Random bits of my so-called life.

The yooperland is a perennially depressed area, economically speaking. So the folks who live here always welcome visitors from anywhere and tourist traps abound. Oh, don’t worry, yoopers are also friendly. Well most of them are anyway. There are cranky people everywhere. Sometimes I am one of them. Just ask the GG.

I went to Meijer this morning after I tried to make sense of the moomincabin refrigimatator. Actually it the freezer I needed to make sense of. And there is no goddamn *light* in the freezer. I dunno what The Commander was thinking when she bought this fridge but probably she couldn’t get exactly what she wanted given the lack of space here.

I know those government folks are telling us it’s okay to eat lettuce from the grocery store again. That may be true but I’m not there yet (they told us that about COVID too) so I went to the farm stand to get lettuce. They were out of lettuce by the time I got there but I got a lot of other stuff. Cucumber, tomatoes, potatoes, and sweet corn. All that stuff plus bison burgers (I got them at Meijer) are on the menu.

So we have long had various “commuter” passes to get across the Big Mac Bridge. We had tokens at first but in the end, we have had a MacPass embedded in our windshield. We drive through the toll booth and the “arm” goes up when it recognizes our car. I was puzzled when signs at the bridge said that EZPass and something else were not accepted. I guess those are accepted other places in the country but not at the Big Mac bridge. A MacPass lane was not open at the bridge yesterday but the GG angled over to the shortest line possible and we were through in no time.

For so many years, I had to make sure I had cash to pay for my transits over the bridge.

We did manage to launch today, maybe because Mercury is no longer in retrograde?

We spent an hour or so with FlaMan (who is an hour or so up the road from The Planet Ann Arbor). He was in good order overall, especially with me. I think I won his heart (and he mine) when we rescued him and his dog from Crazy Old Florida in 2018. After FlaMan, we drove another few hours up to Gaylord, where we met up for lunch with the UU and The Beautiful Gay (TBG) at the Pine Squirrel Bar and Grill. We were there for almost TWO HOURS. In the last few years I have not seen TBG as often as usual. I miss her so much and boy oh boy was it great to talk to her.

I have ALWAYS liked TBG but when I first knew her, I wasn’t all that sure we had much in common. Back in those days, she was taking care of two young children with another on the way and I was stumbling my way into my childhood computer career. And, of course, the GG was just a *boyfriend* and I had no clue if I would have reason to get close to TBG or not. Boyfriends were fly-by-night in that part of my life and I didn’t expect he would stay around…

Of course time flies and he did stay around and now TBG and I BOTH have mature, responsible ADULT children and she has grandchildren and we are both loyal cFam out-laws, not to mention we’ve been married to identical twins for umpteen bazillion years. I love her dearly and have long recognized her as one of my soul mates.

Meanwhile, I need to take a refrigerator inventory here at the moomincabin. Keeping track of the contents of two refrigerators even for a summer can be a huge challenge. And it doesn’t really end for me because I have to schlep whatever is left at the moomincabin back to the Planet Ann Arbor in the fall when we close the cabin for the winter. For the moment, both refrigerators are pretty empty but the freezers are not. So we will be “eating down” what’s in the moomincabin freezer first, supplemented by Jere Farms produce and a few things from Meijer. When we start having visitors again — hopefully next week and pretty surely next weekend — we will regroup yet again.

The beach urchins have volunteered to “stress test” the cabin closing procedure (written by the GG) this year. Meaning they want to close the cabin without us being there. We are ecstatic about that but will not leave them to deal with a mess of leftover food and stuff.

This may be my last trip to the moominbeach for the year. We leave as early as possible tomorrow. I am 95% packed. I don’t have a whole bunch of food to pack this time. Coffee beans and Zingerman’s baguettes and bourbon. The plan is to visit FlaMan for an hour or so, then meet up with The UU and The Beautiful Gay for lunch. And then. With luck we will stay at the beach for a couple weeks. With luck, Little Cat Z will get to spend a week or thereabouts up there, maybe with a camping trip somewhere in the middle. They are adults and can do what they want, including take breaks from us nutso “elderly” parental units.

One thing I don’t have to do much of is clean up after dinner tonight because we didn’t eat here. After drinks with Le Marquis and The Grand Poobah in the back yard, we met up with Little Cat Z and friend for dinner at Sessions. We were home in time to watch the rest of Andy Griffith, which we won’t see for a couple weeks. I will miss the crickets. We don’t have them at the moominbeach.

