Month: November 2014

smashing pumpkins (or smashed pumpkins, really)

It is an American holiday tradition to decorate with pumpkins for Halloween, and carve them into jack-o-lanterns. Some pumpkins never quite make it that far…

This pumpkin was not the belle of the pumpkin patch.

There is also the less widely appreciated tradition of stealing pumpkins of other people’s front steps, and smashing them onto the ground. The closest I have come to this tradition is taking our post-Halloween pumpkins to the compost pile, and throwing them down.


Pumpkins actually don’t tend to smash in these circumstances. A compost pile is a rather soft bed of leaves and other squishy organic materials.


These pumpkins are more smushed than smashed. (I confess I am amused by the distorted faces of the decomposing pumpkins.)

These are from 2009, 2012 and 2013. It is totally normal that I have accumulated a collection of photos of smashed and/or rotting pumpkins over the years. I’m sure you can say the same, right?

pumpkin carving, take 2

Remember how cute the kids’ pumpkins looked a few days ago? Wouldn’t you know it, time got away from me, and I left the pumpkins sitting there in front of the fireplace. Come Friday, I thought I should bring them out and figure out how to light them up. Unfortunately, the jack-o-lanterns had not fared well. Even though our house is chilly, it is apparently not chilly enough to keep a carved pumpkin from rotting and molding:

Oops.

On the bright side, we still had more uncarved pumpkins. I hadn’t found time to carve mine, nor John his, and there were a couple more smaller pumpkins that we had gotten from my CSA. (I’m sure they would have been great for pie-making…) The kids and I had a bit of time after school on Friday before we were joining friends for trick-or-treating, so we knocked these guys out (and set them out) on Halloween night.

I would also like to note that we didn’t have any tea lights, candles or otherwise. We had to get creative to light these up. Two have LED head lamps, one has a small flashlight, and another a keychain light. Each of the lights was wrapped in a layer of a yellow napkin, and the placed in a plastic sandwich bag before being placed in the slimy insides of the pumpkins.

Upping my game

It’s November again, and I am diving into the daily blogging commitment of NaBloPoMo once more. In fact, I got a head start. I decided to blog daily in September. (Uncharacteristically, I did not declare it). And then I kept on going through October. I haven’t been able to put much time into writing, and, as ever, there are many posts in me that I still hope to write. But I have had fun working my way through my hoard of photos and sharing them according to my whims. This month, I have no particular goals beyond spending a bit of time each day doing something that I enjoy.

I also need to up the pace of my research. Things have been so very hectic with parenting and the new house that I have rarely managed to get in more than my minimum time commitment to my research on a given day. Conference deadlines are coming up, and the time has come for me to get cracking on the last push for my degree. I need to find many more hours each week in order to reach my goals. To that end, I hereby declare that for the month of November, I am upping my daily minimum of time spent on my research to 2 tomatoes. Day in, day out. No time off for good behavior. (Or Thanksgiving.)

Wish me luck!

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