Random bits of my so-called life.

Wednesday chili and whine lunch sitting at a bar somewhere?

Once a week lunch (more or less) might not always happen on Wednesday. But it was a beautiful (if cold) day and I wanted to get out into the countryside. I encountered a little, uh, “friction” about it at first but that was due to some computer room “stress” that I interrupted. Who knew? Words were exchanged, including the F-bomb (me, pretty quietly actually), and a few things in the kitchen were slammed around a bit (not violently) but life went on. As it does. I don’t really get computer room stress. 99% of the time working on spreadsheets or code or whatever is zen for me.

We chose Dexter’s Pub for chili today. I actually got chili, the GG got a BLT. As we were mustering to leave, who walked in? The Grinch (the real Grinch, not my cousin), The Cat in the Hat, and I dunno, was it Yertle the Turtle? And others. I didn’t recognize all the characters. I was puzzled about this gathering at the pub until the GG reminded me that there were Seussical (the musical) signs all over Dexter. Oh, duh. We’re guessing this group had done a school presentation. That brought up memories for me of the YAG Lydia Mendelssohn Friday morning school performance. Good and bad memories but we’ll go there some other day. And I can laugh about the bad memories.

Oh, and then. I turned on the oven so I could put a baking tray of American Mom Chicken Shawarma in and turned it on. Or so I thought. I mean I did turn the oven on but, after not hearing the ding telling me preheat was done (which is important on Gertrude), I turned around and was greeted with this chicken nugget display. That thingy on the left ROTATES! I was like, what the hell am I looking at? Is Gertrude broken? Nope, cooking in the “dark” like I often do, I hit the wrong button. I owned Gertrude for at least 15 years before I discovered her ovens have a chicken nugget setting.

Cooking in the dark? I like to live by ambient light. There are LED lights on over the sink and if I need more light, I can turn other LEDs on. These days we don’t really need great big overhead lights (although I have some). I use small twinkle (LED) lights all over my house, my phone and laptop screens, and my Nest smoke alarm lights my way on middle-of-the-night visits to the Water Closet.

I took this photooo in February 2012, a few weeks before my mother The Commander died. I don’t want to talk about all of that for now but it was a very warm winter and there usually isn’t open water between the moominbeach and Round Island at this time of year. In 2012, there was open water. Ice walkers beware.

The yooperland has gotten a lot of snow this winter and it might take a while for it all to melt but it is February and that means we are on the downside. We’ll get more snow and frigid temps but the birds are already trying out snippets of their SONGS (as opposed to noise) and if the sky is not cloudy, it almost looks like a summer sky.

Note to the GG (and me). Do not schedule a vee-hickle for an afternoon service appointment. Man oh man. Cygnus went in yesterday morning (actually it got dropped off Sunday afternoon) for routine maintenance (we did let them replace the rear brakes). Mooon Yooonit went in at 3:00 PM today for routine maintenance and a new battery (deedly-deedly-deep). I was not enamored by the fact that the service area was open until 8:00 PM and we hadn’t heard from them about Mooo Yooonit’s status by about five. I like to be home at The Landfill by 6:00 PM unless we are going somewhere for FUN, not picking up a car from service.

The GG ended up walking over to the dealer while I cooked salmon piccata. It wasn’t their fault. It was ours for not mindfully scheduling a car appointment at a convenient time for *us*.

I did take Cygnus to Meijer today where I got things I can’t get at Plum or other fancy stores: Triscuits, frozen lima beans, frozen potato patties, and drumsticks, the ice cream kind. I also picked up a couple filet mignons (individually packaged), some salmon filets for tonights piccata, and I scored some lamb stew meat. Filets and lamb stew are in the freezer.

In other words, I stuck my head up, saw my shadow, and hunkered down for another six weeks.

I’d had sorta plans to hit the grock store this morning but Cygnus was in for scheduled maintenance and Mooon Yooonit needs a new battery (scheduled for tomorrow afternoon). So no viable car. And it was SNOWING. I mustered enough psychological energy to wash and change the sheets (they needed it, I’ve been a bit neglectful) and empty the dishwasher, and that was about it.

Oh and, I did my NYT word puzzles. Wordle (SPOILER) not a problem if you hang around occasional cigar smokers. I got queen bee on the spelling bee. And the xword was easy since it was a Monday. It was also weird (SPOILER ALERT) because all of the theme answers were “Ground Hog Day”, i.e., the movie. It was weird enough that I checked out what Rex Parker had to say about it. Like Mikey in the cereal commercial from my childhood, “He hates everything.” He had some words to say about it but (surprise) he didn’t seem to totally hate it. We won’t talk about the Connections puzz. I got yellow and green and put it aside. Will I get back to it? I do not know.

After I wrote last night’s blahg entry, I remembered the Stable Bar on Portage Ave. in Sault Ste. Siberia. It was a pitcher-of-beer/peanut-shells-on-the-floor type place and it could get wild. I used to go there frequently with my second high school boyfriend and his friends beginning when I was a high school senior and he was a college sophomore. He had grown up in Sault Ste. Siberia, so we went to the same high school (*probably* didn’t know each other but I think he asked me to dance at a mixer when I was a freshman and he was a junior), and he was attending the local university (LSSU). We drank beer at the Stable illegally at first but on January 1st of my senior year, the drinking age dropped to 18. He was immediately legal and I became legal on my birthday a couple weeks later.

