Random bits of my so-called life.

This is one the main places we used to ski when we were kids. The big hill with the tree in the middle was number 4. I did number 4 a few times but I did it carefully. I didn’t bomb it straight down from top to bottom.

Number 3 was below the clankity old chairlift. Expert skiers (like not me) only occasionally used it as a ski run.

Number 2 (to the right outta the pic) was not the easiest run for someone like me but I managed it pretty well.

Number 1 was the one I skied on the most. You got off the chairlift and skied down the top “leg” of number one. Halfway down there was a dogleg and a lot of people stopped at that point to chat or whatever. Once my childhood friend Helen’s older sister Grace Anne missed the stop and went flying over the side of the hill and we made up a song about it. “Off she goes into the wild blue yonder, sailing up over the side of the hill”. She was not hurt and how could we be so cruel to a person we loved?

She had probably driven us there that day, in their family’s ANCIENT Buick. We were in junior high and we were awful to our siblings sometimes.

The “intermediate hill” with its rope tow merged with the bottom of Number 1 and then over to the side was the bunny hill where I taught 8-year-olds how to ski a few xmas vacations.

Check out those old cars.

Okay, I listen to NPR a lot. 1) NPR does NOT just talk about politics. 2) I don’t get my political opinions from NPR. I get them from the golden rule. Even though I don’t practice Christianity or any religion, it’s a good rule. Trump (and Hegseth and whoever), take a note.

NPR has lately been running shows about LooksMax. I am kinda (horribly) fascinated with the idea that young men (teenagers and twenty-somethings) are actually doing things like hitting themselves in the face with hammers to do something to make their bone structure, uh what? More handsome? There are other things like making yourself taller. I’m not sure that is easy to make happen.

I get it. My bugaboo in junior high/high school was acne. It was pretty bad. Creams and crap like that, prescribed by my doctor/uncle if anything made it worse. Finally he gave me a mild antibiotic (that my family probably didn’t pay for) that I could use and refill when needed. That did the trick until age took over and dried me out a bit, only a few years later.

When I saw something today about “rib remodeling” (for women) fly by I didn’t even want to look at it. Does that mean you are taking a hammer to your rib cage to make yourself skinnier? I do not know and I did not look.

P.S. Having your uncle as a doc? It was not creepy at all. He just did little kid things and the acne thing and once a horrible ear infection. Git in the car, we’re goin’ to town, where he blew the wax outta my ear and gave me an antibiotic (that my family probably didn’t pay for). He didn’t get involved in examining female relatives’ woman parts.

Oh, no it’s not. The only pic I have of the real AirBnB is the one with Chief Tecumseh on the porch.

One of the things I can count on the GG to do when I ask him to take pictures is to take random pics that I didn’t necessarily ask for no matter how specific I am. So I got this, which is not of the AirBnB but from something on their hike. I’ve learned to just roll with whatever pics I get and try to make my own story.

I have been in Chillicothe once in my life. The GG and I drove down for a weekend and stayed with my brother and his wife. None of us had any children yet and I *think* that’s where we met his new golden retriever puppy Laker but not sure. It could’ve been Oakridge, Tennesee.

My brother was a mechanical engineer and I don’t remember what he did in Chillicothe. After that they moved to Oakridge and he did something in the nuclear industry. Eventually he snagged a job in his preferred auto industry and moved back to Michigan where he worked for GM until he died. As a side note, my brother the GM auto engineer was who suggested we buy our first Honda.

P.S. The AirBnB is fine and has adequate kitchen and bathroom facilities.

The GG is “doing Ohio” which means he is hiking with friends down there. His friends had scheduled an AirBnB and when he arrived at the address, this is what was there…

I’m like where are the flushy toilets and showers and where are you gonna cook a lasagna and a bunch of filet mignon in there. Is there a stove? It spent my childhood summers in rustic conditions with outhouses and cold running water from my next door uncle’s well through a garden hose so I can deal with that kind of stuff. But this was a little more rustic than my childhood cabin. He didn’t provide an explanation. To be fair, internet service was iffy.

