For my frozen ice (January) birthday, I was gifted with a workshop at a local arts center. Oh man, I used to take the beach urchins there to do little art prodjects and once I hosted a birthday party there and a customer asked me if I worked there. Nope. I also had that happen to me at the Berkeley Bowl. Miss, where can I find [this exotic veggie]? I didn’t know. I flew to SanFran from DayTwa Metro that day to visit my daughter. Had never been there before. Laughing because I am not an old hippie although I can sometimes look like one.

I am overwhelmed by the choices at the art center but one of them kinda stands out. I have been intrigued by maps my entire life. And I have been intrigued by creating maps of my homeland for a while. So there’s a workshop that deals with topographic maps of whatever places you want. We’ll see what I do. The pic is a map that Little Cat Z made of the moominbeach when she was a child. She nailed it.

I want to make fabric maps of my homeland (and adopted lands) and this workshop is not a fabric workshop but I wonder if it would inspire me.

It was a pretty sweet day. A Landfill Dinner was planned for tonight. It came together beautifully. Last evening I asked the beach urchins if they could help me come up with a dinner plan. I was all outta steam on that but I promised to do the shopping and cooking prep. Little Cat Z came through almost immediately with a Mediterranean sheet pan chicken thingy. It was perfect!

So I hit up the Plum this morning for the ingredients, then I traveled out to the new White Lotus Farms location, a small market and cafe on Zeeb Road. I wanted some of their specialty flavored goat cheese spreads although they have a lot of other good stuff too.

I have been a longtime White Lotus Farms customer. Years ago, I bought stuff from them at the farmers market. During the pandemic, I ordered their stuff for delivery from Argus Farm Stop. A couple years ago, I discovered that they had a little market at their main farm on Liberty but it had limited hours. Recently, I was checking GooMaps mainly to rediscover their hours and “White Lotus Farms Cafe” popped up on Zeeb Road. Today I finally went over there. As I came up to the counter with my goat cheese spreads, I told the clerk, “I am so glad you have this location.” Her cheerful response was, “So are we.” Indeed.

Anyway, I had a great time marinating the chicken and prepping the veggies, mainly cutting them up into biggish chunks. And prepping a simple green salad. The idea was that I would do most of the grunt work and Little Cat Z would put the sheet pan together at the end because she has a JOB and had to work today. In the end, I’m not too sure if things worked out quite that way but I greatly appreciated her help.

The GG spent a lot of the day running errands, mostly to hardware stores, of course, and packing up Mooon Yooonit including a cartop carrier. Then, if I get it right, he took a NAP.

The salad “hands” in the pic are an often used gift from my bonus daughter Pengo Janetto in Hawaii. I made a pretty big, if simple, salad and this is what was left at the end of the dinner.

So. I am missing the Olympics. I don’t normally watch them much but this year we turned them on every night and watched until we got sleepy. (Actually the TV in the back room has been on 24-7 since the Olympics began even though nobody is usually watching it.) We didn’t watch any Olympic event intensely, it was just background noise in our lives.

This photo is pretty hard to “process”, at least visually. This is the GG rehearsing our North Country Trail booth setup at the Quiet Adventure (Water) Symposium this coming weekend at the Moo-U (Michigan State University) Farm Bureau Pavilion.

This event used to feature water sports, like kayaking, etc. Eventually a bunch of hiking type folks (i.e., us, although we also kayak) horned their way into all the fun so they changed the name so as to cover a wider range of activities. The first time the GG helped run a Hiawatha Shore-to-Shore North Country Trail chapter booth, he went over there and back in one day. My BFF Sam (archaeologist, not dog) was in the Moo-U area visiting her parents and I drove over separately in the Ninja and picked her up and we attended the symposium, at least minimally.

Time went on and the GG’s involvement and eventually mine grew to where he does all of the display setups and I hang out and talk to people, introvert that I am. And now we schedule a whole weekend for this, complete with a hotel and lunch/dinner arrangements with friends But I’ll talk about that some other day. Like maybe Friday when the GG is setting up and I reassure our buddy Greg that it’s best to just let the GG roll without any help. Greg doesn’t need much reassurance.

“Silent sport” is a term my brother used when he switched from snowmobiles and speed botes to x-c skiing and kayaking. He was still healthy enough when he made those switches but I think he knew the writing was on the wall. He was making what changes he could to his family’s life, if changes to his own were not possible, at least in the long term. I’ll probably talk more about that some other day too. I’ve been processing this for 20 years.

