Another Halloween has come and gone.

This year we had over 150 kids, along with their parents and even grandparents come through our oversized garage. We’ve added many new decorations this year, including over 50 new animated figures to go along with the hundreds we already have lining the tables and walls. Some kids get so into playing with the animated figures that they completely forget to grab their candy.

We have a graveyard outside, complete with a fog machine to fill it with smoke at 15 minute intervals. My personal favorite is the ten foot long inflatable spider crawling down the front of the house.

I’m also pleased with how my “crystal ball effect” turned out, with the video image of a talking head from a television projected onto a ball thanks to a bit of plexiglas angled towards the viewer.

The complete series of photos from the night can be found in our Halloween 2004 gallery.

And now the cleanup begins …

From Yahoo News:

So far as she knows, Pufferbelly Toys owner Stephanie Cox hasn’t been passing any state secrets to sinister foreign governments, or violating obscure clauses in the Patriot Act.

So she was taken aback by a mysterious phone call from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to her small store in this quiet Columbia River town just north of Portland.

“I was shaking in my shoes,” Cox said of the September phone call. “My first thought was the government can shut your business down on a whim, in my opinion. If I’m closed even for a day that would cause undue stress.”

When the two agents arrived at the store, the lead agent asked Cox whether she carried a toy called the Magic Cube, which he said was an illegal copy of the Rubik’s Cube, one of the most popular toys of all time.

He told her to remove the Magic Cube from her shelves, and he watched to make sure she complied.

After the agents left, Cox called the manufacturer of the Magic Cube, the Toysmith Group, which is based in Auburn, Wash. A representative told her that Rubik’s Cube patent had expired, and the Magic Cube did not infringe on the rival toy’s trademark.

Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said agents went to Pufferbelly based on a trademark infringement complaint filed in the agency’s intellectual property rights center in Washington, D.C.

I’d love to hear the justification given for the Department of Homeland Security having an “intellectual property rights center” and why money, time and manpower should be spent tracking down toys that break patents that have already expired some time ago.

Once again, terror is used to justify stupid actions by the government.

Between all the work getting the inside and outside halloween decorations for the party on Saturday and Trick-or-Treat on Sunday, I managed to finish work on the Fiero’s brakes this week.

Now both the front and rear brake calipers on the passenger side have been replaced, along with both front rotors, and all four sets of brake pads, along with numerous bits and pieces of small brake hardware.

Nothing like learning auto repair through owning a twenty-year old car that wasn’t exactly cared for well by the previous owner.

I picked up Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas at the local Best Buy yesterday, as they’re having a special where you can get one of the games from the “PS2 Greatest Hits” collection for $4.99 with the purchase of GTA:SA.

I’ve noticed that the anti-“popular thing” backlash is starting up in some game forums, where the common complaint is that the fifth GTA game is just more of the same. I wonder if these same people complain about Madden 2005 still just being about football.

From the short amount of game play I’ve had, though, it certainly seems like they’ve added more to the GTA engine this time around than even Vice City did over GTA3.

So far, thumbs up.

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