In an effort to try to liven up this watching paint dry blahg, I’m going to try harder to tell stories from other years, starring other people, instead of recounting my boring daily activities.

So I kinda randomly searched photos back to October 2006 and this is one of the photoooos that showed up. It is Radical Betty and she is sitting on the moomincabin deck (with whine) and that was one of the most gorgeous days ever.

It was the day The Commander and I closed the moomincabin for the season. My old coot had died the March before and this was the first time The Comm had to deal with closing it up without her partner. She was nervous and I knew nothing. Again, in closing the moomincabin for the winter, the most critical thing is to drain the water system and drain it correctly. I’m not all that sure that it was any easier for her to do it with the old coot. In fact, I can just about guess that their procedure was laced with intermittent barrages of Blue Language given all their garbage adventures.

The GG (who is a whiz at managing rustic cabin plumbing, etc.) was out gallivanting around in Cally-forny so I headed on up. No paying career then, so I was on my own time. We managed to get the water drained properly and had a take-out lunch from Karl’s (with whine) on the deck to celebrate.

I don’t remember too much about doing the closing that day and that is because… While we were sitting there with our lunch (and whine), a tree decided to fall. It was a TOTALLY calm day and I can only guess this tree had simply decided “I’m done!” This tree did not fall OVER. It kinda “spiraled” (only word I can come up with) a bit, making a very weird noise, then sorta fell IN PLACE. So that’s the big thing I remember.

This was a gorgeous October day and we had so much fun. And then… Dun dun dun… About Wednesday of the next week (after I had left), The Commander and Radical Betty tried to take a shopping trip to Petoskey. When they got down into the Northern Lower, they drove into a BLIZZARD and it got fuglier and fuglier until The Comm finally said, “Betty, we need to turn around and go home.” And they did.

As I have said, I think the GG has done all of the moomincabin openings and closings after 2006, which GREATLY RELIEVED The Comm. I still do not know the procedure and I KNOW that there would be barrages of Blue Language if I tried to “help” the GG, probably one long barrage. One of the Beach Urchins scheduled some time to go up there this year and “learn” how to do the closing this year. “Learn” is in quotes because I overheard him say to our daughter something like, “We keep saying there’s a ‘procedure’ but really we just wing it.” I dunno if that is *exactly* true or whether every closing/opening comes with a surprise or two or three that you have to be creative about, hopefully small but sometimes not. Arriving to open the place in the spring to find a broken pipe under the cabin in 40 degree weather with the wind screaming offa Gitchee Gumee was probably the worst. The cabin is up on cement blocks and the plumbing is underneath. The GG persevered and fixed it. He was COLD!

I do think that the GG has probably streamlined whatever procedure my parents used. A friend with a similar story tells of her (extremely intelligent) dad using what I think was a Bucket to drain parts of his water system. But maybe that was generational so I will close with my dad’s definition of Running Water. “You grab a bucket and run down to the lake, fill up the bucket, and run back up.” That would be from the days his dad (my grand-dad) could still take a train from Sault Ste. Siberia out to the moomincabin but that’d be a story for another day…

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