Halloween Hijinks

I headed over to Ed & Sue's for their annual Halloween event on Friday night.  They had set up decorations galore, had the fire going, and it was a great evening.  A bit chilly, but not too bad considering it was November Eve.

I brought my usual pumpkin + roll of TP + kerosene with me so that we could have a nice flaming pumpkin.  I also brought a couple of extra ingredients this year; boric acid and gas-line antifreeze.  Wheee!!!

Ok, first the decoration pics...

 

Trust me when I say that there were MANY more decorations than just these, and that they looked amazing in person.  It's tough to snap a decent pic when it's dark out.  (Yes, I even tried using my "night" setting.)

Ok, on to the pumpkin.  Ed and I scrounged around until we found a piece of plywood to lay down to protect the grass (we had marginal success on that), as well as a cinder block to place the pumpkin onto.

A simple face was carved, the kerosene-soaked TP was placed inside, and voila!  A flaming pumkin!

I added some more kerosene to increase the flames a bit and snapped a few pics. This one caught our eye - what the heck is that thing at the top, just to the right of the flames?  It looks like a flame fairy or something.  (I thought it looked like something jumping from the third rope in a wrestling match...)

Ok, on to the green flames; boric acid - HEET gas-line antifreeze, and ta daaaa!

I started getting a little carried away with this stuff and began just pouring it all over the pumpkin.  The problem with that, of course, is that being spread out so thin, it burned up very quickly....

...but was awesome!!

More than once, Russ came up in our conversations.  After all, he'd introduced us to "copper wood" and we're pretty sure he would have gotten quite a kick out of our version of the green flames.

Here's an action segment for your viewing pleasure (please forgive the sideways angle).  I wanted to get a vid of the green flames shooting up so I asked Ed to do the dumping.  He got a little too close and the flames shot up inside the little container of mixed fluid, and you can hear a bit of a "whoosh" right near the beginning, but since the container was just about empty, and wasn't capped, there was no injury, just an accelerated heartbeat on the poor kid.  :-D

When all was said and done and the flames had burned out, my poor pumpkin looked rather disgruntled.  Actually, he looks like a pissed off Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, lol.

For next year, I'll need to make some changes; maybe I'll soak the TP in the boric acid + HEET, rather than the kerosene.  I also want to see about making different colors in addition to the green.

It was another great and fun night, spent with great friends.  Hopefully you all had a fun and safe evening as well!