In just under 24 hours, my annual Halloween Vacation begins. If you can’t already tell, I’m pretty damn stoked about this, and am completely ready for it to begin!
My Lovely Bride and I both love Halloween, and Autumn in general. So we take two weeks off every year, bracketing Halloween as best we can, so that we can enjoy the holiday, and still have time to look at the changing leaves, maybe take one last camping trip for the year, and otherwise just stay at home and rest.
“Resting at home” for me usually means playing hour upon hour of video games, sleeping in, and watching all of the movies we’ve otherwise skipped that year. Oh, and playing with our dogs.
This year, we aren’t camping, because both of the parks we enjoy the most are being renovated right now. This will improve things for next year’s camping trips, but it means we miss out this year, and that sucks. But I guess we can take more day trips around the state, enjoying the awesome Autumn landscapes around Oregon, so that’s pretty cool. Or I might just Livestream on Twitch every day.
My sweetie won’t like my Livestreaming every day, but in the end, she’ll leave me to it for the most part, as long as I make time for her and the dogs, which of course I will.
Halloween itself will be interesting, as for the first time since 2019, we will be decorating the house and handing out gifts to Trick or Treaters. You see, we don’t like keeping Halloween candy in the house (if it’s here, we’re eating it), so we started giving out “Poison Apples” instead. We dress up as witches, and give out plastic red apples that are full of random little toys. Since they can be a choking hazard for really young kids, we instead give them Halloween themed rubber ducks… since we’re Jeep Cultists, after all.
Meanwhile, we usually have horror films playing in the background, or we’re listening to recordings of old horror radio plays from the 1940’s, that sort of thing. Regardless, we usually keep it on some sort of theme. Last year we watched 1950’s black & white Sci-Fi/Horror films. This year, I think we decided to watch old Hammer films (classic 1960’s British horror), but I can’t remember off-hand now.
The following week we will spend a lot of time enjoying time with our dogs, just winding down from the previous week, and getting ready for the winter to come… and maybe seeing if we can find some place to camp for a couple of days, because Tradition and all that. I expect we’ll find ourselves at some park on the southern Oregon coast for at least a day or two, at some point soon. We’ll see how that turns out.
Anyway, I am really hoping to make some progress on one of my planned TTRPG projects over the next couple of weeks. I’d really like to get some horror game done, maybe something really basic, that I can toss out for download on this site for Halloween. Even if it is just a couple of pages, or a small zine released as a PDF, I’d be happy with that.
