Snow job

Hi Carolyn,







I was gonna go on a bit about the wondrous aspects of  humour this time around but now I'm  holding off on that - and here`s why. 

 My extensive and clandestine network of spies and whistleblowers tell me  that under my Christmas tree ( yes I am, I guess, contributing a bit to the Christmas Creep thing here too... but when in Rome ...... ) will be John Cleese's autobiography. I feel I would be ever so much better versed in the whole pursuit and understanding of humour as a concept and phenomenon  after reading it.






Can't help but make some mention of the weather too, as it's been pretty impressive. I imagine that even up there in the Rockies you've  heard about the #*%-kickin' Buffalo, New York, took just in the last couple of days from lake-effect snow squalls. It's not like folks in that part of the continent weren't used to this - I grew up in London, Ontario and we were at the edge of that same snow effect corridor. It can be unbelievably relentless under the right conditions - but this one was truly a Duesy/doozie/doosie.








We've been wriggling out from under a couple of feet in a couple of days here too. And the current prognosis is for steadily more until the middle of the coming weekend, just like it is for those shell-shocked Buffalo-ites. It seems that  Winter just rolled up unannounced  in a huge, snow-encrusted dump truck and  delivered the whole  load  right on top of this part of the continent. 









A couple of things that you mentioned last time around that I wanna get to also. About those "... buggies that plagued us so much last summer " that you were gratefully bidding adieu to with the advent of this winter blast. Yes, they may be frozen now.  But.... make no mistake, they or their descendants,  WILL return.

The spiders will be leading the charge, too.

That bug item also immediately sent me back to The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, particularly  a scene I recently encountered in my ongoing read through. It appears in what the author itemizes  as " Volume Three in the Trilogy of Five `in which Arthur Dent is faced with a creature who, through reincarnation has been various living entities - all of whom Dent has somehow had a hand in killing, at various times throughout time. Sometimes it was an innocently swatted insect while other times it was a plant or small but significant life-form from another planet. I won`t even attempt to summarize it since it`s one of those things one has to read first hand in order to fully experience and appreciate.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This Douglas Adams pilgrimage  is certainly becoming another one of those delightful literary discovery events. It's not as rapturous as my finally clicking into  THE HOBBIT but its pretty dang close. Douglas Adams had such an awesome way with words.  Simon Brett called it fully and completely like it was in his Foreword, when he referred to Adams ``... sheer glee in the potentialities of the English language.``  For someone such as myself who likes to fling words around this is simply a fantastic reading experience, and a multi-volume  workshop given by a master.

 

 

 

 

More on this whole experience once I finish the five volume trilogy. 

 

 

 

You asked if we can hear the wild gobblers out there just beyond our yard. Yes, we have heard them often whenever the air was still. Some years we've heard them in abundance for some weeks and then one night we'll start hearing the coydogs howling. Funny, the turkey conversations disappear shortly thereafter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your mention of the editing workshop and the " say it out loud " advice sent me immediately to the intro from the Kurt Vonnegut collection I read last year. It was written by his son, Mark. He recalled how dad used to constantly " read it out loud" and change the emphasis, or the timbre, or other aspects   for almost every sentence he had just written, just to use his writers ear to  fine tune it. The advice you got, Carolyn, was sound advice in more ways than one ,I`m thinking.


 Vonnegut the younger finished by noting that he figured this was the way that all writers practised their craft.



Finally, the crossword thing sounds intriguing. It would be something to work on in those almost 8 weeks down on the Yucatan Peninsula. You asked if I`d be able to handle that much time away from here and I gotta admit that I don`t really know. I do know that I will be taking that story I`ve been on and off about over the last couple of years with me, though. We had dinner a short while back with the folks who are our landlords while we are there and they mentioned that there were internet hassles down there. Hope they will be dealt with before we get there. I`d be much more dubious about this time away if it was to be spent in the land that Wi-Fi forgot. 

