Carving My First Halloween Pumpkins: A Nevin Barich Blog Experience

Halloween is tomorrow, and to help us get into the spirit, earlier this week my wife Ramona brought us pumpkins for us to carve.

And another "first" in my life was about to begin.

I had never before carved a pumpkin. Not once. Why? To be honest, I couldn't really tell you. I didn't really grow up in a pumpkin-carving environment. It wasn't that we didn't celebrate Halloween. We did. We put up some decorations outside, we wore costumes, and we went trick-or-treating and so forth. But the celebration simply never extended to carving pumpkins.

Ramona, however, comes from a pumpkin-carving clan, and she felt that us carving pumpkins together would be a good husband-wife activity.

She was wrong.

I found out within about 15 seconds that pumpkin carving, to me, is one of the dumbest exercises in the history of mankind. It's not the carving part that's so bad. That's OK, I guess. But it's all the prep work.

First, you gotta cut the top off the pumpkin. That's annoying. Especially when there's one of those big green stems that blocks your cutting path. And one of the pumpkins that Ramona bought was about as soft as concrete. Even our good knives had trouble penetrating it.

Then there's the scooping of the pumpkin seeds. That's just ridiculous. I mean...it smells!! Plus, the inside of a pumpkin looks like the surface of some planet you'd find in the Star Wars Galaxy or an Aliens movie. It's just creepy. And why the hell do some of you save these seeds? What the hell's the matter with you? What good are pumpkin seeds for? They suck in pie, they don't taste good, and they're slimy with pumpkin guts.

And then there's the carving itself. Pardon me if my pumpkin eyes aren't complete symmetrical. I don't know what the hell I'm doing!! It's not like I took a class. Besides, how can I focus after scooping out the damn thing of its seeds? There must be seedless pumpkins out there. Or pumpkins you can buy that are ready to carve. Or maybe I could pay someone $5 to scoop out my pumpkins. Hell, I can find someone to rake my leaves for $5. How difficult can finding a pumpkin scooper be?

Oh, and there's the Pumpkin warts too. That's definitely on the "WTF" list.

In the end, we have two homemade carved pumpkins that we're displaying this All-Hallows Eve. But they weren't carved with love. They were carved reluctantly, with annoyance, and with disgust.

And for any of you who are rolling your eyes at me right now...

...I'm going to drive up to your house on Halloween...

...and throw pumpkin seeds at your windows.

:-)

And now for this week's:

SIGN OF THE APOCALYPSE

A “Gentlemen’s hair salon” in Sydney, Australia is now offering topless haircuts from four confident female hairdressers.

Simply put:

Greatest. Idea. Ever.

And with the women having Aussie accents, it's even more great.

I simply don't see how this business venture will fail.

:-)