Almost There

The Gardener is done. For now. The fabric really bugs me for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it isn't old-looking enough. Right now though, I don't have the time. Or the initiative. It's done and I don't have to worry about it anymore. Sometime after Halloween I'll post more pictures.

I'm going to be all hyper tomorrow morning when I wake up. And then I'll realise I have to set up a projector and a set of speakers about twice as old as I am, clean the house and tape off doorways. Plus all that little detail stuff which is fun to plan but so time consuming to execute. Really wishing I'd had more time, but there's not much I can do now other than finish off an English assignment. Last English work for the year! Woo!

Everybody Scream

Been busy busy busy getting everything done. Just finished The Gardener (ten, fifteen minutes ago), so right now I'm having a bit of a rest and playing The Nightmare Before Christmas in the background. Because nobody else is home and I can.

Anyway, because I didn't post anything last night I thought I post a few videos this morning. This is Danny Elfman's This Is Halloween, from TNBC. As you would all probably know. The first is the original movie version, the second is Marilyn Manson's cover of it, and the third is Panic! At The Disco's cover of it.







Manson's is my favourite because it's actually quite dark, but I do love the original and Brendon Urie (the singer in the last clip) has a beautiful voice. Manson wins though. The only problem with it is that's it's perhaps too good and the movie feels a little lackluster in comparison. Manson's version was on the Nightmare Revisited album released awhile ago, along with quite a few covers from quite a few bands. Korn's cover of Kidnap The Sandyclaws is my favourite from the album, and it's so great I have to mute the scene it's from because the original just doesn't compare.

The "I'm busy so here's a picture" Post. Or "Look, books!"

Went out shopping today. Got what was hopefully the last of the costume + decor stuffs. Including some of these nifty books. From left to right we have A Single Pilgrim, On Safari, The Dominant Fifth, Three Little Maids, The First Stone, Uncle Tom's Story and Life And Death. Uncle Tom's Story is the fanciest one, the pages are gold edged and there's Uncle Tom's portrait on the cover. A little digging (google) tells me that Uncle Tom was in fact Rev. Josiah Henson. I'm told he's the Uncle Tom behind Uncle Tom's Cabin. Which is, you know, nice.

Learning From Your Mistakes

Some things you have to learn the hard way. I found this out, funnily enough, the hard way last night. Anyone following me on twitter would have noticed my little breakdown when everything seemed to go wrong at once.

As deadlines approach (and go flying past, not even stopping to say hello), I tend to start working on things late at night, because it's time I'm usually awake anyway and I find the hours between 11pm and 2am to be particularly productive, if not occasionally dangerous. I attempted to learn that lesson after I tried taking off my left thumb with a stanley knife a few weeks ago. I told myself that I wasn't going to be doing anything stupid like that again. So it only makes sense that last night I decided it would be a good idea to try and finish the papier mache on The Gardener. Because everyone else in this house seems to sleep (freaks), I had to do it in my room. No big deal. Spread out a few plastic sheets on the carpeted area I was working over, thought everything would be fine. And it was, for the most part.

Then I decided I should lean the thing against my desk while I go get a drink. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea. The Gardener is incredibly heavy. He's got two pieces of rather thick timber making up the cross, and in order to get it to stand up but still be portable, he's got a steel pipe hidden up the back of his cross, so I can just shove a metal rod in the ground and shove him on it. Of course, however brilliant that sort of forward thinking may be, it's pretty useless when you're carting the thing around indoors and looking for things to lean it against. You can't lie him on his front because you'll crush his ribcage. Can't lie him on his back because of the vines and the metal pole. So I'd taken to leaving him leant at oblique angles against things, with only the very top touching the wall, and something bracing the bottom. It had been working so far.

Then it fell. Must've slid to the side, then completely lost balance. I came back to my room to find him, still attached to his cross, thankfully, but lying half on the floor, half on the bed. Minus a hand. There was much cursing because I knew it was only a matter of time before one of the hands were broken, they stick out just a bit beyond the cross-beam and have a habit of getting hit on walls and door ways.Walk around your house with your arms stretched out, the same way kids do when they're trying to be airplanes and you'll understand what I mean. Still muttering and just generally pissed off, I take the injured party and move him to a better position. And then I see it.

My container full of my super-secret mache mix (and by super-secret I mean glue + water + hand sanitiser). Empty, a dark patch emanating from the lid, soaking my bed. When I had grabbed the container, I chose it because it used to be full of some sort of fruit in liquid. I assumed it would, therefore, be watertight. Wrong. I spent quite some time trying to soak up all the mix from my various bed things, and then I was stuck with the problem of having no mache mix left, no glue to make more, vines to finish and a hand to reattach.
The best solution seemed to be screaming and/or crying. But I didn't. I cleaned up the mess the best I could, then I made some flour + water mache mix. And I fixed it.

