Random bits of my so-called life.

I wrote about my brother-in-law a couple weeks ago, saying that he was gravely ill and not expected to live much longer. He hung on longer than most people expected but finally succumbed today. He was a beloved brother to nine siblings (eight survive), uncle/great-uncle to 19 nieces/nephews, eight grand-nieces/nephews, and friend to more people than I could ever count. As ill as he was, he kept his smile and sense of humor until the end. Godspeed, Don.

I have been in one vee-hickle accident in my entire life, knock on wood big-time and hold out a big silver cross for good measure. I was 17. I was driving my grandparents’ car (my parents owned it at that time), a 1965 Ford Fairlane, and I was driving past the funeral home, of all places, and there was glare ice and an oncoming vee-hickle went left of center and hit me. Nobody was hurt because we were going pretty dern slow but it took out the front of the old Fairlane. This was before no-fault insurance and we ended up going before a judge who ruled that it was not my fault.

Well. I actually had another little accident when I was a teenager. I think it was with the Fairlane but it might’ve been the Pontiac Tempest. Anyway. I was backing up down at the corner of the road into Fin Family Moominbeach and I backed into the fence. I didn’t slam into the fence. I was being careful and I was going really slow. You can’t go very fast on the road to Fin Family Moominbeach because it is a one-lane two-track. Slow. So I just very lightly touched the fence. It left marks like someone had taken a file to the car. I was terrified. My dad was very particular about his vee-hickles and I thought that I would be in big trouble if I reported this incident. So, I didn’t. My parents more or less freaked out and even called the police about this. I knew that they did this and I still kept mum.

I have had a blahg for going on seven years now. I blahgged about this once before, back when The Engineer (my little brother) was still alive. He commented immediately something like, “they always blamed ME for that”. My parents must’ve been delusional because my bro’ was too young to DRIVE when I did that.

Although we don’t want our kids to go around getting into little scrapes like the one I got into, I think we need to not freak out too terribly much when they do or they’ll lie to us. Like I did. It is a balancing act.

I dunno what I am trying to say here. Driving is different with every kid and I wish you all good luck with that.

<braindump>By the time we got to brunch this morning, I had taken a shower, walked an hour or so, did a load of laundry, changed the sheets, put gas in the Ninja, dropped off a huge bag of old clothes, and ran the roomba in two different places, including a part of the floor in one of the dingy old rooms in the dungeon. And I forget what else and the verbs in that sentence feel like they’re all over the place and if they are, I don’t care a fig. It’s notable that I don’t think I have vacuumed the dungeon in several *years*. Yes, it is that bad.

Brunch does not begin until 10 at Seva on Sunday and I don’t think Mouse would’ve wanted to get up at 0-dark-30 even if brunch *had* begun earlier. We had a fantastic brunch and then we took a walk down by the river. By that time, the temperature was in the 40s and it was HOT walking down there. With slippery, melting snow and MUD everywhere. After that, we totally switched gears and hit the fabric store. Er, actually we didn’t totally switch gears because I still had my boots on. Because of the snow and MUD. In retrospect, I’m a little surprised that I was allowed *in* the fabric store with those boots on. I won’t tell you what the damages were but I will say that I was HOT while we were in the fabric store. Because of the boots, of course. Then a little dip into Meijer for heel thingies and hairspray. Yes, hairspray. No, we did not get Aquanet. It’s for Mouse’s play. So are the heel thingies, actually. Then (whew) home. Except. That I went out again, for my daily (on the weekends anyway) pilgrimage to the Plum Market. I saw one of my profs from community college there, which was a pretty huge shock (say that in a British accent), although I guess teachers have to eat too. He didn’t see me and I didn’t feel like yelling, “Hey teach!” all the way across the store. It’s probably just as well. He is the one that is directly responsible for my current career (I have thanked him) and that statement is a non sequitur and I don’t care a fig about that either or whether or not I have spelled “non sequitur” correctly. I looked it up and I think I did but I may be wrong and that is probably because of the “aging process” and we won’t go any further with that today, thank you very much, except to say that I hope y’all are also enjoying your children. Especially the 20-somethings. (Love you Mouse.)

