Scenes from Verdun

Not everyone goes all out with fall and Halloween decorations, but there a couple of houses around me that always put in the effort

See, those big, orange plastic bags? They are multi-functional - they are full of leaves (if you have a tree on your property, you do a lot of raking in the fall) but they are sold with spooky Halloween images printed on the sides, so they can be decorative as they await pick up by the garbage man!

Adventures in pumpkin carving!

As we don't celebrate Halloween in Australia, this is just my third Halloween ever! Whilst I have dressed up in previous years (a zombie geisha in 2008, a crazed butcher in 2009) this year was decidedly low key. But, there was pumpkin carving......

Excavating the pumpkin insides! Special, very costly (26 cents at the Jean Coutu) pumpkin carving implements were used.

If I had been more prepared I would have washed, dried and roasted those pumpkin seeds, but as it was, we carved in the late afternoon, with fading light and rapidly decreasing temperatures. My "pumpkin scooping" hand was numb..... and orange.

Et voila, it is a...... well, it's obvious right? Ok, so this was a free form carve - no stencil, no pencil even! I was going for a cat, in honour of Pistache and all the other cats that congregate around M's house.

(so much for a geeky image, though we both did think of trying to carve Tyler from MR)

It's alive!

Or, at least, alight!

(And one minute after this photo was taken, the wind whipped through the mouth and extinguished the candle)

Ahh, the aftermath. M snapped this photo of the (ever growing, he is surely ready for winter by now) resident squirrel snacking on kitty pumpkin.

First snow!

It snowed last night! Just a couple of centimetres, and it wasn't cold enough for any to stick - this is what was left this morning and it was melting fast! No more snow is forecast for awhile and it should still be another month or so before our first big snowstorm (which hit December 7th last year, the day before I was due to fly out to Australia) Still, the snow is a big reminder that winter is on its way!


(It is Halloween today and you can see our little pumpkin sitting there, waiting to be carved this afternoon! I don't think we have decided on a design yet, but I am guessing it will be something appropriately geeky! More details and pictures to follow!)