Hell=Pumpkins and Disneyland

Think what you want to think about me.

Blame it on my childhood. Blame it on what I must really look like on the inside. Blame it on creepy clowns.

I don’t like fairs. I don’t want to go to Disneyland or fake wave water parks. And I also think the pumpkin patch on a warm Fall day might as well be a trip to a post office in Ecuador.

Ever been to a post office in Ecuador? How about Mexico? I’m going to go ahead and generalize about all post offices in Central and South America. There is no such thing as a line. There are too many people stressed about a simple non-emergency task like buying stamps. There aren’t enough employees and none of them like their job.

That’s like the pumpkin patch on a warm Fall day in Seattle. People are stressed about getting the pumpkin of their kids’ dreams. It must be round, and stable on its base, and big enough to carve the design of their kids’ dreams. There aren’t enough wheel barrows for the crowds of pumpkin pickers. Job satisfaction among pumpkin patch cashiers is low. And, while lines exist, they are ridiculously long and the people waiting in them loudly point out when you have entered the line in the middle, not the end. Infrastructure is lacking too. You can’t tell if you are in the line to get roasted corn, weigh your stupid gourd, buy leeks, send a package, or pick up mail from a PO Box.

We went to Carpinito Brothers Farm in Kent, instead of our usual South 47 Street Farm in Redmond, because we also had to go to IKEA which was in the same vicinity. We went from the pumpkin patch to IKEA. I needed a drink by the time we left the IKEA parking lot. If we vote Yes to initiative 1100, IKEA will likely start selling Swedish beer. That would help. 

It was a truly beautiful day. The kids found some lovely pumpkins. We paid $19 to do a corn maze. And we never got our hands on a wheel barrow, so we had to lug our 50 lbs of squash through the crowds all by ourselves.

 

I’m only smiling on the outside. The same is NOT true for Finn. He was definitely smiling from head to hoof.

Finn got his head stuck in his ghost. I took the shot, we all walked away, and then noticed Finn wasn’t with us. Steve discovered him struggling to free his head of the cutout.

Even after all that effort, we still had to buy some pumpkins from the underground parking lot at Whole Foods. What irony.