The Severed Cortex

As usual, I'm several weeks behind. Just before Halloween we picked Robert up so we could carve pumpkins. We wanted to do this last year with him, but he had already carved one with his sister so we missed out on it. Fortunately this year he hadn't been given the opportunity to carve a pumpkin so we were in luck.

I picked him up around 10:00 and we headed back to Edwardsville. While we were on our way back, Nancy headed to Market Basket to pick up some pumpkins and by the time we arrived home, Nancy had three fat pumpkins sitting in the garage. A couple of weeks prior, Nancy had already picked up some pumpkin carving tools, both of which came with a series of designs alternative to the boring old jack 'o lantern to carve. In addition, Nancy picked up a copy of Extreme Pumpkins which I will admit has some great pumpkin designs, but most require many days of preparation. All three of us flipped through the myriad of designs with Nancy settling on 'vampire bites woman's neck'. I settled on 'scary hands coming out of grave'. Robert chose a couple that were probably well beyond mine or Nancy's skill level, but eventually he settled for 'alien head'. All three turned out great. Pumpkin carving is sure a lot different than when I was a kid, although scooping out the pumpkin guts still makes me a little sick to my stomach. Something about the smell makes me want to gag.

We really didn't have much planned beyond the pumpkin carving. Nancy put together some lunch for us and afterward we just sort of ran errands, which is kind of odd. We've never done that before with Robert because frankly it's kind of boring for a kid. We did go to the bike store and look around at new bicycles which I suppose is kind of fun. We didn't buy any bikes, but we will be soon. We were supposed to get a new back door installed and even though we paid for it on the credit card, we had to cancel the job because Lowe's couldn't get their personal poop together. So, now we have a large credit on our credit card and new bikes seemed like a good idea. There's so many bike trails around here and it is an activity that we could do with Robert.

Anyway, I digress. We also went grocery shopping which strangely enough was kind of fun with a kid in tow. Normally I'm the kid in the grocery store, placing odd items in the cart to see if Nancy will catch them, begging Nancy to push me in the cart, or just riding the cart full speed down the aisle. I guess this time I wasn't under so much pressure to perform since there was another kid to help pick up the slack.