And that is about it for today. Love y’all, KW.

The GG was kinda complaining that I wasn’t really doing anything constructive today. True but not *exactly* true. I was on edge because 1) coffee high and 2) a hurry up and wait situation that I have no control over. Don’t ask. It’s resolved now in any case.

What I *was* doing was reading (or listening to) Angelline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter series. Three books now. I read the first a few years ago (on my phone). I decided to listen to all three. I binged and finished the third today. These books are about Native American families and culture. They are promoted as young adult lit and deal with mature themes.

The first two are set in and around Sault Ste. Siberia. The third is set mostly in the northern lower peninsula but also in Lansing and Mt. Pleasant. As I told our cabin insurance agent a while back, “I know Sault Ste. Marie like the back of my hand and I will find your office.” And I did. I am also pretty familiar with many of the other towns and cities in these books.

I am not all that familiar with Sugar Island. I have eaten at Clyde’s drive-in, at the Sugar Island ferry dock umpteen bazillion times. My parents took us there all the time. I drove friends there on Sault High senior skip day. I took the beach urchins there many times. Super organized Little Cat Z (at like age 8 or 10) would write down people’s orders before we got there and hand the paper to the waitress when she took our order. I took my parents there the day after my brother died, when I went up there to pick them up. We didn’t know what to do with ourselves but needed lunch and a sit down restaurant didn’t seem like the right choice.

Sugar Island? I asked my parents umpteen bazillion times to take us to Sugar Island. Always no. I finally got over there as an adult and kind of figgered why. There is not a lot to see. The shoreline is all private property so mostly you just drive down the middle of the island and back. There isn’t a lot of spectacular scenery to see.

What I didn’t know was that many Native Americans live on Sugar Island so a lot of the action in the book series takes place on the island.

Many thoughts are swirling through my head but I can’t sort them out. These books may not be everyone’s cuppa. I won’t suggest them to the GG. But I greatly enjoyed them. When will she write the next one?

The GG and I did go over to Sugar Island a couple years ago. The pic is Duck Lake. Reading the books, Duck Lake was mentioned and wouldn’t you know, a pic of Duck Lake showed up in memories a day or so ago.

Not bullet pointed or even organized, sorry. This is mostly dedicated to putting photos of other people on the internet.

My cousins texted a cute pic of one of their grandchildren today with the suggestion that it shouldn’t get posted on the internet. We love this kid and his family and had a wonderful time with them on our deck earlier this summer and I reassured my cousins that I would never post somebody else’s child or grandchild or really anyone on the internet without permission (with a couple caveats). The rules have changed since I created my first Hello World style webpage back in the internet’s wild wild west days.

I didn’t start blahgging until 2003 but I had a static webpage beginning in, oh I dunno, 1997 maybe? The Wild Wild West. I did *sometimes* post photos of young children there. But hey! Almost nobody I knew then had access to the world wide web. It felt like I was pulling teeth just to get people in the young actors guild to join an email list (SO THEY WOULD KNOW WHERE THE NEXT REHEARSAL WAS) and don’t even talk to me about middle school backpack mail. I was the PTO treasurer over there and *I* certainly wasn’t getting important communications outta my kid’s backpack. I only knew what was going on because I was in the inner circle of principal, secretary, and other PTO parents and was in on the planning.

By 2003 I had started my own blahg and shortly after that, I discovered “mommy blogs”. I was FASCINATED! My blahg was never really a mommy blog because my kids were in high school and college by the time I started it. But here were all these young mothers posting pictures of their tots in various states of undress, etc., and/or detailed descriptions of whatever the kid was doing. Toilet training? Yes, really… It’s different when you walk into your job looking shell-shocked as you encounter a small puddle on the floor by the coffee maker after a morning of potty training. But that was just me talking to co-workers who had mostly been there done that (and knew and loved my children). My boss Byron said, “Go sit down, Mama.” I was not broadcasting this to anyone anywhere and we all went on with our work day.

Given their ages, my kids were immune to being put out on the internet during potty training, et al, although I did sometimes still post pics of them when they were small. But I kept thinking something like, “I wonder what’ll happen to these mommy blogs when their little kids learn to read and discover the internet.” Those little kids will be much more internet savvy than their mommies are and for some of them, it’ll happen before puberty. That came to pass a while back and nowadays the internet is littered with stories of kids who are estranged from their parents because their parents over-shared about their early life.