 

 

Anyhow, be back atcha later. My snowblower  ( with whom I have recently rekindled a longstanding romance )  awaits.

 

Don.

 

 

 

 

All images sourced from Google Images

Fig. 1 - www.theguardian.com

Fig. 2 - message.snopes.com

Fig. 3 - www. atbarlow.BlogSpot.com

Fig. 4 - www.mykidsclubhouse.com

Fig. 5 - www.fantasticfiction.co.uk

Fig. 6 - en.wikipedia.org

 

Turkeys, Publishing and Everything in-between

Good morning from cold and snowy Colorado! Just rain and drizzle, Don? WOW! I thought for sure you would have a foot of snow by now. Our temperatures this week have struggled to get above 20 degrees, except for Friday when the temperature reached an almost balmy 38 degrees. Woke up this morning to cold and more snow. One nice thing about this is the buggies that plagued us so much this summer will freeze and not return.

I loved your picture of the tom turkeys! Do you hear them in the wild? I've always imagined that the sounds of the wild turkeys are the same as the domesticated ones. We have a pass between Gunnison and Salida that boasts a flock of wild turkeys... that yours are so use to you that they don't even flinch when you're around is good. I didn't realize that turkeys sat in trees! 

I spent last weekend in a workshop on editing! Learned a lot of powerful ideas that I've been passing on to my students all week. The most re-affirming idea was to "read it out loud!" I do this with my tutoring/writing students. At first they are a bit put out that they have to hear me read it out loud, but most of them start hearing the mistakes and beat me to the corrections in their essays. It makes them feel more confident in their writing. And I don't have to work as hard – once they hear the mistake, I usually don't even have to explain it.

I just got back from another workshop – this one on publishing. Book sales have been good this month Even the Transports are selling! Makes me feel good that people are finally finding Wormhole's writings and reading them! But I want to find ways to increase our sales and hopefully bring more writers into the Wormhole! I've also discovered that maybe I need to buy a Kindle Fire - my Kindle is one of the originals, which I love! but it may not give me a realistic view of what we publish... 

Wormhole is definitely an Independent Publishing firm! And we don't require an agent or previous publishing experience. In fact, we are the experience! It was great to feel like there really is a niche for this publishing company. A place for new authors to get published, a place for seasoned authors to work on new genres... what a wonderful deal!

 I just got the latest draft of 3 Miracles – about Bosnia – and I am stoked to read it and include it in the December Book showcase. I'll be throwing in my non-fiction about Generation Y: Hotwired  for the book showcasing we do in December – Christmas presents for the reader! (Sounds kind of contradictory based on the Christmas Creep rant ... )

Next Friday I actually get to present, maybe if the audience comes, the workshop on The Wired Generation – Gen Y. I want to review what I had originally decided to do – just so I appear somewhat intelligent on the subject. I really enjoyed writing the book and I've been working on the conclusions for the last week. Most of my editors have returned my draft so I have work to do before I publish it in December. Their comments have been positive and re-affirming. That in and of itself has helped lift the specter of doubt. Writing can be so self-defeating at times.

Don, yesterday I was thinking about how lucky you are that you have your Thanks Giving earlier in the month of November; that it isn't the harbinger of Christmas yet to come. I've joined a movement to not shop on Thanks Giving to help retailers know that their employees deserve a day of Thanks at the same time their friends and families are celebrating. Companies, my own included, sometimes forget that without time for our families and friends, we become rather shallow. Sometimes I think the Gen Y generation has it right – family comes first.

If we only kept one holiday, for me it would be Thanks Giving.

I admit that I cheered when I heard that your LSBH worked on the technical end of the play, Brigadoon. It is one of my favorites – and yes, I remember helping to construct the tree that gets climbed, the rocks that need to be stood on ... technical theatre was another life time ago for us. Sometimes I really miss it... I still have directions the technical director wrote for me on a piece of masonite, signed by the director... those were amazing times. I wouldn't trade what I learned or the friends we made; I'm glad we've moved on.

