Many years ago I purchased a plaster of Paris gargoyle at the Texas Renaissance Festival (I really enjoy going to a modern simulation of medieval times – a long time ago it was raining the day I went and it felt so much more appropriate).
Since gargoyles are symbols of protection, I took Gargey to my office, where I figured I could really use additional “protection”. For years he hung above the floor lamp, glaring down on everyone who set foot in my office. Sadly, one day Gargey did a Humpty Dumpty and I hauled his pieces home to be reincarnated from chunks of plaster to a proper gargoyle.
By now I was tinkering with LEDs and simple electronics, so the notion came that Gargey needed to have glowing eyes, so I over one winter break I drilled into his plaster head and strung wires with LEDs attached through the holes. That satisfied me for the time being, but he didn’t have much of an audience stuck in my office.
I noticed a hook in the hallway just outside my office door where a clock had originally been hanging. That’s the perfect place to put him, but what to do about the eyes? I was enamored about the idea of someone walking down the hall at night with most of the lights off and seeing a pair of bright yellow eyes light up as they passed my office door.
So Gargey started hanging out in the hallway, with a motion detector attached which fired up the golden eyes when anyone approached. That also did not work out as expected because few people ever noticed him.
Nevertheless, Gargey remained at his station for a couple of years until everything went to hell when the COVID shutdown occurred and I was eventually migrated out of my office (originally headed to the organizations’ cube farm – I could go on about that for way too long), and he ended up in the garage because I don’t yet have a proper place to reinstate him.
Shouter to Dead Parrots 