So it is up to parents (and their children) to determine what photos/stories get shared on the internet. Husbands? If my husband comes home in his Let’s Go Brandon shirt and a Trumpish wig he found on the sidewalk somewhere downtown, he is fair game. And he knows it. This is the shirt that I have found myself alone with in the Up North Laundromat multiple times and have not abandoned it there. The things we do for love.

P.S. I don’t blahg about boyfriends either. Mine or my kids’.

Okay, so the Michigan political primaries were a week ago tomorrow. Maybe you’ve heard about them, maybe not. I did not vote for El-Sayed for senate. I voted for the more centrist (or whatever) candidate. The more I read about El-Sayed, the more I support him. If only he can beat republican Mike Rodgers.

Here on The Planet Ann Arbor, there were two “progressive” democrats running for mayor and I’m not sure anyone was running on the republican side. I voted for the *more* progressive guy and newcomer to the mayoral position. The current mayor was the other candidate. He’s been in office for a long time and I am not all that crazy about what he and his sycophants seem to be hell bent on doing to our city, especially in the downtown area. In the cause of “affordable” housing, we have tall buildings sprouting up everywhere. I am all for affordable housing (who the hell isn’t). I would like to see carefully designed and planned housing. From my standpoint (not necessarily well informed), it seems like “we” are willy nilly handing our downtown area over to real estate developers and letting them do whatever they want aka whatever profits them the most.

Are units in these big towers affordable? Or is it just a percentage of the units that are affordable? And who the heck wants to live in a high-rise home anyway? Maybe some folks do but when I was a young kid starting a family, I wanted to be able to walk out into a back yard without taking an elevator. Also let’s define affordable. It’s a word that gets bandied about a LOT these days. What does it mean?

I’m not convinced that any elected official can solve these complicated problems. I am also not convinced that anyone who runs for an elected position is in it for anyone or anything except their own personal profit, not to mention ego.

In other words, voting is just a f*ckin’ crap shoot. I rolled the dice, so to speak, and we’ll “just have to see what happens” as a certain vile orange person says over and over and over, in between, “We’re about to have a deal to end the war with Iran.” Roight. BullSHIT. Just like he’s gonna lower the price of eggs and gasoline and “I’ll be so good for women” and THEY’RE EATING THE PETS! Not. And no I didn’t vote for Trump. I vote for anything BUT republicans these days. Youz guyz have done it to yourselves by your mean spirited nutso policies.

Yeah, I’m just an old Sun Bakery Hippie Momma and I’ve had kind of a bad day. Oh, nothing serious, just wanna be at the moomincabin and am not. P.S. I’m not really a hippie.

This sign has been in Mooon Yooonit’s right back-seat window since April. I’m not sure if the GG hadn’t seen it until yesterday or if it took him that long to ask about it. He is the main driver of Mooon Yooonit.

Yesterday he asked if I knew who had put it there. I said, “All I will say is that the person was NOT female.” Meaning it wasn’t me or your daughters. After some thinking, he (tentatively) asked if it was either of a couple of young male friends of the family. That took me a bit aback because I can’t believe either of those gallant young gentlemen would prank somebody like the GG in that way. Or anyone, for that matter. Nope.

I knew exactly who dunnit, of course. There is only one person who would have pulled this prank and it is his ugly brother aka The Uncliest Uncle aka his womb mate aka his ID twin. WHO ELSE??? I figgered it out as soon as I saw the sign on that April day as the cFam gathered for a group photo in front of FlaMan’s apartment.

This isn’t the first time we’ve been pranked by the UU. One memorable one was when I was still schlepping to Cubelandia to work most days. I got into the Ninja and staring me in the face was a Trump sign. On the back of the Lyme Lounge. This was before the 2016 election and I wasn’t sure exactly who the GG supported although I was pretty sure he didn’t like Hillary.

But Trump? I quietly freaked out all eight zen miles to Cubelandia but by the time I got there, I was thinking a bit more rationally. 1) The GG was outta town the preceding few days/week/whatever. 2) He was towing the Lyme Lounge. 3) He was at his ID twin’s house… In fact, when I pointed out the sign, he removed it immediately. He voted, as it turned out, for MAGA (alas) but “I’m gonna be traveling.” To his credit, he didn’t want to proclaim his political preferences to the world. Thank the gods for that at least. It’s one reason I can live with my own personal MAGAt.

