I tried. Yesterday in the late afternoon I tried to sit and whine in the little hollow in front of the Old Cabin. 1) It was too cold. 2) My Old Cabin Hollow Buddy npJane was not there with me. I gave up. I cleaned the moomincabin refrigerator instead. Not that it was filthy by any stretch of the imagination. Actually it was in pretty good shape. But summer is history and it was time to pack up all of the leftover mustards and things and take them home.

I hate schlepping food back and forth to the Yooperland or wherever. It absolutely drives me nuts. Yesterday and this morning when I was packing food up and this afternoon when I was unpacking I vacillated wildly between thinking something like, “there is way too much stuff here” and “actually this is not too bad.”

It really wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t as hard as a few years ago after Radical Betty’s memorial service when I ended up with something like four boxes of whine in the Landfill Chitchen and a whole bunch of other stuff. I did use up the whine and no, I did not drink it all, I cook with whine a lot. It wasn’t as bad as last summer which I can barely remember except that The Comm was still alive and a good time was had by all and I ended up with a lot of food to assimilate.

Today? I now own three boxes of baking soda. I am not a frequent baker so I wonder if I’ll ever use that stuff up. Oh, I know I can clean with it or pour it down the drain or whatever. Actually, I did pour some of it down the damn drain here at the Landfill today. Like, what *is* that stench? Is there a dead chipmunk down there or what? I was able to assimilate most of the leftover food and it *was* easier than the last few years. And some of the excess this year is stuff from The Commander’s house in town, “Grandma’s other house, the real house where she lives some of the days” was how Lizard Breath described it at about the age of three.

We are entering into a new era of managing the moomincabin. One where there isn’t a house “in town” to schlep stuff to for the winter. So, what goes to the moomincabin in the summer has to return to the Planet Ann Arbor or somewhere in the fall.

Where’s the balance? You want to have all of the food staples that you and your family need and you want to be able to supply guests with things that they might need too. But keeping a whole lot of crap in a vacation cabin seems like a bad idea too. There is a small but good grokkery store a few miles down the road in Brimley and there is always Glens (or Woldemort) over in The Soo.

I did okay today. I found homes for most of the items in the six (count ’em) bags of food that I brought home today. I only threw a few things out. I think there is about one grocery bag of stuff left up there now. We’ll get that in a few weeks. And we’ll all go on from there…

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