There’s a postcard from Point Reyes on my refrigerator. It looks a lot like the photoooo above except that it was taken from the air so you can see the whole big rocky thing that I was standing on to get the shot in my picture. I went to Point Reyes almost exactly three years ago, when I made a solo trip out to Cali to visit Lizard Breath. I was thinking about it this weekend because Pengo Janetto is out there visiting Lizard Breath right now and they drove up to Point Reyes yesterday. They only saw one whale. When Liz and I went, there were all kinds of them. On the other hand, they apparently got an up close and personal view of an elephant seal lion. I only saw them, well, er sea lions, at the warf (warf, warf, warf). Point Reyes is one of my favorite places. I kept thinking it was like Lake Superior on steroids. Anyway, I put some of my old photos from 2007 on Flickr. They’re not all that great. I have no aspirations toward being any kind of professional photographer but I do think my eye has improved a bit since three years ago. You get what you get and these are from 2007. Click here or on the pic. Oh yeah. If you get as far as the pic of the steps going down to the lighthouse, why yes, I did get vertigo on those! But I did make it all the way down and back up again.</braindump>

I was so antsy today. I could’ve gone to Houghton Lake to walk on the ice and hang out with the GG and my fun-loving in-laws. I stayed home. I thought I would do a lot of cleaning and throwing out of stuff and work on some prodjects (intentionally misspelled). I did a little cleaning. I threw out a *little* bit of stuff. Prodjects? Naw. If I could apparate ala Harry Potter, I’d've gone to Houghton Lake. But I can’t. No iPhone apparate app. Not yet. It’s all right. I am headed up north for a five-day weekend next week. Powwow with Uber Kayak Woman and The Commander and Grinch and whoever. It’ll be waaayyy fun.

Alert, alert, alert! Kayak Woman! Roomba comin’ along in yer direction. Rrrrrrrrrrr. Move yer feet apart and let the cute li’l roomba come thru. And so I did and cute li’l roomba came thru.

And so, I bought a roomba vacuum cleaner a couple weeks ago. I hate to vacuum. I would probably love to vacuum if I could command everything in the room to levitate about five feet off the ground for the duration (keeping all the blasted knick-knacks intact, of course (I hate dusting too but that’s a whole ‘nother thing)) so I could vacuum the whole blasted floor. But I can’t do that. I have to move furniture around and vacuum and then move it back. Now, I am an AMAZON! I can move furniture if I need to. But life is too damn short for that stuff. It’s boring and I’m sorry.

So. A couple weeks ago, the GG, who fixes appliances and mechanical crap around here, was out of town. I looked at the Back Room and decided that I at least needed to vacuum up the big chunks. Problem. I could not get our super-duper not-that-old upright vacuum cleaner to power up. I tried a bunch of different outlets and it did not work. Okay. Dum de dum de dum. We are not rich. But we both have good jobs with decent salaries. I have been intrigued with these Roombas for a long time. AgateGal has one and she raved about it. And, what the heck? The GG gets to have a remote-controlled helicopter so why shouldn’t I have a robot vacuum cleaner?

I love this little roomba. It does its job. You do have to clean it but that’s a user-friendly process. It cleans better than I do. When it is finished, things actually feel clean. I don’t think I do as good a job. I think it does learn. I took a lot less time for it to do my kitchen tonight than it did the last time.

I don’t understand all that stoopid FTC stuff about blahg disclosures. My blahg is really just my own random blatherings. I can’t even check my stats at the moment. People read my blather or not and comment or not. It’s all okay. If I talk about a product that I like, it’s just because I own it and I like it. Honda vee-hickles. Smart wool socks. Roombas. Nobody is paying me for anything except for my employer. And I work very hard for that.

I was writing my stoopid blahg last night and, in doing so, I tried again to get the Google street cam on my grandparents’ old house in the once beautiful but now decaying city of Detroit. When I was a little kid, I had grandparents a few blocks away from me in Sault Ste. Siberia and they doted on me and I loved them. I also had grandparents down in Detroit and they also doted on me and I loved them too. In fact, my “grandmother” was not really my grandmother. She was Bolette. My real grandmother died when The Commander was 15. She died in a car accident. My grandfather married Bolette a year or so before I was born. I didn’t know Emily, the grandmother whom I was named for (my middle name), but Bolette took care of me like a grandmother should. When we visited their house and my mom’s siblings were there and everybody was drinking and talking and laughing, Bolette would take me out to the kitchen to do dishes. She would ask me questions about my school and she would actually listen to the answers. I loved Bolette.