Office politics – my only advice to your daughter is to not engage, keep your head down, teach the kids and move on.

I've thought of a new twist to the riddles! A cross-word puzzle made out of the riddles we've constructed so
far. What do you think?  I haven't figured out how to do the cross-word puzzle – maybe over Christmas I'll have time.The most important point will be whether or not the puzzles will migrate to the new website that the web designers are working on. Not sure when the new site will be ready, but it will be magnificent! Ways to provide videos, MP3s, a different blogging stage for more story releases...I can't wait!

Eight weeks in the land of the sun and the warm? Can you stand it that long?

Have a great week! Stay warm and safe.

Carolyn

 Wild Turkeys retrieved from Wild Turkey, Meleagris gallopavo, Tom, Gobbler, Hunting, Strutting ...www.critterzone.com

Editing retrieved from Writing: “The Writing Process” - Editing: Spelling -

adamclements.weebly.com

Christmas creep retrieved from defendchristmas.com

Publishing retrieved from Independent Publisher: THE Voice of the Independent Publishing ...

secure.independentpublisher.com

Brigadoon retrieved from Cedar And Willow: Necessary Background #2: Brigadoon

cedar-and-willow.blogspot.com

Office Politics retrieved from LE-AA169_POWER1_NS_20111020143602.jpg

online.wsj.com

Office politics book retrieved from Office Politics on Pinterest | 65 PinsOffice Politics Comic

www.pinterest.com

Cross word puzzles retrieved from [PDF] Perplexing Puzzles | LittleClickers

littleclickers.com

 Generation Y: Hotwired cover created by L. Varvel

Bilbo Gobbler and The Christmas Creep

Hi Carolyn,



Just spent an unabashedly bucolic but most enjoyable evening taking in the local little theatre production of Brigadoon. My LSBH was one of the set design and creation crew and part of the fun was to see just how those  artificially created trees and rocks and rustic village props and all looked once they were onstage and in the spotlight.  They looked pretty cool, to be sure.

 Up until now I hadn't been familiar with the story, but I sure recognized a lot of the music, probably because  my mom, ( who was always either humming or singing something - usually theatrical in origin ) made it part of the soundtrack of my youngest years.

It does have a wee sci-fi twist to it, lassies and laddies. A village out in the rural wilds of Scotland, appears for a day once every century. Our heroes just happen to be there and one of them falls in love with a fair maiden etc. etc. The catch is that after 24 hours the whole place simply disappears for another century ( although to the inhabitants its just like waking up the next day ) There's none of this complicated space-time continuum or other scientific stuff used to explain it. It's all God's doing - back in 1946 this kind of explanation still registered strongly on the plausibility meter.




Actually, it makes me chuckle just a bit to even think of someone, with a Scottish brogue as thick as toffee, wrapping their tongue around the phrase " space time continuum "   Although, I guess if Scotty could handle " di-lithium crystals " then this term wouldn't be daunting.






Had another historically fuelled moment this week too. Let's call it a " Pilgrim Moment ".  It's been a dismal, dull, damp and drizzly last few days, but I've been out putting the place to bed for the winter none-the-less. The snowblower is ready, the eavestroughs/gutters are all emptied, the most egregious blankets of leaves are cleaned up and moved  to the forest out back  ( they weigh a lot more when wet, so progress has been fairly slow ) and all of those others things have been, or are in the process of being tackled to get ready for the you-know-what stuff that will soon start falling. We've seen it in the air already.








Later last week, while I was involved in this depressing task, I turned around while working in the middle of the backyard because I had that something is watching me feeling. There, not ten feet away were four very bold and very husky wild turkeys. They had crossed the little gully that separates our yard from the forest proper and were making their way past me, through the yard to wherever it is wild turkeys go at this time of year. These weren't little gobblers, either. A couple of them were Hobbit sized. They glomped right past me as if I wasn't there at all. It made me  think that if this is how they acted way back when, in the presence of a musket bearing pilgrim, no wonder they became the centerpiece in that quintessential  Thanksgiving chow-down.

