A lovely weekend: fundraising and pumpkins galore

Saturday was a big day for our school, raising emergency funds for a budget shortfall. We had a cake walk, dunk tank and BBQ. I'm still not totally sure how the cake walk works but it seems to be a mixture of musical chairs with roulette and you win cakes. The dunk tank is a ducking stool. Or maybe in the UK it is also a dunk tank and I just didn't know it. That was very popular at least with the dunkers. The dunkees seemed to enjoy themselves too but they took a little persuasion. I know this because persuading them was my job, and most of them were staff at the school including our very sporting Principal who also showed off some mean dance moves later in the afternoon (probably in a bid to get warm again after several dunkings). Anyway, we all had a lovely time and raised a few thousand dollars for the school.

Sunday we met up with friends who took us down to a vast pumpkin farm which was a superbly kitsch place kitted out with Roman soldiers, a Minotaur, Egyptian statues and a display of swordsmanship by what I think were conquistadors but their costumes were a bit vague.

There was an enormous maze made of hay bales which was really really difficult to get out of. We lost two boys first. Then we lost one mother and her daughter. That left the four of us and Eric, the dad to go round and round and round in circles, meeting the same people over and over again, each time with a slightly more world-weary, oh it's you again how the hell do we get out of here expression on our faces. It was really good fun. And we did all find each other again, even if some of us had to use an emergency exit (not us, hurrah!).

Then we bought pumpkins, large and small, and rode ponies, and watched the sword-play and headed off for burritos at a nearby tacqueria.