Sculpin

It took the neighborhood squirrels a while to catch on, but by this morning they’d gotten the picture: pumpkins are good eats. After chasing squirrels away from the jack-o-lanterns and uncarved pumpkins all morning, I thought it might help to set the pumpkins up on the planks where they’d go later that evening. Maybe, I thought, being so exposed will slow down the squirrels and make them think twice. Hah. No. Not five minutes later, I heard a muffled thump; a squirrel had pushed over one of the jack-o-lanterns and had crawled inside to eat like a squashivorous king.

Clearly, on Halloween, what’s scary is the squirrels. (But, damn, so cute when they’re panicked and covered in pumpkin bits.) I brought the pumpkins inside. Only a little visible damage had been done to the one that had briefly housed a squirrel. The jack-o-lantern pictured above is meant as a testament to their Halloween scariness, but I don’t think I really captured the element of squirrelly menace.

We wound up with six jack-o-lanterns this year, only slightly gnawed here and there. My favorite is Josh’s tentacle lantern. Maybe next year we’ll leave one out for the squirrels, light what’s left of it when they’re done, and call it an abstract-o-lantern.

We had about 25 trick-or-treaters this year, despite the light rain. One of my favorites this year was a little kid, somewhere in the 3-5 year range, who turned back on his way down the front walk and struck a “ninja pose”. I saluted him.

Halloween is almost upon us, and this year I’ve been lazy. After three years of awesome jack-o-lanterny abundance, Josh and I seem to have lost our will to carve pumpkins. Only a couple of pumpkins have been carved, and I never did make the enormous shadowy eyes and claws for the windows that I meant to make. My major concession to the Halloween spirit has been heavy sugar ingestion. (And now I am lethargic. No surprise there.)

But next year, if I’m not so lazy and dorky, maybe I’ll try making some of these cute Halloween paper thingies:

• Vintagey Halloween paper crafts from The Toymaker
• Haunted paper toys from Ravensblight, including a marvelous flapping bat!
• a pop-up bat from Robert Sabuda

I am not a fan of wrapping presents with wrapping paper. Wrapping paper is briefly admired, if that, and then it’s trash. Much of the stuff appears to be so impregnated with weird plastics that I wonder if it’s okay to burn, but it usually winds up in the fireplace anyway. Don’t even get me started on that unholy mylar stuff; it’s probably great for something, but wrapping presents isn’t it. And inevitably, once I’ve finished wrapping my presents, I have just enough wrapping paper left on the roll that I feel obliged to try to store the ungainly leftovers somewhere. No more wrapping paper! I quit!

I don’t get a newspaper, or I’d wrap things in comics. The year I hid presents in papier-mache sculptures was fun, but I’m not about to do that every year. And my hippie home-made wrapping paper has tended to look either severe or dorky.

So this Christmas I’m wrapping most things Japanese-old-style in furoshiki. I’ve been meaning to do this for years. My first, more ambitious plan was to buy a bunch of squares and dishtowels from Dharma Trading Company and embellish them in some way, but that went out the window when I saw that the Seattle Restaurant Store had a sale on beautiful cotton dishtowels and napkins, some in holiday colors. I loaded up. I suppose a proper furoshiki is square, and the dishtowels might be a little thick to tie easily, but I’ll manage something. I am going for “useful”, not “authentic”, anyway.

Perhaps I’ll give people friendly apples for Christmas.

Another word I’d like to import: gholonbeh, “gift-wrapped insult”. Perhaps it could carry the connotation of a whole lot of related insults all knotted up into a nasty wad.

Serious thoughts must have gone into the selection of a Persian word that has enough power to unload a ton of weight on one’s heart. Gholonbeh in itself means an indescribable lump or a bulge of something, for example, if you stuff your pockets it will form a gholonbeh. However, in dialogue, the same word signifies a load of insult which is delivered in a roundabout way via metaphors and hints. You won’t find a definition for this word anywhere and, should there be a dictionary bold enough to include it, you’ll be sure to find the translation inadequate if not incorrect.

– Zohreh Khazai Ghahremani on Iranian.com

Is she describing “gholonbeh” accurately? I have no idea, but I love the metaphor.

I finally got a receipt for my donation to the Red Cross.

It’s in Spanish, with no English translation. Because, right, everybody with a Spanish last name speaks Spanish as a first language. You bet.