While we're on the topic of encroaching seasons, I guess you folk down there may be shielded a bit from this phenomenon simply because you've got Thanksgiving bearing down on you as we speak/blog. Up here, however, Thanksgiving has passed and now comes the beginning of what I recently heard referred to as - The Christmas Creep. It's a most fitting term, too.  That creeping, ever expanding space of time during which the marketers of all things Christmas, inundate, and overpower us with yuletide hype.  C'mon, it's still early November..!






Yes, this is my yearly mini-rant about how we are bombarded relentlessly for almost two months from all media sources and in all ways imaginable about the absolute necessity of buying this and using that and doing the other, in the name of the season. It's stress-inducement to the power of one-million for the hapless and helpless shopper. Make no mistake, with the powers of digital information gathering, statistical analysis and behavioural science working in their corner, the marketers and manufacturers have us outflanked, outgunned, outmanoeuvered and  outnumbered to a quantum degree. 


 What alarms me. though, is that I've never had to roll out the  rapacious commercialism rant  this early.

 

 

' Tis true that there will always be people who will start Christmas shopping just after the end of the summer.   My LSBH has a very good friend who brags and boasts about how she always has her shopping done before Labor Day.   These people are at the one end of that sensible  yuletide shopping yardstick. Somebody has to be there, I guess. I'm close to the last minute, wait for spontaneity and wacky inspiration to swoop in and save me end of the stick.





Now, if this was King Don's Kingdom, things would be handled differently. There would be no mention in any national/regional/local media, of Christmas  before December the first. November would be the final denouement of summer and autumn. We'd have more time to reflect on just how great the spring, summer and autumn months have been. People could still shop, but they would have to go into the dens of thieves of their own free will.   Anyone looking for presents for folks on other continents could do so through Amazon or any other online means that require you to at least exercise your free will as to whether or not you choose to  step through their digital door before being pelted with offers.



Okay, we are now back in the RANT FREE ZONE.



 

 

 Had a couple of chats with our daughter recently that were reaffirmations of human nature in a manner of speaking. She's dealing with the wonderful world of office politics. It's lethal just about anywhere but especially toxic in academia. Mind you, this could have a beneficial corollary effect.   She's starting to feel, I hope, that she doesn't have to stay in Canada to follow her academic dreams.

 

Back to the riddles for a bit. You were right. It was baseball. Whatever you're up to there at your educational institution lately has made you sharp as the sharpest tack. I'm gonna leave things off here riddle-wise and let you toss the next ball.


We are starting to think about our Mexico bout for 2014. An airline offer that we couldn't refuse was time sensitive and we ended up booking for almost two months in Merida this year. Can we be turning into bona-fide snowbirds??


Catch ya later,

Don





All images sourced from Google Images

Fig. 1 - www.Owensoundsuntimes.com

Fig. 2 - www.longislandpress.com

Fig. 3 - www.youtube.com

Fig. 4 - www.globalresearch.ca

Fig. 5 - aqwwiki.com

Fig. 6 - sgjobsdb.com

Conspiracy and Aliens

Good Morning!

It has been an exciting week – I finally at long last was able to put the final conclusion and implications into the Millennial Hotwired project and send it off to editors. I'm sure it will come back riddled with red and questions, but at least the rough draft is done. I have to admit that I've even gone back and been able to look at it with more of an editor's eye and I've already changed some of the wording.

I think the biggest thing is how to make is more personable instead of sounding like a 50 page research paper – dull and boring. The information is good, the tone needs to be more pleasant. I had three pages of information on the changes in society's view toward children and the necessary elements of their education. It was an excellent sequential "this is what happened" and it was boring, the point got lost, and by the end of that part, even I didn't care anymore! I was able to craft it down to three paragraphs.