Turns out this shack was at the address but was not the actual BnB. To get to that you had to snake your way around the shack and down a little road to the REAL AirBnb, where Chief Tecumseh stands guard.

There was a substantial No Kings protest in downtown Ann Arbor yesterday and maybe at Vet’s Park, which is near The Landfill.

I did not attend. I abhor Trump and MAGA, etc. I think Trump IS trying to become a “king” or dictator or whatever. Born in the USA well past WWII, I did not have to live through a dictatorship. Thanks to my dad and a few uncles and my father-in-law (and many others) who went to war.

Oh, and the f*cking SAVE act. None of this makes any sense to me, who grew up in an era when women almost always adopted their husband’s name. I did not take my husband’s name. No hyphens, no nothing. I am a Finlayson and that’s my name. I let my daughters take the GG’s name. No problem. My mom had a bit of an issue with me keeping my birth name and always put The GG’s last name on legal documents. This caused problems after mom died and I was being slammed by the most incompetent pettifoggers on earth. But my own lawyer fixed all of that.

I’d like to think my mom would be proud of me today, given the times, for insisting on keeping my name. Thinking back, I’m not sure my dad cared whose surname I used. He never said anything and maybe he was even silently rooting for me. I don’t really know.

The GG has taken a couple quick trips in the last six months or so. Otherwise we have had a LOT of togetherness lately. He was dead set to go to the yooperland a few weeks ago and then the yoop had a bomb cyclone event featuring snow. I actually said, “DON’T GO!” He didn’t. He did drive (on dry roads) west a bit to help build an elevated walkway aka bridge. That was a day trip albeit a FUN one.

So I am left here with Webster. Will he keep me warm at night? Actually it’s always been me who keeps other people warm at night. I didn’t have hot flashes much (TMI?), just that I run a little hot in general. Most of the time. It turned out that one of the beach urchins needed a Webster and we had TWO. So she took one of them.

Somebody got a GREAT pic of the racc (in cool sunglasses) with me in the background looking old and baggy but not terribly fugly. I’m not gonna post it because the only living people I post pics of are the GG and sometimes his ugly brother (i.e., ID twin). I mean, I do sometimes post OLD pics of living people.

So, what did you do today, KW? I I went to the grock store and did a couple other small errands and worked on de-cluttering the Landfill Chitchen. I took Cygnus out in the country…

…and I maybe broke a law. I took Miller to get home. I hung a louie off Miller into the neighborhood so I could get across to Dexter (don’t ask if you are not from The Planet Ann Arbor). In the process, I crossed the new (this summer) dedicated bike lanes to make my turn. There were bikes coming toward me from the other direction. The were much slower than I was and so I turned in front of them. Afterwards, I had second thoughts about that. Should I have waited (with my turn signal on) for them to continue? Probably. When I’m trying to make a left turn and there are automotive vee-hickles coming toward me, I gauge their speed and cross when it seems safe.

I am all for safe bike lanes. In this part of town, bike riders could take neighborhood streets to get downtown (a friend of mine did that for decades) but that’s a whole ‘nother story. I think next time this happens I will be more aware and wait for the bikes to go by before I cross. But this is all new and there are there are all kinds of new “things” in the street (speed bumps and yellow sticks) that drivers who have been traversing Miller since forever might not be able to process immediately. I will figure it out. The folks here on The Planet who are still able to drive but aging out of it probably won’t be able to manage it. The Commander wouldn’t have been able to. Although kudos to her for figuring out the bus system to get downtown when she was here visiting and helping us with her young granddaughters.

Friday is a somewhat unusual night for a Landfill Dinner. Usually we are porterized somewhere but the GG is heading to Ohiiio to hike for a week so we did it anyway.

My morning did not start auspiciously. I went to Meijer (for an aluminum foil lasagna pan for the GG’s upcoming trip and then the plum for an amazingly complicated list of stir-fry ingredients. I kept getting lost in the list and I needed mouse’s help finding a few of the ingredients. She doesn’t usually work on Friday but hey mom, let’s take a field trip.