The house is hard to see through the branches in this pic. The last time I tried to find this house, the street cams hadn’t been there yet. This house? It was beautiful. It wasn’t a large house. But it had a beautiful galley kitchen and a breakfast nook, where we always made toast, and there was a staircase to the upper floor that curved around in a beautiful way. And Grandaddy and Bolette had traveled around the world and so their basement had all kinds of interesting stuff. It was a beautiful house and I loved visiting them. Er, yeah. How many times can you write the word “beautiful” in one paragraph, eh?

Then the Detroit riots happened. My grandparents were not racially prejudiced. But I think that they joined the “white flight” because they knew that they couldn’t deal with whatever came along next. They moved out to the northern Detroit suburbs.

Back in the early 80s, the GG and I made an exploratory trip down to 9975 Mark Twain. The neighborhood was now black, and a guy was watching us checking out that house. All of the beautiful elm trees that were there when I was a kid were gone. The guy yelled out, “Are you the paper boy or what?” I said, “My grandparents used to own this house.” He chilled.

Now? I don’t know what this neighborhood is like. It looks like it has survived, somewhat. Not all of Detroit has…

But the GG came home and, sandwiched in between conversations about our jobs (nothing bad but you don’t wanna know), he randomly brought up the topic of the Chevrolet Corvair. Well, yes. My family owned one of those once. I wish I had a picture of it but, although one probably exists, I don’t know where it is. The Corvair is the third car that I can remember. My baby car was an old black Ford of some sort. I remember being driven all over the place in that vee-hickle. Down to the locks in Sault Ste. Siberia. Out to the cabin over the old gravel roads. Down to St. Ignace to have lunch watching the Mackinac Bridge being built. Daytwa to visit my grandparents. “We go to Detroit in the middle of the night.” Meaning that we had to leave Siberia at something like 3:00 AM in order to catch the first ferry across the Straits of Mackinac. Where there is now a large suspension bridge that I twitter about whenever I cross it. I still remember the ferries.

Around the time my brother was born, Grandroobly bought another Ford. I don’t know the model. The Engineer would and maybe The Commander will comment. It was two-tone, light green and white. I remember It was kind of a lemon in some ways. The Corvair was more of a lemon. Once when we tried to drive north from our grandparents’ house in Daytwa, Grandroobly almost decided that we wouldn’t make it, but somehow we did.

It turned out that my high-school boyfriend ended up owning that dern Corvair. It was his first car and I don’t think he bought it from Grandroobly. I think there was at least one interim owner in between. I don’t think my boyfriend was old enough to drive when Grandroobly sold the Corvair. By the time I knew him, he had a brand new AMC Gremlin. Remember AMC? Cool car and the one I drove around in with him. With Alice Cooper playing on the 8-track tape deck. “I’m eighteen and I don’t know what I want.” Yawn. Goodnight. -KW.

If you are a student (or have been a student), what do you think about group prodjects (intentionally misspelled) ?

Group prodject from hell. It was my first class in the excellent (read: hard) web design program at our area community college. The final exam was to be a presentation. With a group. My heart was in my throat, my stomach was on the floor. I knew that college would include this stuff. I still wasn’t prepared for it. The (excellent) teacher chose the groups and assigned the topics. As she passed out the assignment specs and requirements, I hoped against hope that I would be placed in a group with some of the other old bags in the class. I figgered we could chillax (sorry Mouse, I’m quoting one of the other old bags) at coffee shops. Not. My group consisted of me, a very smart and poised high school student, and a nice young 20-something man with some serious academic issues that it was none of my business to identify.

Okay. How bad could this be. The content would be easy. We basically just had to regurgitate a couple of lectures, dividing five topics and an introduction between us. Original meeting? Young man chose *one* of the topics. High school girl picked two and I took the other two.

Okay. Meeting at coffee shops? Not. Email communications? Not good. High school girl was using a family computer. Remember those days? 20-something was dealing with some old, crippled computer and wasn’t usually available via email.