As I said earlier, I don’t know when he noticed the poop sign. He has not removed it with the same speed as he removed the Trump sign. Or even at all. Then again, even though I knew about the sign from the getgo, I have been driving Mooon Yooonit a bit more this summer as we try to manage with one automotive vee-hickle at the moominbeach so I guess I am proclaiming to the world that I might have to poop…

P.S. Mooon Yooonit was in the body shop for two weeks with that sign in the window.

We took a road trip today to meet up at the Hillsdale Brewing Company with the Baw Beese chapter of the North Country Trail Assocation. Baw Beese was an Indian chief if memory serves. It was a beautiful drive and I met my “next husband” at the event.

First, the signs. Our sister-in-law’s name is Gay and it has long been our habit to get photographic evidence of streets or whatever with that name. Once on a road trip to Crazy Old Florida, we visited a young cousin in Knoxville and as he was chauffeuring us through downtown Knoxville, a Gay Street sign suddenly appeared. Scrambling to get a pic, the GG DROPPED HIS IPHONE out the window onto the pavement of a busy street, which cracked the screen big time. We got it fixed at an Apple Store in Atlanta the next day, this time chauffeured by The Guru.

We passed Gay Road on the way to Hillsdale and made a note to get a pic on the way back. As it turned out, the view approaching the Gay Road intersection going back served up the barn with the Trump sign. These signs were maybe a quarter mile apart and I don’t really have a point in posting them, at least not a coherent point. Just weird slices of American life in 2026. DISCLAIMERS: 1) I totally support LGBTQ+ rights and 2) I hate Trump and MAGA.

My next husband? Oh, I was just kidding, y’all know that. But there was this guy there who knows a bit about my family’s yooperland land and its adjacent lighthouses, all of which have deteriorated into rubble. The GG met him at a similar event a couple years ago and I have communicated with him before and even sent him some pics of the Back Light. But I was still working at the time and our communications kind of fell by the way. My bad.

I was ecstatic to meet him (unexpectedly) in person today. “Oh, you’re THAT guy! I’m so sorry I drifted off” and we kind of clicked in a way I don’t often do with men. Like I got his sense of humor and he got mine. Right off the bat. Even when others were missing the joke/point/whatever. And he *listened* when I talked.

He knows a lot more about lighthouses than I do. I mean, the lighthouses on our beach and Round Island were just part of our playground as beach urchins. This man knows all kinds of details about the specifications and locations, etc. When he started to talk about the “spiral” staircase in the Back Light, I felt ecstatic that I knew exactly what he was talking about. It wasn’t anything like the tight metal spiral staircases you might be thinking about and, well, I just wish I’d had an iPhone in my pocket when I was a kid climbing up the inside of that lighthouse.

P.S. Moscow is a tiny village along US12. US12 runs more or less from Ypsilanti to Chicago and on many of the two-lane stretches of it in Michigan, there are flea markets everywhere. And BIG DINOSAURS in one place. Just ask Little Cat Z. But Moscow was where we had to turn to get back up to the damn I94 18-wheel Clogway. Sigh.

…in what we call G2 (aka the generation above me and my FinFam cousins), that is. That’s My Dear Uncle Harry (MDUH) a few years ago when he was still traveling to the moominbeach in the summer. He turned 99 today.

He married my dad’s youngest sister Bubs and even though their oldest daughter is my age, he is quite a bit younger than my parents. My parents married young (for my family) at 24 and 22 but various difficulties I am foggy on prevented them from having children for 11 years. MDUH and Bubs popped one out PDQ and family legend has it that, although they wanted children, they may have been a bit dismayed that it happened as quickly as it did. Nevertheless, they loved my cousin (and the two that followed) and I have cherished that baby my whole life (I’m a few months older than her).

I have to confess that there were likely times in my childhood that MDUH wanted to wallop me with whatever weapon was available. Why? Because I was a bratty little kid. I grew out of that eventually (well, mostly, don’t get me started on MAGA) and MDUH has always been a great friend of mine as an adult.

After Little Cat Z was born, the GG stopped at MDUH’s house on his way home from the hoosegow to announce her birth (MDUH and Bubs were the only relatives within an easy driving distance and the GG was very excited) and MDUH pointed out that he (the GG) was still wearing hospital booties. When he saw LCZ the first time, he proclaimed her The Epitome of Cutosity!

I could write forever about MDUH but I’ll leave most of it for another time. He is as funny as a crutch, as evidenced by a joke he told at the party held for August birthdays today at his apartment complex. Click over to Le Marquis’s blog for that.

