Pumpkins!

The Grace College Mu Kappa chapter invited us over for a bonfire and pumpkin carving. They invite us to quite a number of activities, but this is one that I don't miss if I can help it. It's fun to connect with recently-landed MKs, enjoy new fireside recipes, and, of course, carve pumpkins.

I'll give you a minute to figure it out.
Give up?
It's a gastropod with an iPod. OK, stop looking at me that way. You already knew I was a geek...

Fiona drew her design before we even left the house, and Deborah transferred it onto her pumpkin. Aiden's pumpkin is the result of his constantly changing the specs of what he wanted while we were carving. The third eye was the icing on the cake.

In related news, the third time was a charm, and I finally was able to make a harvest in my pumpkin patch of... one pumpkin! Now most people would be disappointed to have planted three years running and only get one fruit, but I'm excited to have finally gotten ONE! Maybe I'll do even better next year...

Thar she be. What shall I carve on this one?

Know

Just this afternoon, I came across an online application called Wordle. The idea is that you paste in a bunch of text, and it creates a "word cloud" that gives prominence to more-frequent words. So... I pasted in the entire text of "You Know You're an MK When..."

I have yet to figure out a good way to save these as high-resolution files, but it seems like a great potential illustration tool.

Unamerican

Deborah came across these the other night, as she was getting out her button-maker to use at our church's Spanish VBS. These are old, old, old. Back then, we weren't terribly enchanted with America and it's customs (Deborah especially) and these made perfect sense.

Unamerican. How well do you think these would fly these days? Literally trying to fly with one of these on your shirt would almost certainly get you pulled aside for questioning. Aside from the opinion and it's implications, I don't think people these days are so much in the habit of wearing their hearts on their shirt sleeves (or bumpers) as was more common years ago. These days, you'd pin your political statement to your blog rather than your shirt.

Why I still bother to check the mailbox

I'm a horrible letter writer. Not that I write such bad letters, I'm just horrible about sitting down and doing it. It wasn't always so; in high school, I probably spent as much time writing letters as I did writing homework — and that speaks well of my homework.

I got this postcard in the mail recently:

That, right there, is a keeper.

I should go write some letters....