Two days before the presentation… I emailed both of my group members to ask how they were doing. High school girl didn’t respond. Turned out she was at some kind of family thing. 20-something guy? “I can’t find any information about my topic.” He was the first to choose a topic and I figgered he y’know like, was *interested* in researching it. Roight? I was hanging out in the bowels of the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre during a YAG production when I received that email message. I sat there in a state of stupification for a few moments before I replied something like, “Young man, here is a link to some information about your topic but this is the wild wild west and there isn’t a definitive answer to this, so you have to figure it out for yourself.”

Okay. I cannot believe that my little group got an A on our presentation. We got up there and we all did our stuff. Somehow, we managed to keep our presentation within the time requirements. We hadn’t practiced and our 20-something guy went off on a long siloloquy and the high school girl and I looked at each other, thinking, “What is he doing?”

Against all odds, we did finish our presentation on time and we got an A.

In my life after school, I rarely do group presentations like those I did at the community college. I collaborate with my team but we usually work on our own prodjects. I write and present my own stuff.

What do you think about group prodjects?

I have a whole bunch of blargledy posts in my head. Today somebody asked me if I knew FORTRAN. Well. Yes. I do. Man, that was years ago. I was self-taught. Once, I had to call the guys down at NCC-Univac because my code couldn’t be compiled for some reason. The guy down there told me my code was sexy. I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly and I didn’t pursue it. The GG (today) thinks the guy was, well, interested in me. Which is stupid, since the guy was umpteen million miles away down in the DC area and I was on the Planet Ann Arbor. I think my code was “sexy” because I was using equivalency statements and subroutines to use the same memory location for numeric and character data. And I think the guy was impressed that a giiirrrrllll could do that kind of thing. Hee. Hee. Heee hee hee.

Anyone new to this random little blahg might wonder who The Commander and Grandroobly are (they are my parents) or what the Landfill is (my house). When you have a blahg, it is hard sometimes to decide where to draw the line on privacy. Although I think I am probably pretty easy to find via my blahg, over the years, I’ve grown more careful about identifying other people by their real names. I will occasionally do it, like when my children graduated from college. But I do refer to most places and people by nicknames here. Reader Dona suggested I post a glossary. Maybe not a bad idea and it was just about the slodgiest Sunday on earth, so here’s a start:

The Commander: My long-suffering octogenarian mother (or is it me who’s long-suffering?). Champion grammar corrector. If you feel the urge to say something like “I ain’t got none” make sure that you get yourself over to the schoolyard or some other place where you are out of earshot.

The Engineer: My (late) brother, long-suffering at the hands of a terrifying older sister. Automotive engineer, jazz trombonist, snow-mo and powerboat driver before turning toward more silent sports in later years. Dog-lover and uber-collector.

Fin Family Moominbeach: My family’s beach on Lake Superior since Grandberry bought it (with a couple of friends) back in the 1920s. Actually, it is *technically* on the Upper St. Mary’s River, looking up through the river’s mouth into Whitefish Bay. I spent all of my summers there with all of my cousins and other friends. It was the proverbial village that our school districts are now trying to shove down our throats. Wish I had more time to spend there.

Froggy: Hmmm, I really have no words for this ridiculous little amphibian who occasionally hi-jacks my computer so he can use GarageBand to record ribald little ditties and post them on my blahg when I’m not looking. Grok grok! Ridiculous? Ribald little ditties? Don’ lissin t’ that stoopid Ol’ Baggy. grok Ggokr frdok grodko! Uh, well, there he is. If you see green, it is not me, it is Froggy.

The GG: Long suffering significant other (husband and father of children). GG = Grumpy Growler, although I am usually more grumpy. Twinz of Terror, which you’ll occasionally see, refers to the GG and his identical twin brother.

Grandberry: My grandfather, who is long dead but makes occasional appearances here, not to be confused with Grandroobly, his son.

Grandroobly: My (late) father, WWII pilot rather reluctantly turned banker. Runner, walker, skier, sailor, paddler, driver, ice-clinking beach-sitting Great Lakes freighter-watcher. Grandroobly? We were at a funeral dinner and he spilled water or something and suddenly his granddaughters were calling him Grandroobly. He accepted that. What can I say?

Green Guy Cafe: Radical Betty’s front porch overlooking Lake Superior. Wifi and occasionally coffee.