I'm taking a workshop on Sunday on self-editing. I know that it will be useful to me as well as my students. I'm looking forward to the experience.

Last week saw the failure of one of the Virgin Spaceships – it killed a pilot and sent another to the hospital. There was also an explosion on the NASA pad of an Antares rocket carrying supplies and scientific equipment to the space station. According to safety officers, the rocket malfunctioned and needed to be destroyed.

Okay, so I'm not a great conspiracy follower, but to have 2 major accidents in 7 days of each other is suspect. I'm just wondering ... I know that Russia will take a big monetary hit when the United States begins supplying its own transportation to the International Space Station. Just a thought...

Also in the news almost every day is "proof of aliens" everywhere. The latest and maybe even the greatest was the death bed video of Boyd Bushman, an Area 51 scientist, who revealed that aliens were not only living among us; 19 of them worked for the Government. He classified aliens as "Wranglers" and "Rustlers" and the "Wranglers" were more friendly... I wonder if he's talking about the political parties when he mentions "Rustlers" ...

This brings to mind the movie Cowboys and Aliens starring Daniel Craig, (007) and Harrison Ford (Star Wars). Aliens come to "wrestle up some humans" and only the cowboys and Indians stand in their way. No virus takes them out, just a cowboy bent on their destruction.

We've also been inundated with pictures of human pictographs on Mars and giant earth size space ships hiding in the corona of the sun. The most recent is an elongated face that even has NASA scientists scratching their heads. The seems to be a need to prove that Mars is a long abandoned planet that once housed a prosperous and highly intelligent civilization. The need to prove "we are not alone" seems to be running strong this year.

As I was growing up, one of my favorite, and possibly the tipping literature that moved me into science fiction and fantasy was Edgar Rice Burroughs "Barsoom Series" – John Carter on Mars. That led to the Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. From then on  I was hooked. Burroughs also wrote the Tarzan series which I also read and thoroughly enjoyed.

As a side note, as I was looking into Burroughs' history, I discovered that his great-grandson is the famed film maker, Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel). I've only seen the Grand Budapest Hotel, but one of my students did a research on Anderson's techniques last quarter and I am truly impressed.

At Wormhole we are getting ready to showcase books for December. We've got several that are outstanding and we'll pull the July release books in too. I'm struggling with whether or not to pull the single short stories that we've published this year into an Anthology. I'll let you all know later.

On to riddles! Okay – my guess is Baseball!

I don't have a riddle for you this week, but I'll work on and deliver at the next posting.

 Have a great week everyone!

Carolyn 

  

Images retrieved from google images

Illegal aliens? | Perspectives on the News

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File:Yellow fungus in Cowboys & Aliens.png - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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[PDF] John Carter of Mars Series [Books 1-7] (Mockingbird Classics) by ...

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Area-51 Permit by psion005 on deviantART

psion005.deviantart.com

UFO filmed At Area 51 –Retrieved from beforeitsnews.com

The Newsstreak: Review: "The Grand Budapest Hotel" retrieved from www.hhsmedia.com

Total Baseball retrieved from totalsportscomplex.com

Scriber, B. (Oct. 30, 2014) Rocket destroyed on pad. National Geographic. retrieved from http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141030-first-person-rocket-explosion-antares/

First to know. (Oct. 29. 2014) Watch: dying Area 51 scientist admits aliens are real. Retrieved from  http://firsttoknow.com/area-51-scientist-speaks-out

Apples and orange things and gizmos

Hi Carolyn,



Just got back from a short trip "down country " for a family function or two. A self-professed fan of the "punkin", such as yourself, would have certainly appreciated the scenery. We tried some highly rural routes to shorten the trip and feed our need for " splorin" and, let me tellya, there were gourds galore in the fields and roadside stands and on the sidewalks of small towns. It was a gourd gourmands' Valhalla.









