Random bits of my so-called life.

So this boring photooo is the first photo I took with my iPhone 15. Well, except for the Cloverland “refund” check or whatever it was that I uploaded to my bank. It had my dad’s name on it c/o meeee but I think they will accept it (they have before) but maybe I should straighten that out one of these days?

These are the Twinz of Terror. They’re pretty calm looking here. This morning. Oh my gawd. How much more stuff can we pack? And how noisy can we be making breakfast. I managed to get up and take a shower BEFORE them and after that I stayed outta the fray. The scariest part was maybe when — after they left — the GG came back in for a minute. TO RETURN ONE OF CYGNUS’S FOBS, WHICH HE FOUND IN HE UU’S CAR! They are driving the UU’s car out to NY state and the UU moved Cygnus out of the driveway last night so they could [over]pack his vee-hickle, which is why he had her fob. Not sure why it was in his vee-hickle but whatever. Of all things, now that they are gone I kinda miss them. But I wasn’t psychologically up to traveling with them or staying in a bunkhouse… I need my own private bathroom…

I spent the day unpacking clothes from the summer and sorting clothing out in general. And ordering new charging blocks and cables for our new phones but not getting rid of the old ones so as to be able to support family and friends with older iPhones. And doing TONS of moomincabin laundry. Curtains and sheets. Making good progress but more to do tomorrow. But I am done done done for tonight!

This very fuzzy pic was taken with whatever digital cam I had in 2007, a Canon I think. These were our first iPhones. The second pic is the first picture my first iPhone took. It was an accidental pic taken by MMCB₁. We were having coffee at Barry Bagels and she accidentally opened the camera and took the picture. I kept this pic as my screen photo for a long time until a beach urchin changed it, not knowing it actually meant something to me.

Man oh man, do we set ourselves up for stress. We pre-ordered the iPhone 15. It came (as promised) today. The GG is leaving tomorrow for a couple weeks. Was our journey from our X/Xs phones (yes they are old) to the 15 a smooth one? No it was not. Both of us had a lot of problems with it. We are computer professionals, the GG a computer scientist and me whatever it is that I am, user experience design is what I get paid to do but I am not *usually* lost when the developers are talking.

In the end, I think we both managed to get our new phones working albeit via different paths. I cannot imagine what people without our skills and experience at bashing through tech problems are going through right now. I can only guess that Apple’s tech support phone lines are glutted with calls. The Google suggested that the release was buggy and it sure felt that way. I struggle with why. Where are the user experience designers? Where are the quality control analysts? My work team is not perfect but we test like crazy with every release to try to ensure our users will have a smooth experience with whatever changes we’ve made. And we do not release updates to our product to millions of users in the general public like Apple does.

At any rate, all is now well. I was concerned about the slightly larger size of the phone (from the Xs) but it is really not that much bigger than the Xs. It fits my small hand and into my zip pocket and that’s what counts.

The UU came down for the night and Lizard Breath came over for dinner. Mixed grill (filet mignon and salmon) and friends. The Lizard took it upon herself to do the dishes and uber clean the Landfill Chitchen. I am beyond thankful for that. I do keep up with dishes and kitchen cleanup but she did a little deep cleaning that has been neglected. I sat outside with the UU watching the half moon traverse the sky and slap a few MOE-skee-TOES until they went to bed, as they do.

That was the GG wondering why the refrigerator was broken at 6:00 PM. All right, all right.

Yes, he did fix the dishwasher. It’s a loverly Bosch but it’s nine years old and a while back, I opened the door and it clunked straight down. Bonk. A fix was elusive at first and I was lobbying for a new musheen if he couldn’t find the right part. Having the door clunk down like that would drive me CRAZY and I can afford a new one. On the other hand it still washes dishes beautifully and maybe somebody else would be willing to put up with that issue for a free dishwasher. In the end, he couldn’t get the exact part but he got something close and somehow made magic and VOILA!

The warshing musheen was a bit easier. I actually diagnosed the problem myself. From time to time it starts to get r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w and I remembered there is a part that gets clogged (or whatever). Replacing that part fixes it right quick and on top of that, he bought an extra replacement part the last time this happened so we didn’t even have to order a new part.

I do not know what I would do without such a handy person around. I am not intuitively mechanical AT ALL. If I can’t figure out how to take something apart without brute force, I’m afraid to do it.

