Alan the pumpkin

I currently have a green pumpkin sitting on the table in my apartment. Its name is Alan (I must have been very, very tired when I texted that to Wheat).

Alan's the one on the far left in this photo, which is dangerously not pointless. Or at least not too pointless. I've always said that this blog would turn into a pumpkin if that ever happened...

I have no idea what I'm going to do with Alan.

I have Alan because I did some pumpkin flower pollinating while I was housesitting at Dad's place in the summer, and I'm pretty sure that Alan was the result of one of those manipulations. Oh, for more on that, check this old post from the other blog. I'm not in the mood to repeat the story. Ignore the horrible doodle, though... or more to the point, the horrible scan. Anyway, Alan probably owes its life to me, so to speak, so when Dad cut the pumpkins because of a frost risk last weekend, I took Alan home with me.

I have no idea what I'm going to do with Alan. Did I mention?

I also have no idea how long a green pumpkin can last in a fairly warm apartment before it starts to turn into a stinky mess. What do you suppose my chances are that this thing'll orange up and last all the way to Halloween? I'm not averse to making a jack o'lantern, but I suspect that I may be parting ways with Alan long before that happens. It's over a month, after all. I have it sitting on a towel in my fruit basket so that I can (well, at least I hope I can) avoid the rotten bottom problem of sitting on a hard flat surface (the pumpkin, that is. Not me), but still. A month. Does anyone out there really think that Alan can go a whole month?

Ah well, we'll see. And in the meantime, I've got Alan for company, I suppose. I know it doesn't look especially big in the photo, but put it on a smallish table in a small apartment, and it becomes sort of unavoidable.

I haven't started talking to it.



Yet.

I have no idea what I'm going to do with Alan...