On the way home from the plum, I did the most stupid thing on earth. I took the grocks out to Cygnus, put them in the back, returned the grokkery cart to the corral, FORGOT to close Cygnus’s rear gate, and drove home with the gate open, high in the air. I did not notice this situation until I started backing into the Landfill driveway and the backup cam was looking into the sky! Thankfully, it was a short slow drive. Nothing fell out and there were no cops around to notice. Jeebus.

Other than that, it was a good kind of work day. The beach urchins both worked today and I decided I needed to do most of the stir-fry prep. After Meijer and Plum I went to White Lotus Farms to get flavored goat cheese spread. First up was sorting out all of the sauce, etc. ingredients I had (and had bought).

Next, I sorted out the veggies I obtained. I had choices about those. I couldn’t find a bag of matchstick carrots but the racc is an expert about cutting those up from big carrots and he rose to the occasion.

I made the “sauce” that “marinated” (or whatever) the chicken and the Szechuan sauce. The recipe was pretty wonky about which ingredients went into which “sauce”. An editor was sorely needed but I figured it out.

Finally I chopped up veggies for the stir-fry. I left the chicken chopping and cooking to Little Cat Z, who was pretty tired from her long work week. I felt guilty about that but hopefully I helped by all the prep work I did. I had fun doing it.

The end result was okay but waaaay too salty. Too much tamari, I think. I might not ever do this recipe again. I mean there are a bazillion stir-fry recipes out there including some in my vintage Sunset cookbooks. Then again, maybe I just need to adjust the sauce. The veggies were fine.

P.S. I also made a lasagna today.

Thinking about church a bit this week. So many of us were brought up going to church. I certainly was.

My childhood church was not terrible. It was a mainstream Methodist church and although some ministers were better than others (like some presidents are better than others [snort]), it wasn’t a bad place to be. I loved the singing and the Sunday School activities. Still. Early on, I figgered out that there was a lot of crapola going on.

There was the time that my poor beleaguered mother, trying hard to fit in at the church, was helping set up the coffee hour that happened after church. Me (five) and my brother (two) were running around creating havoc in the church kitchen, which was underneath the nave or whatever it is (xword word). Leatha, an old biddy busybody tried to defuse the situation by gathering me and my brother together and telling us that Jesus was watching us. I don’t think my brother understood a word of it. I just thought it wasn’t true. Jesus (if he existed), didn’t give a crap about us, couldn’t see us, and wasn’t watching us mix it up in the Sault Ste. Siberia Methodist church kitchen. My mom needed help down in that f*ckin’ kitchen and Leatha was not help.

Years and years later when I was an adult, I mentioned Leatha’s name to a bunch of my mom’s friends and they guffawed. They had no more respect for her than I did. I know why people don’t tell 5-year-olds stuff like that but still. Why don’t they tell 5-year-olds stuff like that? There are ways to do it politely.

So what is your church? I think the GG’s church is the North Country Trail, even though he is Catholic by birth and upbringing. Mine I guess is the moominbeach.

When I searched for “church” in photos, this pic came up. Does it look like a church to you? It doesn’t look like a church to me.

P.S. I did learn about the golden rule in Sunday School. I believe in it and try to live by it. But it shouldn’t just be for “Christians”. It should be for EVERYONE on the Planet. Trump, take a note.

I travel solo to and from the yooperland and The Planet Ann Arbor quite frequently, at least during the good driving months. I am done done done with snow driving to the yooperland.

I don’t do plane travel very well. This is kind of crazy since my dad was a WWII pilot and took us up in light planes when I was a kid. But that’s how it is.

I went to visit Little Cat Z in her then home in Berkeley/San Francisco when she first moved out there. The morning I was to fly out, her car broke down, which meant I had to navigate the BART, etc., to get to her.

Not knowing what the hell I was doing, I said something like, it’s okay, I’ll figger it out and I did. She did give me some good instructions.

The GG dropped me off at Daytwa Metro. I breezed through security and got a seat by the gate. It had been 30 years since I had flown but I was seated next to a wonderful couple who talked most of the time we were ascending. That helped me.