I have actually fixed the refrigerator twice today. I was grumptastic the first time. I walked in with a few grocks this morning and when I went to pull out the top crisper drawer to put something in it, a precariously placed container of leftover rice with an ill-secured cover toppled into it. Cleaning up this mess required pulling the refrigerator OUT from its nook (don’t ask) so I could get the drawer out and wash the rice out of it. BTW: this whole thing was MYYYYY fault!

Fixing the refrigerator the second time was a snap. I measured a ‘hattan into a glass and put it in the freezer. All he had to do was add ice and cherries.

When the world was beautiful, right?

This is September 2019 and we are at the moomincabin and I *think* it’s Lizard Breath out there swimming. I could search my blahg database to find out for sure but I can’t think what the data base file name is offhand so not gonna break my brain.

We were so innocent in 2019. Covid was not on the horizon. Back in 2003 the SARS virus derailed a middle school trip to Toronto that MMCB₁ was scheduled to chaperone. That trip got changed to DETROIT (yes, really) because of the SARS virus, a relative of COVID-19 if I have it right. We were rolling our eyes at that. People were being warned not to travel to Toronto but it didn’t seem to be very transmissable and nobody (that I can remember) was talking about masking or closing the borders. Little did we know.

So it was how many months after September 2019 that we started to hear of the novel coronavirus “coming out of” China? Was it November or December? It crept closer and closer throughout January and by mid-February I remember being nervous about our annual trip to Tahquamenon with group lodging and restaurants. I still remember a whole bunch of us crowding around a table at the Camp 33 Tahquamenon Falls Brewery.

After that there were a few more outings, (Griz, Knight’s) like is this really happening? I voted (nervously) in person (for BIDEN!) in the Michigan March primary on a Tuesday. Two days later I was sent home to telecommute forever (and I’m still doing that). My last in-person grock trips were freaky. For the first time in my life, I wiped down my cart before touching it. Really the best thing to do would be to wear a mask but we didn’t know that then. Then my grock worker said, “Moom, you’ll probably be fine but you really shouldn’t be in grocery stores.” Yes.

That was then. Things are not as scary now but covid is still around. One friend was out of town last week (helping an older relative in Fla) while her husband had lunch with friends who subsequently tested positive. Fortunately he tested negative. Another couple we know went to a significant reunion and now HAVE covid (maybe for the second time but I’ve lost track). I did not attend my equivalent significant reunion a year ago and it also turned out to be a super spreader.

After attending a wedding shower on Sunday… Small basement room, pretty well packed, sitting at a table with Liz and about five or six strangers, no one masked. There is NO WAY I could have missed this shower so I braved it. I have no symptoms. Knock on wood.

The good! I read the entire Silos trilogy, Wool, Shift, and Dust. I loved this series. I love a good sci-fi dystopia. I’m sure there are many flaws (most books have them) but I enjoyed the characters and the author’s world-building – I think that’s the word for it. In a way I didn’t want it to end but the ending was satisfying and it is a TV series so I will try that out. What became the first chapter (or maybe prologue?) of Wool was originally a short story. I found that as a free download and then I fuddled around a bit figuring out how to find the REST of the full novel it became. And then I read the other two.

The bad!! Malibu Rising. Why did I choose this book? I do not know. I was interested in learning about the area and surfing. I mean, I’m not interested in actually surfing, except for the low key body surfing we do at the moominbeach when the weather is right. We don’t have a surfing CULTURE on our beach although there are places on Gitchee Gumee where people surf with boards, even in the winter. But the book had almost no info about surfing at all except about how beautiful its beautiful characters looked when surfing with their wet-suits unzipped enough to reveal, well, revealing bikinis.

But. Oh. My. God. What a bad book. Beautiful messed-up people up the wazoo, literally and figuratively. Boring detailed descriptions of 1980s clothing and hair and whatever. The most horrible party you could imagine with beautiful messed-up people getting more messed up and destroying the party mansion. That is about all I will say about that except the party was pretty much the whole second half of the book. The whole time, I was like “I don’t care if they are Dynasty cast members (and I watched that show), kick those people out!” Blech blech blech!

And guess what? It is being made into a TV SERIES! I sorta guessed this book was written to pitch as a series so I googled and I regret it. Ugh, ugh, ugh. Head-banging. Will old Dynasty actors be in this?

