But all the eating up of shoo-fly pie, and the cooking up of gauzy cumuli of pink candy, and the toffeeing of crab apples, couldn't hide the fact that we were winter-bound.

That should be 'ikayaki'. 'Tako' = octopus. 'Ika' = squid. I think a kraken is more squiddish than octopusish.

New street names cannot cause confusion with existing streets, nor is it any longer permitted to debaptize parts of streets in order to give them new names […]

Keep Joss-house a litty on the larbourd-bow. Steady as you go.