I have always been a silent sport person myself. We (me and the GG) do own a couple of *small* motor botes. At Hoton Lake, we own (with other people) a big loverly Flote Bote (pontoon bote).

I never got along with snowmobiles very well. That is not to dis snowmobilers. They are mostly good people and they bring a lot of money to the yooperland and the northern lower.

Why us Great Lake Staters were surprised by this weather event, I do not know. Especially since it started before we turned in last night.

This waylaid some of my plans but a temporarily overloaded refrigimitator also flummoxed me. I am told the driving wasn’t too bad. Mouse’s drive to work wasn’t all that great but that was because she reports to work well before most people are up on a Sunday and they hadn’t plowed anything yet. Anyway, it’s a short drive on usually empty rural roads.

The GG drove a sh*t-ton of food and supplies up to FlaMan and he reported good roads even though light snow was coming down most of the day. Our overnight guest Joan left in the late morning (after a short hike down by the river) for somewhere in New York, fortunately a couple hours north of NYC, so we’re hoping her travels were also safe.

Joan is a wonderful house guest. She was doing morning computer stuff and I was doing morning computer stuff. At one point, worried that I was being a bit anti-social, I mentioned that I was not simply slugging, I was doing the morning word puzzles that I do (in parallel) with Little Cat Z and she and I and occasionally mouse were texting. Joan was also communicating with various people although maybe not doing word puzzles. We are always happy to function as “trail angels” for Joan although usually her travels through The Planet Ann Arbor involve highways, not hiking trails.

We had a tentative plan for a Landfill Dinner tonight but ended up bagging it. Partly because we had an overnight guest (and not-surprise snow) and I didn’t really have time to go for grocks as early as I like to, not to mention that I did not have a dinner plan. Aaaaaand, also because the refrigimitator was chock-a-block full of food to take to FlaMan and I could not process its contents to save my life. It’s okay, a couple of folks (not us) are still recovering from a nasty cold virus. Little Cat Z and I discussed all of this and she said let’s do Tuesday instead so you can “reset”. So that’s what we are aiming for.

So yesterday, I opened the envelope from the Secretary of State, prepared to renew the registration for Cygnus, Moooon Yooonit, and one of the motor botes.

This turned out to be rather a long confusing ordeal. I was able to renew the motor bote (or so I thought). Then I tried Cygnus. It would not let me renew Cygnus’s registration. We were not in the registration period. Say what? I have been renewing car registrations online every year since the late 1990s and this has never been a problem before. Eventually, after much scrutiny and thought, I figured out that I could not renew it because it was NOT DUE UNTIL 2027. Whut? It turned out that the GG renewed all this stuff last year and there was an option to select a two-year registration so he selected it.

Okay. That’s fine. But then, because I never actually checked out and paid for the motor bote’s registration, I later got an email that the renewal had been canceled. So. I did it again. This time, I was asked to provide the date of issue for my driver’s license. And that led to a moment of sheer panic. Wait! Wasn’t I supposed to renew my driver’s license last month? I hadn’t done that. I hadn’t received any paperwork in the mail. Mail delivery can sometimes be flaky here so did it get lost? Have I been driving on an expired license for the last month? Nervously, I pulled my faded driver’s license out of my purse/pocket. Whew! It ALSO doesn’t expire until 2027. When did they extend the licensing period from four to five years? I do not know but the last time I renewed it was 2022.

This is not to mention the less than perfect user experience I had doing all this. How many times did I have to do two-factor authentication via text message to complete this stuff? Something like three or four maybe? This stuff was pretty seamless back in the late 1990s. I know that as fraudsters et al have gotten more sophisticated over the years, any system that deals with personal/financial information has had to be made more secure. But jeebus. What should’ve taken maybe 10 minutes tops took a half hour or so and multiple restarts. And I have expertise in this kind of stuff.

A twitter play from this date during the Polar Vortex Winter back in 2014.

Setting: Cubelandia

FZ (Cube neighbor): More lightning!
KW: Oh shoot, I missed it again!
Mr. Bear (a rather gruff but beloved developer): Why don’t you go out and stand in it?

