunted House Restaurant

ooo look, my first "review"! 

After 4 attempts - we finally made it to the Haunted House Restaurant in Cleveland!

Just an FYI - they have some weird hours.  And the website has conflicting info, depending on where you look.  They have brunch on some days, then they close for a couple hours and open back up for dinner.   But you don't know for sure which days have the brunch!  That's why it took several tries for us to actually get there.  My sister ended up calling (and finally getting a human) and they had the gall to ask her multiple times if she was on the right website!  Just how many Haunted House Restaurants are in Cleveland???      

Anyhoo.  The decor was pretty cool.  They had a lot of hand painted murals and movie posters all over.  The music was good, but way too loud.  It was hard to carry on a conversation with anyone else at your table.   

Chuck enjoyed himself.

The menu was accessed by QR code on the table, but they did have a real one for Mom to look at. 

The food was really good!

(gonna pull up the menu....)

I had the Scream Burger, which is a housemade sausage breakfast burger served on a toasted brioche bun, with candied bacon, over medium egg and honey butter sauce.  It came with spicy potatoes on the side. 

Sis1 got the Shrimp Lagoon, which is four-cheese grits with lemon pepper shrimp topped with chimichurri and sweet red pepper relish. 

Sis2 got the Slimer, which is a green waffle sandwich with the housemade sausage, egg, cheese, candied bacon & maple syrup. 

Mom got the Texas Chainsaw Burger, which is a quarter pound patty with 3 strips of bacon, crunchy onion straws and "massacre" sauce - that was really spicy so she was happy she got it on the side.  It came with fries that were really good. 

We also got some glazed brussels sprouts to share. 

We saw their special birthday show twice while we were there.  Each one was slightly different. 

First a siren goes off and you hear pounding from inside the kitchen.  Then the servers (who were wearing black bodysuits that looked blood-spattered) bust out wearing Purge masks and the Purge Emergency Alert System spiel plays.  Then they do a little dance next to the table and everyone yells Happy Birthday.  Very fun and unique.   

I was driving so I didn't look at the drink menu, but the people at the next table had a "potion bowl' which is a huge glass bowl and whatever the beverage was poured over dry ice so the smoke poured over the sides. 

They had tvs over the bar, playing sports, of course.  But the one I could see kept playing a video that I assume the local college dance team helped make.  They had the road blocked off with a fire dept chief's truck and an ambulance, both with lights going.  And they had Michael Meyers wearing a varsity jacket and a bunch of zombie girls dancing in the road.  I bet they had a riot making it!   

There were bowls of popcorn on the table, too

Even the restrooms had hand-painted murals - I came out of the stall to see Anabel staring at me and the girl from the Ring watches you wash your hands.....

So I think I'd like to go back, just to try some other things from the menu and one of the Potion Bowls!! 

6th day of #Creepmas

Today's adventures take us to Bronner's!

I didn't take Chuck inside with me (I wanted to concentrate on shopping!), but I found some fun ornaments that were apropos.    

 OK, the tiny pickle, not so much.  But that would be a hard one to find in the tree!

 I have some smaller eyeball ornaments - like golfball sized, but these are regular bulb sized. 

 

 

I had a picture of the rack directly below this but it was too blurry to see what it was.  

How cute is that????

 

After Bronner's we went to Slo Bones for lunch.  

 Chuck on stage!

 LIVE????

 

He looks like an ad!

I showed this picture to the hostess and she suggested I posted it on FB and tag them in it - so I did! 

btw, their food is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a carnivore and is the Frankenmuth, Michigan area!

#countdowntoHalloween day 2 - Halloween Baby Shower

Sunday was my Spawn's baby shower!  

Since her baby boy is due at Christmastime, she thought it would be fun to have her shower close to Halloween, then do a Nightmare Before Christmas theme.   And everyone wore costumes!

Since I personally have never hosted a baby shower, it may have been a bit unconventional - but that's OK - we had a lot of fun!

My sister graciously offered her house for the shower.  On our way to her house Sunday morning, we had to stop at the store and called to see if she needed anything.   She requested toilet paper or we'd be having to use leaves. 

Since we're all about playing pranks...

 I give all the credit to my Mom for this idea!  

 Spawn made both the poster above and the banner below herself.  

She worked on them for days!  

The big skeletons were excited to be invited to a party!  

 

Here's a close up of the banner.

"Baby Boy is Brewing"

Her NBC character paintings are so cute!

 

Here's Mom to Be!

She's got devil horns sticking out of her belly.  

 Witchy Sister & Chuck

 I had already changed before we took this, and just threw my muumuu on over my clothes and pulled the shower cap back on real quick.

I'm sure it looked "better" with white socks and without the gray shirt.  

 Me

 Great-grandma to be!