I did many gyrations navigating through SFO to get to the BART but I managed it. At one point I was standing next to some “young” business type guys in a parking structure. We all thought we were at a BART stop but something didn’t feel right to me. I spied a certain sign and redirected these businessmen to follow me and baggy old bag that I was, they did. We got to an elevator, and then (I lost them at this point) I was on some kind of airport driverless transport and FINALLY I got to a place to buy a BART PASS. From there it was pretty easy. I was soooo proud of myself for doing all of that alone.

That’s Little Cat Z and Jess’s apartment in Berkeley. It doesn’t look comfortable in the pic but it was. Even with ants in the kitchen and a slug in the bathroom. At one point an apartment neighbor was caterwauling with his mom about “don’t make me do that”. It turned out that he didn’t want to go to church, if I’m remembering accurately. I can relate.

This post is inspired by my blahggy friend Margaret’s post about traveling all over the world solo, sometimes not knowing the language. She is more adventurous than I am about travel. I like the term “adventurous” better than “brave”, at least for traveling.

You may have to live on The Planet Ann Arbor to know how “speshul” it is. Do not get me wrong. I love it here. But some of the people? And their damn dogs?

There is a leash law here as well as a pick-up-your-poop law. One of the many reasons I don’t have a dog is that I once took a walk with a friend and her BIG dog. She was responsibly carrying poop bags but that dog made a LOT of poop and I can’t remember what we did with the last load of poop because she had run out of bags by that time.

The first year I had no kids in Haisley elementary, I was taking my early morning walk and when I got to the woods, it was PADLOCKED shut. Wait a minute! Can youz guyz do that? I had spent years working on the PTO so I spent a heartbeat thinking, dum de dum de dum, who do I still know on the Haisley PTO. I emailed Jacqui to ask about the padlocks. She asked the principal (not the same principal as I “worked” for) and the reply was “there is science in the woods”. Of course what the principal meant was “we want to be able to take kiddos into the woods to look at flora and fauna and not track dog poop into the school”.

I understand that but… First, I hardly ever see classrooms of kids in the woods behind my house. Second, I believe there are a lot of wild aminals in the woods and they must poop too? Third, my main PTO job was treasurer and when I left that “job”, there was a shit-ton of money hanging around that nobody seemed to want to spend. Maybe they were afraid of meeeee, banker’s daughter that I am, even though I encouraged spending it and probably very few people knew my dad’s occupation. I was thinking that for the amount of money that was in that treasury, the school could buy rain boots for every kid and hoses to clean off their boots before they came back in the building. That would probably be a stoopid solution but padlocking the woods was equally stoopid.

I responded with some of this stuff and the padlocks were removed within days. Thank you Jacqui.

A quote from my old coot: “Don’t go over there. That’s where Sam craps.” “Over there” was a section of the moomincabin yard, which is mostly forested but with spaces carved out for household chores and parking spots. NOT PAVED. SAND COVERED WITH PINE NEEDLES. Sam was my brother’s big rescue dog.

Spring has sprung so to speak but today was a frickin’ cold fugly day. I was in a sort of funk, oh nothing to write home about. The GG surprised me by making a faaar in the faaarplace in the late afternoon. That elevated my mood considerably.

I spent some time communicating with my youngest MacMu cousin (Doug) today (and for the last couple days). He is eight years younger than me. I was born three weeks after his sister Cathy, his one and only sibling. Cathy and I were great friends although I always felt a little less “social” than her. Alas she died a number of years ago. I have been getting to know her little brother in later years and love him very much.

Their mother, my aunt Charlotte, was The Commander’s (my mom’s) next younger sibling (3 and 4 out of 5) and they were bosom buddies. Charlotte was always lovely to me and when I got to be old enough to understand her humor, we had so much fun. She was the Radical Betty on my mom’s side of the fam. Although Radical Betty was *not* an opera singer.

Once when my cousin Doug was 12 or so, Charlotte sent him and a friend up to stay at the moominbeach on a bus from the Detroit area. The Old Cabin was empty at the time for reasons I can’t remember so the boys slept over there for the duration. Charlotte called at one time to make arrangements to drive up and pick them up. I answered the phone and we giggled about her bringing a black negligee up to stay with them in the Old Cabin. To embarrass them, of course.