I won’t try to detail the Polar Vortex Winter except to say that the weather prediction for this particular day was 45 degree temperatures. I think that may have eventually happened but this pic was taken in the late morning and there was a frickin’ blizzard going on at the time, complete with thunder snow.

Dinner tonight at the Westside Sports Bar on The Planet Ann Arbor (no snow), a little bit more of the Olympics, and then to bed. Grocks in the morning and then throwing together some chicken enchiladas for us and a beloved overnight guest tomorrow night.

P.S. The Supreme Court actually DID do its job today. In my opinion.

They were just piddly little storms but it’s been a while and I was enjoying hearing the distant rumbling. Until… I had a Mom Moment. The kind where you are sure your child is gonna die. My mouse was out hiking in an area park. She is well into adulthood and I don’t really have any reason to worry about her. But like my mother before me, I ALWAYS worry a bit when people are driving*. The roads and other drivers can be terrifying. Anyway, I texted her and her reply was “Almost back to the car”. Whew.

A wimpy bit of thunder but we got a LOT of rain, which almost completely melted our snow. Only little piles of it where the biggest snowbanks were. Will we get more? Oh, I’m sure we’ll get more snow but we’re at the time of year when USUALLY, the freeze/thaw cycle eases off a little. Mr. Golden Sun is heading toward the equinox and melts our snow PDQ at this time of year. When he makes an appearance.

The pic is stolen from a text message from my mouse. She and the racc were walking in the church/grave yard adjacent to the “Black Lives Matter” church across the street from their house and found this skull. Deer? I think so. Before renting that house, they researched the church. I know they didn’t want to live across the street from a straight-laced judgmental Christian conservative church. I grew up in a church kinda like that and it turned me off of religion forever.

I haven’t tried to look up the history of that church. Are the long-dead people in the adjacent graveyard turning in their graves that their little church is now a black lives matter church? I’d like to think not. If I get it right, Michigan was a place where slaves were safe way back when. But who knows and I’m not sure “safe” was always the case…

*My mom had reason to fear car accidents. Her mother, my grandmother Emily (my middle name), died in a car accident when my mother was 15. Emily had taken her sister to the hospital to have a baby and died on the way home. Accounts of this accident conflict between stories my mom told me and newspaper clippings I found after mom died. So my bio maternal grandmother died many years ago, before I was born and the grandmother I knew on my mom’s side of the family was Bolette. A step-grandmother who treated me as if I was her bio granddaughter. She had no bio children or grandchildren.

Just yesterday I was kvetching (kinda) about Mikaela and Lindsey bombing out at the Olympics. I have mixed feelings about all of this. As much as I want women (and men) to continue to compete as long as they are physically and mentally capable, I wondered if Mikaela’s time was up. Why don’t you quit, girl? It turns out she had one more rodeo. Slalom. She won gold and I’m eating a bit of crow.

The pic is not Mikeala. It’s my mouse and she’s x-c skiing, not doing downhill stuff. My kids didn’t ever do downhill. Well, my mouse did it once in middle school. She somehow got invited to go with somw “popular” kids*. That was a winter when she didn’t have a REAL winter jacket. A long story but I had a double zip-apart jacket and I gave her the warmer inner part and kept the outer part for me to run errands around town in the POC.

My late friend Sari and her husband share a surname with Mikeala, although it’s spelled a bit differently. Sari was hugely into genealogy and she found connections to 8th cousins and even a connection between she and her husband — 6th or 7th cousins she thought — but she never figured it out. She also found out that she was related to her rabbi (a great friend of hers) and he mentioned that at her funeral to quite a bit of laughter. Greatly love and miss my long time friend Sari.

*If my mouse was not in the popular crowd in middle school, it was because she refused to give in to the crapola kids in a traditional middle school give to each other. Not to mention the teachers/guidance counselors who don’t have the time to get to know the hundreds of kids they have to deal with. I was proud of her for that. My mouse was a middle school survivor and that is about all I will say about that.

We got home from an outing today and the GG wanted to take Cygnus to a car wash to hand spray her exterior and under-parts. I declined to ride along. Being a nice warm sunny day, I figured there would be a line of cars waiting to get into the car wash on Jackson Rd. Jackson, especially in that area, is a dangerous place to sit in the road waiting to go into anywhere. I didn’t understand exactly what the issue was but the the GG came home pretty directly with Cygnus still caked with mud and salt. He dragged hoses outta the Landfill Dungeon and hand-sprayed both Cygnus and Mooon Yooonit. Then he put the hoses back into the dungeon because we all know it’ll probably freeze again.