Well, it gets the job done. And it’s signed by Napoleon Hendrix III. What a great name.

As Wallace Fennel says, “See, when you assume, you really just make an ass out of u.”

There’s a handy Yorkshire expression “to thoil”, a tight little parcel of verb meaning to be able to afford an object, but to feel guilty spending the money. “I don’t dislike that candlewick bedspread,” a Leeds woman might say, “but I couldn’t thoil to pay that price.”
– Alan Bennett, “Going Round”

I’d like “thoil” as part of my own working vocabulary. For more on Yorkshire dialect, consider A Survey of Yorkshire Dialect on the Internet. Rifle around there a while and you’ll find such words as “snooac” (to smell in a snuffing manner) and “nithered” (perishing with cold). I think “wazistheart” may be old Yorkshire dialect for “bummer”.

The UW weather station says that it’s 64.4 F, but it feels a few degrees warmer to me. It feels like exactly the sort of warm, damp, breezy October day that is the very best. I’ve turned off the heat and opened up the windows to let the clean fresh air flow through the house. Saw a flicker in the yard for the first time in months. At least two of them, in fact. (I should get some suet cakes.) Plus juncos, sparrows, black-capped chickadees, and a jay. It’s like a party out there at the feeder. I think I hear a couple of finches now. And here come the starlings, crashing the party.

… Well, it was a nice day until the World’s Slowest Gardener arrived across the street with his stinky gas-powered gardening machines. He’s standing around, slack-jawed, dully watching the effects of his leaf blower. It’s amazing how much noise and dust and stench those things can produce. I loathe them.

I made a kaleidoscope today! Or perhaps I should say, I assembled a kaleidoscope today, at a kaleidoscope-making class led by Thea Marshall, working with elements of her Kaleido-kits. We also learned to do a little glass-cutting and flame-sculpting, and we touched on some kaleidoscope-related math, physics, and history.

This thing is awesome. I must make kaleidoscopes out of everything now. Yessssss. But first I have to stare into this kaleidoscope for a while longer. So hypnotic. So mesmerizing.

Josh bought me the class as a present for my birthday. Isn’t he swell? Weeks ago I saw the listing and said, “Oh! Kaleidoscopes! This class would be great as a birthday present for me!” and then I promptly forgot that I said anything, so it was a marvelous surprise.

This was the first time in years that I’ve signed up to do something for more than a couple of hours that’d require me to function semi-intelligently. I packed along my little folding chair, just in case we were in some godforsaken chairless lab (we weren’t) and a cell phone, just in case I had to call for a ride home early (I didn’t). I managed to keep my brain going and even twisted some glass near the end of class without setting anything on fire. But when I got home, I crashed immediately and intensely for two hours and didn’t un-grog for at least another five hours. So this sedate 5-hour class was kind of a big deal. I was fading pretty fast at the 3.75-hour mark. That’s not a complaint; I was curious to see how I’d do. Josh says, “Better than I thought you would!” Excellent.

PT was fun today. I had a chance to chat briefly with one of the other clients, a veterinarian who is on his way to Antarctica in a couple of days. His description of leopard seals: “Imagine a grizzly bear head on the end of a torpedo.” So of course I will be imagining bear-headed torpedoes all day. If I were a little kid, that’d be the coolest idea ever; even now, not bad.

According to Dan the PT, my progress is impressive in its speed and consistency. He complimented me on my “unusually analytical and objective approach”. That was nice.

On the bus home from PT I watched the bad habits of some of my fellow bus riders. Now I’d like to douse myself in bleach. One guy sneezed into his bare hand and immediately put it on a handrail. Another guy spent the bus ride alternating between rubbing his sniffly nose and gripping a handhold. Agh! Haven’t these people heard the pandemic flu predictions? Can’t they recognize that this is the time to learn to do a better job of keeping their germs to their own selves? Call me paranoid, but with my immune system as tweaky as it tends to be, I’ll be wearing gloves on the bus this fall and winter. Heck, I’d do it if only because of the ewww factor.

Mary Oliver is coming to town to read from her second volume of New and Selected Poems. She’ll be at Town Hall on November 8 at 7:30 pm. The reading is presented by the U Bookstore and the Seattle Public Library.

Tickets are cheap — $5 or free with book purchase — and a portion of the proceeds benefits the Seattle Public Library and Richard Hugo House.