Why I’ll Never Retire

Between the amount of money I spend on and cheap Halloween decorations and on fireworks for the Fourth of July, I’ll never be able to retire.

This weekend, on Saturday the 25th, we had a Big Halloween Bash. In preparation for it, we’d been decorating since late August. What took two months to put up was taken down in quick fashion with the help of a few stalwart friends over the course of five, hustling hours the following day.

The photo above shows the decorations in the basement ‘staging area’, where they’ll be sorted and backed into containers before being stashed into the attic for a few years. (I can only do a party of that magnitude every so often.)

The photo is also noteworthy because it doesn’t show an entire room of decorations that has yet to be taken down. That room is the Spiders Pass (“Cirith Ungol” for my fellow Tolkien fans) – full of giant spiders, webs, and cocooned corpses. That room still stands even now in the anticipation of Trick-or-Treaters. Unfortunately, if last year was any guide, we’ll one have one group of three kids. – Still: those kids will get an eye full and clean up in candy if they come!