2001-10-17 - 3:12 p.m.

Fortune Cookie Factory

You'd think any place that is a factory would be big and scary. Perhaps industrial ... the kind of place that people like Dennis Hopper probably take teenagers to before they beat the crap out of them, right?

Well, Cookies are different. At least fortune cookies are. Yesterday on the way back from the English Pub (appropriately named Fox and Goose) we stopped at a cookie factory.

From the outside you can smell the yummy sweet odor of freshly baked cookies, but the building itself is nothing more than an old run down residence. Many of the older homes in Sacramento are victorians, but this one is just your basic none-descript old home converted into funny factory. You walk in a broken screened door and straight into what I imagine old Hong Kong was like. A Chinese family works mixing cookie dough or bagging up folded cookies, while a very 19th century cookie machine (it looks more like the skeleton of a grandfather clock) pumps out cookies one by one.

Mousetrap or Machine

Now that I think about it, the machine looks more like a steam powered mousetrap than a factory machine. It must have a billion moving parts. I know my dad and many other clock collectors would go crazy. Anyway, the machine takes warm cookies, and folds them around fortunes and then tosses them in a bucket that is on the floor. Actually that should be attempts to toss the cookies to a bucket on the floor. Some of the cookies seem to miss the bucket.

The workers grab the full buckets and sort through them by hand. Good cookies are packaged to be sold, while bad cookies are bagged in other bags and then tossed in the corner.

I honestly don't know if this family speaks English, because I found out through Stompy that if you just wave a dollar, they will point to the reject corner and say something in Chinese that I believe means, "Take some cookies". Anyway, we eat reject cookies all the time. :9

Jogging

The only other new thing in my life, was when I got home at 7 PM last night (the bus was late, as usual) I decided to go for a jog. There is something about running that makes me feel alive. Unfortunately my left leg is reminding me that it wanted to just stay at home and paint last night.

LISTENING TO: The Church's Remote Luxury

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