Random bits of my so-called life.

The moon is full tonight and the sky is crystal clear but I am not in a place to get a good picture of it because of the woods behind the Landfill back yard and it’s at a weird angle. I like this old pic taken about this time of year but I have always been annoyed at how the moon is kinda sliced off on the right. My eye didn’t see it but my iPhone sure did.

Today. Today. I forced my social anxiety into a corner (where it belongs) and went to meet (eight? nine?) former co-workers for lunch (and the GG, who was in heavy-duty North Country Trail recruitment mode). Two of these folks recently retired and a few others didn’t show up because cold symptoms (missed you but thank you very much). This luncheon was not to honor me or anyone else, it was just a pay-your-own-way holiday get-together. The retired folks have already had parties and I don’t really need or want one although I was offered one.

I was the oldest person there and the shortest timer at 18 years. We had so much fun! I told them (and this is true) that I was more upset when I was 16 and Bad Boyfriend dumped me than I was about the layoff. That got a deserved laugh. I told them that Amazon Woman was the best boss I have ever had. I have never had a bad boss but she really was the best. Fun fact: Amazon Woman is an electrical engineer by education and she and the GG both like to take things apart and fix them so they gabbled about that. Taking things apart and fixing them is not a skill I possess. I told old outhouse stories from the moominbeach when I was a kid and I don’t remember what else. People were wondering why I wasn’t in the yooperland right now. Because the moomincabin is closed for the season.

Exit stories came up and I came to know that being laid off is not necessarily the worst way to go although everyone is happy with their retirement. That is all I will say about that. Except that I felt sooooo loved by these old friends.

Most of today is pretty much unblahggable. Not in a bad way though. It was a good day.

On facebook, a friend of my little brother announced his retirement from an esteemed career as a conductor of bands and orchestras, mainly in Florida. I should say he was a wonderful friend of mine too, although he and my brother were both three years younger than me. We were all talented musicians. Me a flutist, my brother a trombonist, and our friend, a percussionist. My brother and I didn’t pursue music as careers but our percussionist friend ended up with a PHD and a career as an acclaimed and beloved teacher and conductor.

We all got our start in music in Sault Ste. Siberia, a place where decent music teachers were few and far between. I had ONE decent flute teacher throughout my childhood there. I was in eighth grade and my flute teacher was married to an Air Force officer who spent a year at Kincheloe AFB (now defunct). They rented a small house across the Lincoln school yard from my family’s little bungalow. When The Commander found out about her, she immediately signed me up for lessons. Jan (the teacher) got what I was all about immediately and showered me with the kind of virtuoso music I craved and more. My family was not rich but The Commander willingly ordered whatever music Jan suggested for me and knowing The Comm, she probably paid Jan more than what she asked for. Among other things, Jan taught me how to flutter tongue. (Google it.) She was a kind, beautiful young woman and I LOVED her.

A few years later, my brother drove a VW Bug he took over from the family car collection when he went to college. I will never forget one night when he and our percussionist friend and a trumpet friend and meeeee, were driving up Ashmun Street across the bridge over the canal and playing Zoom Schwartz Profigliano. I don’t remember how to play that old game and not sure I could even play it competently then.

That’s meeee and my little brother on top of a big snowbank down by my grandparents’ house, eight blocks or so away from our house.

Years and years ago I tried to nudge the GG away from brown colors into blue. I thought he would look good in blue and it is one of my fave colors.

He wasn’t quiiiite ready for blue in those days. It wasn’t until he fell off a log bridge (three times) in the yooperland on the North Country Trail that he began to embrace blue, even though it is the color of the paint that blazes his beloved North Country Trail.

After that incident, he walked quickly a couple miles to where a person with a warmed up vee-hickle met him with warm, dry clothing from a thrift shop. Thanks for cell service there. It was the yooperland so that is not always guaranteed. A photo of him in his thrift shop attire was posted and meeeee and the beach urchins saw it and we were like, he’s wearing blue?

Since then, he often wears blue. He has finally adopted the color of the North Country Trail blazes. So here he is in blue getting a certain holiday item off the top of Cygnus. No, it isn’t in the house yet. I’m not quiiiite ready for it to be in the house.

