Hallowe'en Post Mortem

Well, Hallowe'en has came and went and it been one of the less eventful ones I ever seen. It was our anniversary too, but we're waiting for the weekend to celebrate that. I hope yours was nice, with the candy and the goblins and whatnot. Us, we didn't put on any funny costumes or anything, and in fact went to a yoga class. I know, bo-ring. I had this fantasy that everyone would show up in a rubber Nixon mask and do yoga in silence as if nothing was out of the ordinary. But that didn't happen, as you might have guessed. We did get what I think is referred to as a smattering of kids looking for handouts before we left, but they were soon dispersed when we called in the police. Just kidding; of course we gave them candy and lots of it. Most of them were cute as hell, too. The dominatrix was a little precocious for my taste, but otherwise...

And OK, there was also this pumpkin carving contest at work before the TOT'ing. I hesitate to tell you about it because the ending is so tragic, but I'm still bursting with pride so allow me to be a bit of a bloggart for a minute. There were three teams of four people, selected at random, and each team had a leader, also selected at random. I was the leader of our team, so I designed what I thought would be a pretty cool-looking jack o'lantern, observing the rules that we could only bring one tool apiece and triangular eyes were not allowed.

The night before, I tried out my human skull design on a much smaller pumpkin, so that I could work out the carving kinks and develop a teamwork strategy, as there was a time limit of one and a half hours. I got the whole thing completed while listening to Black Sabbath's first album, so it seemed that we would be fine for time. I messed up a little bit on the three-dimensionality of the brow and upper mandible, but could see where I'd gone wrong and how to do it right the next time. Especially exciting was the discovery that peeling the pumpkin, which I'd thought would create a really cool effect but also be difficult and time-wasting, was in fact pretty easily accomplished with a potato peeler. And it did create a really cool effect of bone with thin veins running through it. (I know that veins don't actually run through bone, but it just looked biological and creepy, OK?)



When the actual contest happened, the plan went off without a hitch, everyone contributed, and we ended up with an awesome looking pumpkin. Check it out.





However, the three adjudicators who were brought in from outside the company decided, in their infallible judgement, that both the internet-downloaded Frankenstein paint-by-numbers stencil and the internet-downloaded obscene hands grabbing a rear end stencil better fulfilled the adjudicatorial criteria of originality and creativity. Who cares, though, right? We had a fun time. Just because we didn't win the crappy tickets to see some crappy movie that probably nobody would ever want to see in the first place, even if you paid them, doesn't mean I'm going to get bitter about it.

But the final paring knife in the squash was that this morning when I entered the office — having had two beers, a yoga class, and a good night's sleep in that order and therefore being truly and completely not bitter in the least about the previous night's travesty, seriously — the glory that had been Yorick (as I'd come to call him) was now a pile of something the colour and consistency, but not the smell, of rolled cookie dough. Completely unrecognizable. Turns out the skin is essential to a hollowed out pumpkin's structural integrity. It was very sad, and my coworkers and I each said a few words of tribute and observed a few minutes of silence before smushing him into the garbage bag.

- Andrew