Happy Halloween 2009!

Since Halloween is one of my favorite holidays and since Katelyn and I decided to get pumpkins to carve from a local farm, we sat down on Thursday night to carve our own designs for the holiday season.  I had suggested to Katelyn that she might want to do an engagement-related design, and since I'm a Mainer and had the taller pumpkin, I decided to do a lighthouse to fit the geographic theme.

As you can see, Katelyn used the initials of our first names and 2010 along with two bubbling flutes of champagne for her design.  I based my lighthouse design on the Cape Hatteras lighthouse from North Carolina, figuring that it might be a little easier to tackle than doing a local landmark like Portland Head Light.

Interestingly enough, this was the first time I ever carved a pumpkin using my own design and using my own two hands to do the carving work.  Growing up, my mom used to carve pumpkins for Halloween, but I never really trusted myself to do any carving with the knives or to do much more than suggest designs and do some helping with the clean-up process.

Compared to Katelyn's very nice toast to our engagement and upcoming wedding, of course, my lighthouse seems a bit, well, scatterbrained by comparison.  But it was the first thing that I thought of in the course of looking at my pumpkin and thinking of a design that fit the shape, so I pretty much just ran with it.

Once I broached the idea of a wedding-themed pumpkin to Katelyn, however, she went right off designing it and I think it really came out great.  She used a screwdriver to get the bubbles coming up from the champagne flutes, and I particularly love how the profile of the champagne sits in the individual flutes.

Today we're heading into the "big city" (though most places are huge compared to tiny little Blue Hill) of Bangor to relax and unwind after the work week and drop in on my brother and his fiancée for their Halloween party.  I don't know if Katelyn or I will be dressing up for Halloween, as it's the day off and neither of us have looked at costumes yet; chances are, the stores in Bangor will be entirely picked over by this point as well.

As much as I love Halloween, I've not been really big on actually dressing up myself in the past few years.  I forget the last time I actually set out to have a costume for October 31st, actually.  But I do enjoy the spirit of the season, enjoying the last hurrah of autumn with scary movies, candy, and fun costume designs.

To end this sort of "fluffy" post, I do want to remind my few readers that posts will be few and far between for the month of November.  As I've mentioned before, I will be participating in "National Novel Writing Month" for the entire month of November, aiming to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.  The writing begins tomorrow, so between doing work for my job as a teacher and doing the novel writing, I probably won't have much time to write here.  If anything does come up, however, you might see one or two posts on the blog.  At the moment, after the crazy venue search we went through, we are at a bit of a lull in the planning stage and I don't mind that one bit.

Hope everyone has a Happy Halloween!