Landfill: My house and main residence on the west side of the Planet Ann Arbor. We bought this house 25 going on 26 years ago a few months before Lizard Breath was born. It is a trash pit. Please don’t anybody even entertain the idea that I might need any more stuff. I don’t. (-;

Lizard Breath: Older 20-something beach urchin living in San Francisco. With part of my heart in a jar under the bathroom sink next to the cleaning supplies. Or somewhere.

Mouse: Younger 20-something beach urchin living, uh, here at the Landfill. One of the most talented people I have ever encountered (not my doing) and looking for interesting, meaningful work. Sorry Mouse, had to put a plug in. Occasionally updates Mouse Nest.

Ol’ Baggy:Th’ ol’ bag hoo calls herself Kayak Woman. Do not be fooled, sheez just an ol’ bag. Grok grok gork.

Planet Ann Arbor: Mid-sized mid-western college town, home to the University of Michigan. Visited cousins here as a kid and always wanted to live here. And do. And love it. But hardly ever go downtown these days. Go figger.

Radical Betty: “Favorite” (late) aunt, sister to Grandroobly. Hiker, bush-whack skier, paddler. Absolutely fearless Amazon woman willing to try just about anything.

Yoop (or Da Yoop): Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I grew up there, my moom (see “The Commander”) lives there, and we have land there (see “Fin Family Moominbeach”). I don’t remember being called a “yooper” when I was a kid and my moom HATES that term. I think it’s pretty funny.

This email was from Esperanza Dawkins. Oh, such a good friend of mine. Rumor has it that when a truck carrying a load of Vlbiaefpgbora slid off into the Ohio River, all the lift bridges suddenly went up. Yes, I usually just delete these things but come on (no pun intended). *bridges*. Kee-reist. Delete delete delete. I do not think that there are whole boatloads of Vlbiaefpgbora. But who knows.

That is Piggie in the picture. I didn’t want to have a guinea pig around here. Actually, I didn’t really allow pets around here in general. I love aminals but I do not like to take care of them. Feed them and brush them and vacuum up their fur, etc. It’s a long story but I always thought that guinea pigs were boring aminals with no particular personality. So I resisted and I resisted and I resisted. And then one night I came home from YAG or wherever and there was the cutest little aminal on earth and he ended up being a member of our family for over four years. He had a very active, social personality.

And he was smart. Every morning, the GG would get up and get his cereal. Piggie would wait until the GG was done doing that and then, when the GG put his cereal bowl in the sink, Piggie would start squeaking like crazy. “Reep reep reep!” Get me some lettuce! I remember once when I walked into the Landfill after a week or so in the Yoop with the Commander and Grandroobly. I walked in the door. I talked to the GG and Lizard Breath and Mouse. Guinea pig was silent. Then. I said, “Hi Piggie!!” Reep reep reep! He ran up and down inside his cage. He knew who I was. He knew all of us. He died when his owner was a college sophomore.

I’m not going anywhere with this exactly. Guinea pigs are great pets and I am gonna crash soon. G’night. -Kayak Woman

P. S. No, I do not want another guinea pig or any other pet for that matter. I like pets best when I can return them to their owners.

Ooooch. This was not a fun day. It was not anything that happened at work. Work was fun as I inched my way through the beginning stages of a new project. It wasn’t the snowstorm. How many of those have we had this week? Five or six. Once again. Snow-hum. Traction control in deep-ish snow in the Dogha is almost as fun as plowing through deep snow in the old boats the kids of my generation learned to drive in and shoveling is great exercise, yada yada, yada.

Most mornings, a walk is enough for me to chase away whatever blues or nightmares I might have. Saying hello to a walking acquaintenance or two or three. Having a friendly (?) standoff with a raccoon outside a storm sewer drain. A fox trotting along right up Revena big as life. Birds landing in the street in front of me. I tiny owl watching me from a tree. Train whistles in the distance. Dodging the Newspaper Jeep. Sirens. On icy mornings those always give me a chill. By the time I get home from my 0-dark-30 neighborhood prowl, whatever demons my poor over-active brain managed to collect during the night are gone and sometimes I’ve also managed to do some problem-solving.

