First, we had to get two giant Igloo coolers. I fill each cooler all the way up to the top with candy. These coolers are now iconic legends all over this part of town. Every year, when kids ring the bell and I open the door, I am greeted with screams of “cooler guy!!“. It’s pretty hilarious. Ask my friend, Dan Ross, about it. I had him “stand in” for me one year, and people only saw the cooler, not the face of the guy behind the cooler.

As you can see, we only give away the good stuff. All the best and favorite chocolate candies.

• Almond Joy
• Peanut M&Ms
• Plain M&Ms
• Snickers
• Baby Ruth
• Nestle Crunch
• Hershey’s Chocolate
• Kit Kat
• Butterfinger
• Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (the big ones)

That’s in every bag. So let’s talk about the bags we buy. We always get good deals in bulk from either Wal-mart or Costco. This year, we got 13 big bags. As I emptied them into the coolers this afternoon, I did the numbers.

Each of the 13 bags had a net weight of 5.6 lbs, and 150 pieces of candy each. I put seven bags in one cooler and six bags in the other. The grand total is 72.8 pounds of candy I will give away tonight, or 1,950 individual pieces. Even Elwood can’t believe it.

Now, how does one give away that much candy in one Halloween night? Well, I have to use two hands. For every kid at the door, I scoop my two hands deep into the top cooler and dump at least a dozen pieces into each bucket or bag. You should hear the reactions when the sheer weight of each two-fisted scoop smacks the bottom of the pillow case!

I think Halloween must be my favorite holiday. What do you think? What’s Halloween like where you are? Leave a comment or contact me via email.

Current Status: The trick-or-treaters have only been coming for about 45 minutes, or less, and I’ve already cleared one cooler. That’s roughly 36 lbs. of chocolate candy – almost one piece every minute.

I started an art journal swap with her over a year ago. We draw or paint something in one of two Moleskines—a small sketchbook and a Japanese book—and get togther periodically to swap them and create the next work. And so on, and so on. That project hasn’t moved as fast as either of us woud have liked, I think, but to our credit we haven’t stopped and are going to make it to the ends of the journals. At some point I want to scan the pages and display them in a section of this web site.

The new project is our first photography collaboration. I was inspired by another site where two friends, thousands of miles apart, posted pictures every day to a common site, and I figured we could do that, too. Not only were the shots really good, but also the project as a whole was impressive. Melinda and I knew we couldn’t realistically commit to shooting and posting a photo every day. But we decided we could shoot and post one photo every seven days. We first talked about it a year ago or more, but we finally started a month ago. We post one photo each to our site, Every Week, on Sundays. We just posted the shots for Week 4.

We decided the first week would be portraits of each other, shot after a lunch at Panera. The second week would be self-portraits. After that, it would be a free-for-all. Melinda is a great photographer. Go see for yourself.

One of the reasons why I wanted to get this project off the ground was to force both of us to shoot more photos, to create more, and in the process I hoped we would be thinking and seeing more artistically all the time. I struggled to find my rhythm in the third week, but last week I started to hit my stride, shooting more and looking for more opportunities. The project has had the same effect on Melinda—she told me that she’s been shooting a lot this week and even had a hard time choosing just one photo to post for Week 4. I’m really excited about it, because I can see that what I had hoped would happen is actually happening.

So watch and see what the upcoming year looks like through our lenses. I will still be posting occasional photos over in my Flickr photostream, but the majority of the best of my new and old shots will go into my new photo gallery here, which is just getting underway.