After that, what could be the fugly? It is a book that is not published yet. By MTGreene, NOT my favorite politician and shouldn’t be yours either. Sorry. She is apparently calling it a “tell-all”. Well, do tell. If she can string a sentence together but probably there’s a ghost writer to do that. The Orange Baboon uses them to mitigate his own Word Salad. Will I read this book? Part of me wants to just to try and figure out where this screaming mimi of an uber bitch thinks she is coming from. But I certainly do NOT want to pay for her book… Library? We’ll see what I do. Hopefully this book won’t be something that can be made into a TV series 🤮🤮🤮

The pic is from last September when we were up at the moomin to enjoy the last bit of a warm summer and close it. This year we had to close a bit earlier so the Twinz of Terror can launch out to New York State for the yearly North Country Trail celebration.

Facebook served up a decent “memory” today. It is a view from Cubelandia’s nature trail from 10 years ago. Those trees in mid photo don’t really look elephantine in this pic but if I could get them at the right angle, it looked like a couple of elephants walking along. I miss the nature trails there although long before the end of my days of slogging over to an office to work, they were not well maintained and TICKS (yick) were a problem.

Thinking about wedding/baby showers, etc., no I do not like to play the games. One of the reasons is that I do not want to win! As wonderful as shower swag can be, at this stage of life, I am trying to get rid of stuff.

When I was very young and I went to showers for people who (usually but not always) weren’t really old enough and/or prepared for marriage and children, the main game we used to play was to put the bride’s and groom’s first names at the top of a piece of paper. The game was that everyone had to make as many words out of those letters as possible. As you might guess, The Brain of Lincoln School (meeee, but I HATED that nickname), always won… And nowadays we have the NYT Spelling Bee? Why am I good at that? Duh. Although I am one word, nu7, down from Queen Bee today. DON’T TELL ME!

Shower games are different nowadays and it’s pretty easy to be a non-participant without attracting attention. The Shoe Game (google it) was actually kinda fun although I was a side-liner. I know the bride pretty darn well but I don’t know everything about her. I hardly know her fiance although he reminded us yesterday that he had crashed out on the moomincouch last summer in his sweats. Oh yes, he fits in with our cousin-y branch of his bride’s fam. As Lizard Breath pointed out, our young cousin is very social but she probably wasn’t crazy about sitting in the middle of the room back to back with her husband-to-be holding up a shoe to answer questions. Still, it wasn’t bad and these functions are for the young folks who are getting married and their young friends.

My fave shower ever was our for the surprise baby of our oldest nephew and his wife. Their (wonderful) story is not appropriate for me to tell on my blahg but I LOVED that people were encouraged to NOT wrap whatever gifts they brought to the shower. Those gifts were displayed on a table for people to ogle over if they wanted to or we could just sit, eat, drink, and gossip.

First, I did not take this pic. Chloe Belle posted it on facebook and I grabbed it. I decided to post this one instead of their standard “us with beautiful women” pic. The Twinz of Terror can get a little crazy and at least one of their daughters (three between the two of them) does not think they should post such photos. Last year they found another set of (female) identical twins for the photo and that seemed okay. How do these old guys get beautiful women to pose with them? I do not know. (They are watching the Detroit Lions snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.)

I had my own event to attend today. A wedding shower brunch for my late cousin Terri’s daughter. Terri started bringing this young woman to the moomincabin every summer since she was a baby. I remember the summer Terri was stressing about toilet training and I (with teenagers) was going “been there done that.” They grow up fast. And Ana (the baby) certainly did. She has become a successful young woman getting married to a guy we like and who can tolerate the rusticity of the moomincabin, at least for a few days. Alas, my cousin hasn’t been around the last couple years and won’t see her daughter marry. I am not all that crazy about showers and I knew I would know almost NO ONE at this shower but there is NO WAY I would have missed it.

Problem. I was kinda roto this morning. The GG had some kind of ticketbastard confuzzlement with his Lions football tickets. These are SEASON tickets that his family has owned forever so I’m not sure why ticketbastard was involved. His stress poured over onto me and then I had a second cuppa coffee which I probably didn’t need. And I wasn’t really sure where I was going although it turned out the venue did NOT involve messing with the I275/I696 Maze. I had anticipated this so I asked my older beach urchin to drive Cygnus over there so I could kinda, y’know, “chillax” a bit. The drive turned out to be a breeze but I’m still happy she agreed. Also it allowed me to have two mimosas. (No *sam*osas – inside joke there.)