It’s in quotes because even though I’m not sure it’s an accurate quote, I *think* it originally came from FlyLady. I like to promote her site when I get a chance because following her guidance for a while once got my house out of a pretty big mess. Not a hoarding situation, just a bit out of control. I always keep up with dishes and laundry and garbage and stuff and I could vacuum and dust, although I HATE doing the last two with a passion.

It was 20 years ago or so that one of my beach urchins alerted me to FlyLady. Oh, not because my house was a particular mess. Mainly because I was kvetching about needing to get rid of stuff. So I worked diligently for a while using some of the FlyLady techniques for bite-size flinging sessions: declutter 15 minutes a day, get rid of 10 pieces of mail a day, etc. I don’t hoard mail. Almost all of it goes into the recycle bin even before it even gets in the house. But I know people who *do* hoard mail — years and years of it. I wish I were kidding. Drywall buckets too but we’ll go there another time. Or not.

Today I was annoyed because the GG was in conversation (on speaker) with a relative about the trials and tribulations of flinging. In this case, some of it belonged to their parents, so talking about it to other (of the many) siblings occasionally brought up the “maybe so-and-so would want that” crapola. DISCLAIMER: I am not naming names or pointing fingers. ALL FAMILIES go through this shit, in this case (and in my case), exacerbated by an inherited jointly owned property. One of the (many) problems is that not everyone has the right psychological energy to “fling” things at the same time. I did a lot of my original flinging all by myself. The GG eventually joined me but by that time, I had lost my flinging energy.

A few years ago, the UU bought a camping trailer. Proud and excited, he posted a pic of it on FaceBook. His son was the first to reply with something like,” “Oh good. More shit for me to get rid of when you die.” Indeed. (Also sarcasm.)

Guess what? Somebody out there somewhere *does* want your stuff. Or bits and pieces of it. It is not your children or your nieces and nephews or third cousins twice removed or special friend from the planet Zephron Three. It is folks browsing the thrift shops (or even cruising past your curb) looking for just the right this-or-that thingy. Some of those folks are furnishing their first ever apartment or home. They might want (some of) your stuff and your parents would want them to have it. Trust me. They want it to be used, not covered with dust in an attic or molding in a Michigan basement. So donate all of it unless you are absolutely certain that you know someone who wants it. I could name a couple examples of that but this is too long already.

At any rate, this stuff makes me reeeeealllly tired because I figured it out (mostly) 20 years ago and have been preaching it ever since but nobody has (apparently) been listening, maybe because I am female? “I am speaking.” –Kamala. (If you are MAGA, just shaddup and listen.)

Since we moved FlaMan back to his home state of Michigan (in 2018), we have often visited him on our trips up and down the Great Lake State but our visits have always seemed optional or could be short ones. Now that his living situation has changed, at least temporarily, we visit whenever we can.

I dunno exactly what’s in FlaMan’s future but HEY, today we had a very pleasant visit with him, where he was sitting up watching TV and reported various escapades of increased mobility, not quiiite like The Commander’s Mad Midnight Hoosegow Underwear Washing Adventure but a bit heartening if probably also a bit dangerous.

What I REALLY liked about this visit was the discussions he and the GG were having. All about FlaMan’s long time (and long time ago) career as a machinist (a talented one) and discussions they had with their dad, an auto engineer whose career overlapped the early years of robotics. And then they got into Rubik’s Cube. When we arrived, FlaMan was dealing with an old Rubik’s Cube that was missing some parts. The GG got to looking around his room and there under his bed was one of the little yellow pieces. He found the rest of the missing parts in other places and, quick as a wink, FlaMan had his cube put back together. So they discussed Rubik’s Cube and its history for a while. (The GG is in the pic, not FlaMan and that is only part of the cube, which they were dissecting at that point.)

I have no real interest in either of these topics but it was fun to sit there and listen to them talk about something other than the usual stuff, which we won’t go into. If I have a role in these conversations, it is mainly to listen and occasionally translate as they both have a bit of hearing deficiency, which is not helped when there is a noisy oxygen musheen and a loud TV in the room. In FlaMan’s defense, he wanted the TV turned down but couldn’t get the remote control to work. I feel his pain and the GG managed to fix that problem.

At the end of all this, there was NOTHING in my refrigerator and I’m sure I left it that way on purpose. But what to do for dinner? Go out to eat? Naw. Order Chinese? Naw. In the end, I went to the Plum and got prepared chicken Milanese and pesto to make with noodles. I have frozen farmers market peas and salad from the eastern yooperland farm stand. Oh! And I had forgotten that my mouse usually works late at the Plum on Wednesdays. Or maybe I forgot it was Wednesday. Upon my arrival, I encountered one of her co-workers, who alerted mouse to my presence, so I got to hug my daughter too.

