I have some serious misgivings about posting this pic, which is another one I got from my moominbeach next door cuz.

I didn’t ask permission to post this but finally decided to do so because I’m pretty sure ababsurdo is obscure enough that nobody will find it and share it on other social media. A blahg is social media but I’m not the most social blahgger although I like people to stop by, friendly introvert that I am. I’m pretty sure most people can’t keep up with me though, I know the GG doesn’t always read it. Diarrhea of the keyboard. I’ve been sharing some of my cousin’s other pics and I love them all but this one is kinda special.

I was entranced by the snow coated red pine trees. I love our moominbeach pines in any weather. I love them after a rainstorm when the lichen glows light green against the darkened bark. I love when the “midnight” (11:00 PM) sun lights them up during the summer solstice. I love them snow coated but don’t often get to see them that way, at least not at the moominbeach. There are plenty of red pines all over the Great Lake State.

So it was a couple seconds before I noticed the best part of the pic. Do you see it?

Kudos to cousin Judd for taking it, his mom (my cuz The Beautiful Jan) for sending it, and please don’t share it although TBJ likely has already sent it to other family members.

G’night! It’s a North Country Trail zoom meeting night. The GG is in his lair participating in the meeting and I am in the kitchen cooking and blahgging. I don’t participate in these meetings except to occasionally lob a sarcastic remark, usually about the GG. Most of folks on the zoom are actually *in* the eastern yooperland so they are telling Snowmageddon stories from the last week or so.

Shortly after I got up this morning, I was pinged with this *loverly* pic from my next door cousin (and his mom sent it to me too) on the moominbeach. There is an outdoor staircase to his second story and this is what that staircase looks like now. Don’t worry, he’s not using this staircase now. There is a spiral staircase inside.

Today was our monthly meeting with the EPA retirees group. Again, I didn’t retire from the EPA but I worked there for a government contractor for 14 years in my “childhood” career. So I know most of these people although I didn’t always know them well then. I am loving to get to better know some of the folks I *didn’t* know well as well as people I didn’t know at all, mostly meaning their wives.

I hope I didn’t flash the guys across the table as I enumerated the green things I was wearing in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. My shirt/base layer was kind of olive green (which counts in my book), my skirt was a lovely tie-dyed green, but I had to hoist a knee to show them my emerald green tights. We were so much older then, we’re younger (not) than that now.

On our way home (slow on the back roads at my insistence), the Uncly Uncle called the GG to say that the power had been out at the group home at Hoton Lake (the cFam cabin) for a couple days and could be out a couple more with potential temperatures in the low single digits. Not good.

This is never a problem at the moomincabin because it gets totally shut down for the winter. It can be a problem at Houghton Lake because we leave it open for the winter with the heat at a low temp. That works well exceot when the power goes out, the furnace blower doesn’t work and that means the place cools down.

There was a lot of discussion about what to do and the UU drove down from his home in Gaylord (not far from the group home) to check things out. When *we* got home (to Ann Arbor), the group home webcam started to update, meaning the power was back on. The rest of the pics are from the UU. Embiggen to see the ice-coated trees. Apparently the drive was okay.

First up is a photo my moominbeach next door cousin sent me, taken from his deck to my little cabin past the big snowdrift. He often sends me pics of the Big Drift between the *moomincabin* the Old Cabin but I don’t think he can get over there at the moment. The moomin and the Old Cabin share a driveway and rustic parking area but we don’t have it plowed in the winter because both of those cabins are closed. My cuz, who lives in a winterized house that his grandparents originally built as a seasonal cabin, does the plowing. The Big Mac Bridge was closed more than it was open over the weekend and they closed it OVERNIGHT yesterday. I awoke to the text “Mac Bridge is OPEN.” Please be careful yoopers.

Back here on The Planet Ann Arbor, yesterday was a beautiful warm (close to 70) day but it started getting windy in the late afternoon. At That Batscope Hour, I used the water closet and the bathroom thermometer indicated it was still 57 outside. But the wind kicked up and the temperature dropped by morning. This stick (in our back yard) is “stuck” into the ground. Literally.

At least we aren’t dealing with this (a photo the GG took somewhere while walking down Huron today).

10 years ago yesterday, at that Bat Scope hour, a thunderstorm was going on and the GG got up to use the water closet. As he was perambulating around the Landfill, he passed a window just as a bolt of lightning EXPLODED a tree (or something) in the woods behind our house. We went back to sleep but I was up walking in the woods in the morning and this is what the tree (yes it was a tree) looked like.

