Put Your Hand Inside the Pumpkin Head

So, then there was this long long time where we didn't blog. We're back now, to tell you all of our adventures in pumpkin carving. (This is not to be confused with "pumpkin craving", which is actually really abnormal. If you crave pumpkins, see a competent medical professional.) We purchased this pumpkin from our local Kroger affiliate, and some cheap carving tools too. (Again, if you're aware of "craving tools", this is a cause for alarm.) It was Family Home Evening, so we did our lesson thing and got to hacking the gourd. All the patterns that came with the carving tools were a little tough, except for the emoticon ;) which would have been cute, but I think I'd prefer H-#, which is the emoticon for "I was playing some Virtual Reality game from a bad 90's sci-fi, when someone came up from behind me and duct-taped my mouth shut." So we decided on a Happy Pirate, which is actually pretty much an emoticon in and of itself.

First, we had to get the goop out. Lobotomizing Jack, I've heard it called. The goop is gross, and the inside of the pumpkin has a smell designed, I guess, to ward off predators. Or maybe predators like that sort of thing. Again, pumpkin cravings are no good. But you just do it because that is the way it's been done in our country since Squanto taught John Smith to do this in Pilgrim times. John Smith carved a witch silhouetted by the moon, and Squanto carved a haunted ear of blue corn.

We carved the daylights out of that thing, and between the fact that our pumpkin was actually a ball of inch-thick drywall stuffed with canned pumpkin goop and the fact that our tools were made out of the finest aluminum Chinese sweatshops have to offer, it was a little difficult. We broke the tools right off, and finished the carving with some good old-fashioned American kitchen knives. The way our parents did it. The way their parents did it.

Then we put it on our Arizona front doorstep. This was the 20th, and in the more temperate climes from which we came this would not have presented a problem. The only downside we've yet found to the Grand Canyon State--pumpkin rot.

We got sick right after the carving, and so for days we barely noticed anything. Then when we got better, there was the pumpkin, housing its own breeds of creepy-crawlies. It was very spooky, with mold over the remaining eye, and bugs deep inside its entrails. I bravely sort of got a plastic bag around it and, careful not to sever the beast with the edge of the bag, rushed it out to the dumpster. Shame, too. Maybe it had some penicillin in it.

Lessons learned: Beware the deadly pumpkin-rot, and don't carve until the 29th at the earliest.