Halloween field trip

October 31, 2009

I’ve been busy, lately doing the final adjustments on one of the continuity books. Apparently, I wrote the whole thing using three or four nouns and a long string of conjunctions. My bad.

But as you may know it is my favorite season. And as usual, I made sure to take time to celebrate the Halloween weekend.

We went to a showing of the movie “Paranormal Activity”, which I can strongly recommend. Although personally, I would have retitled it “Don’t Date a Douchebag”. If you’ve been haunted your whole life by a demon that burned down your childhood home, and has returned to make your life miserable, and all you want is for it to go away?

The last thing in the world you need is to be living with a jerk who is not only going out of his way to anger said demon, he is insisting that he has to take video footage of you first thing in the morning, and while you are in bathroom brushing your teeth.

Someone has to die here. Just sayin’.

The best way to see this movie is in a crowd of people, to feed off the energy of the ones who jump and scream. Or in our case, find it impossible to shut up in a movie theater. During an extremely tense scene, when our hero was sticking his head (and camera) into the attic crawl space where anything might be lurking, some Wisconsin wit behind us announced:

“They need more insulation.”

We followed up our movie with another family field trip to a town called appropriately enough, Butte Des Morts. Butte Des Morts is the home of M. Schettl Sales Inc.

M Schettl’s is what you get if you cross a typical Wisconsin farm with a home improvement center. And then add generous doses of flea market. And then transplant the whole thing to Jurassic Park. On the week the circus is in town.

Did I mention there are also lots of sharks?
And cheap, closeout dog treats.

The whole thing is spread out over multiple buildings, sheds, barns, transplanted psuedo-Victorian green houses and rusted circus wagons.

It’s kind of hard to describe. I did not take pictures of the insides of the buildings. It seemed wrong, somehow. But the kitchen and bath building, prompted #2 to announce, “Now I know what’s missing from our kitchen. A life sized statue of Marylin Monroe.”

In the furniture showroom, I was trying to decide what I wanted more: the $398 three foot tall plush moose, the $698 closer to life size resin moose, the moose in between with the bell on its neck (that turned out to be a reindeer), or perhaps a five foot tall Spiderman.

Or a bra.
Why is there a rack of bras here? With baby toys. Around the corner from the $75 leather jackets in my size.

Under a seven foot long tiger.

You get kind of torn between the desire to buy everything, or just back away slowly.

But the real show is outside. This is where they keep the acres of things to large too put inside.

In Wisconsin, we are used to large fiberglass animals. They make them here. So driving past this

is not that unusual.

But we don’t usually see this.

I threatened to give this to #2 as a wedding gift, if he marry’s a girl I don’t like.

And then there were the tableaus.

This is not just a gorilla, climbing the Eiffel tower. this is a gorilla being shaken off the Eiffel tower as it is tipped by a diminutive Hercules.

And the rhino attack.

You can’t see it in this picture, but they are trying to rescue the caged baby rhino in the trailer behind the jeep.

And my personal favorite:

And it was all for sale.
Thank God that we had no money. Because I sure can’t depend on common sense and good taste to rescue me, in moments like this.

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