I must confess to not being  a pumpkin person. The taste is okay in a pie or cake but it runs a pale and distant second to the almighty apple on my list of harvest favorites.  I count myself lucky to be living smack dab in the middle of orchard country here.  A just picked Macintosh apple sliced up and lightly dusted with freshly ground sea salt is sweet ( and a bit tart ) music to my taste buds. Somebody at a fledgling computer company in Cupertino, California, once upon a time, liked  them too and used the name for a new line of computers. The rest, as they say.....






Okay, I simply have to come back to the most wished for " sci-fi gizmos " topic you were exploring a couple of posts ago. The cloaking device  surely has appeal for me, although it would carry with it the risk of being invisible at the wrong place and the wrong time and seeing something you'd later wish you had not. It's the kind of thing that could be put to just as many bad uses as good, however. Mind you, that could be said about almost any advancement, like writing,  I suppose.







Certainly agree about the teleportation stuff.  Who wouldn't. It wouldn't mean the end of more traditional and tactile modes of transport, I'm sure, but when expediency is the main concern, how could it not be preferred. It made me think back to the Concorde supersonic airliner again.  It offered a half the time but twice the price alternative - and where is it now?

The visual telecommunication item immediately made me think of   " Metropolis " , the 1927 silent film by Fritz Lang that featured just such a device. It also reminded me that both my LSBH and I have iPhones with this capability. We've had them for a few years now and never made use of it.  She has stated categorically, more than once, that " just hearing you is enough"  

 hmmmmmm....

 

Interesting to see that the light saber " an elegant weapon for a more civilised age " makes it to the top of the list. Elegant it may be , but it's still a weapon. In the wrong hands it can still be put to less than elegant purposes.  Gotta admit, though, it would make one funky grass trimmer or whippersnipper. I guess that would be kind of like using a Ferrari to scoot down to the 7-11 for a quart of milk, though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Actually, topping my list of sci-fi gizmos that should be real is the replicator. Well not actually the Star Trek replicator that pumps out Earl Grey for Captain Picard but something more personalised. I'm thinking something more along the lines of the " Nutri-matic " gizmo that Arthur Dent encountered in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  " When the Drink button was pressed ", as Douglas Adams explains it, " it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what would go down well. " 

 

A thoughtful family member presented me with a set of the complete works of Douglas Adams for my birthday a couple of weeks ago and I have decided to make use of that  new comfy little alcove that used to be the breakfast area in our old kitchen, as a reading area. I'm revisiting The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the rest of his novels over the next while. I'd forgotten just how enjoyable his writings can be.


So, let us to the riddles go. Carolyn, I think that all of this HLC stuff you were dealing with at school has made you razor sharp for riddle guessing, and riddle creating.  You were dead on right about my last offering.  As for yours, I have to throw myself at your mercy because I simply can't crack it. I can only guess that it's some sort of fastening device like Velcro. The leverage part is still throwing me off, though.



Anyhow,  I toss this one back 'atcha !

Nine defenders with leather hands

Try to thwart one, two, three or four individuals

attempting to get back to where they started

 

Catch ya later,

Don




BTW - I hope the end result of all of that t dotting and I crossing you were doing at school is a good one and justifies all of your efforts.




All images sourced from Google Images

Fig. 1 - www.ivanbroker.com

Fig. 2 - www.carlywilkiesteven.com

Fig. 3 - www.sott.net

Fig. 4 - en.wikipedia.org

Fig. 5 - en.wikipedia.org

Fig. 6 - en.wikipedia.org

Pumpkin and Autumn Contest

Morn'n Don,

 List the pictures in this blog in the order they should be in for the story - drop your answers in the Comments or email me at clv241@gmail.com for a free ebook from Wormhole Electric! Check out the Wormhole Electric Website and tell me which book you want for free! All for getting the pictures in the right order!

