Look, Ma: No Hands!

Preparations for the pumpkin carving party tomorrow have been hampered by a truly discouraging malady apparently caused by too much typing & pointing & clicking on the part of your correspondent. What with transcriptions to type up for work, and education policy rants to spew, and invitations to compose -- not to mention the standard daily burden of e-mailing and web surfing and blogging and facebooking and looking up "Rube Goldberg" on YouTube and so on -- our right hand and wrist have been rendered inoperable by a kind of tingly ache laced with sharp darts of pain. And our left hand isn't faring much better, frankly.

At first it seemed like the usual tendonitis that occasionally plagues us and is generally cured by a couple of days in a wrist brace. But by Monday morning we had to admit this was different -- and not in a good way. Arnica has been somewhat helpful, and so has the ergonomic keyboard we purchased on an emergency trip to Tukwila through rainy rush-hour traffic on Friday. But the thing we know would really help -- rest -- is much harder to achieve than you might think. It turns out that pretty much everything we are supposed to be doing, along with a fair percentage of the things we would like to be doing and at least half of the things that absolutely must get done by Sunday at 2 pm, all involve the use of one or both hands.

Aches & pains aside, we're getting there. Our new front porch is truly gorgeous, thanks to John, Jeff, Dan and their various crews. It looks even better piled with all those pumpkins waiting to be transformed into ghoulish faces:


(That one on the top right with the peace sign on it appears on our porch every year without fail, and we've never been able to figure out who puts it there. Anyone want to fess up to being our Secret Peace Pumpkin Santa? You rock, whoever you are!)

The shopping was accomplished this morning with Josie as pack mule at the QFC and Andrew & Laura (who happened to be walking by as we arrived home) as stevedores at the home port -- thanks, everyone. The pies are done, with assistance from Menna and Simon (whose Rube Goldberg obsession came in handy when we needed someone to jigger the Cuisinart to accommodate whole sticks of butter so we wouldn't have to chop them up by hand). The soup is mostly done, thanks to Andrew, who prepped the onions, ginger, carrots, and yams, then ran them through the food processor so all we had to do was stir in the cayenne, tomato juice, and peanut butter. (This was in addition to the usual leaf-raking, pumpkin-hauling, furniture-rearranging, and general desperation-clutter-removal he always does in the days leading up to the big event.)

We're hopeful that we'll be able to pull off the mac 'n' cheese tomorrow with minimal manual exertion -- though it's doubtful that even Simon will be able to figure out how to fit those two-pound Tillamook cheddar bricks in the Cuisinart.

The cleaning and clearing have gone pretty well so far. It's always amusing to see what emerges from the corners of the house when we have to empty it out enough to fit everyone we know inside it. This year's archaeological haul included several of Simon's early comicbooks ("Bad Elephant Bob" was our favorite), both Darth Vader gloves (somehow we've only been able to lay our hands on one of these at a time for the last year), the corkscrew (don't ask how we've been opening our wine bottles -- though Aly can give you a demonstration), and a small gingham bag containing several brightly colored scraps of fabric, which turned out to be a sewing project Josie started back in June (a stuffed puppy, originally intended to be Juliana's birthday present.)

In a fit of madness, we agreed to help her finish it last night, making it clear a the outset that we would be available in a consultant capacity only, and would absolutely not be wielding needle and thread under any circumstances. It turned out to be awfully close to done -- just a matter of cannibalizing an old pillow for stuffing; figuring out the counter-intuitive topologicistics involved in pinning the legs, tail, and head inside the inside-out body; sewing it all together, and turning it right-side-out again.

By the time we had helped Josie pin and repin the thing several times, we were sufficiently wiped out that we headed up to bed, but sufficiently invested in the outcome that we asked her to bring it upstairs when she was done sewing the outer seam, so we could witness the final inversion. She actually let us do the honors while she took pictures. It was a little bit like being midwife to a large tropical flower:







It was gratifying on many levels to see this long-abandoned project finally finished, and especially inspiring that it really only took twenty minutes (and the sacrifice of a lumpy pillow) to turn a pile of scraps into a dazzling belated birthday present. And, in the now-necessary cost-benefit analysis of every elective activity involving our hands, this one came out with two thumbs way, way up.