An Unorthodox Halloween

Perseverate.

It’s taken more time than expected. (of course)

However, I’m happy to announce the Gallery is back in working order (though there are a few things that remain hopefully in the background until I can exterminate them). Without getting too awful technical, the old slideshows dated back to 2007, and little on the internet works quite the same as back then, so they didn’t work on mobile devices or play too nice with many browsers.

Unfortunately for me, this meant building new slide shows from scratch. This meant going through 12 years of pictures…

Good news is the new gallery is broken down, organized and mobile friendly (mostly, I think there’s an old video that’s still fussy).

As a side benefit, I stumbled on an old concept from 2007 I had abandoned because the early tests were less than amazing…

Not only has my own ability come leaps and bounds since 2007, so, too has available lighting.

This was just one piece of a larger concept, and though I don’t know how many years it might take for me to get the larger concept where I feel it’s complete, we’re going to be working towards her.

The Bone Mother.

It’s time, finally, for an Unorthodox take on a witch.

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly…

What a long strange road…

It’s been a while coming, really, but between dealing with uncertainty, unemployment, and family deaths, I’ve been neglecting this website for a few years. It’s needed an update for a while, I’ve known.

The road has been one of those that cause you to evaluate what is really important to you. I’m not sure what it says about priorities, but Halloween come out ahead of a lot of things.

It was very nearly down to feed the family or make Halloween in 2014. It had come that far, when a lot of other things had fallen aside. Fortunately it didn’t quite come to that decision.

2015 was filled with it’s own roller coaster of putting things back in order, both financially with stable employment again, and as a family when my wife lost both her parents. Mother and Father were not just creatures, but my own way of working through this in my head.

So, with 2015 in the books, and a new appreciation for just how important this “hobby” is, I decided to finally put in the work here on the website….

And the first update broke the entire thing.

For 2 days I sat looking at a dying husk. I had thrown a static archived page up live to the public, but I was unable to edit anything, unable to go ‘live’. My patience for such things is fairly limited. I’d try things for a couple hours, and have to take a break. I contacted my host, and we’d fix one problem just to create several more. There was only one option left.

KILL IT.

And start from scratch.

I was able to save most the content, though some of the really old stuff probably doesn’t link correctly these days.

So, we are back from the dead. And better for it.

Now fully responsive, it should be readable on your mobile devices. At least the main page here…I’m going through and working the other pages one at a time. Once I figure out how to configure some of the other gizmos, we’ll have more features popping in as well. It’s taken me two weeks to get these bare bones back up out of the ground, and it’s time to start adding some flesh to them.

Looking back

First of all, the site is mostly back to working, if not exactly back to where I want it. Some stuff I’m going to have to start over from scratch.

Time for the annual looking back on what worked, what didn’t, and where are we going from here.

The Orchard was finally represented as conceived in 2010. Our third try. Mostly just finding the right sticks to use was the problem.

The straw bales worked as planned, encouraging kids to spread pumpkins around staging areas, creating little groups instead of a solid line.

The illusion of pitch black in the corn tunnel was back, missing in 2014.

Father was fabulous.

No one but me would notice the problems Mother had.

The bridge redesign simplified setup tremendously and held up better than the old design.

Overall, just about a perfect year.

However, what didn’t work?

The small fire pits won’t last a whole night. No pics of this, they were lighting the treat table. Note for future, they aren’t going to work for that plan…

Candles remain problematic at times.

Batteries for the pumpkins were a little disappointing this year. They were of a lesser quality.

Yes. It’s a short list…

And there’s the rub. “The Harvest” theme is now in the books as pretty much where I wanted it…Now what? There are two competing ideas in my head…one makes sense…one is off the wall.

Well…that was….fun.

Well…some auto updates have broken just about everything here.

Bare with me while I sort all this out.

The Harvest 2015

We’re still getting pictures processed and into the album, but enjoy the slideshow of 2015, it will update automatically.

I’ll be back with final thoughts on the year later.