And this lightning event shot tree shrapnel throughout the neighborhood, including this shard that stabbed our back yard.

The shrapnel from that tree explosion was much more sturdy than the one that landed in our back yard this morning and this is what another tree missile did to our Mean Green Frog Hoppin’ Musheen’s moonroof. (2011 Subie Outback, made in Japan and purchased in the Fukushima era but somehow we got it on time.)

First, the most boring story on earth. I use a polar fleece Patagonia vest as my purse. My phone goes in the left zip pocket. In the right zip pocket are Cygnus’s fob, a wad of cash (which I rarely use), and three cards: debit (which I rarely use), credit (which I use all the time and pay off weekly), and drivers license, not expired.

I won’t even try to describe the details here but hours after a morning Plum Market dash, I took everything out of my pockets(es), put it all on my bed, and then… I picked the whole mess up again and there was a little plopping noise and my credit card was on the floor. My other two cards seemed to be missing. Where were they? Did I drop them in the Plum Market parking lot? When I got out to Cygnus after shopping, I noticed that my right pocket was unzipped but I thought I had checked and found all three cards present.

Did all three of my cards fall on the floor? After a quick check under the bed (and in Cygnus), I texted mouse to ask the Plum if my cards had been turned in. Nope. It turns out they WERE under the bed. Apparently all three cards fell on the floor and two of them “bounced” under the bed. So all’s well and I told you this would be boring.

The GG didn’t get to go north this weekend but he did get to do some chainsawing. Yesterday at the Chief Baw Beese section of trail. Today over at Chez Porter and also in our own yard where he can be seen cutting down a nuisance bush that mouse had advised him to get rid of.

We had a chicken tandoori sheet pan dish tonight, engineered and 95% cooked by Little Cat Z. And I’ll show some snow pics I got from my moomincabin next door cuzzint tomorrow.

When people ask me what my favorite language is, I always reply “FORTRAN”. I know it’s not a human language but I taught it to myself (autodidact here) and it forged a couple of careers for me.. Latin was the language I took in high school, mostly because my MOTHER liked the Latin teacher better than the French teacher and those were the only languages available in Sault Ste. Siberia High.

Mom was right to steer me into Latin. Not only did it clarify a lot of English language stuff for me but the Latin teacher (Mrs. Velde) was indeed very cool. She came to the US as a Latvian WWII refugee who, if I remember accurately, spent time in a concentration camp somewhere and was injured there. She used a cane to help her climb the three flights of stairs to her classroom. I wasn’t bad at Latin (I was a straight-A student except when I tried to get lower grades in an unsuccessful attempt to “fit in” with the in-crowd). But I am not the best with human languages and others were better at Latin than me. I’m probably better at FORTRAN than them but both Latin and FORTRAN are “dead” languages these days. So here I am stuck with English as my first and only language. If my WASPy type blonde self gets deported somewhere I don’t know the language, I’ll be toast.

So if had been faced with the bit of Latin in the title, I would be confounded. I mean “peninsulam” is obviously where “peninsula” comes from and The Great Lake State is made of two BIG peninsulas (and many small ones although we usually call them “points”). And I sorta remember “circumspice” means something about all around. So, “if you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.” The Great Lake State is a beautiful state (water water everywhere and mostly drinkable) but all states are beautiful in their own way.

The GG sent me this pic from his bridge building endeavors with the North Country Trail Chief Baw Beese chapter today. Or is it an “elevated walkway”? Anyway, he had a good time and this is a GREAT pic and the last time I heard from him he was an hour out from home. He’ll be sweaty and I changed the bed sheets today so a shower is in order…

I started out with a completely different idea of what the heck to blahg about. A different whiff of an idea floated into my head and free association took over into whatever the heck I actually wrote about.

Love y’all, KW.

The high winds on the Planet Ann Arbor started at about six AM and have lasted all day. We got porterized at Dexter’s Pub tonight and the lights flashed a few times but we’re guessing they had a generator going because we never totally lost power. Arriving home at The Landfill, it was apparent we’d had a power outage here too. I just fixed Gertrude’s flashing clock and I will bang my head against the LED light colors tomorrow. Grrrr. I do NOT want to set up a goddamn ACCOUNT.

I don’t get toooo worried about wind but we live in a neighborhood with lots of tall trees and twice, we’ve had a tree fall on our house. In the first instance, a thunderstorm blew in and the GG LOVES thunderstorms. They make him sleep. But. Just as he was settling in to sleep, a HUGE wind came through and there was a huge crashing noise. The top third (or whatever) of the tree just outside our house had fallen over and onto our house.