He wanted me to deal with the debris in the Landfill front living room. It was hard but I did it. So hard to combine all the stuff I hauled back from the moomincabin to the Landfill. That was my main task today and I did it.

And then I poured myself a glass of whine and sat out in the back yard reading “Dust”, the third in the Silos trilogy. Dystopian sci-fi kinda stuff. Right up my alley.

Lamb stew tonight, farmers market early this morning. As I was approaching Cygnus after the farmers market, a young man tried to approach me with “Ma’am do you have five dollars”. Nope. Of course I did have five dollars (more like $140) but I skedaddled into Cygnus and took off. I don’t know if the young man really needed money (probably) but it is not my job to randomly give cash to whoever asks me for it in a parking lot.

This is my best pot of impatiens here at the Landfill at the end of summer. The other two pots are kinda okay. One of them has a big dandelion in it and the other has some other huge plant. It is almost the end of summer and I am kinda done with caring what my impatiens are doing.

As the title says, this is just filler. Letting my beach urchins know I am alive and kicking even though we just texted a few minutes ago. Love y’all, KW.

At the end of today, I closed down my laptop, hauled my garbage carts out to the curb, and moved to the back yard to check XFKAT (Zifkat?) and other stuff. Chillin’ out. After a few minutes, I heard other people hauling their carts out. I don’t really think they were waiting for MEEEE to put my garbage out but once LofPNet across the street told us they take their cue on whether the garbage goes out from whatever I do. Most weeks it goes out on the regular day, Friday, but it gets tricky with holidays. Delayed a day on some but not others. I follow @RecycleAnnArbor on Zifkat but I also know how to look things up.

I’m afraid I totally failed as Garbage Woman when we closed up the moomincabin this year. The GG kicked me down the road before he shut off the water and put the dreaded window coverings up. I appreciated that and I HATE when the window coverings are on, as necessary as they are. I KNOW I had a conversation with him saying that I was going to LEAVE the garbage under the kitchen sink for HIM TO SCHLEP in case he found other things to put in it. This made sense to me although I don’t mind schlepping a bag of garbage. I had dumped a Green Bag off at the res two days before so there wasn’t much.

All these days later, I opened up the Landfill garbage cart to put my one bag of Landfill garbage in there. There was a bag in there already that STUNK TO HIGH HEAVEN, which leads me to believe it did not come from the moomincabin. I know there were a FEW chicken bones in the moomingarbage but this smell was NOT rotten chicken. Chemical of some sort. Yuck.

In the ensuing conversation, we came to the mutual realization that he LEFT a bag of garbage up there under the sink. With chicken bones in it. Apparently he doesn’t remember me TALKING about the garbage. I guess next time we have this situation, I will put the kitchen garbage “can” out in the middle of the floor where he might trip over it? I am not complaining. He works very hard on the moomincabin and he will be back in the yooperland later this fall and he can snag the garbage AND the butter I left in the refrigerator.

If you embiggen this pic a couple times, you might be able to see a green plastic can under the sink. That’s the main moomingarbage. I keep an eagle eye on that and whenever it fills up and I need to remove it (and put it in a Green Bag), I wash out the green can before putting a new kitchen bag in.

I actually took this pic to show where the moomin “back” and “front” doors are. The back door is to the left at the end of the kitchen and “back” is toward the garage, road, and swamp. The front door is next to the refrigerator. It is not in the actual “front” of the cabin. That is behind me. It would be really hard to have a door there because the “front” is the beach side and if there is a northwest wind, it could be hard to go in and out. So the “front” door is essentially the “side” door.

Our “front” and “back” doors are not very far apart are they? It’s a small, rustic cabin but we love it.

I FINALLY finished my work today. And it’s okay, it was a SUCCESSFUL day albeit too complicated to describe. I decamped to the back yard and opened up XFKAT (X Formerly Known As Twitter) and this is what I saw. I’m sorry but I could NOT stop laughing.

Just for starters, I canNOT believe anyone would vote for someone so idiotic they would use a sharpie to try to change the course of a hurricane. But Xeorge Xonway usually cracks me up anyway, which is why I follow him on XFKAT. I won’t go into why I started following him or what I think of his wife (I think they are separated at this point). I don’t know who the Elizabeth person is and don’t follow her. The short story on what I think of XFKAT’s owner is 💩💩💩. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about how rich or “smart” he is or any of his companies’ achievements. He is also a NUTCASE and there are plenty of rich, “smart”, nutcases who have wreaked havoc in this world throughout history.

