Random bits of my so-called life.

Back in the day big log booms would come down from somewhere in Canananada. Paper pulp logs to be processed in Sault, Ontario at the Abitibi paper factory or whatever it was. When I was a kid in Sault Ste. Siberia, it often smelled like hell in our town. A twin sister to the Canadian Sault.

The fun thing was that pulp logs would often escape the log booms and drift up onto the moominbeach. We used them for all sorts of purposes. A mini-gym that my dad built in the back yard of the moomincabin and various “cocktail” tables on the beach. And we would build forts out of them. This is one that I think I built. It’s a short one. My older boy cousins, Mac and Mike, built really tall forts. Were they dangerous? Probably. But we were more careful than you might think.

I don’t really remember this particular fort but it seems to have logs across the top so that we could lay our beach towels out and soak up the sun. I wonder how comfortable it was but we look happy enough.

So, in the front is yer fav-o-rite blahgger, hating her pixie style hair as always. To the left is cousin Jay (two years younger) and to the right is my “triplet” cousin Pooh, Jay’s older sister. Sitting up in the middle is beloved guest Becky.

Finn because my surname begins with “Fin”. Family because this land belongs to my family (and another, we’ll get to them in a bit). Moomin because I am a moom. And troll because most of the time, I live in Trollandia, that’s Michigan’s lower peninsula, which is below a bridge, the Mackinac Bridge to be exact. (It’s also a classic children’s book series and I apparently remind “people” of the Groke.)

So I am here and it is brrrrrr, featuring a northwest wind straight off Gitchee Gumee and I would be surprised if the temps are out of the 40s. And looking at my super-duper indoor/outdoor thermometer just now, I am right. It is 46. We are warm inside the non-winterized moomincabin, with two heaters going and the upstairs blocked off.

The excitement this summer is that the neighbors two doors down do not have any water. Their pump has failed and there’s only one pump rodeo in “town”. They are very good but they are so booked up, my neighbor (and lifelong friend) cannot even get on the schedule. Would we be willing to run a hose from the moomin to their cabin?

Yes yes yes yes yes! She seemed a bit reticent about asking but OMG, I was just cracking up. Until I was a young 20-something, the moomincabin and our family’s Old Cabin got our “running” water from a GARDEN HOSE connected to my next door uncle’s well. In the beginning, it was a no brainer because the only water we HAD in the moomin was cold water in the kitchen sink. We heated it up in huge teakettles to wash the dishes and do what limited bathing we could do. I usually took baths in the lake as a teenager, whatever the weather. Our plumbing got a bit unwieldy when we added a water heater and fully-equipped (albeit miniature) bathroom. It still worked but The Commander decided we needed our own well and so we have one. (And I didn’t bathe in the lake nude, I had a system and you do not wanna know.)

After 100 years and multiple generations of sharing this beach with our friends, OF COURSE we will help in any way we can.

We reminisced about how our parents described “running water”. You grab a bucket, run down to the lake, fill up the bucket, and run back up

Oh yeah, we arranged all of this via text messages (the neighbor cabin inhabitants are currently still at their home in Florida). Super easy! When we were kids, the only phone on the beach was my next-door uncle’s and that was because he was a doc and it was a *party line* to boot. We’ve come a long way.

And this is before the GG put the car-top carrier on Mooon Yooonit.

It wasn’t the original plan but somehow we are going to the yooperland for Memorial Day weekend and throughout the next week. I am taking tomorrow off but will be yooperCommuting throughout the week.

Gah. How much stuff can we haul up there? All kinds of North Country Trail crapola for one thing. I think I will have a small bag of clothing, a couple bags of grocks, and a computer bag. Two laptops, as usual. Even if I wasn’t gonna work next week, I would probably schlep my work laptop, remembering a long ago trip to Crazy Old Florida when I spent some time in the Ringling art museum courtyard talking my mouse (who was doing laundry at the Landfill) through logging onto my work laptop, posting a couple of functional specs that I had FORGOTTEN to post before I left, and emailing my boss to notify her that they were posted. Jeebus. The scariest part was making sure the password got entered correctly. And this was all pretty “illegal” but I had verbal permission from my boss to do it.