The other thing that happened that summer was that Doug and his friend wanted to go to the island. Okay. The Commander was iffy about that and kept putting it off. Finally, there was a day when there was a huge nor’wester with big waves rolling in. My uncle Duke said, “Let ’em go to the island. They won’t get more than a few feet off the shore.”

That was true and me, Radical Betty, The Comm, and Duke ended up laughing our asses off looking out from Radical Betty’s house.

Cousin Doug and I are still (forever) eight years apart but we seem to connect in ways I may not have even connected with his older sister, the one that was my age. Even though we were friends and I loved her.

There is a stop sign at the top of the two-track moominroad where it intersects the Birch Point Loop. I don’t think there was a stop sign when I was a kid but there is one now.

Actually, my grandfather and a couple of his friends built the first part of the Birch Point Loop, or so I am told. All of the roads in the area except US2 were gravel in those days and when I was baby, one of my early memories (5 months old) was lying down in the back seat of our old black 1950s era Ford hearing the pine trees susurrate as we approached our family’s Lake Superior shore front land and cabin. That year it was only one cabin, the log cabin my grandfather built. After that, Don and Katie (my uncle and aunt) built their own cabin and eventually (six years later) so did we.

Birch Point Road is now a “loop” and there is enough traffic that a stop sign at the top of Chickadee Road (the cabin road) is necessary. A number of years ago when the family triplets were teenagers, they decorated the stop sign and I took a pic. Journey is not my fave band but it is good enough that I can rock to it. I posted the pic on facebook.

Sometime after that, a facebook friend posted this pic on her timeline or whatever it is. Okay friend, you posted that photo without attributing it to meeee. I like this person but she has a bad habit of posting other people’s pics without telling who took the pic. I was friendly about it but I didn’t let her get away with it.

A couple of facebook groups/pages/whatever spam me from northern Ontario. Highways 17 and 11. As much as I hate being spammed, I am interested in their posts (to a point) although I do not (and will not) *follow* them.

It’s bad enough living in the Great Lake State and having to travel the I75 SUV Speedway to get to and from the yooperland in the winter especially when the Big Mac Bridge closes, which it has a LOT recently. I cannot imagine what it’s like to have to travel Ontario highways 17 and 11 in the winter. These highways are waaaay north and, well, winter isn’t over in northern Ontario. It isn’t over in the yooperland or even here on The Planet Ann Arbor although we are dry and even sorta warm today.

One thing I am particularly interested in is that folks in these groups often blame what they call “flip-flops” for crashes and such. I have sussed out that “flip-flops” are semi drivers (“transports” in Canananada) who have immigrated from I dunno Pakistan or India. Places that don’t often get snow. The implication being that they are driving in sandals. Um, probably not and if they are, they likely have a sturdy pair of snow boots in the cab. They have immigrated to Canada (I think) because they want to make their lives better. For what it’s worth, most of my recent ancestors immigrated to Canada. Difference? They came from Scotland and Ireland, etc., so we are white. I’ve known and worked with many brown-skinned people and I just don’t see that skin color makes a difference.

Are these new citizens being trained properly for snow driving? I dunno. If not, that’s mostly on the companies that hired them. Make no mistake, I have complicated feelings about this but flip-flops is a derogatory term and some of these folks are probably bad drivers but others will rise to the occasion and LEARN.

Even seasoned snow drivers occasionally encounter black ice or whatever and land in the ditch (or worse). I have, although the time I’m thinking of I only landed just off the median JUST outside of Sault Ste. Siberia. I came to a soft landing in deep snow and a state policeman aka my junior high geography teacher helped us get towed out and sent us the last couple miles on our way without any tickets or anything. I mean, we weren’t drunk (yet). I was rattled enough that night that I let my BFF Sam (archaeologist, not dog) drive us down to the Alpha for Bar Night. Bar Night is the night before Thanksgiving when all of the college students who are back in their hometown meet up. At least until they reach a certain age and have children of their own or just want to turn in early.