I sent this screenshot to some beach urchins and one of them sent back “Xnne Xinlayson” (my name with Xs), which cracked me up even more. Not that I’m gonna change my XFKAT handle. I haven’t tweeted or interacted with anyone on that platform for years. Instead, it reminded me of how totally incensed The Commander was once when I was a kid and she received a package addressed to Mrs. “Tinlayson”. Mrs. Tinlayson! Well! Our name starts with “F”. It is Scottish as far as we know although we are aware there are Scandinavians with that name.

My mother was a STICKLER for proper English, spelling and grammar and whatever. As I have said on here before, if you wanted to use the word “ain’t” you had better be over in the schoolyard or somewhere. Wherever she couldn’t hear you. People mangled our family name all the time and it drove her nuts. When I had learned the bare basics of phonics, I remember sitting in my bedroom figuring out that our name consisted of three simple syllables, each a valid word on its own. Fin. Lay. Son. We put the main accent on the first syllable with a lighter accent on the last. How can you screw that up? Every which way, the most common being “Finnelson” followed by “Finallyson” and some people accent the middle syllable. Finlaaaayson. Nope.

And no, I did not change my name when I got married. There was no big political discussion about this. I just didn’t change it. I had no problem with my kids taking the cFam name. I have no problem with people calling ME the cFam name, in fact when the kids were in school, I used that name informally all the time. Once a wonderful grade school PTO prez rather nervously asked me which I wanted to be called. I told him either was fine or just “Mouse’s Mom.” That immediately put him at ease.

The biggest problem is that The Commander always struggled with my refusal to officially take the GG’s name. Her feminist side was apparently at war with her “proper” side. This was fine until she died and my lawyer found that she had referred to me by the cFam name in a few official documents. He was a good lawyer and this was an easy if annoying complication to sort out. And I remember just sighing, “Oh moom.”

So I was driving my five-hour drive yesterday. My phone was plugged in to Cygnus and however the heck that works, it means I can make and receive phone calls without picking up my phone and dialing it. Most of y’all prob’ly have the same kind of technology. I appreciate that I can do this but I prefer to drive without the interruption of phone calls.

I get VERY FEW spam calls but yesterday was my day. Dundee Michigan, area code 734, my area code. Various numbers. I would decline one and maybe a half hour later, I’d have to decline another one. Whack-a-mole ALL DAY. I actually answered one of the calls. I know that is not the way to deal with nuisance phone spammers and I know why but I was at the end of my rope. There were weird “knocking” noises on the other end. I didn’t say “yes”. I know better than that. I did yell, “DON’T CALL ME AGAIN!” Fully knowing that it was likely a bot and hoping it couldn’t “hear” me and translate those words into something like, “you have access to my bank account”. Fortunately the calls stopped overnight. I got one more of them today, then they (knock on wood) stopped. I can (and do) block these phone calls but I have to wonder what happens if you get like say 100 of them in an hour. Who the heck can keep up with that? Is there a way to stop it? Maybe there is but I don’t know what it is.

Speaking of banks, there was some bank annoyance. Actually it wasn’t the bank, it was related to persistent “I’m your bank [or best friend]” telephone solicitors. I won’t say anything more about that. We were not targeted but a vulnerable person we care about was. Again. Myself? I don’t [normally] answer calls from numbers I don’t know. Why can’t these *ssholes use their talents to pursue a more positive line of work?

So we’re ready for new iPhones (we have X and XS, which are basically the same thing and long story). The GG watched today’s Apple “presentation” or whatever it was. I was fighting with a (work) content management system that has changed since the last time I used it, which was a few months ago but I’d’ve been really bored with the Apple presentation anyway. I am not impressed that Apple isn’t offering a phone as small as the one I have now. I have small hands and I like small phones. I guess I will get the 6.1 inch iPhone 15 (I may not know the correct names for these phones) and live with it. It WILL still fit in my pocket.

Actually given Michigan freeways, it’s more like clunkity clunkity clunkity clunk ka-whomp! I am back on the Planet Ann Arbor. I feel like I’ve been on the moon.