But seriously, I can’t figger why we have SOOOOOO much shit to take up to the yooperland. Plus, the GG was in and out and in and out and in and out and rummaging around like crazy today. He couldn’t find his kayak rack. “Is it in the shed?”, I asked. Yes it was but he looked there THREE times before he found it. NOT a productive work day for yer fav-o-rite blahgger.

Okay. I am in that space where I DO NOT WANT TO LEAVE The Planet Ann Arbor. When I get to the moominbeach, I won’t want to LEAVE the moominbeach to come back to The Planet Ann Arbor. Seeya on the other side.

Say it in a “radio” voice. Maybe a bit like HAL from the 2001 space odyssey movie. Or not…

I SWEAR I have heard The Guru say “remote data concentrator” in a deep radio-type voice. I dunno if he remembers this or not but he and Sam the Archaeologist (not dog) were here at the Landfill and I’m sure that’s the last time I’ve heard that phrase from anyone.

The Remote Data Concentrator was a snake pit in a closet down the hall from our office at the EPA (“Operations”) when I worked at that darn EPA. I’m not sure I ever knew what purpose it actually served but for quite a while, if we needed Byron for anything and he was AWOL, I knew where to find him. Butt up in the Remote Data Concentrator closet. And yes, it was a closet.

Byron was a great boss. I think he was skeptical about me at first because I got hired because I knew people. But I am a fast learner (and humble) and we became good friends and after a couple years, he trusted me to run the damn office when he was, uh, not there, for various reasons. When I returned from multiple week vacations in the summer, there would be stacks of Data 100 printouts with error messages all over them on my desk. I would start at the top and pick through to solve all of problems. I’ve been told the auto industry depended on me to get new vee-vickles to the showroom floor on time and maybe they did but I am too humble to accept that.

Being humble is one of the many reasons I am not a goddamn politician. All I was trying to do was do my damn job. I do the same kinda thing in the fintech industry.

I also loved my childhood boss Byron because when I started my family, he said to me that my baby was my first priority. He (and my husband and other folks) helped me craft a half-time schedule. Byron is long dead these days but I have always appreciated that he was always willing to accept women as *valued* employees. He was ahead of his time.

P.S. I don’t blame Byron for being skeptical about about hiring me in the beginning. I knew nothing about computers at all. Little did he (or I) know what I might become.

I mean “wires” of course, not wars. We have too many of those going at the moment. You can see a bunch of WIRES in the pic if you embiggen. There are always a lot of waaaars around the Landfill. When I was expecting my first beach urchin, I tripped over a bunch of them in the back room. The GG was johnny-on-the-spot to clean that mess up (he probably doesn’t remember this). He did not want our baby to miscarry. And she sure didn’t. We were both healthy and well past the usual trimester of miscarriage and I didn’t actually fall or anything but gawd I hate waaaaar snake-pits.

So tonight was another YouTube night. I’ll pick three of my faves. Some of them come with ads but they are pretty easy to skip. Or just skip them ANYWAY

1) Delores O’Riordan and the Cranberries with Linger. I had the Cranberries on repeat when my daughters were middle/high school but where I remember hearing this song the most is when we would drive from Hoton Lake over to the Jordan River Valley and up to Petoskey or wherever. Driving around in the northern lower with our teenage children. And sometimes they would be driving us.

2) The Dutchman. This one actually always brings tears to my eyes. “Long ago, I used to be a young man and dear Margaret remembers that for me.” My Sault Ste. Siberian grandma’s name was Margaret and she didn’t really have to remember things for my granddaddy (that I know of) but still.

3) Ziggy Stardust. One of my all-time fave albums back when I was young enough to glitter up and attract (unwanted (sometimes)) attention from young men. Bowie is dead and how the hell did we all get so old and baggy?

The one song that didn’t get played tonight was the one about you don’t own me. It used to get played for me frequently and when I didn’t expect it. Not sure what happened. Is it because I am “woke” (a word I think is misunderstood) or a “social justice warrior” (I *own* that label) or a Never Trumper (have been FOREVER, since well before his political crapola)? I guess I’ll just have to play that song for myself. RIP Leslie Gore.

