When Did Halloween Become A Month?

Yesterday was another busy day filled with Rotary activities. We had our Rotary meeting with a speaker that talked about the Great Basin and the supposedly vast amount of mineral resources contained in the basin. He was essentially trying to sell mining claims.

Then we had to get ready for Shreek-Reeka. This is a trick&treat type event that is held by the Eureka Casino. In one of their parking lots they have groups from around Mesquite set up booths and the kids can go from booth to booth and play little games (bean bag toss, plinko, etc) and win candy or little toy prizes. They also had haunted house type booths for kids to go through.

This year the two rotary clubs set up together. The noon club had a bean bag toss and our club had a inflatable cauldron with ping pong balls decorated with different colored eye-balls in them. The kids reach in the cauldron and grab a eyeball. Depending on what color eyeball they picked determined the number of pieces of candy they would receive. If a kid picked a red eye ball they got a whopping six pieces of candy. There were only 4 red eyeballs in about 200 eyeballs. So the odds of pulling a red one were pretty low, but hey I am sure that it happened and kids parents were dealing with sugared up kids last night. Feel sorry for the teachers that have those kids in class this morning.

I was on the setup crew. Wet set up the tables and worked on decorating the booth. I was on ballon duty for a period of time. I was filling ballon's with helium and then tying them closed and putting them on this special plastic tape so that they would make a arch of balloons. Well by the time I was done my fingers were killing me from trying to tie the knots in the balloons. My short little sausage fingers were not made for that activity. I probably could have been on Americas funniest home videos at one point.

For a period of time (which felt like hours, but probably was only 30-40 minutes), I was at the booth by myself working on this balloon arch. The other folks had to run get changed into costumes. I was trying to fill a balloon with helium, then tie a knot in it, while keeping the balloons I had put on the special tape for building the arch from floating/blowing away by having my foot on the tape. Anyway, it was like wrestling a boa contsrictor and I am sure anyone who was watching me do this got a pretty good laugh, but I kept chipping away and only had one real close call with the arch almost heading to St George. The damn helium tank tipped over and I went to catch it and took my foot off the arch tape and of course the damn thing started taking off. Fortunately it was a long tape and I was able grab it an reel it back in before the military got called out to shoot down my little colored balloons. Fortunately no kids were around or they would have learned some new inappropriate words.

I guess I am getting old, but I remember when Halloween was one day event and not a month of candy filled activities. So Eureka had this event and then the Casablanca casino has their trunk or treat event. Then there is the actual Halloween. I think the American Dental Association and the Candy makers have conspired to turn a one day holiday into a month long event. I am seriously thinking about calling my congressman to insist on a congressional investigation about this conspiracy. That seems to be the only fricking thing the clowns in Washington do these days is investigate supposed conspiracies.

My fingers are still aching from trying to tie balloons, I guess I can scratch being a clown that makes balloon animals at kids parties off my list of retirement activities and will just have to be the old average Joe clown that I am. The good lord just did not give me the equipment to do the job and it's best not to fight it. I am a little crushed, but life goes on.