The GG kicked me outta the moomincabin this morning so he could close down the water without me in the way. He did fill a bucket of water so I could do one last moominP and flush it down. (I do know how to flush a terlet with a bucket of water, thanks to the moldy old Hoton Lake cabin.) A part of me wanted to follow Mooon Yooonit and the Lyme Lounge down today but it was better for both of us for me to just skedaddle ahead of him.

It was a decent drive (but then again it was a WEEKDAY) except for fairly heavy rain for maybe 45 minutes in the Gaylord area. I touched in when I gassed up in Waters. The rain had momentarily let up and I texted “Waters” to my family but I did not tell them about the rain because I didn’t want the beach urchins to worry about me. And truth be told, I was fine. I slowed down from 75 (the speed limit) to 70.

I suffered a weird lack of driving confidence during the COVID pandemic heyday but I seem to be over it. I hate to admit this but I was even a bit nervous about crossing large suspension bridges for a while, like the Big Mac. I’ve been crossing that bridge almost my whole life and I WASN’T even nervous about it after 2001 when people were suggesting big bridges as targets. But I am over that. YAY! (And I do respectfully note that this is the 22nd anniversary of the 911 terrorist attacks.)

So after schlepping umpteen bazillion grocery bags of food and laundry and laptops and other stuff into the Landfill, I *tried* to chill out for a bit but I couldn’t sit still so after a while I started in on laundry. I did a big load of moomincabin towels, then my sleeping bag, and finally a filthy throw rug that hasn’t been washed in eons. There are more of those and I’m doing them one at a time. Some of them have rubber or whatever and cannot go in the dryer. It will take me a while to put away the non-perishable grocks because there are duplicates, which means I need to RESET the Landfill Chitchen. I did not unload the GG’s big iMac or the rifles. Those are his and I left them for him to deal with.

So here I am sitting in my back yard listening to the crickets and I just slapped a MOE-skee-TOE, which I have seen very few of in recent weeks at the moomincabin. Welcome home, KW. Work tomorrow, Hi Ho!

You’ve heard of Manhattans right? The drink, I mean. 2 shots of bourbon (or whatever) and a shot of vermouth. It gets complicated with bitters and cherries and yada yada yada. And simple syrup. Simple syrup? Whut?

If you know the FinFam, we make Fran-hattans (in which The Commander would sometimes reverse the proportions). And Anne-hattans, which are basically Fran-hattans that I put in the freezer (aka freezer-hattans). As a side-note, my BELOVED sister-in-law Gay spent many years managing her family’s tavern and has pointed out that my recipe is not exactly correct. I’m sure that’s true, especially I learned how to make them from The Commander. It’s okay, I just muddle along.

Tonight… I made the GG a gnat-hattan. Last night I somehow ended up with two partial bottles of vermouth. I had intended to combine them but forgot. And. I apparently threw out the cap to the lesser bottle and DIDN’T combine it with the other bottle and ALSO did not stick saran wrap in the top. So I made the GG a freezer ‘hattan this evening and when he pulled it outta the freezer there were all these teensy tinsey little buglets in it. I looked at mine and noticed a bunch of them too.

The GG saved the day with a sieve and I started remembering that we have been minor-ly plagued by these gnatty-type bugs. I don’t know if they are actually gnats. Whatever they are, they are VERY small and they do not bite. They are just annoying. Especially when they collect into your cocktail of choice.

A rainy evening for our last night here until next spring. This is okay. This pic is off the back deck. If you look carefully, you can see the shed roof and a little sliver of the garage roof.

Poised to travel tomorrow with a whole crapload of junkola and I’m not sure why all of the rifles always end up in MY vee-hickle…

So this patriot or whatever he is took our adult daughter out on a North Country Trail hike today. I did not accompany them. I worked on organizing and packing stuff we will have to schlep down to The Planet Ann Arbor in a couple days.

I do not leave ANY kind of food, perishable or not, over the winter here. It was easier when my parents were still around. They could close the moomincabin whenever they wanted to. They just had to haul stuff to their house in town. If they didn’t get eveything into town all at once, they could drive back out to the moomin, pick up their stuff, visit Radical Betty, and whatever.

We can’t do that. We have to haul whatever down to the Planet Ann Arbor and not come back. I spent today doing penultimate stuff. I have two bags of non-perishable food in Cygnus already. I took some last-minute recycling into town and made a mini-trip to Meijer and dropped off a Green Bag. I got rid of a bunch of condiments, etc. I mean, what is the point of schlepping a tablespoon of pickle relish down home. So I emptied that jar (and some other things) and washed out the jars… So there is more recycling (there is ALWAYS more recycling) but it’ll get dumped into my Planet Ann Arbor recycle cart.