The then teenage beach urchins immediately came out of their bedrooms. What the heck just happened? We all assessed our levels of shock for a few minutes and then we remembered the mini-pets in their cages in the back room. Guinea pig and Izzy the rat. Yikes. They were okay. I don’t remember Izzy being all that fazed but Piglet was kind of a dishrag until he sat in his owner’s lap for a while.

This happened at two or three in the morning. I didn’t really get back to sleep that night. I actually got onto my strawberry iMac and did some young actors guild work. The GG did go back to sleep but he was up at six AM calling tree companies to free the POC, a beautiful but crappy Island Teal Chrysler mini-van that $50 and $100 dollared us to death. I was hoping this incident would total the POC but it didn’t. Sigh. The next car we bought was Japanese and we have never looked back. Note that some (but not all) of our Japanese vee-hickles were built in the USA or Canada.

The second time a tree fell on our house no one was home and I’ll talk about that some other day,

So I heard a few things hit the roof today but not a whole tree. We still have high winds but they are supposed to diminish by morning. I’m looking forward to that.

Don’t worry, it’s nothing terminal. *I* was stressed out because the GG’s plans for the weekend have changed seemingly umpty-nine million times this week. When I went to bed last night, I thought there was a settled plan but when I woke up, it seemed to have changed? Sometimes I cannot keep up with him although other times I am waaaay ahead of him.

His stress was related to the weather forecast which sounded dire with lots of snow and ice “up north” (where he was going) and maybe some here too. 5-6 inches of snow tomorrow and 21 inches on Monday (I mean up north, not here). That amount of snow would likely prevent him from returning home in time for Tuesday’s monthly EPA retirement lunch and neither of us want to miss that!

At 10 AM, a text message came in that effectively canceled any plans of travel to the yooperland. “The Mackinac Bridge is CLOSED until further notice.” Falling ice again. Some days the bridge is closed on and off all day. A couple hours here a couple hours there. Today it was closed for something like six hours, opened briefly, closed again, and is still closed. In other words, even if he made it up to the bridge, he would not likely be able to cross it. Alternate routes? Nope. Unless you count driving across southern Michigan and northern Indiana to Chicago, up through Wisconsin, and across a good length of the yooperland. A Canadian route might be a bit shorter but has its own complications. Look at a map of the Great Lakes and surrounding states and process that for a bit.

When the GG tells me he’s going off on a hiking junket with his North Country Trail (NCT) friends, I usually say, “Seeya!” and enjoy my space-i-fication. This time I had a strong feeling that traveling north this weekend was a bad idea and STRONGLY discouraged him. Fortunately he agreed and changed his plans to visit the Chief Baw Beese NCT chapter on Saturday and help them with a project. Chief Baw Beese is an hour or so WEST of here and SHOULD be an easy drive on a dry (hopefully) freeway.

I was kinda being selfish in wanting to go out to lunch today. My thinking was if he was going away for the weekend, he owed me lunch. In truth, he doesn’t owe me anything and because the money comes out of the same bucket and *I* physically pay the bill with my credit card, it isn’t really a “date” (also it didn’t involve a trip to dump stuff at the landfill). But it was a beautiful day and we had lunch at Cleary’s Pub in Chelsea, where the year-round xmas lights reflect nicely in the highly polished bar top (if that’s what you call it) and bangers and mash is on the menu (but we didn’t order that today).

Quite a few Saturdays ago, the GG asked me out on a date. The date was to drop crapola off at the landfill. I mean the city landfill, not Our House Landfill. I very happily said yes to this date but when we got out to the landfill to dump our load, guess what? My date, the guy who asked me out, did NOT have any money. (It does cost to dump stuff). So *I* had to pay for our date. Of course the money all comes out of one pot but still.

Today, in our continuing saga of flinging stuff we do not need any more, the GG pulled together a whole bunch of shitola to get rid of. Old books, remote control helicopters, a dead TV from FlaMan’s, and I fergit what else. Don’t worry, FlaMan has a fancy new replacement for that TV so between that and the *other* TV he has, he can continue to watch Gunsmoke reruns from two rooms.

So we took remote control helicopters to the Share House and they were very happy to take them. They saw the old TV in the back seat and asked if it had a remote. Well, no, it doesn’t work at all and we weren’t intending to dump it on Share House but the Share House guy had ideas for where to take it. We took it to Best Buy and had to pay a bit to leave it there but the GG got a gift card in the same amount. I don’t really understand this transaction but whatever. We did NOT leave Best Buy with a gargantuan TV screen, thank you Zeus. I am not averse to the GG buying one if he wants one but we would have to get rid of one of the two medium-sized screens that we have.

