happy halloween, my chicklets!

oh my gosh, FINALLY. it's halloween. if you follow tinyengine you will know that i have gone on and on and on about halloween. well it's here.

pretty soon, everyone will be running around in their outfits and opening their doors to strangers and there will be chocolate absolutely everywhere. it's fantastic. it reminds me of a haunted house we made in our garage when i was a little chockchippy. my sister had a great idea of using a terracotta pot and filling it with dryer lint and water and green food coloring. then the unwitting person was instructed to put his or her hand in there and squish it around. it was meant to be witches' brains. it was pretty good. we had other great things in there too, but i can't remember. maybe my sister will read this and tell me what else we did. you know what? i think i will check to see if the dryer lint screen has anything in it. if we have enough witches' brains in there, maybe i'll make up a batch for our little trick-or-treaters tonight.

there was another halloween night when i went up the street to visit a friend before costume-donning and we ended up going into her next-door neighbor's house. (the woman was really only my next-next-next-next-next-door neighbor. it's not like she lived a hundred miles away)--but anyway, i had never been in her house before. i had never even spoken to her before, so i suppose it is kind of weird that my friend and i ended up hanging out there for a really long time and talking and having candy and stuff, so that my mom and dad freaked out a little when i had completely disappeared from the face of the block. anyway, i was up there for a while, it seems. we all sat on her barstools and i guess we talked. i think i was about 8, so i don't know what we talked about with mrs. inaki or whatever her name was, but she was benevolent. i went out trick-or-treating later that night, but i remember feeling as though i had touched down from a very long excursion into outerspace. it was as though time stood still there in that lady's house. i can't even tell you what i went as that night, but i remembered liking sitting on those barstools. it was kind of quiet. it was kind of like a vacuum in there.

well happy halloween everyone! i want you to know that we didn't even end up getting a pumpkin at all. we found one in a weird ralphs on our way to do something else and we were going to pick it up at the end of our shopping. well, we forgot it. so i decided i don't care anymore. you can't be a kid forever. time to grow up, now, you hear me? i think it's the start of a new tradition: no pumpkins on halloween.

happy halloween!

granule sur les mers

since her identity has already been compromised, she has allowed this.

the frost wasn't on the pumpkin

well you'll never believe what happened. we went to the grocery store to get our pumpkins and we found 6 gigantic huge boxes. all empty. there were some white ones there, which, as you know, i like very much, but i like them as a friend to the orange ones. i don't like them on their own. so we found one pumpkin that was sort of a display pumpkin and we wanted to buy it and they said it was $30.00! do you remember what i said about that pumpkin patch? now maybe i should go back there. they were charging $32.00 for the 2 pumpkins. i am thinking that maybe the pumpkins are filled with gold doubloons. or heroin. something. nobody should charge that much. anyway, we didn't get it and it was 40 degrees below zero in the supermarket so our noses were red and running and we were tired and getting sick with polio or something there in the market, so we just got some basic provisions and medicaments and retreated. we are trying it again tonight. i already did some recon this afternoon and i found a place that has them for .39 a pound. i think we'll go to the specialty store where i was a geek with that woman. they are sure to have some decent gourds in that place.

so this afternoon i got a halloween costume for my dear granule. now before you worry that i'm one of those people who carries a little dog around in a purse, i don't. if you don't know by now, my dog is a full-sized dog and she hates the costume and she eats poop and she chews on bones and buries them in the dirt and digs them back up and eats them, covered in dirt and earwigs and everything. so she's a real beefy kind of real dog. well, she is a pirate now. her costume is great. she hated it and i took a picture of her in it and that's the end of that. but it was 70% off at the fabric store and so how could anyone argue with that. it was 45 cents or something. so the reason i was in the fabric store was for supplies for my new boutique i'm opening. the link will be coming soon. i am pretty sure that you can't wait and that you will love it. let's not worry about the fact that right now it looks like the website was built by a brownie troop, it will be pretty good when the goods are flying off the shelves.

well everyone, i'm feeling a little under the weather and i don't even have a little anecdote to tell you today, but i am eating grapefruit seed like it is going out of style, so i'm sure i'll be up and running pretty soon. until then, go download a bunch of roxy music and everything will be just fine.

