Countdown to H-Day!

Well, today as soon as the kids hopped on the bus, I got in the (pre-loaded) van and headed to Brenda's to begin the transformation from regular ol' house to Haunted Pirate Ship. We got a LOT done today. All the sails are up on the roofline and also along the porch railings, the boxes are covering the bushes, we found a great old barrel at the shipyard, we've got Jolly Roger flags everywhere, ropes, rusty lanterns, the base set up for the cannon. We tested sound (still need to fine-tune location of the scream soundtrack), put up spiderwebs, laid out the skeleton bones, did a bunch of other stuff. It was really windy, which meant that the gravestones weren't staying in the ground correctly. The cheesy little stands that came with them are pretty worthless, so I need to make some better ones out of wire hangers.

We're going back tomorrow evening after Mark's out of basketball practice, so we can deal with lighting. We wanted it to be dark, so we'd know exactly what the effects were. The timing isn't really great for me because Mark has a major project due on Wednesday, but I'll have him bring his stuff with him and he can work on it in Brenda's living room if he's not finished. It'll also be past Kira's bedtime, which I'm not happy with, but hopefully we won't take too long with it all. I can always bail and let Brenda and Ned finalize everything. They don't really *neeeeeed* me, they could do it themselves, but we're all doing this project together, so it would be preferable for me to be there.

What else, what else. We're going to use some luminaries. I have a dozen mason jars with tea lights in them (from a few Christmases ago...not sure I ever actually used them). That was Brenda's idea, that the flickering candlelight along the path might be cool. I think it's going to work great.

But overall, except for a lighting check and making the gravestone stands, and trying to convert a .wma file into an .mp3 file so I can have cannon sounds, I'm mostly done with the prep work.

It looks freakin' awesome. The whole time we were setting up, people driving by were slowing down and staring. We were getting a lot of thumbs-ups and a couple of people rolled down their windows and yelled compliments to us. It was great.

I'll be taking pictures, of course, and hope to post them on Thursday. Stay tuned! mk