In the winter when it was snowy (and it was ALWAYS snowy), snowmobilers mobbed The Stable and it was always a huge party. I dunno exactly what clothing snowmobilers wear nowadays but it is surely a lot more high tech than it was then, which was kind of a one piece snowsuit with a hood. I *think* people wore helmets? I was in the bathroom one night and in the stall next to me, I heard a splash and then some kind of expletive. Pulling her suit down to use the toilet, that poor woman had dunked her hood in the bowl. I bet she had a cold ride home that night.

The Stable burned down not too many years later, then the adjacent Northview Lounge. They had the same owner, a guy who lived about a block away from my family. He was kind of a weird guy, not in a good way. Once when I worked the cash registers at Tempo, I thought he was gonna KILL me when I made him wait until the customer ahead of him got their credit card approved. Those were the bad old days when us cashiers had to CALL THE STORE OFFICE, which then had to make a call to a credit card “hotline” (or something) to get a “code”. I was as annoyed as he was but there was not a god damn thing I could do about it. Some people in town (including my dad probably) suspected arson, i.e., he had burned down his own bars.

P.S. That’s my dad in the pic. It’s a scan so not sure what year it was. He was in his early 70s maybe?

Where do I start with this post? I dunno. A facebook friend I have known since probably kindergarten (a popular guy I have never known well) posted a picture of some snowmobiles with commentary that people who complain about snowmobilers should think about what visiting snow-mobilers contribute to the yooperland economy, which is and has been very depressed for many many years. My lifetime and before. And still.

I don’t know this “friend” very well and I don’t think we agree about politics but he also seems to actually CARE about people, etc. I am trying desperately to find any little bit of common ground with MAGA folks so I wrote a polite comment agreeing with him. Because I DO agree with him. Tourists of any sort help struggling economies. My comment was well received by him and others.

I *have* complained about snowmobilers throughout my life. But life is complicated and so are people. As a high school kid, my brother was dying to have a snowmobile. My brother became a mechanical/automotive engineer and snowmobiles were right up his alley. So we had one for a while. I actually drove it once or twice, across the schoolyard and back. I had a guy named Nick Sherman (cousin of my friend Danny Sherman from yesterday) riding behind me. He was apparently impressed with my ability (as a girl) to drive a snowmobile. I was much less impressed with my snowmobile driving abilities. He may or may not have had a bit of a crush on me and vice versa. But he was only visiting us for a few days and his cousin Danny will always be the first “love of my life.”

What mainly bothers me is when trails get mixed. What I mean is that snowmobiles do NOT belong on hiking trails. Those belong to pedestrian traffic. Most snowmobilers are responsible about this but there are always a few of those, “Well! I drive my snowmobile when I’m drunk!” folks. This is an actual quote from a (long dead) moominbeach neighbor at a county meeting where the agenda was supposed to discuss a part of our two-track road. (I was not there.) The road issue didn’t come up until another neighbor rattled along about, “I don’t like when those snowmobilers drive drunk” (blah blah blah). And that didn’t even bring up the road issue, it just prompted the drunk snowmobiling guy to get up and leave, hollering on the way out. My parents and Radical Betty were totally cracking up about this whole thing.

A cautionary tale. My uncle Don was a popular GP in Sault Ste. Siberia. He delivered about a bazillion babies and to this day, when people see/hear my last name (which I didn’t change when I got married), they ask if he was my dad. Nope. He was my uncle. My dad did not do anything involving blood, guts, or amniotic fluid. He was a banker (like his dad). A couple other things my uncle did… 1) Sew somebody’s nose back onto their face. 2) Deal with (in the ER) a person (maybe two, I can’t remember) who snowmobiled across a wire and got beheaded. I’m pretty sure he/they were dead by the time they got to my uncle at the ER. Jack of all trades…

Where do I end with this post? This pic is not from the yooperland. It is from Tip-up Town at Houghton Lake, an event we are not at this year. This event began long ago as an ice fishing event but now incorporates snowmobiles and helicopters and all kinds of stuff.

You might guess that this is an old photo. Even if you don’t know the age of the purple beach urchin (four and a quarter, I think), there is a vintage van (VW bus I think?) in the background that probably hit the junkyard decades ago.

Our snowbanks at the moment are sorta equivalent in size to the one the beach urchin is sitting on. The last several winters whatever snow we got didn’t last long. Is it global warming or weird weather patterns? I do not know. I do believe that using less energy in general is a decent strategy. I’m not sure I will ever be able to adapt to a fully electric vehicle though. It might work for me if I were just driving it around town and could plug it in at home. And if I also owned a robust gasoline engine vehicle to drive me up to the yooperland.

The VW bus belonged to our (late, alas) neighbor Hans’s son, who must have been visiting his parents at the time? The GG and I can’t remember what he did for a living but we think we remember it involved something to do with botes on the Great Lakes. The GG looked him up and apparently he went to the Great Lakes Maritime Academy and “worked the engines”. He also said, “like my dad”. The Gumper was the master mechanic on the Hornet in WWII.