Love talking to my kiddo about her younger days. Like driving to a Radiohead concert in Ohio. As a teenager. She ran into one of her cFam cousins there and he didn’t recognize her at first. And she drove my car (new top dollah Honda Accord) with my permission because she felt like that car might not be likely to break down and maybe if she were driving, she might have more control over what was happening. Like mother, like daughter.

Whitefish Point. Whitefish is usually an annual trip but I think the last time I ventured there was 2019 aka pre-pandemic. It was raining so hard that day (ALL day) that we barely got out of the car, which was The Mean Green Frog Hoppin’ Musheen (Subie Outback). We did go into the gift shops. We don’t really do the museums.

Today I don’t think there was a cloud in the sky ALL DAY, which meant the sun was BRUTAL but it was also not very warm so… We walked the beach to the tippety-tip of the point, where this pic was taken. We continued around the point and walked the nature trail back to the lighthouse area.

We drove the short distance to the Safe Harbor to eat lunch, which was turkey sandwiches, apples, chips, and beer. Except we didn’t drink the beer because there were a TON of law enforcement vee-hickles in the parking lot with us. We later figured out that there were also divers around and maybe the law vee-hickles were involved in some kind of training exercise and probably had no interest in us at all butcha nevah know.

We “nosed” west onto Vermillion Point Road but didn’t make it all the way out to the “point”. The road seemed good if sandy and Cygnus could probably have done it but we were getting a bit taaaared by that time. After a minor spy mission, we stopped again at the outhouse just above the Tahquamenon River mouth and that is where we drank our beers. BTW: that is the cleanest outhouse I think I have ever been in. It smelled wonderful, not even like they were using some kind of floral scent to MASK what is down the hole. And there was hand sanitizer in a dispenser. That said, do NOT look down the hole. I sorta glanced at it and you don’t wanna know.

Back on the road to home again, Liz was driving and as we were passing the Naomikong overlook, the GG yelled STOP. After a few confusing moments involving a deer looking to cross the road, we got turned around and headed back to the overlook. The deer was not why he wanted to stop. It was a North Country Trail friend’s vee-hickle. OMG. I soooo wanted to go home. I did NOT want to get hung up with whatever NCT maintenance was being staged for this weekend. Fortunately, although he found our friends, he was willing to continue on. Once home, two people (Liz and the GG) took naps. I felt nappish but that is never a good thing for me.

For once, Cygnus’s warning to “LOOK IN THE BACK SEAT” was arguably useful this evening (upon shutting her off when returning from a trip to get porterized with pizza). Our “baby” was in the back seat. Of course she has LONG been able to remove herself from an automotive vee-hickle under her own power, not to mention that she has owned her own vee-hickles for many years.

I was sitting outside the other night, under the kitchen window. There was a dragonfly flapping against the screen doing its best to get into the kitchen. This was driving my beach urchin (indoors) absolutely nutso. I’m not sure why it wasn’t really bothering me. It was obviously in distress of some sort.

Finally the beach urchin asked if she could turn out the kitchen light. YES! The dragonfly left for a bit after that but it returned. Why? Because the bright fluorescent light above the stove was still on. Once that got turned off, the dragonfly left for good. Later on I figgered maybe a solution would be to turn off the kitchen lights and turn ON the bathroom light. The bathroom is more or less an interior room. Although it does have a small window so maybe the dragonfly would be flapping against THAT window.

We don’t have that kind of problem with insects tonight because I don’t think the temperature got above 60 degrees all day. Am I complaining? I dunno. 90 degrees the other day was AWFUL except for swimming in Gitchee Gumee. Today’s 60 eventually prompted me to actually turn on the propane stove. Hot or not?

Other than that, laundromat, quick grock stop, recycle, and gasoline. Plus a drive by what we called “the oldest house in town” when I was a kid. No house there any more but the entire lot is ringed with heavy vegetation. I wonder what that house’s actual story is. My parents may have known but they never told us.

The GG took a bunch of stuff to Habitat and did a whole bunch of reorganizing out in the garage. I haven’t been out there to see it yet and there was no way I was gonna go out there at 9:00 tonight. It was time to call it a day. And yes this is all pretty much filler.