The fun part of the day was the preceding outing. This was my second time participating in the monthly EPA retiree luncheon. It turns out that, at the end of each such luncheon, there is a bag with people’s names on papers in it. Whosever’s name is drawn gets to select the restaurant for next month’s meeting. I missed this at last month’s meeting. Today someone said, “We’ll have to put KW’s name in the bag.”

Our restaurant today was The Breakfast Place in Brighton, a town north of here that we don’t really know very well. The GG pretty quickly figured out that he couldn’t get a beer. Although I enjoy some whine for lunch or a late breakfast (this place has lunch stuff too but closes at 2:00 PM), it was a great restaurant. I had the spinach/tomato/feta omelet with hash browns and took half of it home, i.e., it has four eggs. The GG copied me.

Some of these people recognize me on sight from when I worked for a government contractor at the EPA when I was a young “pretty” (some people said) blonde working in Operations (and soaking up computer knowledge). But not all. I remember ALL of these people, whether they interacted with Operations or not although most of them did. And so, when people introduce themselves to me, I say, “Yes! I remember you. I worked at the EPA for 15 years.” As I told someone on the way out today, “I learned computers at the EPA.”

I think I am going to enjoy this group. A different restaurant every month? Yes. And these restaurants are all over southeast Michigan.

Iroquois Mountain aka Mission Hill. The pic is one my uncle Don took. He was involved in the original project to create this ski area, which had one chairlift, a couple of rope tows and three/four runs, plus the bunny hill. Somewhere I have pics of the ski hills but I can’t find them so all you get is the lodge.

I took my first lessons on the bunny hill, which had its own rope tow. I graduated to the intermediate rope tow hill and eventually to the chairlift. For the first few years, I stuck to run Number One but eventually ventured on to 2, [3], and 4. I was never a fantastic skier but could make my way down those runs without any problems and sometimes even a bit elegantly, at least on number 1.

There was a ski school xmas week, which is when I took lessons as a kid. Weber’s Ski School. When I was a teenager, The Commander and her friend Ginny Boult volunteered me and Ginny’s daughter Helen as teachers for young skiers. It was a free ski school and they wanted us to pay back for our own free lessons. I am not the best teacher (of anything) but I had a pretty good time teaching 8-year-olds. The ski school was only in the morning and we got to ski for free in the afternoon.

My parents were always happy to drive us out to Mission Hill, even on glare ice roads.

Quite a bit later, I tried to get my high school boyfriend interested in skiing. It wasn’t all that successful. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the bunny hill (LOL). So I took him up the intermediate rope tow. He didn’t want any kind of lesson, at least not from meeeee. He got off the rope tow and immediately headed down the hill without waiting for me. And his not-ski-pants ripped. Jeebus.

I fergit what happened next. I think I lost track of him for a while? I skied and when I eventually caught up with him, he was in the bar (he was 19 and legal and I was 17, not legal). I eventually dragged him outta there. I was pretty pissed off that day but he really was a good guy, don’t get me wrong. He just wasn’t all that interested in skiing. Bowling was his thing.

Not something I say to myself (or anyone) very often. Friends, I “fixed” my Rooomba yesterday.

The last time I had run her, she errored out at the end of her run. There was a link to instructions about how to fix her (and I had actually followed them before) but I didn’t feel like doing it right then. I had GREAT TREPIDATION about embarking on that prodject, to tell you the truth. By the time I got back to it, the link to the instructions had evaporated. Bad user interface design (UX) although a lot of Rooomba app UX is actually pretty okay.

Anyway, what did I do? I procrastinated, of course. Like, nobody is coming over this weekend, etc. etc. Like, who cares? Actually *I* care but I let inertia take me over.

Yesterday, I opened the Rooomba app. The error had cleared and everything looked all right. So I ran Rooomba. She was okay but I could tell she was struggling because she emptied her bin umpteen bazillion times. Okay. I have done this once before. Maybe I can do it again even without the instructions. And so I did. Non-mechanical meeeee. I knew that there were parts to take off and clean and eventually I figgered out how to do it without breaking anything.