This morning? Yikes. I ended my walk in anger! At what? You don’t want to know. Nothing earth-shaking or life-threatening, that is for sure. It was just that my brain was at work on probably four or five problems at once and I couldn’t see my way through the fog to focus on even one of them. Where do I put my foot? What do I do next with this? Or that? Where am I? How do I? Too many things on my mind…

I wish I could report some great break-through in my mood today but it didn’t change from black to rainbow colors, although I can see those colors again in the back of my mind. A little research into one of the things that was bothering me, a little more shoveling, a couple walks through snow, and rhumba-ing with my Roomba and I’m feeling a bit better. Don’t get me wrong, I am not depressed and I do not even suffer from Seasonal Affection Disorder. Today there was a logjam in my brain and it took me a while before I could grab onto the right thread to pull me outta that.

And I STILL do not have any damn driveway salt!

At least not yet. Last week, while the GG was in Florida, we had all of this gorgeous, warm (sort of), sunshiney non-Michigan-type weather. This week? Snow and more snow. Ice drives to work. Shoveling. Crap, I am the only person here at the Landfill at the moment and somebody just clinked ice-cubes. You guys… Go drive the Ryerson somewhere or something.

It’s a little late in the winter for me to do my usual speech about sidewalk snow removal, which is that whatever you do to clean your sidewalk, you also have to salt it. If you do not, ice will form underneath whatever snow falls on top of your carefully cleaned sidewalk and unsuspecting walkers will fall on their you-know-whats. They might crack their skull or break their backs or pulverize their pelvis.

Here on The Planet Ann Arbor, we are mandated to clear whatever sidewalks are in front of our house. I have been slodging along all week shoveling snow and I love to do that up to a point. Except for the vee-hickle shuffling so that all three (yes) vee-hickles are in the driveway before the plow comes along. And then. We ran out of driveway salt earlier in the week. Last night, I asked the GG to get more salt. He did. Sort of. Except that a horrendous mis-communication between him and some clerk at Stadium Hardware led him to bring home water softener salt. Not the right thing. Driveway salt consists of relatively small grains and when you sprinkle it around, it melts relatively large areas. This water softener salt consists of HUGE grains and each grain only melts the immediate area around the grain of salt. It’s okay. It’s the end of February. It’ll snow some more. When we get into about the middle of March, I usually don’t even bother to shovel any more. It usually melts the next day. To heck with the dern mandate.

Good night and keep shoveling if you can. It’s pretty darn good exercise,
KW

Actually, I am pretty much avoiding my living room these days. Not because of the tepee and, no, we do not have any small children here. That is a froog backpack and an Orange Baby in there and this is the Landfill and sometimes all I can say is that it is what it is and I have very little control over much of anything around here, except for the snow shoveling and the garbage and the compost bin. I only have control over those because nobody else seems to notice that those kinds of tasks need doing on a sort of semi-regular basis. Well, snow is a relative outlier, so shoveling isn’t often an issue. Anyway. I don’t even have much control over the laundry or the refrigerator, try as I might. Actually, scratch that about the laundry. I’m happy to not have control over that. The beach urchins started doing their own laundry when they were about 12 and 10 (respectively). I think they decided I wasn’t doing a good enough job. And that’s okay with me. When they got to college, they were self-sufficient about laundry. So I did right by doing wrong, hee hee hee. One of those fine unintended parenting moments, fer sher.

Y’all might guess that a froog backpack is a stuffed frog in the form of a backpack. This froog has been hanging out upstairs because a few years ago, the resident amphibian known as Froggy (the one who occasionally takes over this blahg to post something a little, well, off…) mailed himself to California. Yes. I was rather relieved but the GG was looking high and low for him. He found Backpack Frog down in the Landfill Dungeon with all of the other aminals that were thrown down there during an anti-climactic tornado warning umpteen million years ago. Backpack Frog is a good, serviceable aminal but he will never have a personality like Froggy’s. And that’s probably a good thing. He does take good care of Orange Baby.

Orange Baby? I’ll save her [their] tale[s] for another day.

Well, what about it? I cannot describe most of today and I won’t even begin to try. The GG confronted me after work today about our, ahem, kitchen renovation. The one that we need to get going on soon. Knock out a wall. Refrigerator in the front living room. That kind of stuff.