Then it was over to Give My Books, where you drive into a small cul-de-sac to a house that “processes” used books, even ancient textbooks if I get it right. You put your books in their garage and text them to let them know you’ve made a drop off. No contact.

Our last stop was REI so the GG could look for “dog mace”. They didn’t have it but the GG thinks Ann Arbor Arms might have it. But that’s all a story for another day.

The people in the pic are not us at The Landfill. They are my parents on their weekly “date” to put the moomincabin garbage into plastic garbage cans and then into their car and then schlep it all up the hill to the pickup point. It was a “fight” every week. It was the *same* “fight” every week. I wish they had lived long enough to be able to fill up green bags and schlep them up to the tribal facility where someone comes out of the building and schleps your green bag(s) into the garbage trailer any time the place is open.

My childhood home on Superior St. “behind” Lincoln School on the south side of Sault Ste. Siberia. Actually it was pretty darn shabby but when you are a toddler, you don’t really notice.

Actually I don’t remember noticing it that much even as a teenager. I had friends who lived in much fancier homes but I also had friends living in shabbier homes. When I was a teenager, my boyfriend and I visited a friend of ours in one of the shabbier houses. Mom was intensely curious about the interior of that house. The kids were highly intelligent (my mom was a high school teacher) but she sensed some family dysfunction. I thought about it for a minute and said, “Well, I wouldn’t want to walk around barefoot in there.” We could definitely walk barefoot in our shabby little bungalow and she never forgot that (LOL). (Dysfunction? We won’t talk about the FIVE-year-old who asked his great-uncle babysitter for a beer TWICE and was granted one each time. We left before he finished the second so who knows how many he had that night.)

That’s meeee on the step stool, eating breakfast in my footie pajamas with what I think are various “eat your breakfast” talismans surrounding me. Looking to my right is Gertrude’s broom closet, the one with the cartoon that I wrote about yesterday. I VAGUELY remember that stove. Actually I better remember when it was replaced. Our new stove had a light that proclaimed “Units” when any of the burners or the oven was left on. The precursor to my Gertrude. When “Units” was on, I would always yell, “Mom, units is on!”

The shabbiness was tolerable but a couple other things were not so much. That house had one of those old “octopus” oil furnaces. It began malfunctioning at some point, so we replaced it with a new gas furnace a couple years before “we” (aka the parents) moved. Also, the south side of Sault Ste. Siberia was basically a swamp and there were a few times the basement filled with a foot of water or so.

My local grandparents lived in a much fancier house but the bedrooms and the only bathroom were on the second floor. At some point, the family moved them into my piano teacher’s single story house (they had moved). After the grandparents died, my parents bought that house from the fam and moved there. I was in college by then.

My time change fumbles are behind me now. No, I didn’t reset the alarm clock. I dunno if the GG did or not. My take-away from that minor debacle was “look at your iPhone if you want to know the time.” One of the funny parts of this is that the GG often randomly tells me what time it is. Um. I KNOW what time it is. Why did he not tell me what time it was at 6:00 AM yesterday? Because he was not awake. Snore.

The truth is, I don’t really need every clock in the Landfill to tell the correct time, or any time. I don’t even need the alarm clock to do that. There are four clocks that I need to be accurate and three of them change themselves. The automatic ones would be my iPhone and our automotive vee-hickles Cygnus X-1 (2021 Subie Crosstrek) and Mooon Yooonit (2018? Toyota RAV4) change automatically. Not 100% sure about Mooon Yooonit because I don’t drive it a lot but probably.

The one other clock in the Landfill that I like to be accurate is Gertrude’s clock. Gertrude is my stove and she is named after a cartoon that was affixed to the inside door of the broom closet in the kitchen of my childhood home, a shabby little bungalow on Superior Street on the back side of “Stinkin’ Linkin'” school in Sault Ste. Siberia. In the cartoon, Gertrude is on her back, draped across an ironing board, totally exhausted. Alas, I cannot find this cartoon ANYWHERE. I can only guess it was lost when my parents moved away from that shabby little bungalow to my (dead) grandparents house up on the hill. Not as shabby as the bungalow but not fancy either. Changing Gertrude’s time (the stove, I mean) is a couple of user friendly clicks.

Other clocks? I do not care. The microwave and other appliances, the time either flashes 00:00 or doesn’t display anything at all. Doesn’t matter.

In the grand scheme of things, if we do away with the time change, I am a fan of standard time.