when the cost is on the pumpkin

tonight is the night we are going to get our pumpkins. we will probably go to the grocery store and pick up a pumpkin along with some toothpaste and some clorox disinfecting counter wipes, but it's a big night nonetheless. once, about a hundred years ago, i went to one of those exciting pumpkin patch places. it was really just a weird streetcorner where they brought in some scarecrows and hard multi-colored corn, but it was supposed to be like an actual pumpkin patch. anyway, i picked out my pumpkin, and another pumpkin--a white one, and i went over to the check-out stand, which was a cash register sort of disguised as a big wheelbarrow. the guy weighed my pumpkins (that is not some kind of euphemism, he really weighed my pumpkins) and then he said, that'll be $32.00. and for some reason, standing there on all the fake hay, i couldn't summon the courage to tell him he was crazy to charge $32.00 for a squash and a half. instead, i gave him 2 twenties and waited for my change while the whole pumpkin patch began to spin in that way that it does when you know you are letting someone completely take you for a ride. i thought: it's halloween. it's fun. i'm paying for the experience of being in this christmas tree lot with hay bales and calico material and kids scraping their hands all over the prickly pumpkin stems and rolling around in the dirt. it's all fun! i went home and carved that hundred million dollar pumpkin and well, i enjoyed it. this wasn't the year that someone ruined my pumpkin. that was a different time. this time, that beautiful expensive old gourd sat on my doorstep until the bottom molded out and the whole thing collapsed on itself in a bubbly mass.

so this year, we will go buy the pumpkins at the grocery store and pay a few cents a pound and get out with our dignity. and our cheap pumpkins.

what i forgot to tell you was that once when i was a tiny squid, i was in my kindergarten class and the teacher was carving a pumpkin. kids were sitting around and some were doing other things and i was sort of walking over to a bookcase, and that smell of the pumpkin or something started to bother me. and i remember looking over at that low 2-shelved bookcase and just sort of starting at it and then i threw up all over the place. i went to the nurse and laid there in the bed, staring up at the acoustic tiles, counting every hole in one of them until my mother came to get me. i always think of that every year when i am carving my pumpkin. i haven't thrown up from the pumpkin smell since that time, so who knows. but that was also the year that we made macaroni necklaces and scott douglas told me that if i smashed the stray rotelle pasta pieces into the carpet with my heel, they were easier to pick up than if we left them whole. so mrs. cohen turned around and saw me smashing the pasta with my heel and i got in trouble. so it was hard times all around.

here's some literature for you. good-night, dear readers.

when the frost is on the punkin
and the fodder's in the shock,
and you hear the kyouck and gobble
of the struttin' turkey-cock,
and the clackin' of the guineys,
and the cluckin' of the hens,
and the rooster's hallylooyer
as he tiptoes on the fence;
o, it's then the time a feller
is a-feelin' at his best,
with the risin' sun to greet him
from a night of peaceful rest,
as he leaves the house, bareheaded,
and goes out to feed the stock,
when the frost is on the punkin
and the fodder's in the shock.

who dropped the salmon strip? a small town whodunnit.

today while we were on our walk today, my dog ate something off of the ground. it looked like a long strip of alaskan salmon that was sort of dried up. the trouble is that it was sitting smack in the center of a patch of mud in a grassy section. and i mean trouble because it looked like it was placed there. it looked like somebody just laid the thing down, gently. and then of course, my dog ate it. she is always eating all kinds of things off of the ground, and she always has lived through it, even though a lot of those things she eats are pretty terrible. but i once had a dog that was poisoned, so now of course, all i can think is that my beloved granule has now died since i left the house after our walk. i'm sure she'll be fine and i'm sure this is just me worrying the way i always do about things like this, but what was that thing? it could also have been a piece of bacon or hammy stuff that fell out of the sandwich of one of those new jersey guys over there, but it wasn't in front of their apartment. although, i could definitely see one of them traveling around while he ate an alaskan salmon or bacon sandwich, chatting on his phone and pacing that stretch of the sidewalk. i suppose when i get home this evening, and he's on his way out to meet somebody for drinks, i'll just casually ask him if he was roaming while eating a bacon salmon sandwich, and did he find it was less populated than he had thought it was going to be, back in his kitchen, when he made it. i think some of those guys eat a lot of sandwiches. there are a few guys that live over there with a little stairs-balcony thing and they always keep their door open. for the first year that i lived there, every time i went into my backyard, i could see them making sandwiches. and i don't mean that as some kind of euphemism. they were there, at 1 in the afternoon, at 10 at night--it didn't matter. they were always in there making some kind of sandwich. for some reason, these days, i don't see them in their kitchen much but their door is still always open and i hear them screeching for some east coast teams whenever the stakes are high. maybe they dropped the thing. i may never know.