For some odd reason, every time I see the black guy in the pic out of the corner of my eye, I see Trump. When I look at it straight on, it doesn’t look like Trump at all. It is a cFam artifact but I don’t really know its history. The “hat” is a basket that I bought a long time ago. It was in the Landfill Dungeon for quite a while and various insects or whatever ate at it. I apologize to the artist that I didn’t take better care of their work. I can’t exactly remember when the frooog showed up but it pretty much fits in.

The GG and I are still not decided on a TV series to watch so we watched various YouTube music videos and other stuff tonight. In part that’s because we are working on plans to head to the moomincabin for a week or so. I have been been a bit reticent about this trip but he enticed me with a lunch stop at either Fred’s (Roscommon) or The Driftwood (Iggy) and that tipped me over the edge. It doesn’t take much, does it? I’m leaning toward the Driftwood going north and maybe Fred’s going south. The main thing is to travel when the rest of the unwashed masses are not traveling for the holiday weekend.

The last time we went north together (in April), we went to Houghton Lake for a week and when we got there, I asked him if he wanted to get lunch at the North Shore bar. He replied with something like, “I can make us PBJ sandwiches.” Jeebus H. Mackinac Kee-reist! Nothing wrong with PBJ but he (the GG) had cajoled me to go up there with him and he wouldn’t even take me out for lunch? We did go out for a burger at the North Shore (they make small burgers) and of course I paid because I am a bigger tipper. The money all comes out of the same pot so it’s kind of pointless about who pays but c’mon, take me out to lunch!

At the end of the day, after a productive family zoom-type meeting, I was feeling like I wanted a ‘hattan. It wasn’t quiiite cocktail hour so I was heading out to the back yard to read for a bit. (I’m just starting in on “Betty”, more on that in a future blahg.)

Before I got even halfway through the kitchen, the beach urchin who organized and “ran” the meeting texted, “Can I come over for a ‘hattan?” Yes yes yes yes. And so she did. When she got here, we were both a bit confused by the GG’s whereabouts. I heard him slam down the bathroom window (not in anger, just because it’s a cranky old window and slams of its own accord), then I lost track of where he was. Somewhere in the back yard maybe? Lizard had tried to text and call him with no success. I wasn’t really worried but, like, WTF. Oh. Here he is. Riding into the back yard on his eBike. And he had left his phone behind…

As we were drinking our ‘hattans, I mentioned that I had eggplant parm in the hopper for dinner. And asparagus and garlic bread and pesto couscous salad, an impulse purchase from the prepared food section at the Plum (it was good!). Don’tcha know, the beach urchin stayed for dinner.

Thanks to blahg commenters and off-line folks for TV suggestions. Tonight we are not watching anything. Mr. Chainsaw Man is super tired although he may not know it and I am just chilling out like I do at this time of the evening.

I posted about turkeys on the moominbeach a while back and here is a better pic including a Thanksgiving looking turkey dad. Embiggen him a couple times! Why do they seem to be living there? Is our neighbor-cousin feeding them? Stay tuned.

P.S. Don’t get me wrong. The family meeting was really good and the ‘hattans were NOT to de-stress. Any stress we have over these zoom meetings is because of distance. It would really be better to just GET TOGETHER in person. But it is what it is…

We seem to be between TV series. I was struggling with whether “series” has a plural but The Great Google tells me that series is the same word singular and plural. Anyway.

The last TV series we watched together was The Queen’s Gambit. We both enjoyed it greatly even though neither of us play chess. Me NOT AT ALL. The Pensioner probably knows a bit of chess. His eldest (late) brother was a chemist with an interest in chess and wrote a chess program back in the day. I mean like 1976.

So… Whaddoo we watch next… I am temporarily stymied. I have heard a lot about the Succession series. It’s even in xword clues. So, while the GG was out chainsawing for 10 days or so, I tried it out. Ho-hum. I dunno why but I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t like any of the characters and I am not enthralled with billionaires or trillionaires or whatever. I think I watched two episodes (and fell asleep during the second one — twice!). I am watching the last season of Handmaid’s Tale by myself. The GG is not interested in any way, shape, or form for reasons that I only partially have figured out. But it’s only once a week anyway and we need something we can watch every night.