Anyway, a VW bus is in my history but not via my family. We had VW bugs. But the Sherman family, who encamped at the moomincabin for two weeks a number of summers when I was a kid, could not fit their family of seven in a VW bug. So they had a VW bus and I rode in it many times. Usually us kids were on adventures with my dad and Pete Sherman, his childhood friend. The Commander and Esther Sherman would be back at the moomin, cruising through the Joy of Cooking, cooking up stuff to feed all of us kids plus community dinners with the relatives at the Old Cabin. Just a slice of my idyllic childhood.

Beth, Paul, Danny, David, and Willy. Beth was Beth Frances and her dad was insistent upon that as her middle name. I can only guess to honor my mother Frances. Danny was my age and also my first boyfriend (at age six). We play-acted our “wedding” on the beach many times. It took place at Niagara Falls (the Shermans lived near there) and there was something about “let’s go honeybunch!” at the end of it. Oh, we didn’t kiss or anything like that. We were little kids.

I kinda wanna say something like thank god but it’s all good fun to be oot and aboot (as the Canuckians say) in the dark and dead of winter.

Today was a birthday of porterization, JP’s to be accurate. We met at the Earle. They took an Uber to the restaurant (good choice) and we drove them home. I have never taken an Uber but I have taken a Lyft. It was right before the covid shutdown and Little Cat Z ordered one to show me how they worked (at my request). We were downtown and wanted to be dropped off at the Plum Market and we were able to show the Lyft driver (a woman, as we requested) the “shortcut” to the Plum. (Dexter instead of Huron.)

The Earle has a wide-ranging menu and I don’t remember what everyone else ordered but I definitely ordered a duck breast dish. I sampled some small bits of appetizers and took a bite or two of dessert. I ordered two ‘hattans, I swear I ordered the second one no fewer than THREE times. Other than that, the service was fine, as always.

It turned out that one of the beach urchins was at the Grotto, a block or so away. I figured out where it was PDQ. Nevertheless, a long conversation about the Grotto vs. the Zal Gaz Grotto ensued. Nope, not the same thing. The Zal Gaz has been there since before I even lived on The Planet Ann Arbor. It is (if I get it right) a Masonic organization providing support for various good causes.

My grandparents were involved in Masonic organizations but not my parents. I was in Job’s Daughters for a while but only because it was a “cool” thing to do in my little town and my much admired older female cousins were in it. I quit after having my stupid white shoes stolen and being forced to shame another girl (a pregnant girl before Roe vs. Wade). That is all a (weird) story for another day. I think two of my cousins did a turn as Honored Queen. Not me. I don’t really have the “right stuff” for that kind of position anyway. Same with Homecoming Queen.

Anaway (as the British say), HB to JP. Another trip around the sun for all of us frozen ice January babies.

Oh yeah, now that I’m retaaared, I am no longer limited to choosing to drive north (or back) on a weekend day or taking a vacation day to do it during the week.

When COVID was “over” — but it really really wasn’t — the unwashed southeast Michigan masses returned to their weekend mass migrations to and from the yooperland and the northern lower. This was in 2021 and I had a brand new car (Cygnus X-1) and my first couple trips driving down on a Sunday were horrific. I have never been a timid driver but covid somehow knocked me down a bit on that. And, man oh man if I wanted to pass somebody slow, I could NOT get into the passing lane to save my life. One Sunday featured MANY motorcycles (there was a motor-sickle event in Iggy that weekend). The motorcycle riders were driving safely for the most part. Just too many vee-hickles on the road and most of them going way too fast.

The GG and Little Cat Z were driving tandem with me in Mooon Yooonit. I can’t remember the exact logistics of what we were doing but they were ahead of me and at some point the GG “panicked” because he couldn’t see me. He called (doo doo doo doo doooooo… cue the Twilight Zone). His ring tone always startles me, even though I assigned it to his contact on my phone. “What mile marker are you at?” He was at mile marker 180. “I’m at 180 too. Y’know, I don’t think I’m that far behind you. I just don’t think you can SEE me.”

Anyway, we drove up last Monday and came back home today. If you are a regular, you may have seen that our trip up was riddled with black ice, etc., and all kinds of “crazy cowboys” going too fast and sliding off the road. Or crashing into somebody else. Once up there, we had a bit more snow but we were mostly dealing with smaller low traffic roads, not the I75 SUV Speedway. Part of me wanted to stay another day but we have a speshul event tomorrow night and we wanted to make sure we were home in time to attend it. This winter, that could’ve been dicey but our drive home was smooth and dry.

It was a kind of a slow “weekend” (except it wasn’t a weekend) and, after a few years of not hanging out much at the cFam cabin at Hoton Lake, I am looking forward to more.

There’s plenty of snow up at the cFam cabin but (obviously) this big pile is from a plow.

Where should we meet for dinner? We were meeting the UU and The Beautiful Gay (TBG). They drove down from south of Gaylord (Michaywe) and we drove up from Houghton Lake. Our drives were roughly equidistant (half an hour or so), with ours probably being a wee bit shorter. It was a snow drive but not the terrifying kind.