FlaMan is a brother of my heart if not my blood.

I never know what the GG is going to be doing next. Today he was gonna “work on prodjects”. So he said as he was putting shoes on. What prodjects? I wasn’t sure. It turned out that one of them was moving all the moomincabin furniture out of the way so as to sweep and wash the floors. It needed it and it smells like Pinesol in here now.

I always feel a bit guilty when he is heavy into this kind of prodject, like maybe I should be helping. But. 1) If he is on a roll, it’s best to stay outta the fray and 2) my favorite cleaning tools are currently dysfunctional. I prefer a cordless vac and the one up here (and maybe the one at the Landfill) are both dead in the water. I ABHOR big heavy vacuum cleaners with cords and things. And my current upright vac (at The Landfill) has been broken for years.

Where was I? Went over to the Old Cabin for a bit and now trying to figger out what my train of thought was. Maybe I didn’t have one.

A slightly chaotic cocktail hour in which Le Marquis came over and we were also porterized. The GG didn’t really participate except to clink his ice cubes once. He was on a zoom call with North Country Trail folks. He was supposed to receive an award for more than 4,000 hours of volunteer work but apparently it didn’t get totally processed in time for his name to be included in that list. Oh well.

I’m done done done. G’night. Typos be damned.

So my internet friend Pam commented about the little stack of books on the coffee table in yesterday’s pic. I’m not sure how that particular little stack of books was curated (randomly, I think) but we do have quite a lot of books around here at the moomincabin.

They go back to books my granddaddy collected somewhere after the turn of the century. I mean the 20th, not the 21st. Horatio Hornblower, Hervey Allen’s Sylvania series, and more. There are about a gazillion field guides/nature books, most of The Commander’s cookbook collection, and some lesser books. Like the Cully Gage series. Not to dis old Cully. His first book was a hoot (raunchily humorous tales about the yooperland) but by about his fourth book, I was like why do “we” keep buying these, “we” being my late brother who never seemed to tire of them. I love you old boy, they are still here, and they will stay here raunchy (and repetitive) as they are.

We have The Mighty Soo but probably need more copies (but they are hard to come by, all used). I have Paddle to the Sea down on the Planet Ann Arbor but we probably need a couple copies up here too.

Geology of Michigan… My parents originally bought a copy of this book (when it was new). This is one of the GG’s favorite books. I have never exactly interacted with it. I have an elementary school grasp of geology and that’s about where it ends. The GG has lent Geology of Michigan books out to other people multiple times. He forgets who he has lent the book to and we can’t find it in our house (which doesn’t mean it isn’t there) so I keep ordering new ones.

We’ll leave pollyticks alone for tonight because I’m waiting to hear what happens in The Great Lake State primaries tomorrow.

Last word to bloggy friend Margaret. My cousin the Mean Old Grunchie Old Grinchy will now be known as MOGOG. It’s a great acronym for him, like something out of Lord of the Rings. Why I didn’t think of that before, I dunno.

The 1-year-old at the Old Cabin says “uh-oh” a lot. I love hearing him through the woods. I guess the 3-year-old probably contributes some “uh-ohs” too but he is also developing a more sophisticated spoken vocabulary. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the 1-year-old is sponging it all up.

So when I spied the Mean Old Grunchie Old Grinchie in the driveway late this afternoon, I alerted the GG to our visitor with an “uh-oh” or two or three or five. Looking at the GG from the driveway through the picture window, the Grinch said, “He looks like Harry.” Yes indeed, he looks quite a bit like My Dear Uncle Harry even though they are not biologically related in any way, shape, or form. The GG has similar hair and wears similar hats but he is quite a lot shorter.

I fixed the Grinch up with a ‘hattan and as we were sitting in the moomincabin, another interloper, Le Marquis, appeared at the door. “Uh-oh!”, said I. I also fixed him a ‘hattan and we all discussed pollyticks (and land crapola) for a while. Don’t worry, no fights broke out. There was only one MAGA amongst us and you can bet it was not meeee. After a while, Le Marquis went back over to the Old Cabin and we shared leftover enchiladas with the Grinch. The Old Cabin folks had already eaten.

