Thanks to my own father making me sit and watch (and in a few rare occasions pitch in and help) him do things around the house when I was growing up, there are very few things I won’t tackle around my house. I can refinish furniture, build simple bookcases, perform general remodeling, install appliances, etc. In fact, I do so many things around here on my own because I’m too cheap to pay someone else to do it, that my in-laws are rarely surprised when I said I did such an such project and are in fact more surprised when I tell them I had to pay someone to do something (such as walk around on my roof blowing out the gutters!).
However, this weekend, I found something that I can’t do…carve pumpkins! I absolutely stink at carving pumpkins. Once would think that with the thousands of dollars in tools that I have in my arsenal, that I’d have the two or three things necessary to successfully carve out some eyes and teeth without breaking the darn pumpkin nearly in half, but I don’t. We got two pumpkins the other day at the Dairy-cum-punkin-patch and my oldest son wanted to carve a picture of Thomas the Tank Engine in it. So, I downloaded the template. I also thought I’d just carve the boys’ names in the other pumpkin, so I picked out a nice creepy font and typed their name in MSWord in a size that would fit on a pumpkin and I was ready to go.
At first, everything went great. I got out my jigsaw and cut the tops off the pumpkins…perfection! This was going to be so easy…and cool! However, when I started trying to cut the design that I had traced out on the pumpkin, I quickly realized that the brute-force power-tool approach was not going to work. Unfortunately, that was AFTER I’d botched the first two letters in my son’s name. Leaving that one in disgust, I turned to the Thomas template and while it did turn out much better, it still leaves a lot to be desired. It looks OK at night with a candle in it, but I’m afraid that for the other pumpkin, I’m just going to print up the boys’ names on paper, let them color it and stick-pin it to the pumpkin and call it a day.
Hey, I’m no artist. I’ve always known this, and why I thought my handy-ness would translate into a useful artistic endeavor such as pumpkin carving is beyond me. But one thing about botching something is that it teaches you a valuable lesson. With luck, this year’s punkin debacle will fade from both boys’ memories as quickly as it takes my youngest to go through a box of diapers and by the time they are both old enough to appreciate punkin carving, and aren’t icked out by scooping out the punkin guts (my oldest wouldn’t touch them), I’ll hopefully have found a nice set of carving tools and perfected my craft.
Maybe next year I’ll get a third punkin and practice on it before operating on the real ones. All’s I can say though, is thank the good Lord that I didn’t become a veterinarian.
At 34 years of age, I’m not old by any stretch of the imagination; however, I’m no spring chicken either. After nearly 15 years of fairly heavy weight training, my joints and skeletal system (especially my back) are probably more in line with a 44 year old. A study back in ’01 revealed that despite any bone density gains weight lifters earn from throwing around heavy weights, once they stop, those gains rapidly diminish. Add to that all of the joint and spinal damage nearly all weight lifters garner, and you gotta wonder why a person does it.
There should be a trophy award for parents who are able to get up in the middle of the night and calm a crying baby without waking up the entire house, or even the entire neighborhood for that matter. And parents who pull this off in an apartment complex should get a cash reward on top of their trophy (“Do you need cash NOW?” I hate those commercials!).
eing the third weekend in fall, and the first weekend of the season that wasn’t mired in the upper 80s temps with humidity nearing triple digits, we decided that it was time to hit the pumpkin patches in search of the perfect picture, oh and yeah, a pumpkin or two also.
Postulates & Pastimes 