word of the day......
Doctor Dictionary knows about the fake pumpkin I have in the living room window:

Word of the Day for Tuesday October 29, 2002

ersatz \AIR-sahts; UR-sats\, adjective:
Being a substitute or imitation, usually an inferior one.

We have yet to get real pumpkins. (Except for the funky one on the porch.) So I guess tonight is when the really scary business of Halloween comes in. Children and knives are just a little ‘edgy’ for me. When you consider that I never carved a pumpkin the traditional way until I was married, I have adapted well. But it is still unnerving.

Did I live 23 years without ever having a pumpkin? No. I just was never allowed to carve one. My sister and I would be handed Magic Markers and we would design the faces and then excuse ourselves from the room. Dad would plug in his saber saw and go to town cutting out our designs. Many years he would also surreptitiously slip a silver dollar inside each pumpkin, just to add a little thrill to the tedium of cleaning out all the pumpkin ‘guts.’ Karen and I always had to have huge pumpkins, so there were a lot of ‘guts.’ What memories.

My job today is to make sure that the next generations memories don’t include a trip to the emergency room. And this year I’ll try not to burn the seeds - last years batch were lost in bad patch of over-extended multi-tasking.