We met at Spike’s Keg O Nails and I wish I had remembered to take a photo but we were all gabbling like crazy and I didn’t manage it. You’ll have to make do with this reflection of the interior of the cFam cabin with some outdoor items. Kinda like a double exposure almost.

We had never been to Spike’s before but Little Cat Z went there a while back and gave it a good recommendation. I was encouraged that they (very happily) substitute gluten free buns for their sandwiches. I mean EVERY sandwich. There’s a small fee but nothing unaffordable and one of our party does not do gluten so that was a bonus. You can also order every sandwich as a wrap unless it already comes as a wrap (mine did). Spike’s Keg O Nails may not sound like the name for a gluten free friendly restaurant. It sounds more like an old sailor’s bar. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. But it was great and our servers were wonderful!

I don’t avoid gluten but I like wraps as opposed to sandwiches with big slices of bread or large buns. A little bread goes a long way for me.

That’s about it for today. I am just out of steam. Packing up and moving out tomorrow. Alas. It’s really nice up here on winter weekdays when there are no tourists around.

P.S. I just have to document this. At one point TBG asked our lovely servers if they had noticed the ID twins. One of them said she would have pegged US (TBG and KW) as the identical twins. I take that as a huge compliment because TBG is so much more beauteous than I am. But as my (late, alas) Jewish friend Sari once called me (even though I don’t think I deserve it), TBG is a mensch. We are (of course) not identical twins and in a lot of ways we are not alike. But we are kindred spirits and I am honored to be able to call her my sister-in-law.

Actually it isn’t exactly a beach here at the Hoton Lake Group Home aka the cFam cabin. This is an inland lake (albeit a LARGE one) so, unlike the oceans or Great Lakes, there aren’t long stretches of sugar sand beach. Mostly people have seawalls, like the cFam does. There are little pieces of sand beach but they are few and far between and some of them are man-made.

The moomincabin is on a 3/4 mile (or so) sugar sand beach on the Upper St. Marys River (no apostrophe in “Marys”). It is not quiiiiite on Lake Superior but faces northwest into Whitefish Bay (cue Gordon Lightfoot) which *is* part of Lake Superior. The moominbeach is a sunset beach.

The cFam cabin is different than the moomincabin. For one thing, it is a totally modern HOUSE although it was much more rustic before the cFam parents died and the cFam sibs rebuilt it. The moomincabin is semi-rustic, mainly that it is not insulated. Nevertheless, it is pretty comfortable except when it’s frozen solid like it probably is now.

I knew the minute I first arrived at the moldy old cFam cabin, in the winter when we had to flush the toilet with buckets of water, that the GG was the guy for me. Go figger. Of course, meeting two of his brothers (including his ID twin), and his (late) little sister (18 or 19 then), The Beautiful Suzie, helped seal the deal. I remember Suze being a bit skeptical of meeeee that weekend. Like, “why is SHE riding in the front passenger seat. That’s MY seat.” But Suze and I bonded PDQ. We loved each other and I miss her greatly.

I watched the sun rise this morning and then we moseyed over to Little Boots Country Diner for breakfast. It’s my first time there since before covid. Before that, we went there all the time. I ordered my usual, the Smokin’ Gun Quesadilla. It is lovely and comes served in three triangular pieces with little containers of salsa and sour cream on the side. My pre-covid approach to what is kind of a lot of food for me was to eat two of the triangular pieces and box the other for breakfast the next day. I haven’t been eating big breakfasts since covid and I could only manage one triangle today. But that’s okay because we have TWO triangles left for breakfast tomorrow. One for meeeee and one for the GG.

17 what? You might ask. 17 accidents between The Planet Ann Arbor and Hoton Lake, that’s what. Can you say intermittent black ice and other various forms of frozen water?

We encountered the first two (slide-offs) within a mile of getting on the freeway. Most of the accidents we saw were slide-offs, including one semi that jack-knifed into the median. I didn’t see his face but the GG got a glimpse and said he looked very unhappy. There were a few two-car crashes and one that involved SIX cars if we counted right. I couldn’t tell if any of these involved injuries, etc. We saw one ambulance leaving a scene but couldn’t see what had happened because there was a barrier between the southbound and northbound. Maybe that was a good thing.

Did the GG slow down? Oh, yes he did. Disclaimer: he is a good driver but occasionally he is a little fast for my taste, especially in inclement weather. Today I was pretty comfortable with the speed we were going but kinda wished we would just get off the freeway and make our way back home via the back roads, although they were probably worse than the freeway today, just not a lot of traffic. The freeway was jammed with semis and recklessly fast pickup trucks. Guys, SLOW DOWN! When we passed a slow-moving pickup, the GG was marveling at its speed until I said, “It’s a woman.”

Nevertheless, we persisted, making a stop at FlaMan’s place after which the roads got much better. And after lunch at the Spikehorn Bar (we were both starving and the fish sandwich hit the spot), gas and windshield washer (low as you can probably guess via the photo), we got to the Hoton Lake Group Home aka the cFam cabin. The GG did a lot of snow-blowing (with my dad’s old blower). We aren’t sure what our itinerary is from here, weather permitting it might include Gaylord and/or Iggy (St. Ignace). But we’ll be back on The Planet at the end of the week by hook or by crook.

