the early bird special

Cody and I made the most adorable Halloween pumpkins ever this year. And by “we” I mean that Cody got bored after scooping the guts out of his pumpkin and disappeared to drink beer while I got to carve two pumpkins. (Multitasking is one of my strong suits, I can drink beer and carve pumpkins at the same time.)

We were invited to Megan’s BYOP(umpkin) party and left our house ten minutes before the party started to go buy pumpkins and walk to her apartment. Safeway had a meager selection of gourds out in front of the store including some large misshapen orange pumpkins in tall cardboard bins, round pumpkins too small to make anything cool out of, and white pumpkins. We pulled almost every pumpkin out of the bin looking for a handsome one, took turns climbing into the bins trying to retrieve Cody’s cell phone when it fell out of his pocket and plummeted to the bottom of the pumpkin crevasse of hell, and finally decided on one tall orange pumpkin and one smaller white one. I had purposely picked out a tall pumpkin to fulfill my artistic vision; a pumpkin-face Harry Potter. Cody picked the white pumpkin because he was mad at the orange pumpkins for being in a bin that was laborious to fish a lost cell phone out of.

Pumpkin-face Harry Potter turned out exactly as well as I had hoped with the aid of some googly eyes and emergency nails when I cut the pieces too close together. The white pumpkin was carved with a robot with a heart for a chest. Hopefully pictures will be forthcoming. Hopefully I’ll just buy a new digital camera soon, because I’m tired of refreshing Flickr every half hour hoping that someone will have uploaded pictures of me or my craft projects.

We brought our pumpkins home and they looked even more charming when they were lit up in the hallway approaching the front door. For a whole week I lit the votive candles when I got home from work and make excuses to walk outside and admire the pumpkins in their full glory. Friday night tragedy struck when our landlord, Bessie, informed us via note on the door and that open flames were forbidden in the apartment complex, which seemed over the top, but I’d hate to be that girl that started the fire that wasn’t covered by the fire insurance and that consumed the worldly possessions of everyone else in the building (the majority of whom I dislike or have never met; beside the point). Saturday morning I ran into Bessie outside raking leaves and apologized for violating the candle rule, and that woman is the most amazing ever because she seemed genuinely sad when she said that she really liked our pumpkins, but her daughter had insisted that she enforce fire code.

I guess we could get some electric lights or something, but with Halloween two days away now it hardly seems worth it. Alas.