…is over. We made an airport run to drop our bonus daughter off at metro at 0-skunk-30 this morning to continue her holiday adventures. After we dropped her off and got onto I275, I could see the first rays of today’s sunrise.

I was kind of a nervous wreck. I could not believe how much traffic there was on that run. I knoooooow it’s just after Thanksgiving. I wish I had taken a picture but I was sitting in the back seat of Cygnus just trying to keep myself calm and collected. It helped that bonus daughter was very calm, chatting with the GG in the front. She flies all over the place all the time so this was just another day in the air and she sent a pic of her and a friend meeting at Metro because they were both there at the same time. I mean, they planned to make that happen, it wasn’t random.

Bonus daughter didn’t actually stay with us. She bunked with Little Cat Z. Much more fun and they even co-worked a bit. Despite a four-year age difference, they have always been close and some of my fave memories are of LCZ singing to BD upstairs at the moomincabin when BD was fussing a bit, as young babies do. BD grew up (as young babies do) and ROCKS the world. I had a hard time dropping her off and am missing her. If the stars align correctly, we hope to see her in the summer.

The pic is of the GG playing with one of his boy toys, a big yooperland sized snowblower. We didn’t really get a lot of snow but it was kind of fugly snow and from what I’m told the roads weren’t great Sunday morning when this was taken. Thankfully everything was dry for our airport run this morning.

But then, the GG came home and spent ALL DAY working on the jigsaw puzz (and finished it) and THEN! He started rummaging. I was dealing with another (somewhat stressful) issue and I was NOT a happy camper. Oh don’t worry, it’s technical crapola and it’ll get sorted out eventually, which I am okay with. For now. Ticket successfully filed. Onward.

We didn’t have a dinner plan for the fam tonight, at least not a home made one. I’ve been craving Chinese takeout for a while so I suggested that and it was a go. Little Cat Z collected everyone’s preferences and made a LIST!

Besides being an uber-organized person in general, she has a lot of experience making lists of what people want at restaurants. When the beach urchins were small (my kids and their first and/or second cousins) and we were at the moomincabin, I would often pack them into the Exxon Tanker Valdez (Chrysler mini-van) and take them over the back roads to Clyde’s Drive-In on the St. Marys River, where we could watch freighters go by while eating. Or we could get to-go food and take it over to “Goose Poop Park” (aka Rotary Park) where there was playground equipment.

We always took cafeteria trays with us and clean wet washcloths. Clyde’s is loverly but quite greasy. When Little Cat Z got old enough to write a coherent, easily readable list, her task became taking orders from everyone in the van and making a list on our way there. So when we got to Clyde’s, we could just read off the list or even hand it to the waitress.

Here’s the 2011 Mean Green Frog Hoppin’ Musheen at Clyde’s back in the day. The St. Marys River and Sugar Island Ferry are out of view behind me. And by this time there were no beach urchins in the car. They were all graduated from college and off on their own adventures in their own vee-hickles.

I have kind of a long weird history with this Planet Ann Arbor theatre. My first memory of it was when I was I dunno like 10 or 12. We traveled from the yooperland to visit our FinFam Ann Arbor cousins and we went to see HMS Pinafore. Was I entranced? I dunno. I have never been all that entranced by musicals but I certainly didn’t have a bad time. But I NOTICED THE LIGHTS in the lobby.

Years and years later, living in Ann Arbor, as I do, I was a mother of young children and I was sometimes recruited to play the flute in pit orchestras for musicals in the Lydia Mendelssohn. I REMEMBERED THE LIGHTS! In the lobby. From when I was a child.

My children grew older and I stopped doing pit orchestra gigs but then. My children became actors with YAG. And guess where they played a couple times a year? The Lydia Mendelssohn. I REMEMBERED THE LIGHTS. In the lobby.

I spent many years working to support YAG and my children in plays at the Mendelssohn. I loved ALL of it. I especially loved hanging around with Madame Producer in the green room. We would laugh uproariously (but silently) when things kinda went sideways. As they do. I loved helping the uber costume women in the bowels of the theatre and running front of house.