The deal is the more recent Roooombas empty their own bins but occasionally stuff builds up inside the works and they need help getting it out. My poor Rooomba has to deal with my long(ish) hair, which gets wound around the ends of the rollers (not a technical term and don’t ask). I pulled those wrapped coils of baggy old bag hair off the ends of the rollers, dumped out some other bits of detritus, and put her back on her charging station, hoping I hadn’t mucked something up.

Today? She started up without a problem. No error messages. She cleaned her entire “map” and only emptied her bin once.

So a bit of mechanical success (I have also fixed my garbage disposal via YouTube videos). I don’t think I will try to do car or warshing musheen repairs any time soon.

The pic is outhouses at Tahquamenon Falls State Park. Don’t you love their “hats”?

Or without the GG as the case is this year. It’s okay. At this age I am pretty jaded about spending the “holiday” with my partner although make no mistake, if he were here we’d be grilling filet and having a fake log faaar in the faaarplace. And watching the Olympics.

But he’s not here, so I’m gonna heat up leftover (homemade) pizza and blahg and make a grock list for tomorrow morning. And watch the Olympics. Oh wait, are the Olympics still going? If not, I guess I’ll have to find Svengoolie but I think the Olympics are still going.

So we delivered the GG’s handmade cards and chocolates to the beach urchins on Thursday and yesterday I started thinking, “Hmmm, where’s mine?” I didn’t dwell on this, it just crossed my mind a couple times. By this morning, I had totally forgotten about it. An odd thing though. When I got up and made my way to the Water Closet, I passed the bookcase, as usual. But this time I actually NOTICED Trunky. I guess Trunky lives there these days but I don’t usually notice him.

So shower, etc., and I was working on word puzzles when text messages started coming in, as they do. One was from the GG to meeee saying, “I left something for you under Trunky.” Ohhhhh, *that’s* where my Valentine loot is.” And it’s probably why I noticed Trunky this morning because with a Valentine box of candy underneath him, he is a different height.

The first pic is of *one* of the interior pages of his handmade card. I love that he actually somehow found a RAINBOW series of feathers. WITH ALL SIX COLORS! (I actually think he has a stash of craft store feathers somewhere in his lair.) I clearly remember learning the color and order or the rainbow colors in kindergarten and have always been annoyed when some misguided person leaves one out (orange usually or sometimes purple). Or adds indigo. Nope. Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Purple. The thing about the million dollars illustrates his penchant for tracking down odd facts and/or making complex calculations. I’m not sure this is a typical Valentine sentiment but it’s how the GG rolls and so it suits me fine.

Fun fact: My dad was a banker and on one of his trips to the federal reserve in Minnesota (I think), he was handed a million dollars. Just to hold for a minute, I mean. I don’t know what the denomination of the bills making up the million were or how much they weighed.

Last but not least is a photo of Trunky on top of a messy bookcase in the messy “master” bedroom, if you can call it that. It’s small but what the heck, all I ever do in there is sleep. Trunky technically belongs to mouse but like many entities from her very creative childhood, he lives here. He even has some money in him. Mouse used to regularly empty him and give the coins to me to trade for bills.

Years ago when the beach urchins were in middle and high school and doing theatre productions and I was the theatre guild administrator, Valentine’s Day fell during “tech week” of our February play. Because I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off, the Landfill ran completely out of toilet paper, like there was ONLY the roll on the holder. Okay. This cannot be. I schlepped over to Kroger to buy TOILET PAPER and found the aisles crowded with drunk looking men grabbing candy, cards, and flowers left and right. Oh! It’s Valentine’s Day. I better get movin’.

Iggy being St. Ignace, Michigan. Immediately north of the Big Mac bridge.

Iggy is where the GG is staying the next two nights (with a trip to Tahquamenon in between). There is Pond Hockey this year! Pond Hockey is scheduled every winter but it doesn’t always happen. Ice always forms on the Great Lakes, at least in places. Whether or not the ice is safe to walk/snowmobile/drive on, is a whole ‘nother story. And it varies according to where you are and how much water movement is going on under the ice.

Mackinac Island is a short ferry ride from the mainland most of the year. If the ferries aren’t running (because ice), it can be difficult to travel back and forth. It is possible to snowmobile (or walk or drive) across the ice but the recommended way to go is to fly back and forth from Iggy (a seven minute flight).

