Pumpkin News

This picture was taken before the hurricane.  This is Orange Mama.  Can you see the cracks on her underside?  Definitely a bad sign.  As you can probably figure, we lost Orange Mama.  I'm not exactly sure what happened.  I'm calling it pumpkin rot.  If you find this offensive, please do not look at the next photo.

Orange Mama post-mortem.  She was a good pumpkin while she lasted.  Now she's gone back to the earth in our wetlands.  Even though we lost this one, we gained new ones in her place.

Meet Steady Betty!  She grew down from the vine just like Steady Eddie did.  Even since I took this photo last week, she's already much bigger. 

Another new pumpkin!  This one is off by herself on the gravel without much leaf coverage, and to me she looks like a beached whale.  So I'm calling her Baby Beluga.  

Hurricane update: I had already set up this week's blog posts before the storm came. I don't have any interesting pictures to share from this week's weather, just a boring story about what a drag it is to be without electricity, running water, and cell phone service at home since Sunday morning. It could be so much worse, so we're thankful this is all we're having to deal with. In our state about half the people are still without power. As of today (Tuesday is when I'm writing this) on Main Street, the only establishment with power is the grocery store and they have a generator. Not even the town offices are open. Next door in Southbury, where there are a lot of stores, they didn't lose power so everything's open. Our local coffee shop in Woodbury was open yesterday on generator power, and this morning they're closed. Right now I'm at Barnes & Noble in Waterbury where there's free WiFi. And as I just posted on Facebook, I read in today's paper that we can go to the Woodbury Fire Station to shower, refill our water, and charge our devices. In the meantime we're eating out (as are a lot of people) and thanking our lucky stars that this is all it amounted to. Before the storm I had started reading Zeitoun, which takes place during Hurricane Katrina. Being in the middle of that book during all of this is kind of interesting. But this isn't even in the same galaxy as that.