Replying to a comment by JP of Porterization a couple nights ago… JP and the GG tie for the title of King of Cryptic Text Messages. I mean, just today, the GG texted me from Sparrow Meats to ask if I wanted him to pick anything up. Yes. Lamb stew meat and do they have duck breasts? I was hoping for a yes-or-no answer. I got, “She does not have duck breasts (human I think).” Yes that is crude! It also doesn’t answer the question. The answer turned out to be no and while I was disappointed, it was okay. They have the best duck breast form factor in town and I had originally planned on duck breasts (from Sparrow) on my birthday but I got distracted and it turned out to be a no-go. But filet mignon worked out fine.

So JP of porterization commented “When we go out, we get our car started before we get back. (ibid)” The back story behind this is that it was uber cold on Friday night so we decided instead of making everyone walk a distance from parking to Dexter’s Pub, the GG and I would drive our friends of porterization out there and drop them and me off. They parked on the street in front of our house and transferred directly into Cygnus and we taxied them out and back. As it turned out there was a close parking space at Dexter’s (and we didn’t even have a Parking Guru in the car).

We took a river ride back and at some point somebody became sentient enough to realize that we could probably start the vee-hickle of porterization remotely from Huron River Drive. Some fumbling occurred but yer fav-o-rite retaared user experience designer figgered it out and when we turned onto our street, there was their car, headlights on and running.

I do not know what “ibid” means. I even looked it up but the definition was a bit obtuse. Plain English, please? I could have been an English major and at one point early in college I was actually (very casually) invited to be an English major. But I was gonna play my flute and I didn’t study English. But I am not stupid about English either (don’t ask me about the subjunctive or things like “ibid” 🙂 ) That said, one time an uber-smart colleague in India got all excited about the Oxford Comma. Yes yes yes! It’s a bit controversial. Such a fun conversation.

It snowed ALL DAY today. I’m not sure if it’s done yet. We are not in any kind of snowmageddon. This is typical southeast Michigan snow. I think we might get six inches by the time it finally ends. Our stores do NOT EVER run out of milk and bread and other staples because of a snowstorm. Covid maybe. Back in the 2014 Polar Vortex Winter, the Plum Market butcher at the time walked through deep snow down the middle of North Maple to get to work on one particularly challenging day. (He lived somewhere in the neighborhood.) I had walked too and was there to greet him at the meat counter, LOL!

Actually it’s Guenther Road, which intersects with Jerusalem but I like the name Jerusalem better. It’s also a prettier road, lined with old oaks or whatever, a bit like a tunnel, but Guenther is pretty too.

Moooon Yooonit did not start (again) this morning until her “younger sister” Cygnus jumped her but after the GG drove her around for a while, she has been starting without a problem. My personal opinion is that it’s still time for a new battery. Clearly this one is in a failure mode and a car battery is definitely not something we can’t afford. Fortunately I almost exclusively drive Cygnus (she’s “my” car), so I don’t have to deal with it.

A little car battery story to illustrate The Master of the Universe’s skills and ingenuity. Long long ago in a galaxy only blocks away — our pre-baby apartment on Jackson Ave. — the battery in one of our Ford Fiestas died. These were the old-school Fiestas from the late 1970s/early 1980s. *I* could actually (sorta) afford one at $5,000 but my parents bought me one anyway and NO I was not spoiled. My dad and brother were all excited about the Wenkel engine. Google it if you care. I was really excited about owning my first *new* (cute) car but I have long since moved on from my Ford Fiesta. My top three fave cars being the Dogha, the Ninja, and Cygnus X-1. Not in any particular order.

Anyway, in those days, the GG and I used to drive to work in one Ford Fiesta and I would usually walk home (We both worked at the Environmental Protection Agency). We knew the battery was in a failure mode so we went to Sears (why Sears, I dunno) to buy a new one. Problem. Some young punk at Sears refused to install it. I fergit what the “policy” was but they did allow us to *buy* the battery so the GG put it in the back of the car and we went home.

The next morning, the OLD battery started right up and we drove the few blocks from our apartment down to the Huron/Seventh stop light. And stopped. And the battery died. Right in the middle of all kinds of traffic and not to be resurrected. The GG opened the back hatch, pulled out the new battery, *jumped* the old one with the new one and voila, we were on our way (and so were all the people behind us, gah). This operation took a couple minutes.

The Twinz of Terror put themselves through college in part by working summers at the Chrysler Hamtramck Assembly Plant. The GG could take a car apart and put it back together and in our early days, he did a lot of DIY repairs, sometimes dicey ones. Nowadays we mostly take our vee-hickles in for service. In part (but not totally) because of all the computerized components.

There he is, all plugged in and everything.

So this is what went down this afternoon. Don’t worry, it isn’t all that exciting although the GG was a wee bit stressed out about it. We had a need to get Mooon Yooonit outta the driveway. Mooon Yooonit has been in the driveway for quite a while now and hasn’t been run for a long time. You can guess what happened next, right? If you guessed “her battery was dead”, ding ding ding, you win the booby prize.

