In other words, I stuck my head up, saw my shadow, and hunkered down for another six weeks.

I’d had sorta plans to hit the grock store this morning but Cygnus was in for scheduled maintenance and Mooon Yooonit needs a new battery (scheduled for tomorrow afternoon). So no viable car. And it was SNOWING. I mustered enough psychological energy to wash and change the sheets (they needed it, I’ve been a bit neglectful) and empty the dishwasher, and that was about it.

Oh and, I did my NYT word puzzles. Wordle (SPOILER) not a problem if you hang around occasional cigar smokers. I got queen bee on the spelling bee. And the xword was easy since it was a Monday. It was also weird (SPOILER ALERT) because all of the theme answers were “Ground Hog Day”, i.e., the movie. It was weird enough that I checked out what Rex Parker had to say about it. Like Mikey in the cereal commercial from my childhood, “He hates everything.” He had some words to say about it but (surprise) he didn’t seem to totally hate it. We won’t talk about the Connections puzz. I got yellow and green and put it aside. Will I get back to it? I do not know.

After I wrote last night’s blahg entry, I remembered the Stable Bar on Portage Ave. in Sault Ste. Siberia. It was a pitcher-of-beer/peanut-shells-on-the-floor type place and it could get wild. I used to go there frequently with my second high school boyfriend and his friends beginning when I was a high school senior and he was a college sophomore. He had grown up in Sault Ste. Siberia, so we went to the same high school (*probably* didn’t know each other but I think he asked me to dance at a mixer when I was a freshman and he was a junior), and he was attending the local university (LSSU). We drank beer at the Stable illegally at first but on January 1st of my senior year, the drinking age dropped to 18. He was immediately legal and I became legal on my birthday a couple weeks later.

In the winter when it was snowy (and it was ALWAYS snowy), snowmobilers mobbed The Stable and it was always a huge party. I dunno exactly what clothing snowmobilers wear nowadays but it is surely a lot more high tech than it was then, which was kind of a one piece snowsuit with a hood. I *think* people wore helmets? I was in the bathroom one night and in the stall next to me, I heard a splash and then some kind of expletive. Pulling her suit down to use the toilet, that poor woman had dunked her hood in the bowl. I bet she had a cold ride home that night.

The Stable burned down not too many years later, then the adjacent Northview Lounge. They had the same owner, a guy who lived about a block away from my family. He was kind of a weird guy, not in a good way. Once when I worked the cash registers at Tempo, I thought he was gonna KILL me when I made him wait until the customer ahead of him got their credit card approved. Those were the bad old days when us cashiers had to CALL THE STORE OFFICE, which then had to make a call to a credit card “hotline” (or something) to get a “code”. I was as annoyed as he was but there was not a god damn thing I could do about it. Some people in town (including my dad probably) suspected arson, i.e., he had burned down his own bars.

P.S. That’s my dad in the pic. It’s a scan so not sure what year it was. He was in his early 70s maybe?

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