the state of the salmon was good!

the dog is thriving. this is actually about a year or so before she ate the mysterious thing, but she looks pretty much like this right now, which leads me to believe she has lived through another day in the urban jungle. normally, i would protect her privacy, and not post her likeness, but she requested it this once.

also, i know this post is dated before the one in which we discussed the actual potential poisoning agent, but i didn't want to ruin the suspense, which is, after all, what we're all about here at tinyengine.

that old saw?

if you are a faithful and a fearless reader of tinyengine, you will know by now two things: the first is that i am not an early riser. the second is that (the tearing down of) the house next door is taking its toll on me. and say what you will about me being a baby and wanting to sleep until 9am, and say what you will about how my life is pretty good and i shouldn't complain about things, but just wait until i tell you what happened this morning.

first i will say that i grew up with a father who built things. there were a lot of tools around the garage. i know all about all kinds of tools. i don't know how to use all of them, like a lathe, or something like that, but i generally know what they are. so, this morning, when i dreamt that i heard a radial arm saw starting up and then whirring into a piece of something very hard and strong and shiny, and the tone changed into that high metal-splintery raging shattery screech, i was almost reminded of the old days hearing my dad at work in the garage. then, i woke up. and then i realized it was completely dark outside. and then, lying there, perfectly still, in the pitch blackness of the pre-dawn, i heard it again. somebody was using a gigantic power saw inside of that cavernous house with open spaces where windows and doors should be. and they were using it before the sun had even come up. the sound echoed all over the place inside that house, and then it catapulted directly at my bedroom window, as if it were being shot through a big gramophone horn. it was shocking. and loud. and i was mad. not as mad as the guy who yelled all kinds of things about how he doesn't wake up at 6 in the morning expletive expletive expletive, but i was upset. i had also been up until about 2am, worrying about all the lead paint wood dust and chips that were ending up in my yard. so at this point, i had slept about 4 hours. well, the saw stopped and then after a number of minutes, a faint hammering was heard. it was as though they hammered something for fun, and then waited to see what would happen, and then they started hammering things for real. i think that at that point everybody on the block was awake and even if they had tried to go back to sleep, the hammer sounded like a brahms rhapsody at that point, so nobody yelled again. anyway, my plan is to practice a lot of opera tomorrow afternoon. maybe for about an hour i'll just work on a really tough cadenza, with my windows open. that might be a good idea. i'll see your saw and i'll raise you a high F.

crustaceanism

i'm going running in about 18 minutes. i am hoping that it stops raining by then. i was sort of secretly hoping that we would have gale force winds or anything that would make it impossible to go running. or a baleen-led tidal wave or something. and that is only because for the last few nights i have had very little sleep. they continue to destroy the house next door. now it looks like someone made a gingerbread house out of flesh-colored cottage cheese and cut holes for the windows and then put the slabs in the oven. it's just a pebbly-looking peachy box. it's kind of weird when a house is reduced to that. it's a little bit embarrassing, really. the house is there, with no coverings and no bricks and no window sills. and people are running roughshod through the whole thing. but it's also the noisiest box on earth. there were 4 different hammers going today. and one crowbar thing. they all had their own rhythms. i heard them all going as i was thinking that it would be nice to sleep late for once. i wonder how long it will take to finish destroying that house? i might go over and help. at least it would be one more person working toward a common goal. many hammers make light work. then i haven't been sleeping at night because of storms and all manner of noise.