So the GG got out his “jumper” (in the pic) and guess what? It didn’t work. Did it overheat or is it just dead after *45* years? I’m thinking whether or not it overheated, it’s probably time for a new one. And maybe a new battery for Mooon Yooonit at six years and I’m afraid to count how many miles. He did eventually successfully jump start Mooon Yooonit via Cygnus’s battery. But still.

I INSISTED that we take Cygnus out to Dexter’s Pub. Friends of porterization were riding with us. I KNEW Cygnus’s battery was fine. I didn’t exactly trust Mooon Yooonit’s at this point. What if we get done with dinner and the battery is dead *again*? Me and Cygnus won that sorta argument and all was fine.

And then. After he charged Mooon Yooonit’s battery this afternoon, the GG started trying to tell me a long story about Toyota design flaws (Mooon Yooonit is a RAV4) and his “jumper” and as it went on and on, I finally said something like, “I am not gonna EVER understand all of this.” He retorted with something like, “You have no idea about what kind of things I do around here.” No. No, I don’t. I am not mechanically or electrically inclined. But also, yes I do. I so so so do appreciate all the things he does that I have no clue about how to do or even that he is doing them.

By the way, the backdrop to all of this is the temperatures around here are now about zero F. and never got above five today. I’ll tell y’all (again) about what it was like to walk to high school in minus 32 degree temps some other day. And I am NOT talking about the wind chill factor, which wasn’t even invented yet. Minus 32 was the ambient temperature.

I’ve stumbled upon some facebook videos that I actually like. Amateur online videos generally drive me nuts. Things I hate about these: 1) Sometimes they are toooooo long. I mean with nothing happening FOREVER or even at all. 2) Quick little videos that don’t make any sense. Whut just happened? 3) Big family videos. How many kids do you have and why are you putting them out there on the internet? How many of them are gonna move to Timbuktu without leaving a forwarding address when they reach the age of majority?

On facebook I am delighted to have stumbled upon Jase and Josh, two British guys who are doing a little drive-through of the Great Lake State. In January. A cold and snowy January. They were most of the way up the west side of the state and went sledding at Boyne Mountain (I skied at Boyne a billion times in my misspent youth) and one of them (Josh, I think), did something to his back(?) (not sure if the sledding caused that or not) and spent a couple of nights at the hoosegow. They had to make a decision about whether to continue on to the yooperland and they decided YES! They are in Marquette now. Yes, they did miss Sault Ste. Siberia. That may have been a good thing. Today (yesterday?), a jeep was going waaaay too fast for conditions coming along the curve on Ashmun (the main drag) north toward Easterday, spun out, jumped a couple of four foot snowbanks, and crashed into a house.

I love Jase and Josh’s videos. They are 10-15 seconds each, so they are short, but we KNOW what’s going on because they narrate them. I would call them amateur but very well done. So I am following them.

The photooo is another one from 2006. I can’t think what car we navigated up that ice hill with. The Dogha (Dirty Old Green Honda Accord) maybe? At that time we did not own an SUV, except for the Jeep Wrangler, which at 14 years old, I doubt we drove on that trip. The Dogha was a great car and could handle snow like a champ. But that ice? Not sure…

The other thing that initially puzzled me about the timing of this photo is that it was 2006 and my dad died in 2006. But then I remembered this was January. We must have been up there for my birthday and my dad was alive and well on that trip. 10 days later (or so), he was on his daily walk down the escarpment when he fell and smashed his pelvis. The Commander called me to say they were being air-ambulanced to the Henry Ford hoosegow in Detroit. I made daily trips over there for three weeks or so. They fixed that and he was ground-ambulanced back to the yooperland and installed in rehab at what was then called Tendercare, a couple blocks from their house. Alas, he did not thrive, which was not unusual for someone that age with that kind of injury, and died in March.

The GG is on a call with the Hiawatha Shore-to-Shore North Country Trail Chapter. I don’t participate (much) in these calls but I like to be able to hear them from the kitchen. I am not all that involved in the details but I am interested in what they are doing. Especially the chainsaw guys.

Apparently the GG set up two computers to join this call. So they can all see him in duplicate, which would be the same as looking at identical twins, and he has one. For a moment there was a thought that I might also join from my laptop in the kitchen but naw. I did many covid type years on MS Teams calls and we did NOT show ourselves live.

This MacStack is from the 2000s. I’m sure my original 2003 12 inch screen PowerBook is in this picture but not sure if we still have it. I was the earliest adopter. The Commander bought me one (long story). It arrived a day late because snowstorm. It came with a printer and I fergit what else. The GG was in the back room when it all arrived and I unboxed it all. Eventually he came out to the front room to visit our guinea pig and that’s when he noticed my new laptop.

When I schlepped my laptop about town(s), I was met with differing reactions from people of the male persuasion. Young males would sidle up to me and offer help, which I certainly didn’t need. Older males acted like they had seen an alien. Nope, it’s just a SMART woman with a computer. Women? They didn’t really pay attention to my new computer. They were doing what women do, chores and grock shopping and laundry and schlepping children around. Computer? Whatever.

Within a couple years, this stack of Mac laptops had accumulated. Me, The Comm, daughters, nieces, and sister-in-law. I think. And a ‘hattan to top it all off.

