How do I love thee?

Holy carpal tunnel! See the picture to the right? Now multiply that by about 1,000 and you have one obsessive compulsive dad when it comes to Halloween! It must be someone pretty special for a guy to take a pair of scissors and spend the better part of three hours cutting strips of paper (that would be my daughter, who's upcoming fifth birthday serves as the springboard for our annual Halloween party). I won't reveal what, exactly, it is I am doing - suffice to say that it involved a lot of cutting, and I was very pleased with the end result. This should be a Halloween party unlike any other that we've attempted before.

In other news, the cemetery fence project came to a grinding halt, as I don't have the proper saw to halve 2x4's into 1x2's, and didn't really want to invest in one for what is supposed to be a fairly cheap project. The only expenditure I was planning on having was for black spray paint, finials, and black plastic landscaping chain. I'm hoping that my father-in-law, who is known to pick up a tool now and again, will come to my rescue and cut some boards for me. Otherwise, I may end up risking life and limb to cut them on a table saw (which I have already tried once and was happy to walk away from the experience with all my digits intact).

On the bright side, Mel and I (and the two little critters) happened to walk into a JoAnn Fabrics just for the heck of it to see what they had on sale. I was amazed to see shelves and shelves of stuff that was perfect for our party - and all marked down 70% OFF! We picked up a veritable treasure trove of stuff for a song, and now have the majority of our decorations for the party in hand. The best part is, much of our decorations and such are not of the terrifying/nightmare-inducing variety of years past, so we can actually put them up throughout the month of October and leave it up without traumatizing my wife's daycare kids for life. This means a lot less last second decorating before the party, which is huge, as we always seem to run out of time on the big day.

More projects are set for this weekend. As always, I'll try to take pictures and get them up here as soon as I can. Until then, happy hauntings...