We have a diverse ecosystem here at the moominbeach, I guess most shoreline areas do, Great Lakes, ocean, or wherever. The GG spent the morning up on the escarpment (land my family used to own) clearing stuff off the JimFin trail.

In the afternoon, he suited up for a swamp walk. The cabins on our shorefront property are built upon sandy soil, which supports a forest of red and white pine trees along with some deciduous trees, birch and maple are what I can think of at the moment. On the other side of our 2-track cabin road is a swamp and then the escarpment, which is also forested.

The GG walked through the swamp today and he found the remains of the Back Light.

He has been trying to verify various property lines around here, which are not as straightforward as you might think. The last time he did this kind of a walk, he could not find the Back Light. Today he did. When I was a kid, it was easy to find the Back Light, via an established path that began with concrete blocks but quickly deteriorated into a mossy, spongy thing. That path disappeared when the current owners of that property (but not the Back Light, we don’t think) built a f*cking road that obliterated the ancient concrete blocks.

The second pic provides a reference to what the Back Light used to look like. That’s my dad in the pic and he and my brother and his dog Sam were out there on a winter day. We used to climb the Back Light as kids but by this time it was unsafe. I posted about the Back Light sometime in July but today’s excursion prompted an update.

The sweaty, grimy GG disrobed on the moomindeck before taking a shower. His undies were kind of tattered with loops hanging down but I refrained from taking a pic. You’re welcome. Then the neighbor cousins returned from their day trip to Whitefish Point and came over and spent the rest of the afternoon on and around the moomindeck. Excursions were made to the Lyme Lounge and even The Garage! Treasure trove of license plates and old toilet seats. So much fun.

That’s the report from The Planet Ann Arbor. If you’ve been following along (and I sure don’t expect anyone to be doing that), Mooon Yooonit has been in the body shop the last couple weeks. For the miniest of mini issues, parking lot hit-and-runs that no one who drives Mooon Yooonit (the GG, mostly) even noticed FOR MONTHS. So why the repairs got scheduled in the middle of the summer, I am still scratching my head about. Our mouse and the racc tag teamed to drop the vee-hickle off and pick it up. Meanwhile, the GG has been driving Cygnus X-1 so she is full of trail maintenance tools and other crapola.

Today? A circuit through Sault Ste. Siberia carefully orchestrated by yer fav-o-rite blahgger who knows all of the ins and outs of navigating that town because she grew up there:

— Recycling center (because I had the recycle in Meijer re-usable bags and needed them to be empty because…
— Up North Laundry
— Ace Hardware (the GG walked there while I was at the laundromat)
— A quick errand at the cabin’s insurance agency, one that I could’ve done a couple weeks ago but we were in and out of town and I didn’t have a car all week
— …Meijer, where we each made separate trips through the store. My shopping bags were empty because recycling dropoff
— Repairs to the gas grill and the kitchen sink “faucette” (the GG did those of course)
— New propane tank to go with the gas grill repair
— Green Bag garbage dropoff

Switching to Glide, we had lunch at Pickles (no Capn*Queen*Leila today) but all the servers are wonderful. Then home to the moominbeach. The GG left for a bit to help a friend up on the escarpment work on a string trimmer, then we were BLESSED by a nice long deck visit by some Old Cabin folks, my cousin’s son, his wife, their two toddlers, and their dog. I love the FinFam next generation kids. The older toddler in this branch of the family loves tools and boy oh boy does the GG have tools. They are all over my car! This kid was a little freaked when the GG faaaared up a chainsaw, which is probably a good thing. He does love the Lyme Lounge and has been introduced to the tick collection. We are fam-i-ly! I’ve got all my cousins and me.

Mark is the grandpa and “Billow” (or something like that) is what his grandson calls the GG aka Bill. The GG has been called a bunch of things by people’s grandchildren. “Ball” is what his identical twin’s first child called him as an emerging talker. That kid is entering high school in the fall and is an athlete, fisherman, and girl magnet (I’m guessing at the last).

The GG’s arrival this evening after running a gauntlet of traffic jams and family members means I actually have my car back! Yay. Now, where is my fob? I must have asked about my fob a bazillion times before it finally materialized. Fob? FOB? FOB??? You know what a fob is? It’s that thingy that I put in my pocketses to make my modern automotive vee-hickle start when I push the button. Right? Right.

After a week of kvetching about the propane stove pilot light being out, OF COURSE the GG walked in to the moomincabin, turned up the stove and voila, let there be heat. I am such a klutz. Not that we need heat today. It was in the upper 70s this afternoon.

