Pumpkin fraud!!!

I don't think my pumpkin is really a pumpkin. See, Tracy bought it a few weeks ago to carve it, but never got around to doing so. So, when I saw that she still had it this past Tuesday, I asked her if I could take it to make pumpkin soup for my autumn-themed shindig on Sunday.

Since I am going to be out of the house most of the day tomorrow, I planned on baking it tonight in preparation for making soup in the crock pot on Sunday. When I cut it open, this is what I found:



Now, for the uninitiated, this might not seem unusual. However, the flesh of a pumpkin should be orange, not white, and solid, not stringy. What I suspect we have here is some kind of cross between a pumpkin and spaghetti squash, bred to look pumpkiny from the outside, but not have the amount of seeds and pulp that a regular pumpkin would have. As you can (sort of) see from the photo below, the pumpkin breeders were pretty successful--the small amount of pulp is quite dry, not very messy at all.

I have half of this Frankensquash in the oven right now, but I am fairly certain that A) it is going to come out more spaghetti-ish than pumpkin-y, and B) whatever the character of the cooked flesh, it will be pretty inedible.

Boo. Next year, when I have my garden, I am going to grow pumpkins that actually ARE pumpkins.

In non-produce news, Karen, Dustin and I went to see Brian Regan at Nashville's historic Ryman Auditorium last night! I have seen Brian several times before, the last time in New York infamously concluding with a fist fight in the audience (I was not involved). If you are familiar with Brian and his comedy, you realize how ironic this is.

Most of the photos I tried to get to document the hilarity were unfortunately blurry. If you've never seen him, Brian is quite physical and does a lot of hilarious faces and gestures, none of which are represented in these photos.

As if BR at the Ryman we're excitement enough for the week, Wednesday saw the first official "Kickin' It Night" for the Belle Meade NFG. Basically, this just means that we're going to be trying to get together on the "off" weeks from our normal meetings to hang out in a less-structured way than we ordinarily would.

K.I.N. #1 started off with two rounds of Funny Bones. The game is semi-related to the old song, "Dry Bones." Each pair of players gets a card with two connected "bones"--e.g. "Nose bone connected to the shoulder bone." They then have to make that "connection," with the card suspended between their body parts. If the card drops, they are out.

Don't let my boring, dry explanation fool you. It's pretty hilarious. See for yourself:

After that, the gathered assembly split into three teams and played Cranium. The ladies' team won. (For Paul's sake, try to act surprised about that.)

In closing for this extremely lengthy blog entry, here are a couple more items for my wishlist, in case you happen to be out garage-saling this weekend:

SCALE: preferably digital, for weighing yarn and food

STUFFED ANIMALS: large sizes, clean and in good shape, for modeling knit items in photos. I would particularly like any life-sized realistic-looking dogs, for showing off doggy duds.

Thanks, y'all! Happy weekend!