But here's some things I learned:

• Top heavy things will fall over, especially if balanced precariously.

• Just because you think it's water-tight, doesn't mean it is.

• Using flour glue makes you smell like you've been baking.
  

• Tape fixes everything.

• Your time spent over the last holidays playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village wasn't wasted.

"Critical thinking is the key to success." 

(Okay so I didn't really do anything puzzle like. But at the time, remembering I could make glue out of flour and water made me feel like a genius. Shush.)

Innards/Progression

I think it's fairly safe to say that I enjoy taking photos from this perspective. It's pretty cool though, you can see the changes taking place, from the raggedy beginnings to smoothed out edges to the final coat of paint.

Pumpkin Teeth, Eyes & Blood, at Flickr.
(Eyes is my favourite. Just the colours.)

Now Watching: Young Dracula

I'll start this post by saying that Young Dracula, despite being a kids tv show about vampires, is nothing like Twilight. You can breathe easy now. There's no sparkling or stalker-like love stories, and almost all of the vampires like drinking blood.

Instead, Young Dracula is a wonderfully campy show about a young boy, Vlad, who moves to a small town in England after his family is run out of Transylvania by torch-wielding villagers.

Vlad (right) lives with his father, the Count Dracula (centre), his older sister Ingrid (left), their servant Renfield (far right) and their talking stuffed wolf Zoltan in an abandoned castle.

Vlad takes the move as a chance to be a normal kid, despite the fact that his father is grooming him for the vampire throne. He befriends a local 'breather' (humans, if you hadn't guessed), Robin, a normal boy who wishes he were a vampire, who wears a cape to school. Meanwhile, Ingrid spends her time toying with the breathers, using her vampire powers to get what she wants. She's actually rather evil at times, something which the Count ignores, as she reminds him of her mother, who ran off with a werewolf. She makes a few appearances throughout the series, returning only to mess things up and leave once she's finished.

Just to stop things being too easy for the Draculas, the school's woodwork teacher Eric van Helsing is also a vampire slayer. Well... he tries to be. He's not very good at it and nearly gets himself killed several times, but he keeps on trying. Everyone else thinks he's crazy but he's right most of the time (quite like Mr. Crocker from The Fairly Odd Parents), just rather inept (also like Mr. Crocker.)

I've embedded a video of the first part of the first episode for your enjoyment, and parts 2 and 3 can be found here and here.

They've only played the first season in Australia so far (boo), but season two looks quite promising.
And I'll stop talking about kiddie shows soon, I promise. Well, I sort of promise. There's actually quite a lot of weird and wonderful children's shows out there.

Work In Progress

And only two weeks overdue. I was going to get all of the papier mache on the vines done last night. Was. That was before I discovered a spider inhabiting the support pole under the vine and had a little freak out. It's dead now but I had trouble working to the same efficiency knowing I'd almost touched a spider. Yes, I know, it's a tad girly but it was either a funnel web (very bad) or a house spider (not so bad). There's a nice spider chart here telling you just how hurtie the spiders will be. Don't click on it if spiders freak you out, the pictures, while obviously drawn rather than photographs, move.
But moving away from spiders, once I've got the last of the mache done all that remains is a coat of varnish and then paint. It is shall live! -evil cackle-

-From now on this post will be about mind-numbingly mundane details of my life, so turn back now if you wish. Don't say I didn't warn you.-

Sadly The Gardener is turning into one of those things that I could've had done in a week had I not have had so much else to do. I've probably mentioned this on twitter several times, but the last week in October is for me not only the week before Halloween (and therefore the most exciting), but also the last week for school work submissions for the year (therefore the most nerve-wracking). The logical, "let's get straight A's and go to University" side of me says I should put off everything else and study. The rest of me though, is screaming Halloween. Because I don't really want to go to University, and well, I like Halloween more than I like writing essays about feminism in Ancient Greece, the changing status of artists from the Middle Ages to today, and knowing the formulas on how to find the angles and side lengths of triangles given only one length and one angle.

Ultimately I've chosen to do both. I finished and submitted my math assignment a few days ago. The Gardener is both for Halloween and for school. I got back my mark for my feminism essay last night (I did shockingly well). I spend most nights sewing my costume instead of doing revision and on Wednesday I finished my last compulsory day of sound and lighting tech classes. It's a strange feeling, to be honest. A lot of things have been done, and yet there's still a lot left to do. So I made a list. And another one. And then one more. Then I made a chart of the days leading to Halloween/end of school and filled in when they had to be done. I'm a nerd. I know. These are two of the lists:

Orange note pads make me happy. But the point of this post (there was one, honest) was to ask how the hell you guys do it, those of you who have such large haunts. I have enough trouble with just my modest decor-plans.