This post is not about Charlie Brown–not at all. I am feeling the call of the pumpkin. I don’t have my Halloween decorations up, or even out yet, and I haven’t been to a pumpkin patch. Admittedly I’m feeling the call of the canned pumpkin. All of a sudden I’m obsessed with pumpkin recipes–I want to try them all: pumpkin bread (with cranberries, walnuts, and chocolate chips), pumpkin butter, pumpkin pie pancakes… I’m getting all excited just writing this post! Last weekend I made pumpkin bars with cream cheese frosting, and while everyone that tasted them (no one in my family) loved them, I didn’t much care for them. Well, the cream cheese frosting was delicious, but the bars themselves were too slippery. But this failure has not deterred me in the slightest! I still have aspirations to run the gamut of pumpkin creations this autumn (with a side bonus of keeping the hiccups at bay–see last post). I just thought of something: pumpkin cheesecake! Oooh, with pecans! Yum! If you have recipes, send them my way!! Pumpkin scones?? Even that sounds interesting. I can’t stop myself… My Vitamin A is about to shoot waaay up!

Yesterday my older son (nine and a half) told me he had a fool-proof cure for the hiccups. Given my son’s proclivity towards making sweeping statements of fact, I was naturally a bit skeptical. He told me all you have to do is stare at something that is the color orange ‘as hard as you can’. Now this sounded positively ridiculous to me, so I responded only with the ambiguous ‘Hmmm’ that moms use all the time. So today I had the hiccups–twice. The first time I made a show of announcing it, along with my search for and stare-down of something orange (just happened to be a bag of candy corn). What do you know, it worked–my hiccups disappeared. Then again later, hiccups again. So I tried The Method with a bag of carrots. Worked again. Now I’m wondering if this is merely coincidence (like when someone offers you a twenty dollar bill if you’ll only hiccup again–or maybe that’s not a coincidence…) or if there might be something to it. Maybe the glitch that causes the hiccups is soothed by the warmth and cheeriness of the color orange. Makes you wonder–are hiccups less prevalent during the month of October with its pumpkins galore? Something to think about…

Something else to think about: how did my son come up with this Method?

May I ask, when did the STOP sign get to be so baffling?? I’ve always understood it to be relatively straightforward. When you pull up to the posted red hexagon with the self-explanatory and succinct instruction, you follow a simple procedure:

STOP (it should go without saying)
1. Scope out your periphery.
2. Follow the first-come, first-served rule of thumb. If someone was there and waiting before you, let them go first. Then, proceed on your merry way.
3. However, if you happen to be traveling on a multi-laned road and someone in an adjacent lane has already waited their turn and starts to move through the STOP sign (and you’ve already come to a full and complete stop), feel free to ride his coat tails, or tail pipe as the case may be.
4. If you fail at step #3, you’re simply going to have to wait until the opportunity comes around again, round robin style.

Do not anger and frustrate the drivers around you by participating in a multi-lane free-for-all, in which one of you goes, then another, then another. That will result in a complete and utter breakdown of stop sign protocol and efficiency. Not to mention common courtesy. We are not animals, and this is not rocket science.

This public service announcement is now ended.
Now envision the headache involved with three just-implemented STOP signs in a half-mile stretch and a gaggle of Texans with apparently no notion of what to make of them. Insanity!

Serenity now…