i did remember one of my dreams though and it was that i was in a big outdoor oceany beach amphitheatre aquarium place. a group of people were gathered on dune-y sand. they were all listening to a girl reading a poem. there was an advisor there who was trying to help her. he was critiquing it and trying to make changes. i was standing near to where the girl and the man were, which was just in front of a gigantic tank, like the big huge building-size multi-fish displays you see at huge modern aquariums. so anyway, i decided to step in and i asked if i could make my own suggestions for the girl's poem. the advising man allowed this and i started talking with her. together, we worked the whole thing out and the poem was getting pretty good. i had all the notes on her original and i also had all kinds of other notes in my hand. then, all of a sudden, a gigantic baleen whale appeared in the tank and it came forward and then turned in a spiral. the poet girl got sucked up in the mayhem somehow and there was a lot of chaos, with water everywhere. when the water cleared and everyone turned out to be fine, i looked at my notes. the people were still waiting for the finished poem. i couldn't find that one page. it had gotten washed away when the whale twirled. it was a tense moment that quickly subsided when we realized there were people and other things living inside the tank, which was now accessible from where we were on the beach, because the glass had broken and the whale had retreated back from whence it had come.

when we went inside, there were a bunch of oceanographers who had been sleeping in those super special mummified sleeping bags. they were unzipping themselves out of them. they were all laying underneath a big pool table. then, next to them i saw a bunch of gigantic, man-sized oyster-colored crustaceans who were also unzipping from their oyster-colored quilted super arctic sleeping bags. they had been doing research and they were all tucked into their arctic ocean sleep cocoons. the shrimp type of characters were sort of really lobstery and crayfishy with their pearlescent and oystery-colored bulbous projections and then those antennae sticking out. but they had their own sleeping bags, different from the non-crustaceans. it was quite a find. i liked seeing them all there, lying on the ground. and i forgot all about having to fix that girl's poem.

and the point of all of this is that i was so tired from having to go through all of that last night and this morning but i am going to try to keep to my running schedule. today i will have to go to the track i think, as the concrete seems to not be doing me any favors. well i hope to run run run until i am too tired to stand up and then i can fall asleep at an early hour. if i can just get a lot of sleep tonight, i might be able to catch up. i was awfully tired today; boy was i crabby.

rise and shine! it's 1952!

what i feared has come true. the man who bought the house next to ours is going to take it apart, piece by piece with a hammer. he started this morning at 6:55. there is a brick facing, which i am sure has a more interesting and architecturally correct term, but for our purposes, we will say there is a brick facing on the house. they took all the bricks off today--and by "took all the bricks off" i mean, they hammered and smashed them off before they could find anything quieter to do--and then they threw them, armful by armful into the big empty metal bin. so i got up at 6:55am. generally, i get up at about 9:30. or 9:00 if we're getting a jump on the day. so 6:55 was a pretty big deal.

once i accepted that there was no going back to sleep, i decided that i would get all of my shopping done for a dinner party that we are having tomorrow night. i figured that nobody would be at the stores that early and then i would have my evening to do other things. so i even had time to throw a load of laundry in, feed the dog, tidy up a little bit and make some finishing touches on my shopping list. it was really sort of nice to have that kind of time in the morning and also to not feel rushed.

and then something crazy happened. i started to like being up that early. i felt like a productive member of society. i looked forward to strolling the empty aisles and finding something nice for breakfast. i was really in a pretty good mood. so i did all that shopping at the local grocery store, and it was so easy. and the produce men who are always very nice, were excruciatingly nice, because it was so early and nobody had yet knocked down their granny smith towers. and all the single bananas were spooning in a row. everything was beautiful. they even told me where i could find the kohlrabi, announcing that the purple kohlrabi was holding up nicer than the white kohlrabi. everyone smiled and i tucked two bunches into my cellophane bags, which came off the roll and opened up for me without any fight at all. it was such a nice grocery outing. now, i know you are expecting the turn here - - that i will tell you that all of a sudden somebody rammed their cart into me or something, but no. nothing happened like that.

