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.

When I hear about a literary type book set in the yooperland, especially the Sault Ste. Siberia area where I grew up and still own a part of my family’s beach, I have to read it. I had to wait a bit for “A Good Animal”. It didn’t drop until yesterday. I am already finished with it.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this book to everyone. I’m pretty sure the GG would not be crazy about it but that might be mostly because it doesn’t have Russian Revolution or WWI stuff in it. But I greatly enjoyed it and am experiencing a “book hangover” now.

The overall story arc is kind of a teenage romance/coming-of-age/sheep farming. There are some difficult parts to read and that’s all I will say.

Part of what I like about books like this is the eastern yooperland is my homeland. I know every square inch of it. I can still remember the eight (or so) block trip from my family’s shabby little bungalow on Superior Street to my grandparents’ rather grand house like I walked there just yesterday. I lived on the backside of Lincoln Elementary School, which I red-queened* to every kindergarten morning.

The author made many references to familiar landmarks in Sault Ste. Siberia, including Lincoln School. Rotary Park was one of them. The GG took the beach urchins to the nearby Clyde’s Drive-in (not mentioned in the book) once and they ate their takeout over at Rotary Park. I will never forget my younger niece Pengo (pre-K) arriving back at the moomincabin and gleefully telling her straight-laced mother, “We went to Goose Poop Park!” Yes, plenty of goose poop at Rotary Park. I think the GG was in the doghouse for a while after that. Good thing there is a Van Gogh painting in the doghouse (inside joke).

I grew up in the city of Sault Ste. Siberia and our summer cabin was (is!) west of that. Our beach looks out into Whitefish Bay and Lake Superior. My family often took drives “downriver” (where this novel is set) and the GG and I have continued that tradition. The downriver area is very flat and is mainly farmland. It is beautiful but it isn’t a lot like the terrain to the west of Sault Ste. Siberia although there is also some flat farmland south of the moomincabin.

Anyway, the author grew up downriver from Sault Ste. Siberia in a sheep farming family and she captured the landscape absolutely beautifully. I couldn’t find an appropriate pic of the downriver area so here’s this one of the Sugar Island ferry (also mentioned in the book) from Rotary aka Goose Poop Park.

*Red-queening? In “Through the Looking Glass” the Red Queen runs faster and faster to stay in place. Oh, just google it if you want to know. I don’t exactly remember but I was a pretty fast runner as a kid and The Commander called it red-queening.

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.