I won’t try to describe the twists and turns we went through to cook a chicken on the grill tonight. It was a Sparrow Market chicken that I brought up from the Planet Ann Arbor and the GG’s eyes totally lit up when I showed it to him a while after I got here on Thursday. Look what I have 👀

One of the twists was that we don’t seem to have a meat thermometer here. I feel like we’ve been through this search before and I can’t believe we don’t have something like FIVE meat thermometers but whatever. The GG rummaged the Old Cabin kitchen and found a sugar thermometer but not a meat thermometer. So he headed over to cousin Judd’s place and was more successful plus Judd came over and was so much fun to talk to as he always is. I remember when he was born and slept in a dresser drawer when he stayed up here at his grandma’s place (where he is living now). A meat thermometer is now on the GG’s hardware store list. I told him I’d put it on my list but he wants to choose his own and that’s fine with me. Whew! Something off my list.

And then we ran out of propane halfway through cooking our chicken. We put it in the oven while the GG made a quick trip to Brimley to get more propane and now it’s back on the grill.

Last I looked he was smoking a cee-gar. He is a very occasional cigar smoker. Neither of us have ever smoked cigarettes outside of minimal experimental stuff when we were very young. My parents were also not cigarette smokers but my dad often smoked a cigar after dinner when I was very young. And don’t talk to me about marijuana. I am a 1970s college student so I HAVE tried it but I did NOT get along with it.

My little brother emulated my dad by smoking ‘gars aka CRAYONS! He was like three years old. My main memory was a big yellow crayon that was his favorite ‘gar. That ‘gar rolled around all over the Old Cabin, where we spent our summers before we built the moomincabin. It got really dirty (in my opinion) but The Commander didn’t seem to be bothered by that as much as I was.

I was driving to Meijer this morning because when I got here yesterday and asked if there was any food, I was offered beanie weenies. For dinner. I don’t really have anything against beanie weenies but NOPE. I made him get takeout whitefish baskets from Pickles. He rightly figgered I didn’t want him to buy a lot of food and also that I wasn’t bringing much but still… I had planned both to get Pickles takeout last night and go to Meijer this morning anyway. (I saw exactly ONE other masked person in Meijer.)

On the way to Meijer, the beach urchins were texting me puzzle progress and we got off onto beanie weenies. And yes I was texting while driving but I was voice texting and I can do that in Cygnus, at least on the slow back roads in the eastern yooperland. Not much traffic. A handful of automotive vee-hickles, two Amish buggies, and a flock of wild turkeys who were standing in somebody’s driveway fluffing out their feathers. Like the Thanksgiving turkeys we drew when we were kids. I have no clue what was going on there and didn’t get a pic.

This place is about as grubby as it usually is after nine months or so of being closed up so I picked away at cleaning tasks. We then got into some of the usual conversations about things that need to be changed or gotten rid of. The baskets next to the front door were a temporary target. They have been here probably almost since we built the place when I was a kid. Eventually we decided they were keepers although some of the crapola in them is not. Dog grooming equipment from my long dead dog? I loved Tigger to distraction but I have no emotional attachment to any grooming stuff.

Books books books. Books were an early issue of contention after The Commander died. I’ve never figured out why since I had no plans to get rid of them any time soon. But we have too many and I am beyond tired of trying to clean around them. I devised a tentative plan to ask her grandchildren (and the GG) to identify books they WANT to stay around and eventually I’ll get rid of any that aren’t spoken for. Like, The Forest and the Fort series my grandfather owned is a keeper but I doubt anyone cares much about Tom Clancy paperbacks but who knows? We’ll see if I get around to that and if I do, how well it’ll work. Given the ongoing hostility and lack of communication from one of her grandchildren, I don’t have high hopes🐽🐽🐽 (I dunno if said grandchild ever lurks here or not. I am not hostile and I do communicate or used to try.)

So it was, as they say, colder near the great lakes today. I took a beach walk this afternoon and then did a complicated couple of dances of jacket vs. vest and sitting on Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench vs. the little hollow in front of the Old Cabin. This view is from the hollow. The bench is not protected from the northwest wind but it got downright HOT in the hollow.

Sayonara, KW

It was with some trepidation that Cygnus and I launched off the Planet Ann Arbor this morning on my first trip to the yooperland since I returned last year in mid-September. Part of my uneasiness was fueled by ongoing generalized pandemic anxiety. Part of it was that the weather forecast for all of Michigan was rain, rain, and more rain. In the end I slowly packed and did word puzzles until after 9:00 AM, which I figured was after rush hour, then I JAMMED my anxiety into the dungeon it belongs in and got on the road.

The drive was pretty much fine. The truck and Redneck Macho Man traffic pretty much fell off after Bay City. I got hit by some light drizzle off and on from West Branch to I dunno north of Gaylord maybe? Dry pavement pretty much prevailed.

