I voted today

I'm due back in town from the World Fantasy Con in Calgary quite late in the evening of Monday, November 3, the day before the election. If anything were to go wrong with the flight, I could end up really crunched for time the following day, and I did not want to take any chance that I might miss the chance to vote. So, I voted early today.

I believe that voting is a citizen's right and duty, and we should all vote. So, I was pleased and proud to see a busy polling place when I showed up this afternoon to cast my ballot. Voting made me happy, and seeing the great turn-out made me even happier. I hope you vote on November 4 (if you haven't already).

Tonight, we held our annual pumpkin carving party, at which a group of about a dozen of us got together and ate spaghetti, talked (probably too much politics for some of the folks there), and, yes, carved pumpkins.

As is our tradition, after eating dinner and finishing the pumpkins, we set them up on the front stoop, turned off all the lights, and admired them.

In the first photo, you can see how they look in the flash. This picture makes clear the wide range of pumpkins we carved: big, little, classic orange, greenish white, and a pair of rather nubbly rascals.

The second picture shows the same creations in the darkness, where all their scary and silly and just plain mysterious virtues are most manifest. We had so many that to fit them all in this picture we had to shoot wide enough that the details of any particular pumpkin are hard to see, but I have to say that I quite liked them all. I won't be home this Halloween, so I'm particularly glad I got to participate in tonight's festivities. I find this little event a welcome sign of the changing season and a marker on the ramp-up to the always hectic but always fun holiday season. I hope your weekend and your Halloween are good.