A lot of people think driving their snowmobiles across the ice to the island is a kind of “bucket list” thing. Problem? A lot of the folks who try this are not *from* the area and have NO CLUE about whether the ice is safe or not. Heck, even a lot of people *from* the area probably have no clue. So people go down and when they go down, they go down fast and then quickly drift away from where they went down. UNDER THE ICE. Pretty hard to rescue someone if they don’t have time to call for help and pretty hard to recover their bodies when it’s almost impossible to do an underwater search.

Area folks used to line the ice path on both sides with discarded xmas trees but they aren’t doing that any more, probably so as not to call attention to the path.

Winter can feel like forever in the upper great lakes but the ice isn’t always safe for a very long time, especially in locations like this.

Now. Pond Hockey ice is as safe as it gets. For one thing, it is near shore in a lee-side bay where the ice gets a chance to set up unimpeded by high winds and rough water. And the event sponsors check the ice thickness regularly throughout the winter. If it doesn’t get thick enough, Pond Hockey gets canceled. Sad but better to be safe than sorry.

It wasn’t canceled this year and the GG is there and he walked around on the ice and took some pics.

Now that I’m “retaarrred” I have put my foot down to have a once-a-week weekday lunch. Lunch sometimes also happens on the weekend but it’s usually something with a beach urchin. The plan for today was to take a drive in the country and wind up at The Sports Bar Westside, which used to be (I think) Banfield’s West.

The GG was acting a bit secretive this morning and stranger noises than usual were emanating from his lair (usually computer keys clicking and occasional siiiiggghhhs) but he finally approached me with a “plan of attack” or whatever. “We have some deliveries to make.” Okay, I knew what was going on. Do not open until Saturday, if you want a clue.

Our first stop was Little Cat Z’s house, where she (working from home today) caught us red-handed making the delivery. He was going to put it in her gas grill, but being a meticulously organized person, it wasn’t hanging around outside (like ours is). Probably carefully put away in the garage.

Second stop was mouse’s house. It was mouse/racc’s day off but both cars were there. The GG knocked but there was no answer. I suspected that they were ignoring the knocking. I mean, I’m sure not a whole bunch of people knock on their door out there in the country. So he put the delivery in the garage and we drove off and then… I had a mom moment! Will I ever stop having those? “I hope they’re okay in there.” We texted and everything was fine (of course) except for a cold virus.

BTW, we are not in the habit of “bombing” our kids at their homes without advance notice.

So, on to more back road driving and then the sports bar. A lot of TVs were on but we were GLUED to the bobsled/luge/skeleton events. We weren’t sure exactly which event we were watching. Did we care? No, we did not. We love every form of bobsled.

The GG: I wonder if they train in Michigan? KW: I wonder if they train in Jamaica? Cool Runnings was a family fave when the beach urchins were, well, urchins. We watched it multiple times both here at the Landfill and at the Moldy Old Hoton Lake Cabin. If I get it right, it was based on an actual Jamaican bobsled Olympic team.

A couple other movies we watched a lot were Free Willy and Anne of Green Gables. ALL of us, INCLUDING THE GG, knew all of the words to the Anne of Green Gables movies. Trivia: The only reason I can tolerate my name, Anne, is because The Commander claimed she named me after Anne of Green Gables (and not my eccentric great aunt).

My fave scene in Cool Runnings is when the Jamaican team gets off the airplane in Calgary. They walk out the door of the airport and immediately hustle back in. John Candy is standing outside dressed lightly (for Calgary) and smoking a cigar (I think).

Cool Runnings was a good John Candy movie, at least my family liked it. There are some other good ones. There are also some very bad ones. Do not even try to watch Canadian Bacon. But still, RIP John Candy.

Anyway, we had a great time at this sports bar and were served by a sparkly young waitress (I mean sparkly personality, not pasties, she was wearing a sweatshirt). She’s heading to a university in the yooperland next year and of course that got the GG going on the North Country Trail.

Cheers!

The GG: I gotta get OFF the computer.

KW [silently]: YES!

[A few minutes later, keys are clicking at the computer again.]

KW: Are you at the computer again?

The GG: Yes, but only for a minute.

KW [silently]: Jeebus Kee-reist.

I’m trying to figure out if this snow capped mushroom resembles a classical music composer from days gone by or an aging punk rocker or something else.

