Don’t worry, it’s nothing terminal. *I* was stressed out because the GG’s plans for the weekend have changed seemingly umpty-nine million times this week. When I went to bed last night, I thought there was a settled plan but when I woke up, it seemed to have changed? Sometimes I cannot keep up with him although other times I am waaaay ahead of him.

His stress was related to the weather forecast which sounded dire with lots of snow and ice “up north” (where he was going) and maybe some here too. 5-6 inches of snow tomorrow and 21 inches on Monday (I mean up north, not here). That amount of snow would likely prevent him from returning home in time for Tuesday’s monthly EPA retirement lunch and neither of us want to miss that!

At 10 AM, a text message came in that effectively canceled any plans of travel to the yooperland. “The Mackinac Bridge is CLOSED until further notice.” Falling ice again. Some days the bridge is closed on and off all day. A couple hours here a couple hours there. Today it was closed for something like six hours, opened briefly, closed again, and is still closed. In other words, even if he made it up to the bridge, he would not likely be able to cross it. Alternate routes? Nope. Unless you count driving across southern Michigan and northern Indiana to Chicago, up through Wisconsin, and across a good length of the yooperland. A Canadian route might be a bit shorter but has its own complications. Look at a map of the Great Lakes and surrounding states and process that for a bit.

When the GG tells me he’s going off on a hiking junket with his North Country Trail (NCT) friends, I usually say, “Seeya!” and enjoy my space-i-fication. This time I had a strong feeling that traveling north this weekend was a bad idea and STRONGLY discouraged him. Fortunately he agreed and changed his plans to visit the Chief Baw Beese NCT chapter on Saturday and help them with a project. Chief Baw Beese is an hour or so WEST of here and SHOULD be an easy drive on a dry (hopefully) freeway.

I was kinda being selfish in wanting to go out to lunch today. My thinking was if he was going away for the weekend, he owed me lunch. In truth, he doesn’t owe me anything and because the money comes out of the same bucket and *I* physically pay the bill with my credit card, it isn’t really a “date” (also it didn’t involve a trip to dump stuff at the landfill). But it was a beautiful day and we had lunch at Cleary’s Pub in Chelsea, where the year-round xmas lights reflect nicely in the highly polished bar top (if that’s what you call it) and bangers and mash is on the menu (but we didn’t order that today).

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