Wow! What a good time. At the EPA retiree lunch, that is. We met at Paesano’s. It’s a really good restaurant but we don’t often go there because it’s across town and getting there is like running a gauntlet. A (late) MacMu uncle of mine lived down the street from the restaurant so usually we went when there was some kind of family event he was organizing. (But not the one where he told a bunch of us, including an aunt and uncle on the FinFam side of my family that the last time he had a party, he ate so many marijuana brownies he couldn’t remember if he had six or eight kids. Answer, six. Three from his first marriage and three stepchildren. But that party was in his back yard. My main take-away from that was “don’t eat any brownies.” I learned early on that pot makes me paranoid and I don’t touch it.)

I hadn’t seen some of these people in AGES and some of them were more familiar than others but once they reintroduced themselves, it all fell into place. Making things a bit difficult was that I was facing bright sunlight so I was seeing the folks on the other side of the table in silhouette, meaning their facial features were not very visible.

Nevertheless, I remembered EVERYONE. I worked at That Darn EPA for 15 years (or so) and got to know a lot of folks pretty well due to my presence at “The Window”. The Window was where people dropped off data sheets (hand-filled) for processing and picked up printouts from the Data 100 printer, a behemoth. Oh yeah. And COMPLAINED.

When I first worked there, it was my JOB to man The Window. I mean, I went to college for this crappy job? I think it paid something like $8,700 a year. But I am a self-starter and after a few years, I was the “technical supervisor” (something like that), teaching myself how to code FORTRAN along the way, and was receiving a more or less living salary. Various other people ran The Window by then but I was still a regular presence there, solving problems and showing people how to fill out their data sheets, or just lending a hand and hopefully some good cheer. “This is not rocket science, we will figure it out.” And we always did.

It was a smallish crowd today and that was okay with me. “Friendly Introvert” that I am, that allowed me to “ease in”. There were three women besides me and they implored me to come back again to increase their numbers. Yes. Yes, I will. I love all these people but in particular, CDP’s wife is special to me. She did not work at the EPA, she was an MSU college prof, so I didn’t meet her until much later but we hit it off PDQ. And in one of those strange twists of fate, I also know her daughter. We took community college classes together for a couple years. I left for Corporate America and I think she is free-lance but she also *taught* at the college at least for a while (she has a masters in education).

The pic is from “memories” (2025). Man was that day a mess. We hadn’t gotten a lot of snow but what we did get was CEMENT. See the branches sticking out of the snow cement on Cygnus’s veeendsheeeld? I backed her down the driveway to get some sunlight and ran her defroster at full blast seemingly forever but I can’t remember if I ever got that stuff melted or not. At least not that day.

P.S. This is kind of a higglety-pigglety stream-of-consciousness entry so I want to make clear that: 1) I did not retire from the EPA. 2) I retired from Corporate America. 3) I worked for the EPA as a contractor (Computer Sciences Corporation) and voluntarily took a layoff from that company when a new contractor took over and I decided to be a SAHM for a while. I could have probably taken a job with the new contractor or maybe even gone federal. But I didn’t.

The poorly framed photo has nothing to do with the content of this post.

I’m gonna riff off the old Sault Ste. Siberia Penney’s store (and others), since Pooh and Margaret kinda got my brain off on a tangent. J.C. Penney *was* a relatively affordable place to buy clothing if you were not a terrifically affluent family and we bought stuff there. I suppose there were also the “dime stores”. We had three. Woolworth’s, Kresge, and Scott’s. Did they even carry clothing? I can’t remember. I do remember lusting for a Barbie bridal gown, but they never had one so The Commander made a beautiful one for my Barbie. I suppose the last Barbie bridal gown got off the truck in Traverse City or some place and those yooperland kids would just have to deal with tennis outfits or whatever. (My kids are probably ROFL if they are reading this.)

The store The Commander liked the best was The Hub (womens’ clothing). Unfortunately we were only occasional customers there. A bit too expensive for us. There were a few other stores selling womens’ clothing but I suspect that the sometimes snooty Commander regarded them as “old lady” stores. And not without reason. I don’t think the inventory changed all that often (like for years) and once all of the hats in one of them had to be fumigated (or whatever) because of lice. In all fairness, The Comm’s early career was at the downtown Detroit Hudson’s, which was an elegant store when she worked there but was imploded (on purpose) a number of years later.

Nowadays, I am all about comfort and ordering online from trusted sources. Elastic-waist skirts, tights, leggings, base layer shirts. Tie-dye. Anything that’s comfortable and makes me look a little crazy.

Fun fact, my MacMu granddaddy worked in downtown Detroit (he had something to do with building contractors) and he used to see old man Kresge in the streets at lunch time or whenever. I don’t think he knew Kresge personally. He also used to meet my mother (his daughter) for lunch at places that, well, I’ll just say, by the time she moved to the yooperland with my dad, she knew the difference between pasties (long a) and pasties (short a). Don’t worry, she was of age on these lunch junkets, if barely.

So. Go or no-go. Until now, go/no-go was when my team got together before a software release to decide whether it was a “go” or maybe we had to pull it back. I don’t think we EVER didn’t decide on GO. We were that good. Tomorrow’s go/no-go is do I go to the monthly EPA retiree lunch (with the GG) or not? I have not been to one of these lunches yet. If the GG goes alone, I get to be spac-i-fied. On the other hand, I know a lot of those people because I also worked with them long ago. And I was pretty dern bored today*. If the weather permits. If I do go, I hope CDP and wife are there.