Against all odds, I am thinking about white cabinets. I’ve been thinking about them for a while. My kitchen will not look like the beautiful one in the photo that I scanned out of a magazine. It isn’t configured in the same way and, although we have a woods behind our house, the kitchen doesn’t look out onto it. It looks out onto the back yard that for many years belonged to the Burkes. The backyard with Burke’s Erection, a rather elaborate deck and gazebo construction. Where the Burkes had cocktails on many afternoons. Those afternoons that they weren’t gallivanting around the country or world. The Alma Highland Festival. Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Russia. Wherever. The GG and Burke had faarrrworks waarrrs in the old days and more than once, we witnessed Burke in all of his newborn glory out on his deck in the middle of the night.

The Burkes are dead and we have new neighbors now. They are fine and I am not proud of myself. I introduced myself when they first moved in but I have not been as friendly as I could be. Sigh. I live under a rock. My particular rock is “I work outside the home. dah dah dah.” Well, I do work outside the home as y’all are tired of hearing about. But. Not a good excuse.

Anyway. Kitchen… I am now thinking… White cabinets. Wood floor (the GG is grumpy about this). Granite countertops. Motawi Tile backsplash. Glorious vibrant color wherever I can fit it into the details…

Updated to say thanks for all the comments. I was trying to love cabinets in a natural wood color but since I want a wood floor also (yes, I know water can damage it), I thought I would get lost in all that brown. Not my favorite color in life. Keeping white clean. The jury (both on and off-line) is split on that. (-: No wood stove here at least. I can see how that could create an ongoing cleaning issue.

Well. That is. I rock cars. Back and forth. Forward. Reverse. Lather, rinse, repeat. When they are stuck in 8-10 inches of heavy wet snow.

We’ve had another snow-hum here in the southeast part of the Great Lake State. I don’t know what the weather gods have to say but the business end of my shovel at 0-dark-30 this morning told me that we had around 8 inches and it continued to snow until about two o’clock or so. The snow was a little wet this morning but still fluffy enough that our little Ninja car (Honda Civic SI) could manage it and it was actually *fun* to shovel. Yes, I am a little crazy. I love shoveling in the dark of the early morning. I did the sidewalk and whatever I could do of the driveway and then I shoveled a path through the backyard to the compost bin. I had all three vee-hickles running with the front and back defroggers on and the GG brushed them off and we were good to go to work when it was time and I won’t describe that. The GG had a worse time than me but he had the Ninja and I had the Dogha (Dirty Old Green Honda Accord).

So, when I got home this afternoon, all the main roads had been plowed and they were wet, so no problem. The street in front of the Landfill? Well. Not plowed. Probably 10 inches by this time. Heavier and wetter snow with ice underneath it all. I drove up in front of the Landfill in the Dogha and I dithered and dathered about whether I should park it and pull Mouse’s little blue Civic out of the driveway and put the Dogha in. Car shuffling? Hmmm. I made some sort of wrong move and I was STUCK. Put the tranny in D and Rrrrrrrr. Put the tranny in R and Rrrrrrrrr. Okay. Flashers on. Out of the vee-hickle. Shovel out every bit of snow that I can. Put the shovel in the snowbank for future use. Put the tranny in R and Rrrrrrr-grab-just a little. Put the tranny in D and Rrrrrr-grab-a-bit and then (thank you god) the traction control system comes on and I am outta being stuck and able to drive into the Landfill driveway. I am a Yooper and I can rock cars. Sometimes anyway.

I wonder. We are buying these energy efficient vee-hickles. They are wonderful. The Dogha is actually pretty darn good in snow usually but it is a top dollar Honda with a V6 engine and therefore, not all that energy efficient. The Civics are very light-weight and don’t have the guzzinta to drive through heavy snow. If we are all driving tiny little vee-hickles, we are using less gasoline but if nobody plows our neighborhoods when a significant amount of snow falls, how are we supposed to get out and do whatever we need to do? I think this is an unintended consequence of the so-called green movement. I am definitely in favor of driving smaller vee-hickles but what are you going to do? Is it okay for folks with 4-wheel drive vee-hickles to be able to get out during a snowstorm but not folks with small energy-efficient vee-hickles. I know that when I first walked out there this morning, I wished that we still had The Indefatigable (our old jeep wrangler).

