Because it’s that kind of winter, although that could still change… It was actually pitch black when I took this photo. I’m standing under a floodlight over in the Haisley schoolyard. Note that the right Yak is a little bit crooked. I didn’t notice that at the time but a little later in the trip, it disintegrated. That’s the second of two NEW Yaks that has done that. I bought two pair and one of them seems to be defective. (It’s complicated, don’t even try.) It wasn’t all that slippery this morning and the left Yak kept me upright just fine. My right foot only slipped a bit as I ran across a snow-covered street. No, there were no vee-hickles in sight.

In other news, I was walking over to the Plum after work (no Yaks needed by then) when the daughter of the woman who owns the house kitty-corner from Hans’s old house hailed me from her car and gave me the downlow on what’s been going on at that house. That’s the house where the dad once barricaded himself in a closet with a gun of some short, threatening suicide. The poleeese closed off the neighborhood and I had to park my car down at Goose Mom’s house and walk home through the schoolyard when I returned from an errand. The SWAT team catapulted themselves over PerryNet’s backyard fence, where they demanded ladders and things and generally scared the sh*t out of Marsha, who was Home Alone that weekend and just beginning to enjoy the evening. She catapulted herself across the street to our house, where we took good care of her with gin and tonics and chips with guac and I have to say that if those cops wanted ladders, they were in the wrong place and I know where the RIGHT place is!

I wasn’t afraid of the “gunman”. I didn’t know him well but I knew his wife and kids better (one of my kids was an occasional playmate of one of theirs) and he was never a “problem” neighbor in any way and he was struggling with cancer. If he was barricaded in a closet in his own house threatening to shoot himself, why the heck was he a threat to me?

Eventually he recovered well enough that one dark, snowy winter morning, I was out shoveling and he came along and blew my sidewalk with his blower. Not sure what that was all about because it was the only time EVER. I just hope it means he was feeling better.

So, now he is dead. I was never provided with that news in a direct way but I guessed it when the house went up for sale a couple years ago. And sat and sat and sat. And then the signs went down and some of the family members started hanging around again and the dad’s truck is out in the back yard, which borders the street and if I was a nasty old biddy, I’d complain to somebody but I actually couldn’t care less and this is The Planet Ann Arbor after all and, I dunno, people kind of do what they do and [most] other people put up with it unless your house starts to smell or whatever.

So, the mom is back in the house and so is the young woman I talked to today with her baby and I’m not sure who else. This woman is the older of the mom’s two adult daughters (not the one my kid played with (bear with me because I think I have entered the land of powterization in terms of story telling [grin])). But it gets hard to process from here because this young woman has a grandchild. At 38. I remember when her [cough] now 20-year-old daughter was born. At that time, doing the math based on the facts that I know, *her* mother was about 35, which means that she was probably born around the time her mother was about 16 or 17.

So the woman who lives more or less kitty-corner from me and is [I’m guessing] seven or so years *younger* than me is now a great-grandmother.

While you are processing that, I will go on to say that this young grandmother [daughter of the woman who owns the house] seems to be interested in this baggy old kayakwoman’s walking habits, at least that is the talking point that she always engages me with. I like her. Maybe she will start walking for exercise? But probably not at 0-skunk-30… in snow… etc. …

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