Good evening my beautiful Beloved! Tonight we pass an important milestone in the history of your favorite Halloween, Horror, and Do-It-Yourself project blog. This is our 100th blog post since we launched the site on June 23, 2012. Can you believe it? Less than 5 months and already 100 episodes. Honestly, I’m a bit surprised I’ve been able to accomplish this. You will soon know why as we run through a year in the life of your old pal Scarydad.
You see, I had begun this post as a sort of a retrospective anyway. Every year my employer requires of us a year-end summary of our accomplishments. It gives us a chance to highlight performance above and beyond our normal job roles as well as an opportunity to explain deficiencies, should they occur.
A couple of weeks ago, as I was crafting that document, it occurred to me that if I were to do the same thing for my personal life, it would probably be pretty impressive. And so, because I’m a nerd in that way, and because I didn’t have any interesting torture victims that day, I sketched out a few bullet points. A few turned into a lot.
Tonight we will summon the ghosts of Scarydad past, present, and future. I want you to know where we’ve been and where we’re going.
January was relatively relaxed. We came off of a very busy holiday season and I believe I spent most of the month nursing a hangover. It wasn’t too terribly busy. However, I did begin to write some essays because I knew that I wanted to build a website in the near future.
In February I bought the domain and began piecing together what would become Hats and Guns, my first website. As I learned how the back end of a WordPress control panel worked, I wrote nearly daily content trying to develop a voice and focus.
I also spent much of February and the first part of March being very sick. Spawn of Scarydad picked up some kind of plague from daycare and the family passed it around pretty regularly for weeks. Then right at the end of February, I got scratched by a poison ivy vine that caused a systemic infection that put me in the emergency room.
Of course, Bride of Scarydad caught the ivy rash from me and we both spent nearly a month being pissed off and itchy. And then things got worse.
In March we had to get our foundation repaired. On the second of what should have been a three-day job, a major thunderstorm came through and flooded all the holes. We had to wait for it to stop raining before they could finish work. Five days later…
Oh yeah, and one of those holes was dug inside the house in the middle of the hallway. For a whole week we had plastic hanging and a 4-foot deep hole right outside the bedroom. With a toddler running around.
I wrote blog posts and tried to stay sane.
About two hours after the foundation guys left we met with a Realtor to put our house up for sale. About 24 hours after she left we discovered that we had to replace the sewer line. Then the city guy came out and said we had to move it over six inches. I got to tear down and rebuild a section of fence. This was how April went.
Meanwhile, as all of this stuff was going on we were staging and actually showing the house and looking at ones we might want to buy, and I wrote stuff.
Then came the breakthrough.
Our house got an offer on it. We had to find a place to live and super quick. All of this was on fast forward as May sped on by and we raced into June. In June I started Scarydad because Hats and Guns was still having trouble finding its footing, and amid all the chaos, running two websites instead of one just seemed like a really good idea. Scarydad could be something similar with an obvious focus, as well as being the mouthpiece for my insane alter-ego who I always had to fight to keep quiet with the more serious blog. At this one, I’m more the oddball than he.
Moving on.
We went to Cancun for a week because, you know, that’s what normal people do with two contracts on homes pending… We came back, sold, bought, moved, and I drank some beers. Then this:
We, being the masochists we seem to be, tore a wall out of our new house. For nearly a month the new house was under construction as it was remodeled.
I built a workbench in my garage and made cryptic notes that would guarantee I was certified insane once I finally snapped from all this shit. We’re only talking July here guys, we still have four months to go!
Ok, I’ll speed it up a bit. Basically, after the remodeling was complete, we decided to take it easy. And by take it easy, I ramped up the Halloween projects and blog.
I designed and built several brilliant projects for my Halloween haunt and I believe every one of them was greatly successful. I have now retooled the laboratory into a twisted Santa’s workshop where I make toys and little projects daily.
Your beloved Scarydad has been a busy little monster, hasn’t he?
Phew. Okay. Damn.
Okay, so where are we and what’s next?
Well, I can tell you where we are. With no advertising except the occasional personal plug on social media, our traffic averages about 90 visitors a day. That’s a combination of new and returning traffic and on some days it’s higher, but that’s the average. You guys seem to like the picture dumps and tutorials the most, but we get about the same amount of traffic whether I post anything new or not, and regardless of what it is.
We’re growing my friends.
Now as to the future.
In January I will have Scarydad swag such as stickers and shirts for those of you who want them. We will begin to have contests and giveaways across our social media pages. You can expect many more tutorials as Scarydad moves out of the exclusively horrific and begins showing you kickass life hacks you can use to save time. The fact is, I do stuff all the time and it’s not always scary. I know that’s shocking, but it’s true. So, you will be privileged to share in this sacred knowledge.
I’m really looking forward to 2013 and creating even more mayhem.
Thanks to all of you who have paid attention to this crazy, sawdust-covered doofus. I couldn’t do it without you.