Until I got a few miles south of the Big Mac. BIG FOG BANK AHEAD! TURN ON YOUR FOG HORN KW! I drove across the Mackinac Bridge in pea soup fog. I could see where I was going but when I got to the north side, I was like WHERE ARE THE TOLL BOOTHS? It’s okay, I found them just fine. When I stopped at the rest area just above the bridge, I found text messages including one from the GG warning me to turn on my fog horn. BTW, I was the ONLY masked person inside the rest stop.

The fog marginally improved as I got inland but as I approached my Rudyard exit, the rain had increased and it sounded kind of icy? Hmmmm. What is the temperature? 54 degrees. I wasn’t worried about the road surface being slippery but I was glad to exit at that time because my remaining travel was on low traffic roads. Not that there are a lot of vee-hickles on the I75 SUV Speedway in the yooperland.

The first pic is at the entrance to the cabin road. As we were unloading Cygnus, we were both eye-balling the precipitation and discussing whether it was actually SLEET, given its whitish color. I posted this on facebook and npJane commented that we had better FIX THE SLEET SITUATION by TOMORROW, which is when she is coming up.

It still isn’t very warm but the sleet has stopped and a little while after I posted that Mr. Golden Sun made a brief appearance so I posted THAT. Is this better?

Tempo is your store with more at lowest possible prices. Doo doo doo.

In light of the latest HORRIFIC school shooting, I have been remembering my own encounter with potential gun violence. I was a college student working in the office of “your Tempo store” (I did cashier too) in Sault Ste. Siberia.

I dealt with all kinds of things there. People paying their utility bills (yes really). People returning things (we’ll talk about the town pimp some other day). People returning things (we’ll talk about the people who were trying to return things they had stolen some other day).

Tempo was a discount department store kinda like KMart. It sold a lot of stuff. Including sporting goods. Which included firearms, mostly hunting rifles if I remember accurately but I knew nothing about guns.

So one day I was working in the office and a guy came up to the counter and laid a RIFLE across it like pointing it at me. Yikes! I was like 20 and my dad owned rifles but I never saw him shoot one of those or any other gun. So. All of us in the office kind of freaked out. Until I asked him why he wanted to return it. The guy humbly told us that he had lied on his application to buy a rifle. What did he lie about? He had checked “NO” next to the box asking if he had ever been diagnosed with a mental illness.

We didn’t freak out at that. This was in the early 1970s and people were not regularly blowing up schools and churches and stores and things. The guy’s MOTHER was with him (I think she made him come in to the store with her). Mr. Drysdale got involved and I believe he decided to let the mother own the gun. Something like that. No schools were blown up after that and we went on with life at Tempo.

This is just a story from my life. It was scary until it wasn’t but I think nowadays he might have been shot on the spot.

I needed to get out of the neighborhood for a while this afternoon so I took a River Ride. I wasn’t totally paying attention to the radio at first but NPR was talking about something at an elementary (?) school in Texas. As I was tuning my brain into it, I eventually processed that a shooting had left two students dead with 14 at a hospital. By the time I got home that had been revised to *14* dead students and a teacher and I have no clue if it has changed again since then.

How many mass shootings have happened in the last week? It feels like they are happening every other day now. I could look up the facts and statistics about this but I know that others will do it for me. Will the US president’s main job become traveling to mass shooting sites to offer condolences since they are happening so frequently?

Thoughts and prayers? I’ll guess that there are some victims’ family members who appreciate prayers. I am NOT religious and therefore would not be among them. If a family member of mine ever succumbed to a mass shooting, I would be CURSING whatever god people worship. Thoughts? I’m not sure what that even means. Are the “thoughts people” setting aside a time each day to sit around and think about mass shooting victims? There’s a long list at this point.

Again. I am a gun owner albeit by inheritance. I have never shot or handled a gun except to gingerly pack some rifles into the POC once. I’d like to get rid of most of my guns but this isn’t really about taking away anybody’s guns. I wish we could keep guns out of the hands of nutso people. But we can’t with internet shopping and parents who think going to shooting ranges with their disturbed teenage child is “bonding” and elected officials who post pictures of their whole families holding guns around the xmas tree. And how can we identify people of any age who are at risk of going “postal” in such a horrifying way.

Although pro-choice is my hot-button issue at the moment (and always will be), I will NOT EVER vote for political candidates who aren’t interested in coming up with reasonable laws for selling and purchasing guns. I know that we can’t ensure that a deranged person won’t get hold of a gun (one that can kill 14 children in a manner of minutes) but we have to try. I do not care how many thoughts and prayers they send to victims’ families. Those are worthless.