I will never forget when I got my first Apple laptop (2003 and The Commander helped buy it, thanks moom) and I figured out that I had wifi access at the Mendelssohn. That was a game changer. No more big binders full of papers to haul around.

We had a FinFam steak dinner here tonight and it is snowing but everyone in our family has made it home safely.

Looking for something else, I found this. I dunno what I was even looking now. It’s Radical Betty and the GG two years before she died. We were having brunch at the Hotel Ojibway and The Commander and Cam are also with us (and not sure who else).

On NPR (LOL) this afternoon I heard a familiar voice. It was Big Abe. He has been dead for a long time but he was a Native American fisherman (and bar owner, probably more well known for that) in the area of the moominbeach and there was a big kerfuffle about various kinds of fishing, “gill net” being an operative word. This is all too complicated for my “pretty” little head and my family does not fish at all but that would be a story for another day. Or not.

At one point, Big Abe got taaaared of law officials trying to track him down, so he called them up and said, “I am gonna be fishing HERE today, come and get me.” A lot of stuff ensued that I don’t really understand, so I’ll have to listen to the podcast.

Okay. I had a Japanese Uncle. Tatsuo Takei (yeah, he was from samurai). He married my eccentric Aunt Roberta when she was 70 and he was 60. He fancied himself as an entrepreneur and wanted to do some kind of deal with the eastern yooperland Native Americans. So he scheduled a meeting with the tribe and he and Roberta stayed with my parents, who accompanied rhwm to his meeting out on the reservation. Now. My dad was a long-time *savvy* local banker and I’m sure he knew a lot of these people and what they were all about. Native American or not, my dad had a better handle on what eastern yooperland people were all about than Tatsuo did.

So the whole meeting from what I remember being told about it was a little crazy in terms of cultural differences. Japanese? Many rules and protocols, like kids (for example) were probably not even around in Japanese negotiations. Native Americans? Kids were running in and out of the building all the time, acting like “wild Indians”, kinda like my cousins and I did when we were kids on the moominbeach.

Tatsuo dubbed Big Abe as Big Chief. Big Abe was not the chief. He called another guy “Big Mouth”. I don’t think he was the chief either. I don’t know who the chief was. My parents were laughing about all this but I suspect Tatsuo also understood some of this stuff. I’m pretty sure no entrepreneurial deals came out of this shindig.

My main mantras for dealing with successful adult children are “go with the flow” and “stay outta the fray”.

Today I came up with a new one. It’s a holiday mantra but I’m not sure I totally have the right words yet. Something like, “plan for more than enough for whoever might show up and welcome everyone but don’t ever try to guilt trip people into joining you” but that’s a pretty long mantra. I mean, it’s not like I’ve never done things that way anyway. Turkey day is easy to do and I do welcome everyone. Well, not serial killer type people of course but they are not likely to hang out with the people in my family.

So it was a great turkey day. Some of the fam went downtown to do the turkey trot. The GG went downtown early early to meet up with them (although he did not do the trot). He did eventually find the trotters but not for a while because he didn’t exactly get the time right. Whatever. We had eggs benny and then the trotters came over and made their own breakfasts on Gertrude after the turkey trot. My mouse cleaned Gertrude’s stovetop within an inch of its life and I am forever grateful for that.

Then I cooked a pretty traditional tday dinner with enough for everyone in the local fam plus. npJane visited for a while but had other plans for dinner with The Friends and we had a couple other guests. And a terrifically hard jigsaw puzzle, which the GG is working on in the pic. I am not really a jigsaw aficionado (except for the one the Uncly Uncle had made for me out of a photo I took) but jigsaw puzzles give people something to do on holidays when it’s too crappy to go outside and the football game is over.

My main point is, anyone who wants to join us for turkey day (or any other holiday) is welcome. Even if you want to spend the afternoon napping on the couch, which a couple of trotters did today. I love when people are napping in my house. That means they are comfortable here.