Today did not start out very auspiciously. I knew the time changed overnight. Fine. Time changes don’t really bother me and I was planning to get up at my usual time, DST or not.

Problem. I have two time-telling devices on the dresser next to my bed. My iPhone, which automatically changes the time and my alarm clock, which does NOT. Guess which one I kept looking at throughout the night? If you guessed alarm clock, DING DING DING. You win the booby prize. So when my alarm clock proclaimed 6:54, I wondered why it was so light out. Well, because (you ding dong) nobody reset the time. iPhone? It’s actually 7:54 (you ding dong). Good thing I don’t have a JOB to get to on time.

It was a gorgeous warm day (for March in The Great Lake State) and the GG walked to Dexter. He called me around noon to ask for a ride. I said, “Does this come with lunch?” Yes. Yes it can. An obvious choice would’ve been Dexter’s Pub but he said something about Manchester and I couldn’t think of any place in Manchester except the Blacksheep Tavern but that closed eons ago. But we decided to head south to Manchester and take our chances.

We settled on The Village Tap. It doesn’t look very auspicious does it? There was a newer fancier sports bar across the street and I’m sure it would’ve been fine but the Village Tap was calling my name. We walked in and 1) it was a little shabby and 2) I was the only woman in the bar except for the bartender. But still.

We took seats at the end of the bar and were NOT disappointed. I had chili in mind when I walked in and they had it but when I saw OLIVE BURGER, I switched to that. The bartender was VERY friendly and attentive and anticipated things we didn’t even know we needed, i.e., “I cut your olive burger in half. They can get messy.” Yes, they can and I greatly appreciated that. The first bite I took got all over my chin! Good though! Manchester is not on our regular country roads “beat”, at least not at lunch time but that is one place I will remember whenever I am in the area and in need of lunch.

The icing on today’s cake is a loverly call with my uber cousin UKW. We don’t call each other often but when we do we have a great time catching up. Love and laughter abound. Nothing like spending your summers with two fellow female cousins your own age and a bunch of other beloved relatives. They say it takes a village and we had one.

Once again (two days in a row!) I made up my own recipe. I used to have a “chicken in succotash” recipe somewhere. I thought I typed it into my ancient, clunky old MacPlus. The one we had when the beach urchins were children. I would start up a complicated Excel spreadsheet, go down to the dungeon to move the laundry around and when I came back, my document would be open. Maybe. Or maybe the recipe was in a cookbook. I own quite a few cookbooks. But it wasn’t anywhere. Southern Heritage Cooking? I am not southern (I am waaaay northern) but I own that book. But it wasn’t in that book

So I googled again. Recipes for succotash abound. I couldn’t find one with chicken, at least not one I thought would work for me today. So I cooked some boneless chicken thighs and sauteed some red onions and peppers with herbs, and boiled some lima beans and corn. I put all of that stuff in a baking dish and am baking it. Along with some biscuits (and make no mistake, I am not the best biscuit maker on earth).

Last night we went to the Sports Bar Westside for a Friday dinner of porterization. This is what we encountered when we walked out. As we were driving home, we saw lots of faraway lightning and then more when we got home. More rain this morning and some lightning kept me from getting grocks but I eventually managed it.

Greek orzo salad. For many years, the Plum reliably stocked its salad bar with this salad (or a version of it, since I don’t have the Plum’s recipe).

All of a sudden, it became intermittently available and now I can’t think when the last time I’ve seen it. They seem to have replaced it with an orzo salad with Italian sausage and some other stuff I can’t remember. The Italian sausage version is fine (I tried it) but I like the Plum’s Greek one much better. The Italian doesn’t have feta or Kalamata olives for one thing.

So I did the google and found a bunch of recipes that looked similar and voila! This has the main ingredients. Orzo (of course), feta, Kalamata olives, grape tomatoes, red onions, and English cucumber. I have recently (via the beach urchins) discovered English cucumbers and like them because they don’t rot as fast as regular cukes (except for summertime farmers market cukes). The dressing is olive oil, lemon, red wine vinegar, and a few other things like oregano, garlic, and black pepper.

I will use a bit less orzo the next time. I was following the recipe but that looks like a bit too much for my taste. I think I would like a higher veggie/cheese to orzo ratio. I ditched the artichokes in the recipe. I like artichokes just fine but they weren’t in the Plum’s version and didn’t fit my “vision”. I also ditched the teaspoon of honey although I may try to add it the next time I make it. But really? What would a teaspoon of honey add to this? It just seems like a fiddly-diddly ingredient to me and I bet it isn’t in the Plum’s version.