What we ended up watching tonight was a narrative by Steven Garner, a cross-country skier who traversed the North Country Trail from one end of the yooperland to the other this past winter. A couple versions of it are on YouTube. The one we watched was two hours. It was fascinating except that the photos that accompanied his narrative did not match it in any way, shape, or form. If I had to guess, I would guess that Steven wasn’t all that interested in stopping every five minutes to dredge his iPhone out of his zipped pocket or wherever he keeps it (or dig it out of the snow where he had dropped it — been there done that). This was an arduous trek in many places and he had to spend a LOT of time and energy on getting from point A to point B without freezing to death or falling off a cliff or A LOG BRIDGE or whatever. So someone else set up a random slide show. But it was a GREAT narrative and I think if he had photos to go with it, it would be a great presentation for the 2026 Quiet Water/Adventure Symposium.

I had a meeting with my new colleague today to help him make some changes to the high fidelity prototype (demo) of our web application. He has no experience with html. That is okay because business analysts in general don’t really need to have html coding in their skill set. For our team’s application, it helps if you know it though. Plus some CSS and (fugly old-skool) javascript. We’ll start with html, which is pretty easy to learn and we’re just making little tweaks to existing files. Easy peasy as some say.

Okay, so he was sharing his screen and I was walking him through his first change to an html file. At one point, I told him to hit the CARRIAGE RETURN!!! Whut??? Oh, do you mean the “Enter” key? Duh. Are you showing your age KW? Yes! We had a good laugh about this and y’all are laughing too. Gah! In my defense, in the training I have been doing all week, we were often shown files in which each line ended with “CRLF”. Carriage Return, Line Feed. Welcome back to the 1970s/1980s.

New Colleague is quite a bit younger than I am but not a kid. I don’t think of myself as a good teacher but I am a good coach for a person who is a quick learning autodidact. Like my new colleague. We were online for 2.5 hours and he had little html tweaks to make in random spots all over the damn demo. We did the first tweaks together, then I suggested that I would be quiet and let him find his way until he needed help. And so I did and he needed so little help that I am thinking he might be my replacement one of these days. That’s a good thing

In the middle of this session, a guy in a neon green vest came up to the door and asked, “Is that your Subaru in the street?” Yes, yes, it is Cygnus. Cygnus was in the street because Mooon Yooonit was scheduled to arrive in the afternoon with the Lyme Lounge in tow and the GG would want to back them into the driveway. But some folks were doing tree work for the city and I had to move Cygnus into the driveway. I texted the GG about the situation and when he arrived he had to park down the street a bit. OF COURSE, all the young tree dudes were enamored with the Lyme Lounge.

Dinner of porterization at Dexter’s Pub and g’night!

I have spent the last four mornings in an intense training session for a new software tool that our team is using. I won’t try to describe it except that it is very cool and it is right up my alley although I am nowhere near able to say I understand it all. I don’t think I have EVER done organized training at my company before this. Except for a “crucial conversations” thing once long ago. It was excruciatingly awful. This was not.

This is my childhood dog, Tigger. She isn’t really all that old in this pic. This was probably when I was a tween in the 60s and she lived until my sophomore year in college. She was 13 when my parents (rightly) euthanized her. I was driving my grandmother’s 1965 Ford Fairlane to college that fall (I didn’t get to keep it there and was car-less seemingly forever) and my parents said, “Say good-bye to your dog,” as I was getting into the car. This was a surprise but I was okay (as my parents knew I would be).

Tigger was not really a “trick” type dog. She learned a few commands like “sit”. Maybe that was the only one? She was a very smart dog though and the tricks she learned involved how to get along with people. She was bouncy as a puppy (“Tiggers don’t jump, they bounce” – A. A. Milne). She was a very young stray puppy when we “adopted” her and we treated her very well. When she got older, she learned to approach unfamiliar people SLOWLY with her big bushy tail wagging like crazy. “I want you to pet me.” She was usually rewarded. That is to say she would do that on the moominbeach where she was safe with her family (us). At our house in Sault Ste. Siberia, where boys cutting through the yard would sometimes hit her with geography text books, she could be a bit more territorial.