Oh, don’t worry. I have NOT moved over to the fugly orange side of things. And neither has Gertrude, my stove. Just file the pic under Weird Stuff Found in the Landfill. And I found it just before the GG was scheduled to arrive at home this afternoon so of course I put it on for his entertainment. That’s the kind of thing you sometimes do when you are in a Mixed Marriage. In our case, that would be Trump supporter (the GG) and F*ck Trump (meeeee). Turns out Doug (our brother-in-law) bought these hats and handed them out. I love Doug ANYWAY.

Gawd, it was fugly this morning. The only thing that wasn’t happening was snow. Not yet. That started later but Old Man Winter was just spitting it at us. Last I looked there was NO accumulation. Not so in the yooperland, northern lower, and west coast (Michigan west coast that is). Lake effect.

It was windy as all getout this morning when I made a Plum dash right about when it opened at 8:00 AM. That was my penultimate shopping spree before turkey day although (of course) I was texting mouse with forgotten items later. If I need anything tomorrow, I’ll make another wee run or the GG can do it if it’s something he can manage to select properly. I am a u-scan ninja but my fave cashier Joyce was there today and I chose to be lazy and let her and her lovely young bagger scoot me out the door. I picked away at prepping turkey day stuff the rest of the day and the GG came home with some surprise pork chops from Sparrow, just the right size for a small turkey day eve dinner.

Babblety babblety g’night. The GG has been playing a turkey gobbling audio clip off and on ALL DAY. Yeah, just like the REAL turkeys that were waking me up at 0-skunk-30 in the morning at the moomincabin last summer.

We met up at Sessions for dinner tonight. I keep a lot of family stories in my head and I told some tonight.

The one I will tell right now is about a time I drove the beach urchins up to the moomincabin from the Planet Ann Arbor. Little Cat Z was maybe a second grader. I worked a half day and when I got home, LCZ had made peanut butter sandwiches for us to eat in the POC (crappy old Island Teal Chrysler minivan).

We stopped at Hoton Lake halfway up to visit with the beach urchins’ Grandpa Garth and Grandma Sally, where we exchanged an old rusty rake and some shoeboxes and empty film canisters and I fergit what else for a rotten cucumber and green pepper. Something like that.

While we were there, I somehow got the grandparents rolling on retirement accounts. Jeebus. LCZ, who had heard this spiel umpteen bazillion times before and knew how much I hated it, got up close to my ear and stage whispered, “Mom! Change the talk.” And so I did, which is how we ended up with the rotten veggies. I took those oid veggies up to the moominbeach and dumped them in my uncle Don’s compost. Don’t get me wrong, my in-laws were wonderful and I loved them.

We’ll talk about the time my dad was running from the moominbeach into town on the old railroad grade and ran INTO a person running the other way some other day (or not). It was pitch black when that happened.

Then there’s just plain weird stuff. I was hanging around the Landfill this morning making gravy and of all the things that popped into my head, I realized that I was probably more upset when I was 16 and Bad Boyfriend dumped me than when I got laid off last week. I think I cried for days and had no appetite.

Jeebus. I was a pretty (I was told) but VERY awkward high school freshman when Bad Boyfriend noticed me and brokered a meeting with me through a mutual friend. Joan was her name. I did not have male friends at that time. I had no clue how to talk to boys. The mean old Grunchy old Grinchy didn’t count ’cause he was my cousin and my brother’s friends were just little kids.

Why did this *gorgeous* older (sophomore) guy want meeee for a girlfriend? We didn’t meet up all that often at first because we couldn’t drive and he lived out in Algonquin, a long way from my house. The first time he met my parents was when he walked me home from the Memorial Day parade. Thinking back on that, I can’t believe he would want to be seen with me, wearing my fugly band uniform. Or maybe I’m slightly misremembering. Anyway, The Commander, a teacher at my high school, asked, “Where did you find him?”

The Commander liked him all right but she was worried that I would turn into a fairly typical yooperland statistic, pregnant and married well before I was ready. That did not happen, partly why I was dumped. I knew I was college bound and he wasn’t, at least not yet. I learned through the grapevine that he was later regretful about dumping me but by that time we had both moved on to different relationships. His led him to an early marriage and children, mine into a more mature relationship with a college guy. That was “okay” back then, it is viewed as a bit sketchy now. But it isn’t always. That boyfriend was a gentleman and treated me very well. But I dumped him and a few years later, I ended up with the GG who gave me my beautiful beach urchins.