I don’t know. Some of us can telecommute. I could but I kind of like the challenge of getting to work in a snowstorm. What kind of vee-hickle do you have and does it get you to work and does your neighborhood get plowed and yada yada yada…

And in limbo for the last week or so. The GG has been in Florida with most of his living siblings saying goodbye to their wonderful older brother Don, who is gravely ill and isn’t expected to last much longer in this world. I haven’t been blahgging about this partly because it is not really my business and partly because I have not had much information (which is okay). My husband flew down to to Florida last Tuesday. He had his iPhone with him but not his laptop. We have had lots of short communications but it wasn’t until this morning while Mouse and I were having coffee and buying groceries at the Plum Market that he texted me his flight number back to DayTwa. Home.

The GG asked me if I would go to Florida with him. Sigh. I wanted to but I need to save my vacation time for going north and dealing with my own family. I worked all week and spent the weekend doing things with my Mouse. Lunch (and whine) at Seva. Buying a Roomba and testing it out. Coffee at the Plum Market and then an urban hike down by Barton Dam.

I don’t know how many hours Don has left on the earth. I am impressed with how my husband and all of his siblings have rallied to try to make their brother’s last hours be as comfortable as possible. Large Catholic families seem to be my lot in life and this family is one of the best of those. Love you all.

I am taking just a little break from what has been a rather sucky winter around here. Yes, I can talk like a middle schooler. Actually, middle-school kids are probably way beyond “sucky” by now. But. This winter has brought one problem after another. Mostly small things but some of the sucky stuff that is kind of waiting in the wings is quite a bit heavier.

Today? Well. The sun was out. A bill I thought I had to pay was already paid. I had lunch with Mouse. Elephants were fitted with box feet. And there was something nice at work. For me. Not something earthshaking, mind you. I am not all that upwardly mobile at this point. I don’t think I would even want my boss’s job. But I got a nice little recognition of my work and skills today and I was greatly appreciative.

This post is for anyone who is switching careers in mid-life. I am thinking mostly of women although I know that men also encounter this situation. Go for it, is about all I have to say. Three years ago, I was a vagabond beach bum empty nester moom boomeranging back and forth between The Planet Ann Arbor and Da Yoop wondering what the heck I was gonna do with the rest of my life. I kind of wanted to be a free-lance web designer/developer but I knew that I didn’t truly have the personality that would be required to do that. I had gone back to school though. That got me an internship and my current long-suffering, cat-herding boss took a chance on me and hired me as a regular full-time employee. If I’d seen my job advertised anywhere, I wouldn’t have bothered to apply. I would’ve thought I didn’t have the skills. It is a job that didn’t exist 15 years ago. Who knew?

I’m not going any further with this. I’m just saying that, if a tired old kayak woman aka moom of grown children can find decent, interesting employment, so can y’all. Don’t give up!

I was restless today. I was restless all day. I love winter. I love the darkness that surrounds the solstice and the cold and the snow. I don’t know why. I know others have trouble with this and I empathize with them but for me, the cold and the dark are energizing. To me, there is nothing like getting up at 0-dark-30 AM and walking out into the schoolyard and seeing the Dippers in the sky. Or even slodging along through a snowstorm. I can’t deny that when we go through weeks and weeks of single digit or below zero Fahrenheit temperatures, I get tired of pulling my snowpants and balaclava on and off but once I am outside, I am happy. We are coming up on late February. It is at this time of the year when we in the Great White North start seeing what I like to call Summer Skies. Bright blue with blinding sunlight. I usually see skies like this while cross-country skiing in the great northern woods. I have not been on skis all winter and I have only been in the north a couple of times this winter. Today I was restless. I went out and walked my lunchtime away. I got this photooo when I turned back south. The sun was so bright that I couldn’t even see the screen to see what I was photographing. The last time I took a photooo from more or less this vantage point, it looked like this, which I also think is beautiful.

Time is marching on and today I got my first glimpse of the summer to come. Summer 2010. Our first summer without Radical Betty, not to mention those who went before her. I will be walking the beach. Fin Family Moominbeach. Who wants to walk with me?

Restless.

P.S. Man oh man, this should not be a postscript but I have again forgotten to mention that it is DogMomster’s birthday! Even though I did wish it via Twitter. Head over to cliffsvic and wish her a happy birthday!