Above all, it is pretty darn easy to make, especially if you are lazy and buy already chopped up red onion. Yes, I am lazy. I did halve the grape tomatoes. A nod to Little Cat Z.

We have “droven” Island Lake Road (gravel/dirt) many times and we did it yesterday. We have an EPA retiree luncheon coming up in Chelsea this month and wanted to figger out the location.

On the way to Chelsea (from Dexter), we took Island Lake Road and while we were still on the dirt/gravel part of that road, we spied this log cabin. Somewhere along the northern shore of West Lake, somebody parks a seaplane in front of their house but we didn’t see that yesterday. What we did see was this cabin, one that we have never noticed before.

We think it is old but we don’t really know. It is constructed in a similar way to our family’s Old Cabin but it can’t be as old as *our* Old Cabin, which was built in 1924. It’s a lot smaller. But there’s that rock chimney.

We’ve been watching Andy Griffith reruns lately (before and after the Olympics). Tonight the “bed jacket” episode was on. Again. Aunt Bee sees a fluffy bed jacket in the window of a store and falls in love with it. Her birthday is coming up and she gets canning jars instead. A bunch of horse trading goes on with the mayor and she ends up with the bed jacket, albeit a day late.

I first saw this episode as a child and have seen it a few times since. Bed jacket? My bed clothing is a Smartwool nightshirt and some socks. I get up early in the morning, take a shower and put *clothes* on. Given that Aunt Bee makes breakfast for Andy and Opie, I can’t believe she ever has time to sit around in bed wearing a bed jacket. But whatever.

Actually, this is Dexter’s Pub, not The Den of Iniquity. The Den of Iniquity is the Tahquamenon Falls Brewery, which a North Country Trail friend renamed after a teetotaler with a religious tilt in our group once fussed a bit that we were going there after snowshoeing. It isn’t actually a den of iniquity either. It is a family friendly bar/restaurant that is usually so crowded nowadays we don’t even try to go there.

What a difference a day makes. Taxes are now done except for one document. It isn’t late, it doesn’t arrive until this month. So today was a much different day than yesterday. The GG took off early this morning to take a walk. To Dexter. “Wanna meet me in Dexter?” Yep. What he meant was meet for lunch at Dexter’s Pub. Well. Mr. Golden Sun was out, the temperature at the time was in the low 30s but it was predicted to rise to 47 (and it did). YES!

So that’s what we did. I got there first and snagged two seats at the end of the bar. The server came to take my drink order and for some stupid reason, I felt obliged to tell her my husband would be joining me in a few minutes. I mean, is there any reason a baggy old woman can’t enter a bar by herself, sit at the bar and order a glass of cab? No there is not.

We each ordered a bowl of chili and I ordered a second glass of cab because the GG, after walking 14 miles, ordered a BIG beer and wasn’t finished with it. The server poured the usual pour and there was a little still left in the bottle so she dumped it in too, giggling with her eyes. It was more than I needed but what the heck.

I giggled quietly too, remembering the last time we went to Crazy Old Florida for FUN, i.e. not end-of-life issues or rescue missions. We were on our way to FlaMan’s trailer to pick him up for dinner and the GG (in a kinda panicky way) suggested I look for a restaurant. The reason for that was because earlier in the week, we had taken The Beautiful Suzie (the GG’s sister) and Mr. Ed out to eat and they struggled to think of a restaurant. They didn’t really like to dine out but finally came up with a lovely Italian restaurant they had eaten at back when they were first married, if I get it right. And that was a loooong time ago.

I remembered this but I looked at the GG and said, “Jack (aka FlaMan) will have a restaurant in mind.” And yes, he did. Cody’s Roadhouse! Okay, let’s go! I had my standard two glasses of wine with dinner since I didn’t know if they would make a decent ‘hattan or not. We were sitting at the bar and the food was fine. The bartender must have been paying a bit of attention to whatever crazy conversation we were having because, as my second whine was approaching the bottom of the glass, he (with my silent permission) winked and dumped the last bit of a bottle in. FlaMan is a “trip” albeit a beloved one.

This day touched every single one of the things that majorly stress me out. A couple of them are un-blahggable but taxes are not. Jeebus.

The GG was in his lair ALL DAY, emerging at random moments to pepper me with random questions. Where is this document, where is that. I could swear I put the Planet Ann Arbor winter property tax doc in his lair but it didn’t seem to be found. I used my ninja computer skills to find the invoice online and printed it out for him. I hoped that the printer starting up would jump him out of his skin but it didn’t, because I had to yell from the front living room, “Did you get that?”

