Pumpkinpalooza!

Well, the election has come and gone, but I am going to go a little more old school and write about Halloween - our first in Pleasanton. It would have come sooner, but we didn't get the photos downloaded until just a few minutes ago. Alas, the wonders of technology. Anyway, this was our first Halloween as a couple. And our first in our new house. So we were pretty excited to go get pumpkins and do the carving thing. On the Saturday before Halloween, we drove by a big pumpkin patch, so we strolled in. This place was awesome. They had big pumpkins, green pumpkins, little pumpkins, pumpkins with character, and carnies. Yeah, carnies. They had rides and stuff. We strolled about and picked out a couple of big pumpkins. Seriously, these things weighed about 40 pounds each. They were gynormous, the kind of pumpkins you pick out when you don't remember how hard it is to clean them out. The next day, we headed over to Bill Bates' place to hang out with some friends and their kids. Stacy is a married woman of child-bearing age; you can imagine where her mind went (no worries, though - I want kids too). We craved and scraped, shoveled and cut. While I was arm deep in my pumpkin, Stacy was picking out the pattern for hers. So Stacy ends up trying to make this skull thing. It looked awesome until she got to the teeth. Whil trying to carve out these little holes in a pumpkin the size of a small fridge, she broke her pumpkin. She did some toothpick repair, but this pumpkin was doomed. It lasted for a few minutes until one of the kids walked over and poked at it. Lovely.



We eventually got the pumpkins home. They rode in the backseat while I took every curve with caution, every light with a slow start. We got the pumpkins up on our front porch on Sunday. Halloween? It was on a Friday. As it turns out, that is waaaaay too long to wait between carving and Halloween. We ended up with this giant orange, smelly, mushballs. Seriously, if you touched the pumpkin, it was dissolve in a moldy mess all over your hand. So it is almost Halloween, and Stacy goes out to buy candy. I left her with one piece of guidance - "Don't buy lame candy." She came back with High School Musical, Incredible Hulk, and body part candy. None of it tasted particularly good. Strike that. None of it tasted at all good. I will pick out the candy next year. Who doesn't like $100,000 bars? Those things rock, and you never get enough of them at Halloween. None of it mattered though. The smelly pumpkins and untasty candy were no big deal. When Halloween rolled around, we got all of 3 trick-or-treaters. Three. _3_. That's it. Next year, we are going to put up a stand in some residential area where there are more kids. If they won't come to us, we will take Halloween to them. And they will like it, damnit.