Anyway. This pic is from our driveway in the back of our Superior Street bungalow. It backed out into an alley. The house and garage in the background belonged to our neighbor Green Thumb McGinnis. The white fence bounds the Oberman house across the alley. One of the few Jewish families in town but YES THERE WERE/ARE Jewish people in our little city. I have heard of people from northern Michigan who don’t think any Jewish people live up there. Yes they do.

I walked past that white fence umpteen bazillion times during my childhood. Sometimes dodging the “Wise” (subbing for a Finnish name) family boys (four of them), who were ROCK throwers. (I didn’t complain to The Commander about the rock throwers, knowing she would just tell me to fight my own battles.) At the end of the alley across the street is the Wood house, I would hang a right and head to Laurie’s house in the next block. She was one of my best friends in grade school even though she went to St. Joe’s and I went to Stinkin’ Linkin’, a public school.

Am I nuts or what? I want to talk about what I *think* are called “saddle seasons”, times of the year where popular vacation spots are not crowded. I am getting zilch from The Google. The results are mainly turning up stuff about horse saddles, which I couldn’t care less about, having not had particularly fun experiences riding horses in my life. And some sort of “Saddle Club” TV series. Am I using the wrong search term? Do I need to deploy some sort of AI search?

Aaargh. I tweaked my search terms and The Google turned up the correct phrase, which is “SHOULDER season”. Gah. My dear old brain came up with the tweaked search terms, not AI. I am not anti AI, just haven’t processed it yet and also think We The People need to be careful when using it. There’s enough dis/mis-information out there even without AI. AI is on the radar at work though so I may have to focus on it sometime soon.

So. It is mid May and the GG is at the moomincabin and it has been HOT up there. But. There are still a few bitsy little snow banks (piles) hanging about. Like this one by the propane tank. The propane tank and snow pile are in between two parking spaces. On the left is a small space that I often parked in throughout the years when my parents had a car in the actual driveway. To the right is a bigger parking space that fits two cars if necessary but also accommodates a car and trailer. When I was a kid, our Sherman friends would occupy this space with their VW bus and pop-up tent camper for a couple weeks each summer. Good times with their five kids. The Sherman dad grew up with my dad in Sault Ste. Siberia but drove his family from the New York state Niagara Falls area to visit us.

The Scamp trailer in the pic (the Lyme Lounge), is in the actual moomincabin driveway and beyond it is the front yard, the beach, and good old Gitchee Gumee.

This guy (or gal, who knows) travels the sewer system, exits in front of our house, scales a tall fence in our yard into a neighbor’s yard, then emerges under their fence and here he/she is. That is what the GG observes. I’m guessing he/she is sniffing out baby henries (our word for rabbits).

I hissed at this character a couple times. When I hiss at feral cats in the yard, they skedaddle PDQ. This raccoon, not so much. I finally yelled at him to GET OUT (but not before I got the pic). He did skedaddle when I yelled at him.

But that was yesterday (but yesterday’s gone). I didn’t see Rocky Raccoon today but Henrietta (rabbit, remember) was was hopping back and forth throughout the yard all day. Or at least late this afternoon when I wasn’t working any more.

Back in the day when the older beach urchin was a toddler and our mouse wasn’t even in the pipeline, the lizard was standing at one of the back doorwalls. A raccoon came up to the screen and acted like it wanted to EAT her or whatever. No, you are not gonna eat my baby. The GG mitigated that situation PDQ.

Tonight, a feral cat emerged outta nowhere and was chasing Henrietta (rabbit, right). Oh, no. I hissed at that cat and it skedaddled PDQ. As they do. I do not know what will happen to any baby henries/rabbits in my yard overnight but I don’t think I can control that.

All right! I got a notification that there is a new episode of Handmaid’s Tale and I am gonna watch it.

