moose stink and pumpkin Jack

Performance day. I helped drag furniture out of the children's section, then stopped and sniffed; something smelled like Newfoundland. Here approached the Canadian storyteller, who wore bushy white eyebrows and an inuit jacket made of smoked moose hide. This turned out to be the magical memory trigger; my childhood smells like dead moose.

I ruined his authentic get-up with a nut lei.

He made a passable bear-with-head-stuck-in-bucket, despite this.

Then I tried to fit myself in the bucket and stowaway back to the Yukon. Shooed out, I gave his wife an avocado from my "oh please just take them" box, which she sniffed at and tried to peel like an orange. I was both charmed by her polite struggling and mortified that I had put her on the spot with a mutant fruit. But it had to be done. The produce situation in our kitchen is getting out of hand. I have been wandering the yard, wailing for the avocado thief. I promised not to make a jacket out of him this time, but no hungry face appeared in the shrubbery. To help deal with this crisis of bounty, the cohorts arrived for chicken and dumplings, the new Fest Bier, caramel apples, and some pumpkin butchery.

Another masterpiece of chilling innovation and execution. The men wielded the knives, so Jack was nearly sawed in half when it was time to take his top off and gut him. 

The kids burned off their sugar highs and collapsed in front of Tim Burton while we hid on the porch behind cards. Losing spectacularly at rummy is a special skill of mine. Like my 69 bowling average. Am built for surviving childbirth and ice ages; not playing games that involve points or skill or luck. 

Grey, blustery weather, with sweeping curtains of rain. The newspapers are grim, the ghost has been amusing itself with readjusting my driver's seat so that I smack my head off the door when I get in, and we are hunkering indoors to bake the chills away.