Here are the pumpkins I helped to carve on Friday night, with , , Lyssa and Rob (after a nice evening at the pub with , , , and ). I carved the big slit-eyed guy with fangs and horns sitting top row center (he has a forked tail too, which you can’t see), and the smaller, demonic, forked-tongue dude just to his right. Apparently I was going for a sort of cat people/Maurice Sendak/Darth Maul kind of aesthetic this year.

My personal favorite was Lyssa’s tiny pirate-pumpkin with the eye patch and the big mouth, top row far right. The one sitting on its own lid, bottom row on the left, was an experiment in “sight-unseen” duo-carving. carved one eye, half the nose and half the mouth, then covered her part with a towel, and Lyssa set about carving the rest without knowing what the other half of the face looked like. The result was quite disturbing –hints of Picasso mixed with Dave McKean– but I likey!

I didn’t make it out to a single actual Hallowe’en party this weekend, due to some unpleasant and inconvenient menstrual cramps, but I’m sure everyone had a rockin’ time without me. I actually stayed home from work yesterday, too, and watched the last two discs of Gilmore Girls season 6, while soothing my aching tummy with endless cups of tea and then making it feel worse by dipping into the vast stores of bite-sized chocolate bars that we’ll be handing out to the little nippers in our neighborhood tonight.

No costume, still. But today is the day that my little white home-grown pumpkin gets shanked. Bernard, as I’ve affectionately dubbed him, will be made into a ghosty-faced jack o’ lantern, his seeds will be preserved for sowing next spring, and after about 3 hours on our front porch with a tealight inside him, he’ll be brought in for photographs, then roasting, and tomorrow will likely become a tasty pie.

Happy Samhain, all!