I wish I had a pic of the little ice rink across the street from my family’s shabby little bungalow on Superior Street in Sault Ste. Siberia when I was a child. It was a basketball court for the most part but in the winter, the city or school district or whoever turned it into an ice rink. My parents definitely bought me figure skates so I could hang out over there. I learned a few eensy weensy tricks on my skates but mainly I raced across the ice and crashed into the big snowbanks that ringed the rink, laughing uproariously and flipping onto my back to gaze at the star-studded winter sky. Thinking about it a bit, for a few years, a hockey dad lived next door to us and he made an ice rink between our houses. So two ice rinks next door to my house.

I wanted to learn to skate with the “pretty” girls who took lessons at the Pullar Stadium, where the Red Wings used to practice when I was a kid. My mom did not let me do that. The reasons were complicated but I think she didn’t feel like she fit in with that particular mom crowd, even big city (Detroit) girl that she was.

I always envied my figure skater friends but in the end, skiing was more my thing. My parents always supported that sport for me and my brother and all of our cousins skied.

In the end, The Commander came out ahead in life, so to speak. After a number of years of being a stay-at-home mom for me and my little brother, she eased herself into teaching, then got a masters degree and taught high school a number of years. In her later years, she became a revered elder in the community. I am so proud of her.

The year my dad spent a few weeks at the Henry Ford Hoosegow, the Olympics were on. It was 2006 if I remember correctly. I would drive over to the hoosegow and back every day and crash out in front of the Olympics every night. After dinner (which was often Dexter’s Pub) and my blahg and an email to family and friends.

At that time, I collected a lot of family and some friends who wanted to hear updates about my dad. Sometimes people would ask how I could write these daily emails. Well, first, writing helps me think things through and process them and writing those emails helped me as much as anything else. I was AMAZED at how many people wanted to hear about our journey through my dad’s injury, surgeries, and eventual death. It helped me that people seemed to care about this. When I was writing those emails, we were optimistic that my dad might survive but a few weeks after we moved him back to the yooperland to a rehab facility, he succumbed to sepsis and made his exit. Actually I wasn’t all that optimistic throughout any of this journey but I was holding the world on my shoulders and all I could do was think positively and carry on.

Tonight the Olympics are on again and I was a bit ambivalent about watching. We’ve been watching Andy Griffith and when we heard his whistling, I kinda wanted to watch that. But we turned to the Olympics anyway and whaddya know, it was giant slalom! I downhill skied a LOT as a kid and I love to watch skiing on TV. I was never really any good but I could manage my way down ANY hill, no matter how many moguls, if not elegantly. So we watched giant slalom and then some pairs skating (and learned the word “twizzle”) and now we’re watching what I think is slalom (gates are closer together than giant slalom).

I am not falling asleep in front of the TV tonight but I will probably not last all that long.

G’night, KW

After a couple weeks of kvetching about the SuberbOwl, the GG now has it on and plans to watch it. I do not know who he’s rooting for. I am rooting for the Seahawks of course, not that I’ll actually watch the game, as if I could follow it…

I am rooting for the Seahawks for two reasons. 1) Because I have two cousins who live in the area (and their families) and some bloggy friends I have known so long they almost seem like local neighbors. Just to say, one of my cousins is hosting a SuberbOwl party, the other one couldn’t care less about football and I don’t think she even has a TV. 2) Because I kinda hate renaming teams things like “Patriots”, although the GG informs me that the team hasn’t been renamed. That is its original name, I guess. Fair enough.

I have mixed feelings about renaming teams in general, especially if for “politically correct” reasons. I don’t really like “patriotic” names. I *am* patriotic, believe it or not. Just that “patriot” is taking on some different connotations in this day and age and I am not a fan. I am not a big fan of renaming teams with Native American names but I think that the Native American communities should have some say although I gather that the Native Americans’ opinions sometimes vary. Now. My high school was (and is) the Blue Devils. I thought that was a cool name and fortunately any attempts to change it were foiled. I think there *were* such attempts but am terribly fuzzy on the details. But who wouldn’t want to be a Blue Devil? I was proud to be one. “We are the devils, the mighty mighty devils…” Memories of being on the band bus and SING-SHOUTING that to the world. We did that when we rode the junior high bus, the high school bus was more subdued. For one thing, as cool a name as Blue Devils was, our team did not win a lot of games. Needless to say, we were a bit cynical by then.