Now to get the GG to settle down for a few days at least.

Since I got my driver’s license at 16, I can count on fewer than five fingers the number of days I have been without an automotive vee-hickle at hand. Actually that’s not quiiiite true because my first couple years of college, I didn’t have one there. It was a pain in the you-know-what ass but those years have blurred a bit so I’m just gonna skip over them.

During the first year or so of covid, one of the beach urchins was driving one of our old cars and it could be pretty dern persnickety with 150-plus miles on it. So there were some times I lent her my Ninja while the Mean Green Frog Hoppin’ Musheen was in the shop. If the GG was outta town, that meant I had no car. It was okay. I was not out shopping a lot in those days and since she works a few blocks away, she would often park the Ninja in my driveway and voila, I had a car.

But I have basically always had my own car in my adult life and I made sure I married a guy who understood that I needed a car, like we have two adults in our household so we need two cars. There have been times when I have wished (and argued) for NEWER cars but (knock on wood) those wishes ebbed when we started buying Japanese cars. Long story short, blame my late General Motors automotive engineer’s advice for that switch.

Here at the moominbeach, I have not had a car all week. We’ve been trying to drive one car up here this summer since I am not telecommuting any more. I wasn’t a fan of the GG going down for a “rocket trip” that turned into 4-5 days. But I am doing pretty damn fine without a car. I know that I can ask the Neighbor Cousins at the Old Cabin to get stuff for me from the grocery store but I don’t need anything. In fact, last night I was asked by the sweet cousins in the generation down from me if I needed anything from town. No. I have food. I have bourbon (giggle). I am doing okay.

Here at the cabin, the pilot light is broken, the northwest wind is screaming, I don’t have a car to drive, and one’s on the way. Apologies to the late Loretta Lynn for my HORRIBLE paraphrasing of her song lyrics One’s On The Way. This is a really good song and even if you are not a country music fan, you should listen to it.

And no, of course one’s not on the way here. I birthed two beautiful baby girls but that train left the station a loooong time ago.

We heat the moomincabin via a propane stove and a couple of space heaters if and when we need them. Before I went to bed last night, I made sure the propane stove was set at “pilot”. Waking up throughout the night as I often do, I kept hearing an irregular ticky noise which I attributed to the stove but it didn’t alarm me and I always went back to sleep. At 4:00 AM, I woke up and was sentient enough to actually get OUT of bed to go to the water closet and check the stove. It was set just a tad above “Pilot”. I turned it to *exactly* pilot. When I got up in the actual morning, I turned the gas up to low but nothing happened. No pilot light. I’m enough of a wimp that I don’t know how to light the pilot light.

It was okay. It’s midsummer and I was not cold at all, even with a strong northwest wind.

When I was a little kid and my parents first built this teensy tinesy wee little cabin in the woods on the shores of Gitchee Gumme, we had a wood stove here. We had to order wood and collect kindling and that was a pain in the butt. The biggest pain was that when it was cold in the morning, my parents would faaaar up the stove and then later in the day, when the beach temperature warmed up to 80 or whatever, our wood stove would still be kicking out heat. This one heats up and cools down quickly. When it’s working…

And I didn’t beat him up although I threatened to throw him in the lake a couple times yesterday if he didn’t find some other way to chill out. Jeebus.

It is purple paint! He had just returned from a trail blazing trip up on the ridge on the JimFin trail, named after my late brother.

I was berating him about chilling out because he was FUSSING about grilling the chicken. Hey, just put it on the grill and cook it. If it’s done a little bit before the other stuff, put it in the oven on warm. How hard can it be? It’s a deck evening and we are not in some kind of huge rush to eat.

As it turned out, the chicken didn’t exactly cook as planned, at least not on the grill. Reason? Our ANCIENT gas grill had a broken part and was not getting gas as needed. Also it may have been almost out of gas? I’m not sure. In the end, the chicken was transferred to the oven in a special grill pan that belonged to The Commander and it was just fine, even a bit charred, just like I like it.

Now I am Mom Alone, hopefully only for a few days. The GG skedaddled pretty early today with multiple stops to make on his trip down to The Planet Ann Arbor. Little Cat Z took her time. In the late morning, she discovered that there were a bazillion blueberries down on the bank. This kind of bounty has been unusual in the last few years so she took advantage of it and picked blueberries for an unplanned couple hours. I did not join her. I did not inherit any Butts Up (in the blueberry patch) DNA. 15 minutes (a cup or so?) is about my limit.