Progress on Relay for Life

The last few days, we've been working on our booth for the local Relay for Life, a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society.

Most people just show up and sell cookies, lemonade, or hot dogs. But that's boring, and not really our style here at ImaginEERIEing. Instead of just a booth to buy snacks at, we decided to have a Wild West town full of games, music, and fun. On a shoestring budget.

Yesterday, we finished putting the finishing touches on the jail, where people can get thrown in by their friends and have to talk someone into "posting bail" for them to get out. It's a walk-in jail complete with bars and details on the walls.

Today, we finished our standees which people can stand behind to get their picture taken. Characters for the standees include an outlaw, a prospector, and a saloon girl.

We also finished our shooting gallery, a facade that looks like a wild west bank that kids will be able to shoot ping pong balls at out of a burp gun. If we have time, we're going to put little bank robbers in the windows.

Other members of the team are working on other attractions, such as a poker tournament, some live music, a roping contest, and other scenery such as hay bales, cow skulls, and wagon wheels.

But the thing that's taken the most effort so far, for me anyway, was the stupid Plinko game I made. I just got in from drilling over a hundred little holes and filling them with dowels, and building a box around a sheet of plywood. The game board is pretty much finished, but it still needs painting and something to prop it up with.

I tested the Plinko game, and unfortunately, the poker chips sometimes just stop halfway down, balancing on a dowel, and also sometimes just fly off the board. I'm hoping another coat of paint and a coat of sealant - to make things less rough - will fix this. I'm down to the wire on this, though - the Relay for Life is Friday night, leaving me only one more night to work on the board! Yikes!