There’s still snow in the woods at the moomincabin but the beach was scorching hot this afternoon and this is what the GG sent me this afternoon. If you don’t know our bay, that is Round Island in the middle. The land on the right is Canananada and the land on the left is the USA. The waterway is the St. Marys (no apostrophe) River, which leads NW into Whitefish Bay, yes the Gordon Lightfoot Whitefish Bay. There is a downbound freighter on the left and an upbound freighter on the right. Heading up to and down from Whitefish Bay as freighters do. Embiggen a couple times to see the freighters a wee bit better.

The back door (into the kitchen) apparently lost an argument with the gas grill so one of its (four) window panes has been replaced. People may wonder why I put up with MAGA. It’s because he fixes windows (and terlets, etc.). I mean my own personal MAGA, to be clear. In general MAGA can go to hell.

He called me from the beach and I got to talk briefly (via iPhone speaker) with Cap’n*Queen*Leila (who has probably outgrown that moniker) and cousin Judd (who lives next door to the moomincabin). In his immediate future is a dinner decision – he’s taarred of eating dehydrated camping-type food. I suggested driving up the shore and if the Cozy wasn’t open, to try Pickles, which probably *is* open. In the next couple days he is chainsawing, etc.

I am here at the Landfill, where I am immersed in an intense training course for a new (to us) software tool. Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? It is hot here but not as hot as at the beach because of the cloud cover and plenty of breezes.

The moomincabin is open for the summer and the north shall rise again!

The GG sent this from the moominbeach tonight and I do not think I have ever seen a wild turkey on the beach before.

I don’t ever ask for or expect mother’s day stuff. For one thing, I believe every day is mother’s day. But people wanted to come over for dinner anyway and I engineered BBQ chicken and potato salad(s) and local asparagus and garlic bread. I did the shopping at the Plum (for most of the stuff) and Argus Farm Stop for the asparagus. I was home from all of that by 8:37 AM and spent the day picking away at food prep. I did the salad, garlic bread, and BBQ sauce (Joy of Cooking recipe). Mouse manned the grill for the chicken and asparagus and Lizard did the cleanup.

The beach urchins did a few other things for me. Liz re-potted a plant I have been sorta successfully nurturing since she gave it to me for my 2024 bday. It needed a bigger pot. I sidled up to Mouse at the plum this morning to ask if she would bob my long straggly hair. Yes. We got that outta the way PDQ. I love when pros do my hair but this was soooo easy. 15 minutes in my back yard. Mouse does a good job and my hair is forgiving since it is kinda “bushy”, which can hide imperfections in length. Remember the old “shag” haircuts?

My mouse also helped me with my bedroom window. I woke up at that batscope hour (three AM) unable to go back to sleep. Yesterday was pretty hot and I could open the actual wooden window but I couldn’t lift the storm window to save my life. It was off its track! So I couldn’t expose the screen. I mitigated this whole thing by manhandling the bathroom storm window open and then the temp outside went down to about 40. Whew. My mouse took the whole damn bedroom storm window OUT so now the screen is exposed and if it gets too cold, I can just shut the regular window. I dunno if this all makes sense. It doesn’t to me and I WROTE it. It does seem like new windows may be in our future.

The plan for today was for Lizard Breath to “pick me up” for lunch and a wee flower shopping trip. (She drives over and drives Cygnus, which has more room than Ruby for hauling flowers.)

I was a little surprised (but shouldn’t have been) when we were texting yesterday and she said something like, “I’ll be at your house at 10:45. Sessions opens at 11:00 and that’ll get you home before the witching hour.” And then, “Neither of us likes the late afternoon.” LOLOLOL! Does my kiddo know me or what? I knew my own mother pretty well but not sure if I knew her THAT well. But my kiddo is a crackerjack.

So we got to Sessions right around 11:00 AM (and that’s fine, I had been up since before six and prefer an early lunch). WE WERE THE FIRST PEOPLE AT SESSIONS. Jason/Jacob/J-something was our server and when I asked if we could have a booth he (appropriately and we were all joking) said something like, “You can sit wherever you want.” Indeed. The other thing about this is that my beach urchin ALSO tends to like to eat lunch on the early side.