Then there was the missing 1099 from our main bank (checking and savings). I do NOT know what happened to that but I do know how to find at least some tax documents online from our bank. The GG couldn’t find it. Within two minutes, I found the l099 on the bank website and printed it out. Again, I wanted to surprise him and again, I had to yell from the living room, “Did you get that?” It was eleven dollars or so. I mean, it is interest on *bank accounts*.

We won’t even talk about the moomincabin taxes. I paid the summer taxes by writing a check. I paid the winter taxes online. But I used a credit card, which I didn’t remember so it took me a while to find the invoice but I did. With my ninja skills. I guess we did talk about the moomincabin taxes after all.

I think that we are finished with taxes except for a document that arrives in March and then we can send this stuff off to the accountant. Will the GG and the accountant agree this year? Last year they were three dollars apart. Probably because most accountants drop anything after the decimal point. Why bother?

People. Almost all routine tax documents are available online. If you are missing a 1099 for whatever reason, you can probably get a copy via your online banking app. Anyway. What’s the point of reporting eleven dollars and some change?

And no, I was not for Trump in 2016, 2020, or 2024. I am a never Trumper. That refrigimatator magnet was a prank. I keep it on there to commemorate the weird parts of my generally good marriage.

It is difficult to have to live with someone who is MAGA. It is also easier than y’all might think because he can fix terlets (and just about anything). I am not mechanically inclined so if he gets hit by a bus, I would have to play the roulette wheel to find a handyman. Plus after going on 44 years of marriage we kinda get along. Not gonna say it has always been easy ’cause marriage isn’t always easy but we have made it work somehow and continue to do so.

Why oh why are we bombing Iran? Yeah, they were “building up their nuclear program”. Okay. Didn’t our dear leader (not) say back in June that “we” had bombed their whole program out of existence and it would take many years to rebuild it? If that is true, why are we bombing Iran now? I might ask why we are bombing SCHOOLS in Iran but what’s the point?

It seems like Trump changes his mind about why “we” are bombing Iran every five minutes. In other words, Trump and his sycophants do not have any kind of plan. They just feel like bombing somebody somewhere, anybody anywhere. Peace President, right? Not.

As to why people voted for him in 2024? I. Do. Not. Know. We endured him and his lies throughout his first administration. We endured his role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection attempt. Why did anyone expect a second term to be different. Oh, he will “fix” “the economy”. Um, not really. The president can’t really do that kind of thing single handedly. At one point he actually said something like he would be “so good for women”. Say what? Hasn’t ever done anything good for women that I can think of. Reversing Roe V. Wade? Nope. Not good for women.

His second term is much much much worse. Whatever forces were reining him in during his first term are totally gone this time. He has hired ridiculous sycophants and they are doing the jobs that he (NOT the idiots who voted for him) wants them to do.

If you voted for Trump, are you happy about the things he is doing? Bombing Iran, deporting legal immigrants with no criminal record to countries they have never set foot in before, killing CITIZENS? How are your grocery bills? Can you afford to buy a house? Have you been invited to Mar a Lago recently? What has tRump done for you?

Bad Orange Man.

I don’t think we’ve been to the Fleetwood Diner in Lansing since March 2020. The GG wanted to go last year the morning after the symposium but I was kind of restauranted out. This year I was ready ready ready and even had my omelet (gyro) picked out last night.

There is also a Fleetwood Diner on The Planet Ann Arbor. The Planet Ann Arbor version (which I don’t ever go to) is in an old railroad car. Both have the same owner, a person whose daughter went to high school with one of my daughters, and who the GG is somewhat acquainted with. He named-dropped the owner today [snort]. Anyway, good food 24 hours a day, including Hippie Hash (which I have never tried). Excellent (and friendly) service too. The GG ordered a side of sausage patties with his omelet (or whatever he ordered) and was served bacon instead. He was fine with that and we didn’t say anything. A bit later, our server stopped by and acknowledged her mistake, profusely apologizing. It was complicated but she had somehow hit the wrong button. No worries, she was great and I tipped her well.

We like to take back roads home after the symposium and this time we dropped down to Mason (where BFF went to high school) to hook up with the Dexter Trail. When we got to M52 we opted to head south to Stockbridge because the road looked potentially worse if we went straight (snow and ice, see below). After Stockbridge, we turned onto North Territorial, which was also pretty dicey with all of the ups and downs and twists and turns you get in glacial moraine country. Then through Dexter with the final leg of the journey being on Huron River Drive. If you’re unfamiliar with this area and can’t follow me, that means we took three scenic drives on our way home.