This will either be her 4th or 5th great-grand baby.  

We have a niece who is also due in December but I'm not sure exactly when. 

 Wayne & Garth!

 Baby Shark & family

This was so funny!

Another unconventional tidbit was that most of the prizes for games were alcohol!

The "big" prizes were a bottle of sangria, one of tequila & one of lemonade vodka. 

The smaller prizes were bottles of moscato in blue packaging!  The guy at the liquor store said a lot of people buy these little 4 packs for baby showers, since the come in pink or blue. We also tucked little airline bottles of tastiness in with the moscato (Fireball, Apple Crown, Jack & Jose) 

We didn't plan out the games well, but we still had some laughs - the guys were hilarious with the "what's in your purse" game.  For the baby gift bingo game, they filled out their cards with gift wrap / tissue paper / love / affection.  And we had one where we were tossing candy into pumpkin buckets but we didn't figure out scoring or teams -so that was a comedy of errors!

The goodie bags were a variety of Halloween hand sanitizers & candy. 

Grandma Shark made the pumpkin bucket candy bouquets - so cute!

Photo credit on several pics to Witchy Sister since I stole them off Facebook!

Happy Middle-of-August!

Also known as 2 weeks til my birthday!  

It's been a minute since I've been on ye ol' blog, what have we been up to?

I finished my Creek E. Bonez headstone!  It's pretty big, so I think I'll just lean it against the house, instead of figuring out a way to keep it upright out in the yard.

 I was going to write a post detailing how I made it, but I think anyone could figure it out.
Pose & glue skeleton with liquid nails to plywood board.  I had to add a foot or so piece to this 4 foot board since the skeleton was taller than I remembered. Slap a coat of exterior paint over the whole thing to seal it.  I got a nice poo brown from the oops paint shelf at Lowe's.  Coat #1 of DryLok.  Coat #2 of DryLok I dabbed on with a paint brush to fill in the brushstrokes.  2 coats of the perfect shade of exterior matte gray, also from the oops paint shelf.   Drybrush black over the bones.  Add a little acid green and call it done!

This is my memorial for my Jack-a-poo that crossed the Rainbow Bridge back in February.  It's going to be weird setting up the cemetery this year without him.  He'd been out there with me "helping" every year since I started Maple Grove in 2008.  

I'll put this toward the back of the cemetery & backlight it so there's hopefully a halo effect around it.

Here is my puppy boy last year, watching me work on some project.  

He went downhill (heart disease, etc) soon after Halloween.  

So last weekend we went to the Cheeseburger Festival in Caseville with Spouse, my Mom & Sister #1.  And Chuck, of course!  

Mmmmm cheeseburgers!  I had the "Cristo" which was made with french toast as the bun & topped with Swiss cheese, Canadian bacon & a dusting of powdered sugar and maple syrup to dip into.  (swoon!).  Spouse & sister had the "Porky" burger with pulled pork, cheddar & BBQ sauce.  Mom had a plain boring burger since she (gasp!) doesn't like cheese.  Later Spouse & I shared a burger on greasy buttery garlic bread, topped with Swiss & cheddar & bacon. The huge patty was cooked in a pie pan, so we got a wedge of burger.

 One of the sister's friends has a camper right up along Lake Huron, so we stopped in to visit & go swimming.

 

So I hadn't planned on really buying much this season, but ya know...things happen.  Of course I said that before I saw any of the offerings out in stores. 

Yes - I scored one of these puppies from Michaels!  They'd barely had anything else on the shelves when I saw they had them in stock at a nearby store. 

I got 2 sets of these skeleton hands & the "iguana" below from Oriental Trading.  

Speaking of (please excuse how my brain works!) I'd ordered some M&Ms from O.T. and they arrived looking like someone sat on them for a while in a warm room, so I got a refund and these instead.   The pink & blue M&Ms had been for a gender reveal party because I'm gonna be a Grandma!  

The grandson will be making his arrival around Christmastime. 

During the ultrasound, he looked right at us & it lit up the lens of his eye - creeeeepy! 

So I also stopped into Big Lots last night and was happy to find their "haunted" CB radio.  I'd seen a picture that someone posted but didn't see it on their website, so I thought I'd imagined it.  Nope! Since it's the closest I'll get to a ham radio, we'll just have to pretend.  My witch shack may be a ham shack in the cemetery this year!

 I was on the HalloweenForum today and I was reading the thread about Joann Fabrics and someone posted about a pig & chicken skeleton, but then said they weren't on the website anymore.  Maybe 2 or 3 weeks ago they weren't but they were today and both were available nearby!  I was just going to get the pig, but I really like the chicken a lot more than I expected!

So it looks like it'll be less gypsy-flavored in the cemetery this year and more farmyard!
And I love it!