My relationship with MAGA continues to evolve although I am NOT AND NEVER WILL BE MAGA OR pro-TRUMP no matter who I live with. But. A Sault Ste. Siberian facebook friend shared a post from a local animal shelter yesterday. An older gentleman cat’s family had experienced a sudden major disruption and the cat needed to be re-homed. The shelter posted that they were waiving the adoption fee to try to get this cat a new home as quickly as possible. Well. Within an hour, my MAGA “friend” Mushie had snagged the cat. (For clarity, Mushie is not the same person as the woman who shared the post from the animal shelter, just a commentor.) He tried to pay the adoption fee *anyway* and when it was refused, he made a donation. Later he posted a pic of his wife and their (now) two cats in their cozy living room. People are complicated.

Other than that, we met up with Little Cat Z for lunch at The Griz. Haven’t been there for a while and the mac’n’cheese side tasted good, especially loaded up with bacon.

This is inspired by my cousin Jay’s latest post.

She was breaking up and jettisoning an old box. I do that frequently. When my father-in-law was alive, he saved all kinds of boxes at the Moldy Old Hoton Lake cabin (since rebuilt). Every once in a while (when he wasn’t there), the Twinz of Terror would rampage through the cabin gathering old boxes. They would build a big bonfire and burn baby burn. They also cleared the cabin of old pieces of wood. If you are a mechanical engineer of a certain sort, you keep little pieces of wood because they can be “useful”. And I guess they were, to the Gumper. Me? I am laughing so hard writing this that I can hardly stand up.

Do not get me wrong. I loved my father-in-law dearly and I think he reciprocated that. That said, he had a whole lotta people to love with 10 kids and 19 grandchildren. But I landed in a good place in terms of in-laws.

So the Dewar’s box I will NEVER get rid of! It is wooden and it had been around since before I was born and I think it moved from the Old Cabin to the moomincabin when we built the moomin. It is also the box that my cat Twinkle’s second litter of kittens (I knooooow) was born in. We knew she was pregnant and one morning, her water had broken. I was maybe seven and my mother did not explain this to me in detail. But suddenly there was a tiny orange kitten in the box (Butterscotch nee Butterball). That was the signal for us kids to run down the path to the Mullin cabin to get the Mullin kids to come and watch the rest of the litter get born. They had a phone but we didn’t.

And then there’s the Red Owl box. This is a close up and you can’t see that it isn’t an exactly rectangular box, the top is larger than the base and there are handles on each end. I think this box is in the moomingarage and I hope to hell “no one” has thrown it out or burned it. When I was a kid, there were three “main” grocery stores in Sault Ste. Siberia plus some smaller ones and bunches of mom-and-pop stores. We most often went to the A&P but fairly frequently to the Red Owl and occasionally to the Piggly Wiggly.

The Red Owl handed out free stuff on a weekly basis. We got the Currier and Ives “china” from there, which we still have in the moomincabin. I think that’s also where we got the Golden Book encyclopedia set. The one with pictures that I read as maybe a second grader, up until maybe about the “E” book. I do remember reading about daguerreotypes (but don’t really remember what they are).

Tomorrow is the 57th I-500 snowmobile race in Sault Ste. Siberia.

The first race lasted all day and way into the night. I went there with Bad Boyfriend. We had a stoopid fight and he left me way on the other side of the loop in the damn dark. I walked around the rest of the track alone, wondering how I would get home. I mean, nowadays, I would just WALK home but I was a little high school girl then and I was terrified about who might be lurking in the dark. When I got back to the grandstand area, of all things, THERE WERE MY PARENTS! What the hell were they doing there? I dunno. Bad BF told me later that he had been looking for me. I believed him. He was not really a bad person and I think he felt some remorse.

I may have gone to the I-500 a couple more times before I left town. I do remember playing my piccolo (with glubs on) with the high school band once or twice.

The next time (after childhood) I went to the I-500 was when The Commander was in hospice care in 2012. My sister-in-law was visiting (yes, that one…) and I took her there. At that time, it was an easy walk from The Comm’s house, where we were luxury camping. It was a weird year though. The temperatures were approaching 40 and it turned out to be more of a mud race than anything.

This year, temperatures are c-c-c-cold and there’s a lot of snow so conditions are much better for a snowmobile race.