The woman in question was walking the beach and I had just decamped to Bill’s Birch Beach Bank Bench. The questioner was a life-long friend. I answered (with a bit of a giggle), “Yes, it’s my daughter!” I think my friend remembers my beach urchins as very small very cute tow-headed blonde baby girls. They are still blonde and they are still good-looking but they are 30-something adults and blonde hair is not usually as brilliant on adults unless they get it out of a bottle. Which my daughters (and me) are not interested in. For that and many other reasons I can understand why my adult children don’t look familiar to my friend on sight.

For many many many years we didn’t encounter too many unfamiliar people walking our beach. In recent years, now that the OTHER end of the beach is accessible, we see more although we are certainly not inundated. If I understand riparian rights law at all (and I think I am shaky on that) it is legal for people to walk along waterways even if the waterfront property is privately owned. Our beach is private but it is certainly walkable and I don’t usually question walkers about who they are.

Yesterday was interesting though. When Lizard Breath and I went down to the beach to cool off at the end of her work day (and my slug day), there were two women standing just off our shore with kayaks next to them. In earlier years I might’ve been a bit perturbed but times are changing and I just gave them a hello and followed my daughter out past the second sandbar to get dunked and COOLED OFF! They were just hanging out there gossiping (yeah, I’ve been coming up here with “Bill” since 2007). I kinda wish I had introduced myself and talked to them more but for many many many many many years, I would go down to the beach here and be the ONLY person on the beach. Being social to strangers on the beach is new to me.

My childhood friend and I are definitely in in agreement with keeping our families’ beach as private as we can for as long as we can. And I felt her relief knowing who “that woman” was. She knows any daughter of mine is an ally 🧡🧡🧡

These candle holders are from Crate and Barrel — I think but I could be wrong. I also think (but could be wrong) that I bought them for the moomincabin. Whatever the truth is, they are PERFECT for the moomincabin. For dark stormy evenings or even just parties that go on into the late evening although most of ours end pretty early.

The problem has been that they have never “lived” anywhere. And that’s not really true either. They lived in the drawer at the bottom of the barrister’s bookcase. That odd location meant that every time somebody wanted to get the candle holders out, they had to REMEMBER where they were. And the flip side of THAT is once somebody gets them out, they end up kinda scattered randomly all over the room. Like this summer.

THIS summer! The GG had a brilliant idea! He would build shelves between the studs in our un-insulated dwelling. We have shelves like this already in other places, The GG has put some up and I think my parents did too. But this was a REALLY GOOD IDEA. Not only would the candle holders be easy to grab when needed, they are a DECORATIVE element. Why hide them down in the drawer at the bottom of the barrister’s bookcase. So here they are. First pic is a close up, second shows (more or less) where they are situated.

Other than that, it was another EXTREMELY hot day here. 90, which is very hot for here. Once again, Gitchee Gumee saved the day by cooling us off.

Swimming on a hot summer day. Labor Day to be exact. It was hotter than Hadies today. I have to compare it to a Labor Day in my childhood when bitsy little snowflakes were spitting at us. Us kids HAD to swim. When we were kids, we swam EVERY day. Hot or cold, calm or windy as hell, rainy, whatever. Spitting snow. Yes we were gonna swim. Later that day we had to move to town and the next day was the first day of school. I remember The Commander down there life-guarding us in a winter jacket and Otto, my dad’s buddy and father of some of my beach friends.

It was so hot today I had to sit on the back deck next to the grill to read this afternoon. It was the only place not in the sun. I eventually swam after my older beach urchin arrived and we ate dinner with the neighbor-cousins. Dinner was kebabs and corn and potato salad and garlic bread and green salad. And blueberry crisp for dessert courtesy of my cousin. Preceded by a ‘hattan or two. We swam between dinner and dessert and I still feel wonderful and uber clean after our beautiful dip into the fresh water of Gitchee Gumee.

I was remembering a night long ago when I was up here alone with The Commander. It was hotter than hell (like today) and my aunt Radical Betty and I made a plan for an evening swim. I encountered my other aunt Bubs (she and Betty were my dad’s sisters) and I asked her if she wanted to join us. She said… Maybe… As it turned out, the three of us did swim. By that I mean we all walked out past the second sandbar until the water was up to our necks, hung out a bit and headed back in. I miss those two women and their brothers.

Love y’all, KW.