OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Sacrilege

October 31st, 2007

So I have a list of interesting things to write about and the attention span to just sort of look at the list and then go and see if any of my favorite blogs have been updated in the last fifteen minutes again, and, good lord, I hope it isn’t permanent, but I guess I will live if it is. But it’s pumpkin day and we commemorated by offering to run a game of Werewolf/Mafia in Aodán’s school, and it was fun but also sort of strange because the kids are clearly brilliant but not quite strategic enough to try and figure out who is lying, I sort of think that at 11 and 12, they are just not that practiced at seeing outside of themselves, they’re so much more absorbed with figuring out for themselves how to lie convincingly that they don’t watch each other to see who else is lying. Or else they’re all so squirrely all the time that their tells are well camouflaged.

Part of the reason we are so bad at this holiday thing is we just don’t plan ahead well, so it occurred to us last night that that was it for our chance to carve pumpkins for the year. I had bought one pumpkin on Sunday but I had to tow it home up the big hill in the trailer behind my bike already loaded with two heavy small children, library books, and various other groceries, so one was the limit. I just figured Raven would pick up another one or two on his way home from work last night. No dice, he went to three or four grocery stores and called several others. Nothing. But the local Michael’s did have the realistic looking hollow foam pumpkins, about 200 of them, and they were marked down from $10 to $2, so he went and got six of them and you know, I didn’t end up having to hollow out four or five pumpkins as I have in previous years, and they won’t rot on our porch, and the kids got the part of the experience they loved, which was designing and cutting, and I did the one real pumpkin so I got the smell and the slightly irritating feel of pumpkin guts drying on my hands… plus, the foam ones bounce! (oh, and the foam ones are flammable, so, um, no candles. But we wouldn’t be home to light them up tonight anyway, since we’re heading across town to a slightly more suburban neighborhood where we hope for better trick-or-treating, anyway…)

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