P. S. 18 children dead and the shooter also killed his grandmother(?)

The Gaylord Tornado kind of took over Friday’s topic, which would probably have been the TICK (YICK!) the GG found on his leg in the shower that morning. Where did it come from? How long had it been hanging around? We do not know.

I immediately said I was gonna wash the sheets. He pooh-poohed that idea. But. He left for the Great Spirally North that morning so I washed the sheets ANYWAY. And the mattress pad. Which needed it. It’s been a while. TMI? I have not seen any more ticks. I can handle taking showers with spiders and frogs. I do not want to sleep with ticks.

Our moomincabin internet appliances have been fixed following the Lightning Strike. And the DSL has been replaced with a modern one. It has always been a workhorse but at 11 years old it was time. The landline phone too even though no one EVER uses it. The Jamadots guy dredged up an old used one for us. We’ve had good and bad experiences with Comcast (once they sent out a “serial killer” but another time a cheerful superman climbed a pole in below zero weather). Jamadots is 100 times better. Apparently they weren’t easy to get hold of over the weekend but they were out by late morning today and had everything fixed slam bang.

During this, my cuzz The Beautiful Jan and I were going back and forth online a bit. She reported that there were PELICANS out by the island. Pelicans do not hang around in the moominbeach area but they often make a stop during migration. I may be mangling that 🤣. I am a casual bird-watcher at best.

The new mouse nest acquired both a lawn mower and a trash cart today and both inhabitants are waaaaay excited. Apparently a celebratory beer is involved. And “inhabitant” is the one spelling bee word I didn’t get yesterday. I got “inhabiting”, “inhibiting”, “inhabit”, “inhibit”, “habit”, and “habitat”. It’s fascinating how the brain works. Or doesn’t. Hibbity-habbity.

It is “No Mow May” here to “save the bees”. This is working out for some people better than others because apparently this isn’t a good month to institute such a policy in this area. It isn’t mandatory and I had to laugh when a neighbor whose spouse is involved in a lot of this kind of stuff told us he was gonna mow ANYWAY. The GG also mowed. To me, not mowing is counterintuitive to the idea of tick prevention. This is complicated stuff though and I don’t claim to be an expert in any way, shape, or form.

The pic is from Friday evening. I heard a lot of voices in the school yard, then as dusk fell, what sounded like a MOVIE! I looked it up and it was Haisley Movie Night. It was a beautiful mild night for an outdoor movie and I headed over to take a pic. I didn’t get too close. I figured I’d probably have to buy a ticket and also, I don’t really fit into that crowd any more. Back in the day, I’d’ve been running around with cash boxes and big ziploc bags of cash. Small bills, of course. I wonder who’s running the PTO treasury over there nowadays…

Chilly because we have the screen in the storm door but I like to keep the big inner wooden door OPEN because it lets more light into the Landfill and I love natural light. Or lack thereof. It was in the 50s this morning but we are good at layering and there are lap-sized blankets all over the place so we were FINE!

We had a wee bacon-based brek and then lounged on the Green Couch doing our daily word puzzles in person. Usually we are texting back and forth. I have still not gotten to Queen Bee today. I am missing one in10 word and it is NOT one of the pangrams. Actually I may have given up on it for today. Just not seeing it. A new bee person walked quickly to Queen Bee today without even looking at the grid! So congrats! Note that we do NOT do this competitively! It is FUN and we are all word-y type people and it is a low-key way for adult daughters to interact with their mooma duck.

We eventually roused ourselves and drove out to Swan Corners to look at the cygnets (still 8), then did a mouse nest drive-by, knowing that no one was home.

The GG sent this cute little pic to indicate that he had arrived at the moomincabin and was getting it opened up for the season. I wanted to ask for a pic of whatever snow was still around but he… was… busy… Among other pesky little problems, plumbing mainly (which he is good at fixing quickly albeit it sometimes with multiple trips to the hardware store) the DSL was not working. I’d had a heads up about this when Our Northern Correspondent texted me yesterday to inform me that a dramatic lightning strike had taken out their internet as well as that of a McPiedy neighbor. We didn’t know if it was a local problem or more widespread. Well, apparently more widespread. Hopefully it’ll be fixed after Memorial Day when I plan to do some telecommuting from up there.

I suppose I’m about done for today, at least with this blather. I am cracking up though because as I started writing about the spelling bee puzzle, NPR played a song called Queen Bee by Taj Mahal, one of the GG’s faves. I couldn’t believe my ears! (Starts with 2 ads but one is 10 seconds and the other can be skipped almost immediately).

For those who care, I am doing well. I took Cygnus X-1 out to look at the *8* cygnets at Swan corners. Now I’m hanging out at the Landfill with my Lizard Breath. We’re trying to figure out how to turn on the TV. Maybe we’ve got it…

Got up a wee bit later than I wanted to but I had a different agenda than usual. I made it to Meijer just about at 7:00 AM. A case of beer (bud, but not lite) for FlaMan, a FEW cleaning supplies for the GG to take to the moomincabin this weekend.

