Malania Book Launch & the Templeton Pumpkin Festival

The shameless Sunday book-flogging for my little old lady friend, Fae Malania, went off very well. I found homes for all 60 of the books that I'd ordered, and I even sold most of her author copies. By the time the stragglers show up, we'll go over 70.

It was a peaceable, teetotaler's party--and much cheaper than champagne for 100--your basic C & T plus cake. I ordered a Gargantua-sized cake with yellow roses and an icing book on top with the sugary words, The Quantity of a Hazelnut by Fae Malania--made by an enterprising Templetonian baker--plus pots of red and white cyclamen and ornamental peppers from the Farmer's Market. And those went home with a few of the many people who have helped Fae.

There is a perfect riot of confusion in my brain about the money in little baggies and the checks, but I suppose it will be sorted out before long. Some have not paid but have taken a book. Some the reverse. Some didn't show but reserved... Sigh. I do not like to play accountant, extortionist, and delivery girl.

I celebrated book-launch success by taking my youngest to the second day of Pumpkinfest. Yesterday we saw Merdwyn the Mediocre do his famously mediocre magic show at the Doubleday Field. My son got him in a corner (difficult in an open-air festival) and talked candy and magic and other important topics at him until he begged us to go.

We inspected the giant pumpkins, including a 1,407.3-pound winner. That's one thousand four hundred and seven pounds, plus. Or as my third-grader says, poring over the problems in expanded form: 1,000 + 400 + 7. I don't know what he'd do with the smidge left over. I don't think he does expanded-form-with-fractions as yet.

Each of the four mega-pumpkins on stands in front of the Doubleday Field gates broke the New York state record. Which just goes to show that a little sunshine--what marvelous weather we have had this year--helps with all kinds of expanded form. I could deal with weather like this year round. If it was up to me, I would deal with weather like this year round. Most Templeton summer mornings I get up, put on a sweater, and lodge two or three complaints before breakfast. Some fall mornings, I put on snow boots and the giant down blueberry. It's so big that it stands up by itself and sticks its arms out. More expanded form at work.

Here is something I learned at Pumpkinfest: grossly fat pumpkins look just as weird and astonishing as grossly fat people. I thought my Southern cohorts might not know that, and it's an interesting fact. We have the spectacle of 450-pound humans pretty much everywhere these days, but it's not so often that we see a really excessive pumpkin down South... Pumpkin giants flop as they grow, lose their flower ends and umbilicals in wells of flesh, and sprout stretch marks.

In today's installment of pumpkin mania, my son played silly games and had his picture taken while sitting inside a pumpkin, next to a Grumplie, an equally large pumpkin carved in high relief. Sour-faced: hence, Grumplie. Our favorite part was watching the Catskill Puppet Theatre do "Hiawatha" with rod puppets; we'd seen the show once before, but one of us was only a toddler and didn't recall.

Alas, we missed the Regatta, though we did go and inspect the wet pumpkin boats behind the Lake Front Motel.