So we have dotted the T's and crossed the I's... the school building has been sanitized and starched, the reports edited  and edited again to within commas of their very existence. Meetings on how to "just answer the question" have abounded... we are ready. HLC, the accrediting body for the college I work for arrives for full review on Sunday, and the games begin early Monday.  It's like having your mother-in-law come and you don't know if she's going the check the door-frames for dust.

Schedules have shifted and changed, meeting rooms have started on second floor only to end up in the Penthouse. Keeping track of who meets who where and when should have been made into a pool and bets taken. This not to make light of what is happening, just to make what is happening lighter. We could donate the money the scholarship fund.

This is not my first time being visited, but it is the first time that I have been more involved in the process.  I helped with the writing here and there, did some editing...  I'm glad I'm not one of the main characters in this play – being just a minor character is more than enough for me.

Autumn has arrived. Most of the trees in our yard have finally changed to the beautiful golden and red hues that herald the change of seasons and the grass is a lush golden textured carpet. As I write, MBH is cleaning out the "gutters" (eavetroughs to you). He is also using the blower to blow leaves out of the trees - creating the golden ticker –tape parade you were talking about.

What is so interesting is to walk down the street and the trees on one side of the street will have changed, have already dropped their leaves and on the other side, the trees don't seem to have gotten the memo stating" fall this here, drop your leaves and rest."  

Our temperature for the last 2 days has been in the low 80s – record setting. However, Monday and Tuesday are forecast to barely break 50 degrees with rain. High country has snow, but these temperatures have melted most of it off so that early skiing probably is not going to happen.

He believes pumpkins are the best medicine...

I think my favorite part of autumn is to walk through the leaves, kick them up, hear the crunch...what a beautiful way to usher in winter!

Halloween is just around the corner! And it is celebrated with my favorite gourd – the pumpkin. For me, the pumpkin has it all – size, color, versatility, and self-propagation. I went to the History site and found more facts than I know what to do with!

 

• The largest pumpkin pie was baked in 2010 and weighed in at 3699
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  pounds
• The heaviest pumpkin weighed in at 1810 pounds, 8 oz. in 2010
• Historically, pumpkin comes from Central America and has been grown in North America for over 5000 years.
• There are 1.5 billion (1,500,000,000) pounds of pumpkin grown each year
• Each pumpkin as an average of 500 seeds in it
• Pumpkin seeds are high in protein
• Early settlers believed the pumpkin was just shy of being the cure for everything 
• Jack-o-lanterns were originally carved out of turnips and potatoes by the Irish; once the Irish landed in North America and discovered the pumpkin, history was changed 
• The largest pumpkin carving was in 2010 - a 1689 pound pumpkin 
• Pumpkin carving knows no boundaries 
• 
  

Remember taste and nutritional facts – pumpkins are one of the more healthy foods for you. On top of that, there are pumpkin cookies and bread as well as pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup; did you think of pumpkin pancakes or ravioli or cannelloni made from pumpkin? For the health nut, how about a pumpkin smoothie! Imagine the taste of pumpkin mixed with chocolate chips... and Pumpkin candy, a Mexican tradition is a great way to keep the pumpkin taste alive and well deep into the dark cold months of winter. Use pumpkin butter on the pumpkin pancakes! Or any time to spice up the flavor of plain bread, waffles and pancakes.

Waxing on ...

Yes, Don! You were correct in your answer to my riddle! "Roots" – tree roots actually.

I've been looking at yours – my guess is: the computer mouse?!

So here is a new one back at you:

Leverage is my advantage

In order to deposit my sharp pointed gifts

Used to bundle things together for easy storage

Have a great week!

Carolyn 

All images downloaded from Google Images

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(np5) limpando | Paulo Jorge Vieira

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Fall Is My Favorite Season : theBERRY

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Jack-o'-lantern And The Family Fun Day | Family Holiday

www.familyholiday.net

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