I'm a Geek With a Pumpkin

It's that special time of year.  The time when stores go from Halloween, to Thanksgiving, to Christmas (Hanukkah-ehh), to New Years sales in less than 30 days.  The time when the radio plays the monster mash on one station and sleigh bells on another.  The time when empty lots become pumpkin patches or forests of evergreens ready for tinsel.  The time when that one store that never has anything in it suddenly is full of costumes for that candy filled haunted night in October, and then left hollowed out like the Jack-O-Lantern on the porch.  

Jack-O-Lanterns-- This brings me to a very important part of this special time of year: carving pumpkins.  

I've been carving pumpkins since before the days of daddy-daughter pumpkin carving.  Every year, it is one of my favorite things to do in fall.  I love going to the pumpkin patch, or that empty lot with the pumpkins on the tables and choosing the one with the most character.  I am partial to the ones with a nice stem (in case I want to use it for a nose) and a very fat, plump round body or a tall and skinny thing.  Usually some crooked face gets etched into my orange gourd, but this year, my cousin Z wouldn't allow just some silly face. She's a stencil user you see, and two triangular eyes and a three toothed smile just wouldn't cut it.  As I stared at the taped picture of a cat glued to her globe, I realized that I had no idea what to carve into my pumpkin.  If I was going to go all out and use a stencil, it was gonna mean something!  Everyone was carving things that had to do with their costumes, spiders and cats, but somehow the Tardis didn't seem to work well on my pumpkin.  So I searched the web... and found nothing acceptable.  (How do you use ellipses guys?)  Then I searched my brain.  What was meaningful to me that would look good on a tall, skinny pumpkin?  Then it came to me in a fit of geeky-ness!  I was going to carve the most absurd thing I had ever carved into a pumpkin.  

In honor of my good friend William Shakespeare, and my professor who thinks Hamlet should be learned over five weeks even though Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and every other play only gets one week, and the teacher who first taught me Hamlet, I carved (drum roll please!!) Act Five scene one!  That's right. The gravedigger scene. You know, "Alas poor Yorick!" Because yeah, I am that much of a geek.  

Im a geek with a pumpkin and I'm proud of it!  

Happy carving! Happy candy eating! Happy Halloween!!!!