We had a couple/several inches of snow overnight, which made the road conditions interesting. The Lansing/East Lansing main roads were pretty much fine as long as you slowed down for intersections. I’m sure the freeways were great. The back roads? Intermittent snow/slush/ice/whatever. Combined with the twists/turns ups/downs of glacial moraine topography. By the time we got up this morning, the snow had moved east and Mr. Golden was doing his work. But. The temperature was down in the 20s so when we were driving, Mr. G-S hadn’t finished his work and had actually made things a little worse..

Somehow, it was a relaxing drive *anyway*, even for the GG, who was driving. He was driving at slow enough speeds that I was comfortable, the scenery was beautiful, and Mr. G-S was making us feel the promise of summer. March can bring some horrendous snow and/or ice storms but the good news is that it *usually* melts pretty quickly. Don’t tell that to the good people of Sault Ste. Siberia though. They have endured record snowfall this winter if I have it right. Instead of melting, it hangs around and more snow piles on top of it and they are all ready to move on NOW.

When we got home I was faced with “What’s for dinner?” I mean from my own baggy old brain, no one was bugging me about it. For about a split second, I thought something like, “Maybe I should text Little Cat Z and see if she has any ideas?” I bagged that idea PDQ, deciding I wasn’t so old and baggy that I had to sluff off meal planning for the me and the GG to my daughter. So I came up with a different lamb stew than my go-to recipe, garlic bread and salad. This recipe will use up some frozen artichokes so win win.

P.S. Neither one of us made a move to turn on the radio the whole time, not even Willie’s Roadhouse, which has become a “neutral” station for us, i.e., not NPR and not MAGA. (Although the GG actually does listen to NPR [snort]. It isn’t *all* “libtard” pollytickle stuff.)

I sent the GG out to Mooon Yooonit this morning a few minutes ahead of me. I wanted to use the water closet one more time but mainly I just needed a few minutes to collect myself. The GG gets really excited about things sometimes (I can’t exactly explain why) and Quiet Waters is one of them and I was like, go start the car (Mooon Yooonit can’t be remote started without buying an app and the GG refuses to do that) and I’ll be out in a couple minutes. Of course when I got out there, *this* is what I encountered.

I got in the car *anyway* and moments later when we turned toward the east, this was our view.

Last week I posted a pic of the GG setting up a “wall” in our back living room. That was a test drive to make sure all of the working parts were present and fitting together correctly. He took it apart again, packed it up, and set it up to look like this in the pavilion.

I attended presentations off and on all day and a bunch of us met up (as usual) at Pizza House for dinner after it was all over.

So now the GG and I are back at our hotel arguing (again) (sigh) about Trump and his latest ridiculous actions. No it was not right for Iran to retaliate by bombing other countries but it was also not right for “us” to bomb Iran. We started it. People have already died and many more will follow. Did this stuff really happen? This is the “president of peace?” I think not. More like the president of gigantic ego. It was blissful to ignore the news all day and distressing to catch up with it tonight.

Actually, it’s “Quiet Adventure Symposium” nowadays but some of us have a hard time giving up the old name.

First stop, Dagwood’s to meet up with Greg, Tom, and Erin for lunch. Olive burger for me. If an olive burger is on the menu, I will order it. Fortunately Dagwood’s burgers are not the huuuuge burgers everyone seems to be serving these days. This is an OLD tavern, way pre-dating me, and has changed very little over the years. That is for the good.

At the pavilion setting up the “wall”. I was hanging out in Mooon Yooonit reading and staying outta the fray. The GG does not need my help with stuff like this. Greg and Tom are pretty good at figuring out what help is needed and they were all having a good time.

Mostly empty arena. Will be packed tomorrow.

And then Beggar’s Banquet. Which seems, uh, different this year. The food was fine but the menu had totally changed. And the Gimme Eat sign had lost “Gimme Eat” somehow (the pic below is from another year). Did the place change hands after umpteen bazillion years? I did a quick google but didn’t find anything. I mean, this is the place where my (late) cousin Teri worked when she was a young 20-something (having lost both parents), trying to figger out what to do with her life. A young lawyer (and rock band drummer) kept coming in to eat and then visit her and eventually he convinced her to marry him. And now their daughter Ana is part of the FinFam. Okay, cut the nostalgia KW.

Nevertheless, it was a good time. I was the only woman at our table and one of the men is a presenter tomorrow. He drove over from Minnesota. I am definitely going to attend his presentation tomorrow so more about that then.