I am trying to duplicate a recipe I had around here for YEARS. I got it from My Dear Uncle Harry and I think the title was Ethiopian Beef Stew. It had apples in it and I *think* potatoes. I have tried numerous times over the last few years to find it with no luck. I am doing a “Morrocan” stew instead. It has beef and apples but not potatoes. I think it will be okay. I wish I had some couscous to cook with it but tonight rice will have to do.

Home from Friday Night Porterization. We chose a German restaurant this evening. We arrived and were seated after a short wait for a booth before the Porters arrived. The wait staff knew we were awaiting friends but they didn’t realize the friends we awaited were celebrities at the restaurant. Of course we were treated well anyway, even though we were not recognized as Friends of Porterization. When they found out the friends we were awaiting were indeed the Porters, everyone was all excited and we were all treated like royalty.

This is an ancient restaurant although it moved from downtown out to Zeeb Road a number of years ago. I love the food but I have to be careful what I order. Some of the traditional German meat dishes have waaaaay too much meat for me, even if I take a box. They do a great job with fish but tonight I actually ordered tournedos, two mini filets wrapped with bacon. Rare, thank you veddy much. Most entrees come with two sides, which you can pick from a wide variety. Tonight I chose mashed potatoes and a small cucumber salad. I took one of the tournedos and about half of the mashies home in a box.

Upon leaving, I eyeballed the adjacent barroom and decided it would be a good lunch spot for me and the GG one of these days.

And that’s about all for today except that I actually sat out in the back yard where it was 70 degrees and sitting in the sun, I was waaaay overdressed. I did have one of my super duper sun hats on (from Sunday Afternoons). The pic is from yesterday on Liberty Road, driving the back roads home from lunch at Dexter’s Pub.

Love y’all, KW

It’s a garter snake. We used to pick them up off the beach all the time when we were kids. I’m not afraid of them but I leave them alone now. They don’t generally bite humans (that I know of) but probably would if antagonized by some rascally kid (thinking of our childhood friend Kevin with his Alvin the chipmunk voice). I do have a pic (and video) somewhere of a garter snake eating a toad. Taken by the GG.

We have one venomous snake in the Great Lake State, the Massasauga rattler. They live in areas near the Planet Ann Arbor but are rarely seen. They certainly aren’t in my yard. Up at the moominbeach, the only snakes I have ever seen are garter snakes and grass snakes, little green snakes, grass green. I’m not sure if grass snake is an official name, just what we always called them as kids. Probably that’s what my dad’s generation called them. A quick and dirty google was not helpful.

So, who the heck is the cat? That’s Mike aka Muksaslooie aka The Fur Nerd and I fergit what else. He was gifted to my cousin Susie but she was in grad school at the time and did not have time to take care of a cat. No problem. The White Tornado (Susie’s mom, my aunt) loved cats and took him on and he became a beach cat. His home base was The White Tornado’s house but he also spent a lot of time at Radical Betty’s, where Uncle Duke often complained about being a doorman to a cat. Muk occasionally visited the moomincabin but The Commander wasn’t all that crazy about cats and would only let him in if she thought I was sleeping a bit late and needed a huge cat to walk on my head.

Muksaslooie was a Great Hunter. Moles and milk for breakfast? Yes. One day a bunch of us were slogging around on the beach when Muksas came along with a grass snake in his mouth (alive). He dropped the snake on the sand and sat on it with a smug look on his face, like “look what *I’m* gonna have for lunch!” Problem. He sat there long enough for the snake to slither out from underneath him. There was quite a kerfuffle when Muksas decided to proceed with lunch and the snake was gone. Lots of pawing at the sand and laughter from his human beach slogger audience.

Photo credit (snake) to my mouse who had the day off and was apparently romping around in the woods somewhere. This was the first garter snake of the year, at least the first that mouse saw.

I have some serious misgivings about posting this pic, which is another one I got from my moominbeach next door cuz.