I’ve also figured out through the grapevine (and facebook) that Bad Boyfriend turned out pretty okay too. He did eventually go to college and earned an engineering degree! I am happy for him but I feel lucky that he dumped me and I ended up with the GG.

The point here is that life can be bumpy but it does go on.

My old facebook “bio” was “Vagabond masquerading as a fintech pro”. So it was time to change it.

Back in my early days of my fintech industry employment, my then boss (the LSCHP) found my twitter account, which had the same “bio” as my facebook profile. Remember when we (some of us at least) used to actually USE Twitter? I was on vacation when he tweeted me. Like really? I panicked for a split-second. What do you do when you’re sitting on the moomindeck and your boss TWEETS at you? Is he firing you? By Twitter? Nope, although we certainly know someone who does that now. He was just letting me know about an upcoming team function at a science museum in Detroit. Of course I replied to him. It was all pretty funny because when I got back, my then Cube Nayber told me our boss was ADAMANT that he TWEET the invitation to me which was hilarious to both of us. And my boss loved my Twitter “bio” and wished he had thought of it for himself.

The post title is my new “bio”, or half of it at least. I’m not quiiiiite ready to give up the cool thing I did for a living for 18 years. I’m not gonna just sit around and do little old lady things (whatever those are) although I’m not sure what I AM gonna do next. (Don’t ask. I know. I said that already.) For the moment I am gonna enjoy Turkey Day week, which will likely mean umpteen bazillion trips to the grokkery store. But I have friends (and a relative) there.

I wonder how many people actually know what “pragmatic” means. I *think* I do but I have to keep looking it up to double-check myself.

My old mensch of a boss had to lay off MANY people over the years and HATED every minute of it. I survived all of that including his own layoff. I’ll probably write more about all of that someday (or not). I will say that when he did get laid off, I was the first person he told. I mean, maybe because I was the first person he encountered when he left his office. But we were close.

Right now, I am still “processing” my own status although I still don’t seem to be upset about it. Reductions In Force are part of working for Corporate America and I knew that going in. 18 years… I will say that my old boss landed on his feet. I haven’t had to land on my feet because the GG and I have already been on our feet for years. We haven’t had a mortgage or any debt for many years and we have successful adult children. We aren’t “Warren Buffet” but we have worked hard and are fine.

How many hats can one man own? Turns out the count is 30. Last I was told.

This guy wears hats. Sometimes he even needs one. It does get cold here in the Great Lake State. Stormy Kromer hats? He probably has about eight.

Anyway, the GG puts a hat on every time he goes outside and often wears one even in the house. I don’t bother to tell him that wearing a hat inside the house (if you are a man) is sorta verboten. Or at least it used to be back in the “white glove”, “no white clothing after Labor Day” era. I was a child in that era and I did have white gloves to wear to church and such. The Commander tried to raise me “properly” but her lessons didn’t really stick. She was trying to fit into Sault Ste. Siberia as a young wife and mother and part of that was teaching us kids how to behave, etc. And then the 1960s hit and all hell broke loose everywhere. In the end, The Comm became a greatly loved and respected member of the community on her own partly because she didn’t exactly subscribe to all those old social rules and eventually kicked back a bit. My dad picked a good gal on the banks of the Red Cedar River. My words are gonna trail off here for today, because I’m talking about the GG’s hat “collection” today.

So, about three times a week, the GG will be rummaging all over the place. I ask, “What ARE you doing?” and he replies, “Looking for my hat!” Well. Which hat, just for one thing?

Apparently today was the day to rummage the Landfill collecting all of his hats and gathering them together. Maybe he could donate some of them? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have lice.