i bought all my groceries, even found nice collard greens and a big container of cayenne pepper that was less than the tiny container and i went on my way to the specialty store. i was going to get a coffee, but i was feeling so lively because of the crisp air and the early morning friendliness of everyone that i didn't even bother.

so i made my way to the empty parking lot of the specialty store and i found all the wine i wanted and some nice french cheeses and heirloom tomatoes and i was really just about floating on air. i was thinking: i will enjoy all this construction. i will get up at 6:55 every day and i will buy fresh produce and then, because we will be getting up that early during the week, we will also get up at 6:55 on the weekends and we can go to the farmer's market with our organic tote bags and buy more nice produce, and help local farmers too! then i envisioned outfitting our whole house in organic cloth slipcovers and getting the dog a remnant-who-shall-return white cotton collar and i imagined churning my own milk and laying the bread out to rise before tucking into bed at 9:00 at night. i was really in heaven, you should have seen me.

and then something happened: i got so happy that i became a total geek. i was at the register checking out and for some reason, my coupon for seventh generation chemical-free laundry detergent wasn't being read by the scanner. the check-out woman kept trying to scan it and she kept trying to type it in and it just wouldn't work. i told her to forget it and she kept trying. i was so happy that nobody was in line behind me, because nobody was in line anywhere in the store--it was so early--that i said, giddily: "gee, i'm glad no one's in line behind me, because they'd really have my number!"

and then i thought: oh my gosh. why did i say that? who says that? who says "they'd really have my number"? who?? even the chirpy check-out woman didn't really know what to say. she just kept trying to scan my coupon and then her whole demeanor changed. i had gotten too happy. it was bound to happen. somehow when i get too happy, i end up becoming some kind of well-meaning aunt from a 1930's movie. the kind that shows up with baskets of things and the kids just wait for their handouts and then roll their eyes and run outside to play with sticks or something. the kind of lady that tells weird stories to people for no reason, but in some kind of vernacular from another time.

i walked out the door of the specialty store with my bags of groceries and i could already feel the sheep's milk cheese souring as i held the bag against my chest. there were loads of cars on the street--everyone rushing willy-nilly to work--and the sun was beating down all of that dewy air that had just been there. i made my way back home through angry commuters.

the workmen next door were carrying bent window screens across the lawn and whizzing them like pizzas into the commercial waste bin.

carrying my bags i realized how heavy they were. i had so many bottles and things. i finally finished unloaded all the groceries and i just felt so tired. i could hear the workers yelling something. boy was i tired.

socko to me

the other night i had a fantastic idea. i shouldn't even tell you about it, because if you have nothing to do tomorrow, you will probably go straight to the patent office with this one. first, i will tell you that for years, i eschewed mexican food in favor of cuisine that was onion-less. i had a weird thing with onions where i would get kind of sick if i ate one. so that was it for me and mexican food. i had nice experiences at certain great favorite mexican restaurants that used raisins and things instead of onions, but then i couldn't ever go there with my sister, for example, because she would rather do the running of the bulls in pamplona than eat something sweet together with something savory. anyway, a funny thing happened. lately, i can't get enough onions. red onions in salad and in chicken salad and tuna salad. i'm sorry to say, it's very good. if you think i'm mean by eating chickens and tunas, then read here.

so back to this onion thing. i have been eating so many kinds of tacos and things lately, and also yummy burritos at a good local place, and every time i end up with drippy stuff all down my arm and all over the table and all over my pants. don't get me wrong here, i am a demure lovely eater. i am not that kind of sloppy person, normally. what's going on here is a flaw in the system. so that is why i have decided to invent the sock-o. it's a taco that is shaped like a sock. why on earth should a taco be shaped like a taco? everything comes pouring out of it and you have to do a weird thing where you tilt your head sideways and only sort of tilt the taco to meet your head half-way, but of course, you can't tilt the taco, because if you do, everything falls out, so you do a strange kind of feigning tilting of the taco and an actual tilting of your head. it's very awkward and not very fun to do. well, with a sock-o, or a soc-o (i'm not sure which is the best way to market this) you don't have to do it at all. you could have a soft taco, with a sock-shaped corn tortilla, or a burrito, with a soft flour sock-shaped tortilla. then, for the hard-shelled tacos, the corn tortilla is just shaped like a tortilla cup. a sock, if you will. and everything stays right where it is supposed to stay.