I didn’t ask permission to post this but finally decided to do so because I’m pretty sure ababsurdo is obscure enough that nobody will find it and share it on other social media. A blahg is social media but I’m not the most social blahgger although I like people to stop by, friendly introvert that I am. I’m pretty sure most people can’t keep up with me though, I know the GG doesn’t always read it. Diarrhea of the keyboard. I’ve been sharing some of my cousin’s other pics and I love them all but this one is kinda special.

I was entranced by the snow coated red pine trees. I love our moominbeach pines in any weather. I love them after a rainstorm when the lichen glows light green against the darkened bark. I love when the “midnight” (11:00 PM) sun lights them up during the summer solstice. I love them snow coated but don’t often get to see them that way, at least not at the moominbeach. There are plenty of red pines all over the Great Lake State.

So it was a couple seconds before I noticed the best part of the pic. Do you see it?

Kudos to cousin Judd for taking it, his mom (my cuz The Beautiful Jan) for sending it, and please don’t share it although TBJ likely has already sent it to other family members.

G’night! It’s a North Country Trail zoom meeting night. The GG is in his lair participating in the meeting and I am in the kitchen cooking and blahgging. I don’t participate in these meetings except to occasionally lob a sarcastic remark, usually about the GG. Most of folks on the zoom are actually *in* the eastern yooperland so they are telling Snowmageddon stories from the last week or so.

Shortly after I got up this morning, I was pinged with this *loverly* pic from my next door cousin (and his mom sent it to me too) on the moominbeach. There is an outdoor staircase to his second story and this is what that staircase looks like now. Don’t worry, he’s not using this staircase now. There is a spiral staircase inside.

Today was our monthly meeting with the EPA retirees group. Again, I didn’t retire from the EPA but I worked there for a government contractor for 14 years in my “childhood” career. So I know most of these people although I didn’t always know them well then. I am loving to get to better know some of the folks I *didn’t* know well as well as people I didn’t know at all, mostly meaning their wives.

I hope I didn’t flash the guys across the table as I enumerated the green things I was wearing in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. My shirt/base layer was kind of olive green (which counts in my book), my skirt was a lovely tie-dyed green, but I had to hoist a knee to show them my emerald green tights. We were so much older then, we’re younger (not) than that now.

On our way home (slow on the back roads at my insistence), the Uncly Uncle called the GG to say that the power had been out at the group home at Hoton Lake (the cFam cabin) for a couple days and could be out a couple more with potential temperatures in the low single digits. Not good.

This is never a problem at the moomincabin because it gets totally shut down for the winter. It can be a problem at Houghton Lake because we leave it open for the winter with the heat at a low temp. That works well except when the power goes out, the furnace blower doesn’t work and that means the place cools down.

There was a lot of discussion about what to do and the UU drove down from his home in Gaylord (not far from the group home) to check things out. When *we* got home (to Ann Arbor), the group home webcam started to update, meaning the power was back on. The rest of the pics are from the UU. Embiggen to see the ice-coated trees. Apparently the drive was okay.

First up is a photo my moominbeach next door cousin sent me, taken from his deck to my little cabin past the big snowdrift. He often sends me pics of the Big Drift between the *moomincabin* the Old Cabin but I don’t think he can get over there at the moment. The moomin and the Old Cabin share a driveway and rustic parking area but we don’t have it plowed in the winter because both of those cabins are closed. My cuz, who lives in a winterized house that his grandparents originally built as a seasonal cabin, does the plowing. The Big Mac Bridge was closed more than it was open over the weekend and they closed it OVERNIGHT yesterday. I awoke to the text “Mac Bridge is OPEN.” Please be careful yoopers.

Back here on The Planet Ann Arbor, yesterday was a beautiful warm (close to 70) day but it started getting windy in the late afternoon. At That Batscope Hour, I used the water closet and the bathroom thermometer indicated it was still 57 outside. But the wind kicked up and the temperature dropped by morning. This stick (in our back yard) is “stuck” into the ground. Literally.

At least we aren’t dealing with this (a photo the GG took somewhere while walking down Huron today).