After lunch we headed out to Hilltop Greenhouse and Farms, out on Liberty past where there is deep water over the road at the moment. We were getting meeee impatiens to pot for the Landfill back yard and various flowers and a huge fern for her front porch.

I decided I would be the Cart Lady. There were other mother/daughter shoppers there today and at one point, I moved our cart so that another baggy old Cart Lady could get through the aisle. She said something like, “Women are better drivers than men.” I replied, “Yes! We were just talking about that at lunch.” And we were but that’s as far as I’ll go with that.

Anyway, not to say that my daughter(s) are my clones. They most certainly are not. Thankfully for them (and me), they seem to have inherited some of my better qualities? And not some of my “other” qualities…

I got home before the witching hour and spent the dreaded late afternoon in beautiful sunny 75-degree weather in the Landfill back yard.

Musing: I remember when Becquet (intentionally misspelled) next door was a pre-schooler and she and her dad played frisbee in the yard between our houses. Tonight, years later, she is shooting baskets into the portable hoop they have set up in their driveway. She is out of my sight but I can hear the basketball bouncing and I love it. I wasn’t bad at basketball when I was a grade school kid. We lived across the street from my grade school and there was a basketball court directly across the street from my house. Ice rink in the winter.

I spent the whole day on and off the phone with a couple people on my team. A dev wizard and our new colleague. All of us except the new person made mistakes and there was a lot of starting over on various things. I can’t ‘splain it all and y’all do not want to know.

This was interspersed for a while with texts with the beach urchins and we won’t go there either except to say there were some benign weekend activity discussions.

I’m not Catholic (or even religious) but I guess I can have an opinion about the pope, right? I liked Francis. Leo the 14th seems promising too. I know there are dissenters on this opinion. I support any pope or any religious figure who follows Jesus’s teachings, meaning that they care about all living beings no matter what color or even species they are. My early view on this pope is that he may follow through on that. I’m not sure if my (non-practicing) Catholic husband agrees with me. We don’t agree on everything. We do agree that children need to be loved and nurtured and we need to live by the Golden Rule and within our means.

Is Pope Leo the 14th a jazz trombone player? Some people are speculating that the new pope played jazz trombone in Chicago as Bobby Prev. I dunno and the intertubes including Trombone Chat are inconclusive. I am interested in this because my (late) little brother was a talented jazz trombonist. I can envision him participating in Trombone Chat. But I kinda side with the intertubes that say the new pope did not moonlight as a trombone player in Chicago. But who knows.

P.S. I saw somewhere that the trombone pope pics were probably AI generated.

I’m gonna bend your ear AGAIN about modernizing “legacy” computer applications. Trump’s pick for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Sean Duffy, seems to think he can modernize the FAA in FOUR YEARS!

NOPE! You are not going to do that. Not without planes falling outta the sky. You are still using floppy disks.

I have said this umpteen bazillion times before but I have spent the last 18 years of my life working on an online banking development team. Most of my time at this company has been focused on building out our web application to handle what the old “legacy” system did. Green screen and mainframe emulators. Guess what? We are there now. Sometimes there is some tweaking but that’s easy. Usually. The thing is, errors in on-line banking applications can create all kinds of chaos and havoc. But they usually don’t make planes fall outta the sky or crash into helicopters.

Yes, the FAA systems ABSOLUTELY need to be modernized. Floppy disks? I actually managed to get the GG to get rid of OUR old floppy disks a few years ago. But we need careful planning by people who know what the hell they are doing. Anyone who says this transition can happen in four years does NOT know what they are doing.

Today, I spent a lot of my time untangling one of the most byzantine javascript files ever. I finally had to hit the nuclear option. That means I deleted everything except the stuff that WORKED. I learned this back when I self-taught myself FORTRAN back in my childhood career at That Darn EPA. Today, I was carefully putting things back a bitsy bit at a time with lots of testing when a few other folks usurped me for other stuff so… It’s okay. These are the fun work days.