Two of my cousins originally from The Planet Ann Arbor and their husbands were in town to do an early Thanksgiving with their dad, My Dear Uncle Harry (MDUH). He’s 98. We were not invited to this event and that is fine fine fine. Small celebrations are usually better for the elderly although I have pics of Radical Betty’s last birthday and she was rabble-rousing even then. But not everybody is Radical Betty and Radical was a bit younger then than MDUH is now.

Anyway, we met at Casey’s Tavern for lunch today, minus MDUH, who is probably still recovering from the hilarious salad faux pas from yesterday’s dinner, and plus Little Cat Z (who lives and works close by). I am an extreme introvert but I am also a friendly one. Talking with all of them about my recent employment status change (and general life stuff), I am sure I talked their ears off. Sorry you guys!

Several people were experiencing or recovering from cold symptoms after visiting grandchildren, although nobody was coughing. One person had actually taken a covid test, which was negative, thank you god or whoever although covid doesn’t freak me out since the one time I had it, I was not terribly sick.

Still. I took a risk and hugged every single blasted one of my visiting cousins today. Pooh and Mark and Jay and Carl. Love you all.

Oh don’t worry. The pic doesn’t signify anything sinister about my mental health. Just starting to process. No organized thoughts yet. That’ll take a while. Although I haven’t been fired or laid off before, I know how this kind of thing rolls. I mean I think I am STILL processing the deaths of my parents and brother years ago. One foot in front of the other and which foot goes first and what does it land on?

Daughters and I always text (a bit) in the morning. Two of us do NYT word puzzles, the other just texts stuff about whatever she is doing. We are NOT a family who is in CONSTANT CONTACT with each other. I know people who do that but that’s not how it rolls here and that’s a good thing.

Today, a question was something like, “What is moom doing today?” The answer? Going to the grokkery store! What else? I mean I am a moom and Thanksgiving is coming up and my refrigerator (and house, for that matter) is a mess and since I am not working (outside the home) any more, I need to get going. Being a moom, when I am not sure where next to put my foot, I go to the grokkery store! And so I did. I’ll be there again tomorrow and probably most of the rest of the days before Turkey Day and although I probably won’t PERSONALLY go to the grokkery store ON Turkey Day, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else ends up there. Hopefully not anyone who WORKS there. A couple people do.

I posted this photo a while back on the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I am posting it again today. Why? Because it kinda fits my life today.

I was laid off from my job today. I AM NOT UPSET! I was planning to retire anyway but was lollygagging. Due to complicated work circumstances that I won’t even try to explain (not bad things), this was not really unexpected. Except that getting the call is somehow always unexpected. You’re going along engaging with your colleagues and then… You’re not.

I more or less fell into this job 18 years ago. I wasn’t really looking for a job but I figured out PDQ that I had landed in a good place. For example, when The Commander was nearing the end of her life, there was a period of months when I was hanging out in the yooperland helping her out. I was “telecommuting” (I have always been able to telecommute but didn’t do it permanently until covid) but I wasn’t all that productive during that time. And guess what? My then boss the LSCHP allowed me time and space to deal with my mom (“family is first” was one of his mantras). He knew I would become productive again when it was all over, and I did. When I finally returned to the OFFICE, my cube was decorated with crepe paper streamers and there was a LADDER in it. Which he (rightly) knew I would find hilarious.

I will have some processing to do but I am okay. I told my boss something like, “I am an adult and I have a great life and I can carry on.” And I will.

I don’t really know what’s next (don’t ask, please). But a couple hours after I shut down my work laptop forever, I got an email from my first cousin Uber Kayak Woman. We are very very close but we don’t communicate all that often. This email came through Ancestry and noted that we matched as first cousins. Yes (LOL), she taught me and our other “triplet” cousin how to climb out of our cribs when we were toddlers. I’ve done the Ancestry spit-test but I am mostly a wee bit of a dabbler. But whether or not I get more into genealogy, the message was well-timed. There’s more out there for you to do, KW.

Love you all! And onward.

When I was a child (and a pretty picky eater), Minute Rice was one of the things The Commander could count on me eating. I ate a lot of other things but I didn’t like things like au gratin potatoes (outta the box, fer kee-reist) so if that was in the hopper, she knew to make me Minute Rice.

