We had a great crowd at this morning’s Town Hall meeting and a packed agenda. So let’s get straight to the recap!

“Brent” introduced himself to the crowd with his standard meeting-opening month-in-review slideshow.

Retail Operations Director Shirley Hall recognized Percy Goynes for his 45 years of service with Goodwill.

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This week’s roundup is all Halloween related!

• Our friends at Goodwill of Northern New England are cranking out the Halloween costume tips. Get a load of these — How to be a cave woman, Mad Men, another Mad Men, creative costumes for kids and three other women’s costume ideas. They also host an annual Ghoulwill Ball, and you can see the photos from this year’s ball at their Facebook page.
• What do you do with your pumpkins on November 1?
• Want to make an easy, no-waste Halloween porch decoration? Crafting A Green World suggests a drunken farmer.
• They also have a tutorial on making a reusable solar jack o’lantern.
• Evil Mad Scientists has a coardboard crocodile how-to. If you’re like me, you’ll see that tutorial and think “They could go further with this.” So do that. Take it further. Embrace the cardboard crocodile’s destiny.
• At GreenHalloween.org, a family shows how they made three animal costumes with the help of Goodwill for under $15.
• And The Go Green Blog shows you how to make some tin-can Halloween lanterns.

Have fun this weekend, and be safe. And don’t forget to enter our costume contest! We’re taking entries until 5:00 on November 1st, so be sure a camera finds you in costume this weekend.

So far we’ve talked about some easy costume ideas for Halloween — the Christmas tree, Candy Corn and A Dozen or So Things You Can Do with a Bull Costume, but what about those who want to go out as a couple?

The Omaha World-Herald ran a story today about couples costumes, and it includes Tammy and Mark Cain, a couple from Union, Nebraska who have used Goodwill finds to bring their ideas to life.

Makeup and spray paint.

Give Tammy enough and she can create unusual costumes.

One year the couple wore an ensemble with a silver and gold theme.

Mark dressed as a non-speaking “silver mime” and Tammy went as his gold “trophy wife.”

Tammy took Mark’s jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, shoes and gloves, hung them up in the garage, and spray painted them silver.

It took a few coats to finish the job. Afterward the clothes, Tammy said, were a “little crunchy.”

For her costume, Tammy found a gold slip at Goodwill for her top, and a dark slip for the base of her “trophy.”

One year they gathered more clothes at Goodwill and dressed as an “old casino couple,” a pair you might see playing the slot machines after stepping off a tour bus.

But they wanted to add a little more fun. So Mark, who’s 6 feet 3 inches tall, dressed as the lady, complete with pink slacks and gold sandals

Read the rest of the article and find more couple costume ideas at Omaha.com.

And then when you’ve got your costume finished, enter our contest.

So Erin and I went into the Benson Park Plaza store the other day to get some Halloween inspiration for you good people. We went in with no ideas — we wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to put together a costume with the seemingly random things you can find at a Goodwill store.

So let’s get started. First, we found this bull costume.

Okay, so I’m a bull.
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Goodwill is the place to go for Halloween. If you haven’t heard that a time or two or more in the last month, you’ve been missing out on quality news features, blog postings and Facebook updates.

Just like a kid never gets tired of going door to door asking for candy, we never get tired of picking out costumes. Today Goodwill employees, along with one Goodwill spouse and the tiniest Goodwill yorkie, headed to KMTV’s Morning Blend to show hosts Mary and Mike the costumes we put together. With a little time searching through the racks and a little creativity, you too could be a sitcom character, ancient queen, not so friendly neighbor, or construction worker.

Check out the video at the Morning Blend website.

Oh yeah, and we’re having a costume contest.