Did your dad and brother have choppers when you were a kid? Mine did. What are choppers? Back in the yooperland day, they were leather work glubs. If you were a guy in the yooperland, you had choppers. They were great for shoveling snow or taking the trash incinerator out to the alley to burn the trash (anyone else remember incinerators?) or working on the cars or snow-mos or whatever.

Well, “if you were a guy” maybe applied to my shabby little family bungalow. The girlz in the fam wore more fashionable glubs. Or did we… There were a lot of homemade mittens too. They were cool but they weren’t necessarily very warm without something like ski mitts over them. Or choppers. But I bet a lotta yooper girlz wore choppers too. If not then, they certainly do now! (You don’t own me.)

It seems to me that I mentioned something about choppers around here a few weeks ago. Home or work or wherever. I can’t remember. My audience did not know what the heck I was talking about! Choppers? Say what? I shut my mouth quickly.

Last weekend? Saturday at Tahquamenon Falls. Temperatures hovering around zero with howling winds and blowing snow. Choppers? Yes! Our hiking buddy Pat (on the left in the photo) was knitting mittens to wear inside them. Our hiking buddy Marilyn had an extra pair that she foisted upon me and she gave me some hand warmers too. We have hand warmers around (somewhere). We may have bought some of them but we also get them free sometimes with LLBean or REI orders. We’ve never used them. Honestly, we don’t usually need them.

I used Marilyn’s extra pair of choppers and some hand warmers, although I eventually gave the handwarmers to Kay, one of our Fearless Leaders. I will be buying my own choppers soon and finding / collecting the Landfill hand warmers. I expect I will manage to complete that little bit of an organizational chore about the time we get 50-degree temperatures again… March 2, according to our loverly QA manager…

It was so much fun to be able to use the word “choppers” in a sentence up there in the Yooperland and not have to explain that I wasn’t talking about helicopters or something.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2015 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.