She served Minute Rice in these bowls. She would put the rice in the bowls, then pour boiling water over the rice. Wait five minutes (or one?) and it was set to go. And butter! Yes, butter.

I dunno who made these bowls (and tops!). They look handmade but not sure. In any case, they were integral to my childhood. Maybe The Commander even made them? I dunno. I do know that a few years after she died, I started wondering where they were. I knew I didn’t get rid of them. I knew I had carted them down to The Landfill. I finally found them in a box with some fancy little white coffee cups. I think The Comm obtained the coffee cups later in life and I don’t care much about them. The rice bowls are part of my childhood and I will keep them.

Nope. This moon is not flying. It’s a fool moon from last year. Tonight’s moon is a waning crescent and I haven’t even looked for it.

Apparently we had dinner or some other event that night and the GG hooked up the “sparkler”, which makes the red and green sparkles or whatever you want to call them. I like it up to an extent but sometimes I get tired of it. When we hooked it up at the moomincabin couple summers ago, I asked my next door cousin if it bothered him. Nope. He had asked me if running a power washer would bother me. Nope. We are fam-i-lee.

Today I was in a meeting with Amazon Woman and My Replacement and the GG was running the goddamn tornado vacuum. It was so f*king loud I could hardly hear the meeting. I muted and tried to get the GG to stop the vac. He didn’t although he did close the door. I mean, he is an ID twin in the middle of a set of 10 siblings and he and the UU do whatever hell they want to do. At my wedding rehearsal dinner, their aunt Gale (like the wind, she would say) told me they were holy terrors. I already more or less knew that. In the end, they have been successful in life.

Well, we have football in the back room, regular Sunday night music on the chitchen radio, and eggplant parm and friends in the hopper.

That is about all. The Lions are playing somebody somewhere and we were watching them and kibitzing about the uniform colors. The Lions wear Honolulu Blue, the other team (who was it?) was wearing a dark green color of some sort. The GG thought it was totally green but I felt like there was some blue in it. Dark teal?

When I renovated the Landfill Chitchen a while back, I talked Certified Kitchen Lady into teal backsplash tiles. She was a bit reluctant at first but she got my drift and in the end, my little kitchen was put up for contests. It didn’t win but so what.

I do not know what today’s picture is exactly about.

The football game is not over yet and I guess we will watch it in the bedroom. At least the GG will. I’ll probably crash.

This morning didn’t exactly go how I wanted it to go. I was like, where is the bag of returnable cans that is usually hanging in the entryway? Oh, it’s in Cygnus, was the reply. He was taking all of the cans to Kroger this morning to return and also buy a bunch of stuff to take to FlaMan in Flint tomorrow. He warned me that the freezer was full but that didn’t stop a ziplock bag of frozen chicken from falling out of the freezer and ALMOST landing on my foot.

So I didn’t have Cygnus to make a grock dash and I didn’t really wanna take Mooon Yooonit, not that there’s anything wrong with Mooon Yooonit, just that me and Cygnus are joined at the hip. So I waited until the GG got home to take off for my Plum dash. On my way home my phone buzzed a couple times and when I finally got home and looked at it, the GG was walking to Dexter and might want a ride home. What the hell? Let’s just have lunch in Dexter at the pub and so we did.

We sat at the bar, which we like to do if there is no one annoying at the bar, like the too-friendly woman pre-covid who knocked back at least three huge beers. She wasn’t there and no one else seemed to care about talking to/at us. But down the way a bit was a guy who was (loudly) advocating for not paying off mortgages quickly.

I wasn’t sure what he was saying exactly but WHUT? We had a 30 year mortgage and we managed to pay it off in 13 years. That among other frugal practices more or less led us to be debt free pretty much forever. Like the last time we bought a car (Cygnus) we actually wrote a personal check. I hope that loud person was not really trying to influence other people like his kids or whoever. Probably preaching to the choir here but if you need to go into debt, do your best to get out of it as soon as possible. Trump and his 50-year mortgage idea? F*ck it. I bet he hasn’t had to take out a mortgage in his entire life. (Banker’s daughter here.)