10 years ago yesterday, at that Bat Scope hour, a thunderstorm was going on and the GG got up to use the water closet. As he was perambulating around the Landfill, he passed a window just as a bolt of lightning EXPLODED a tree (or something) in the woods behind our house. We went back to sleep but I was up walking in the woods in the morning and this is what the tree (yes it was a tree) looked like.

And this lightning event shot tree shrapnel throughout the neighborhood, including this shard that stabbed our back yard.

The shrapnel from that tree explosion was much more sturdy than the one that landed in our back yard this morning and this is what another tree missile did to our Mean Green Frog Hoppin’ Musheen’s moonroof. (2011 Subie Outback, made in Japan and purchased in the Fukushima era but somehow we got it on time.)

First, the most boring story on earth. I use a polar fleece Patagonia vest as my purse. My phone goes in the left zip pocket. In the right zip pocket are Cygnus’s fob, a wad of cash (which I rarely use), and three cards: debit (which I rarely use), credit (which I use all the time and pay off weekly), and drivers license, not expired.

I won’t even try to describe the details here but hours after a morning Plum Market dash, I took everything out of my pockets(es), put it all on my bed, and then… I picked the whole mess up again and there was a little plopping noise and my credit card was on the floor. My other two cards seemed to be missing. Where were they? Did I drop them in the Plum Market parking lot? When I got out to Cygnus after shopping, I noticed that my right pocket was unzipped but I thought I had checked and found all three cards present.

Did all three of my cards fall on the floor? After a quick check under the bed (and in Cygnus), I texted mouse to ask the Plum if my cards had been turned in. Nope. It turns out they WERE under the bed. Apparently all three cards fell on the floor and two of them “bounced” under the bed. So all’s well and I told you this would be boring.

The GG didn’t get to go north this weekend but he did get to do some chainsawing. Yesterday at the Chief Baw Beese section of trail. Today over at Chez Porter and also in our own yard where he can be seen cutting down a nuisance bush that mouse had advised him to get rid of.

We had a chicken tandoori sheet pan dish tonight, engineered and 95% cooked by Little Cat Z. And I’ll show some snow pics I got from my moomincabin next door cuzzint tomorrow.

When people ask me what my favorite language is, I always reply “FORTRAN”. I know it’s not a human language but I taught it to myself (autodidact here) and it forged a couple of careers for me.. Latin was the language I took in high school, mostly because my MOTHER liked the Latin teacher better than the French teacher and those were the only languages available in Sault Ste. Siberia High.

Mom was right to steer me into Latin. Not only did it clarify a lot of English language stuff for me but the Latin teacher (Mrs. Velde) was indeed very cool. She came to the US as a Latvian WWII refugee who, if I remember accurately, spent time in a concentration camp somewhere and was injured there. She used a cane to help her climb the three flights of stairs to her classroom. I wasn’t bad at Latin (I was a straight-A student except when I tried to get lower grades in an unsuccessful attempt to “fit in” with the in-crowd). But I am not the best with human languages and others were better at Latin than me. I’m probably better at FORTRAN than them but both Latin and FORTRAN are “dead” languages these days. So here I am stuck with English as my first and only language. If my WASPy type blonde self gets deported somewhere I don’t know the language, I’ll be toast.

So if had been faced with the bit of Latin in the title, I would be confounded. I mean “peninsulam” is obviously where “peninsula” comes from and The Great Lake State is made of two BIG peninsulas (and many small ones although we usually call them “points”). And I sorta remember “circumspice” means something about all around. So, “if you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.” The Great Lake State is a beautiful state (water water everywhere and mostly drinkable) but all states are beautiful in their own way.

The GG sent me this pic from his bridge building endeavors with the North Country Trail Chief Baw Beese chapter today. Or is it an “elevated walkway”? Anyway, he had a good time and this is a GREAT pic and the last time I heard from him he was an hour out from home. He’ll be sweaty and I changed the bed sheets today so a shower is in order…

I started out with a completely different idea of what the heck to blahg about. A different whiff of an idea floated into my head and free association took over into whatever the heck I actually wrote about.

Love y’all, KW.