Re-reading yesterday’s post in the cold clear light of day, I may have made it sound like I don’t like Sesame Street. That’s not exactly true. While I have never really cared to watch it, that’s because I encountered it as an *adult*. Its target audience is not (necessarily) adults. Its target audience is mainly young children.

I think Sesame Street’s main audience is young children but also the sometimes under-prepared parents who are struggling to raise them. I think one of the show’s missions is to help with early childhood education for children who live in places that don’t have Reading Chairs (or even toilets) and/or parents who have the time and patience to sit in a Reading Chair with their babies and read book after book after book to them. And maybe those parents also cannot read.

Although the GG certainly can and did read to our babies, I was the main reader. I read to my kids until they were well past being independent readers. For a summer or so, I read chapters of “Indian in the Cupboard” aloud on the moominbeach to several generations of relatives. I miss those days but they are “moiles” away.

I enjoy reading aloud. I like to put at least a little “feeling” into the words. I will act out the voices of some of the characters if there is dialogue. I even do that kind of thing when I am presenting functional specifications at work. Maybe there is an actor buried inside me somewhere? I do get tired when I read books where a FROG is the main character because then I have to use a raspy voice and I get pretty hoarse.

So I get what Sesame Street is trying to do and I support it. Also Mr. Rogers, RIP. An early savior of public broadcasting. It’s long but it’s good and f*ck Trump, whose children have had all the advantages money can buy but still seem to be idiots.

Alas. At our daily stand-up meeting this morning one of our Indian colleagues reported that another Indian colleague could not attend because his area was under a blackout. I think everyone is okay and it sounded like this was maybe a drill of some sort but war is hell and I wish we could just not do it.

What is the demented despot doing today? Making an executive order to defund public broadcasting. (Was it today?) NPR has rolled in the background of my life for many years. I used to listen to it at the moomincabin and when they had fund drives, I would harass The Commander to call in and make a donation (I couldn’t afford it then). I dunno if she ever did (she kinda brushed my young ass off) but I do now support three NPR stations.

I remember when my kids watched various children’s programming on PBS. In fact, I even remember when my first child was pretty much too young to process TV (butchya never know what they are processing). There were some kind of serious senate hearings (or something) that preempted Sesame Street shows. A beleaguered mother of pre-schoolers quoted her kiddo saying, “He not Cookie Monster”. I don’t remember which senator was speaking at the time but I’m sure he didn’t look anything like Cookie Monster. There was also a lot of “Ah don’t recollect.” If you cannot recollect things, maybe you shouldn’t have run for office. “Ah don’t recollect” was in a southern accent but all of these sleazers find ways to say this in their own regional words and accents.

Just to say, one of my children was not all that crazy about Sesame Street and referred to Bert and Ernie a bit derisively as “those silly guys.” I was never crazy about the show either but I always liked The Count because Radical Betty would always say, “I am zee count and I veel count zee (whatevah)” and I am good at counting things.

What’s weird is that Sesame Street didn’t start until my beloved aunt Radical Betty’s children (my beloved cousins) and me were teenagers. So I dunno why Radical was watching it

The snow is at the moomincabin and the GG is there and that green thing with the googly eyes is the propane tank and behind that is the shed. This snow is not yellow but I bet umpteen bazillion aminals (including one particular human) have peed there so don’t eat that snow. Frank Zappa here.

Oh, just from my work day. I had umpteen bazillion meetings today and I had to be on my toes in every one. I did not always accomplish that very well but we made it through and we will move on from here.

My brain loves being stretched to teach a new person our sprawling product. I’m more accustomed to refreshing long-time colleagues and often my own memories about how something works and where the hell it is, etc. So I am constantly readjusting to the fact that I have a new audience for the stuff I write. Functional specifications and email questions and whatever. This is a good thing for an old bag. And my new colleague is a self-starter with some really good ideas. Today’s ideas didn’t really fit into the scope of our next product release but we are excited about maybe incorporating it in a future release. This has been “escalated” and We’ll see what happens. I am on board.

Unrelated to the rest of this, re-open Alcatraz? Say what? Is our president in full fledged dementia? I certainly think so.

This red flower pic is from the Landfill backyard, not from Hawaii.