stop laughing. it's sort of like an ice cream cone. you wouldn't laugh at an ice cream cone, would you? neither would you scoop ice cream into a cone the shape of a taco. your ice cream would pour out the sides like a messy taco does, ending up all over your new nice black soft pants that you wore out with your husband for a little late-night mexican dinner. then, you would have to wash just the pants as their own load of laundry when you got home, to make sure that they didn't stain, but then you'd feel bad that you were wasting water, but you had just finished all the laundry earlier that day, so you didn't even have anything else to wash with the pants. so you'd do it. then the next day, you'd forget they were in there, because there was just the one thing, and no laundry basket out to remind you, and they would stay in and end up starting to smell moldy and so you'd have to wash them again, wasting more water and energy. that is why you need a sock-o.

pour the black beans (which are always really the first to jump ship in a traditional taco) and the rice and salsa and sour cream, (if your cholesterol is not flying through the roof even though you are really too young to have that medical problem, but are somehow genetically predisposed to have it, and even though you exercise an awful lot and were a vegetarian for 30 years it doesn't seem to matter)and whatever else you would like to put in there. everything stays right where you put it and it's a good idea.

don't tell me that what i'm describing here is a burrito. everybody knows that just folding over a tortilla doesn't really keep everything in there. especially if it's all sort of cooked up yummy peppers and onions in there, like the place near me does. there's a lot of saucy stuff that drips all over the place.

this is not a folded flour tortilla burrito. this is a sock-o.

now, for my sake, i hope that you have a lot of stuff to do tomorrow so you don't steal my idea at the copyright office.

also, avocado is pretty darn good in there too.

what gasmask shall the poor girl wear?

so we finally went shopping this past weekend for our emergency kit. it only took a few gigantic earthquakes, katrina, rita, and wildfires--not to mention 9/11 and post-9/11 duct tape and cellophane hysteria. we finally did it. oh sure, we still need to get a good whistle and a few spacefood sticks, but we did a good job. (don't worry, we aren't really going to have spacefood sticks in our emergency kit. we will have actual important kinds of food.) we went to target and managed to get most of what we needed. i had already gotten gallons and gallons of water, which i found out later is the wrong kind of water, because it goes bad. i didn't know it could, but apparently it can. but it's good enough for now. if armageddon comes tomorrow, i think my water will still be good.

well, we ended up putting everything in 2 separate duffels, so we can each run easily from the burning house/smallpox spores/deadly fires/tsunami/tornado/dirty bomb, and we have just about everything we need. it's kind of weird to go through a store and pick out the few items that one will carry through the apocalypse, though. is this pink folding mirror better than this blue one for signaling that we survived the blast and have taken shelter next to this old building? or how about the one bra that i will wear as we hike across the desert? and of course, i have a spare pair of glasses in the emergency kit, but i really don't like the way i look in those. does that mean that even though i have a nice bra, i'll have to wear those ugly glasses for the rest of my life? and what about the dog? we have a ton of kibble, but how long until we can get back to the pet store? what about chewies? should we bring any?

we were standing in the store deciding which duffel bags to keep everything in and my husband said to me: well, we'll be grabbing all our stuff and we'll be on the move... and i thought: i don't want to be on the move. i don't want to be running through the wasteland with a duffel bag full of water purification tablets and with my dear diabetic dog flailing around on the end of leash. we were standing in target, running scenarios and it was really awful. i felt pretty bad about it for the rest of the day. but when we got home, i remembered i had saved a pretty nifty little blue plastic container with a mirror on the inside of it. it snaps closed and everything. it was from a set of crest whitestrips that i used for about 4 days, before i decided the feeling of that goop in my mouth for 20 minutes was really gross. we put the crest whitestrips box into our kit because it will hold something really small and important and we can use it to signal for help. i knew the thing would come in handy! so i think i'm going to grab the other really nice compact mirror we got at target, since we won't be using it. every time i take it out to look in it, i will think how close that mirror came to being the mirror at the end of the world.