*I am okay, just haven’t cobbled together a new routine yet. I WILL GET THERE! CHEERS!

I have driven up and down Trinkle Road umpteen bazillion times. During the heyday of the pandemic, I did it frequently because it was a way to get OUT of my neighborhood, especially when the GG was gone for the weekend, or a few weeks or whatever.

Today is the first time I have ever seen this structure. It is feet (10?) from the road but when the trees are leafed out, it is invisible, at least if you are driving (and are an intensely focused driver, like me). Today I was in the passenger seat and there are no leaves and there it was! Turn around and STOP! I gotta get a pic! There were also a bunch of smaller outbuildings in various states of disrepair. Some creative dad or whatever once had fun creating a small “town” or maybe “farm” is a better word and he is no longer around to keep up with it.

I have to laugh when I mention the GG being gone for a few weeks. He occasionally is, especially when he is supporting our friend Joan in her hiking endeavors. A few years ago I was walking in the woods behind my house and Luke of Perrynet approached me. He asked the question shyly, giggling a bit, “Is the GG ever coming home?” I’m sure he had been noticing that Cygnus was the solo car in the driveway and wondering if we had separated or something. Oh, no such luck. I explained about his adventures with Joan and all was well. The GG came home the next Sunday. We don’t have a particularly unconventional marriage but we trust each other and give each other a lot of space. I’ve never been interested in having affairs with other people and neither has he.

A serious winter storm is predicted for midnight through Tuesday morning and this time I am thinking they are not lying. It is a snowier winter than we’ve had for a while and I feel it in mah bonz or more likely my intuition is telling me to hunker down.

P.S. Pooh (my cousin) asked if the building in yesterday’s pic was the old Sault Ste. Siberia J.C. Penney store. Yes. Yes it was. And yes we bought fabric there. There was a balcony between the 1st and 3rd floors that housed fabric and patterns. Nowadays I believe it holds tribal offices (the decoration feels Native American) and I thought that the River of History Museum was in the building’s basement but not totally sure. The museum entrance is a couple doors down the street. But it could be that the museum continues along under several buildings including the old Penney’s. I only did light googling on this stuff.

The filets were cooked to perfection. Beach urchins took care of all the rest of the food. We couldn’t get the music pods working the way we wanted to so the Racc started pulling out records (and we dredged some more records up from the basement) and he did a great job of DJ-ing throughout the evening.

A number of years ago I started boxing up my record collection, such as it is, as well as my parents’ records and I was about to donate the whole shebang. Not so fast, KW. Little Cat Z happened in on all this during a visit from her then home in Detroit. Not so fast, mama. She took a box of records and the rest, or some of the rest, were relegated to the basement. I think I was thinking something like digitizing the ones I wanted and donating the rest. As it turns out, I was wrong (again!) because they sure came in handy tonight. And with somebody else’s eyes to leaf through the so-called collection, the playlist was much more interesting than whatever I might’ve stumbled upon. I do NOT have anything approaching an organized record collection, which may (or may not) make DJ-ing more interesting.

The pic is one I took on my daily winter 2012 schlep to hang out with The Commander at the War Memorial Hoosegow in Sault Ste Siberia. YakTrax on, backpack filled with two laptops (work and personal), phone in one pocket, cash, cards, and keys in the other. People up there were and are ingenious with their snow removal equipment. This is just a small bit of equipment. On the other end, there is a HUGE snowplow that can lift a plow totally up in the air over a parked car if necessary.

This was a cold day but in truth, that winter was an extremely warm one overall. The I500 snowmobile race was a mud race that year and after The Comm died in late February, when we were back on The Planet Ann Arbor, March featured temperatures in the 90s, a tornado and trees that flowered two months early. Flowering trees usually don’t blossom until May here.

So, on No Politics Day (NPD), I actually didn’t listen to a lot of political news. I did veer in the direction of politics when I mentioned one of my fave causes, Planned Parenthood, but that threatened to escalate and that’s all I will say about that except we shut that discussion down PDQ.

I prefer going out to lunch (over dinner) on NPD. I do like having a Landfill dinner on NPD. So we did lunch with some beach urchins at Casey’s Tavern today. We’re being porterized tonight at the Landfill (Chinese, the food, not the Porters), and tomorrow night we’ll have a family Landfill dinner. If I were still working, I would’ve taken today off and since MLK Day is Monday, it’d be a 4-day weekend. But whatever.

I was spotted at Casey’s because of my tie-dyed skirt by a man with a tie-dyed t-shirt. I *think* we have encountered this couple in Casey’s before. The wife is in a wheelchair. This was a good encounter.

We porterized ourselves tonight with Chinese takeout. I was happy with that and there was a fake log faaaar in the faaaarplace. We are on a different “clock” than our friends of porterization but they are now on their way home to watch whatever TV shows they want until whenever they want to watch them and I am gonna crash out.

P.S. I did snow driving today and I was a champ. Regained some of the driving confidence covid took away from me.