For years (pre-COVID), I tried to buy as much stuff down here as I could and schlep it up. My reasoning was that I didn’t want to spend my time up there going to town to get grocks and supplies. Well, guess what? I always ended up shopping up there ANYWAY. Two years ago was the early scary days of COVID with no vaccines and a nutso president who was doing everything to ignore scientific data and promote his own quack remedies.

So that year I tried to bring EVERYTHING up. Man was that stressful. And curbside pickup was available but it wasn’t easy, at least not as easy as it was on the Planet Ann Arbor. At one point I was told that I couldn’t *do* curbside pickup at the Meijer 15-20 minutes away because I wasn’t in the right zip code. Um, c’mon. What do you care what zip code I’m in? I’M COMING TO PICK IT UP!!! I know people who live in the central yooperland who travel to The Soo Meijer frequently.

Last year, vaxxed but still uneasy, I masked up and braved the Soo grocery stores and laundromat, etc. And even a few restaurants, not all of them in the yooperland. Alas. Cases started to surge in the fall and people we know got breakthrough cases. And then I got my own breakthrough and yes I am STILL masking. “Other people” are not but I have given up trying to nag them 🐽🐽🐽

Anyway, I sent him up there with a few cleaning supplies (like dish soap and the only TB cleaner that WORKS in that terlet) that I know he will probably need. But this year I am not gonna go nutso about schlepping all kinds of stuff up. I’ll mask up and get what we need when we need it. I am going up for Memorial Day and probably a bit beyond. If I can’t get exotic ingredients, I won’t cook exotic stuff, not that I do much of that anyway.

So this afternoon MMCB₁ DM’d me because apparently a significant TORNADO went through Gaylord. She knew the GG was heading north today. Did I know where my husband was? Not exactly. I didn’t think he was in a ditch under Mooon Yooonit but I called him anyway. Nope. He was at Hoton Lake with his sister Gr8gerty. He was heading to Gaylord but that would be long after the tornado passed through. The UU (his identical twin) got footage of the funnel cloud.

I stole this pic of Spring Beauty ephemeral spring wildflowers from my mouse who texted it to me a while back. These are at the new mouse nest, one of the perks of the new place. The previous place was exotic in a lot of ways. This place is exotic in others.

Like ROOSTERS!!! For a short time a few years ago, we had a rooster in our neighborhood. I LOVED hearing it crow. Alas, people can keep hens in our city but not roosters. I’m sure there are some good reasons for this (?), I mean besides waking people up in the morning. Heck, in my neighborhood, at this time of year, there are birds galore and they make noise well before sun-up. Outside MY window, not three houses away. I love hearing bird and aminal noise of any sort and I have missed the rooster ever since another neighbor ratted on its owner.

Today I was kind of a slow-moving train wreck. The GG is heading north tomorrow and will open the moomincabin among other things. I can’t put into words my own civil war type struggle between the north (moominbeach) and south (Planet Ann Arbor). The problem is I love them BOTH. Now that I CAN telecommute from the moomincabin I have to figure out how long I want to stay there. I don’t want to miss shelling pea season at the farmers market for instance. Last summer I kept thinking I would go up there for various periods of time. Long weekends with a week or two weeks whenever. It turned out that I did some of that but I ended up staying there for SIX WEEKS at the end of the summer. That was not planned…

These are my Snag Tights Ukraine themed duo color tights. I ordered them a couple months ago knowing that they would not arrive soon. Snag Tights has been making duo color tights for a while (legs have different colors) but I didn’t really notice until they emailed me about the horse queen duo color tights. So I ordered some.

These tights were designed to support Ukraine and if I get it right, all profits will be donated to Ukraine’s effort to deflect Russia from invading their previously peaceful country. And that’s what Russia is doing. Killing innocent Ukrainian citizens for whatever reason. There are better ways to solve these kinds of problems besides trying to bomb the crap out of other countries.

Some people are making quilts or flags in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. I guess I am buying tights. I wear tights ALL THE TIME at least when it isn’t hotter than Hades. I was dithering and dathering when getting dressed at 0-skunk-30 today. Am I gonna wear these kinda crazy tights to the Plum? Am I gonna go to the Plum? I sucked it up and put on my Horse Queen blue and yellow tights. No one seemed to notice them on my walk (uh, I didn’t SEE anyone on my walk). I did decide to go to the Plum and no one seemed to notice them there. Later on, a guy walked by teleCublandia with a Ukrainian colored umbrella. Yes!

I do not in any way shape or form understand why Putin’s agenda requires killing innocent Ukrainian citizens. I suppose there are people in Ukraine who might want a different regime. There are outliers in every society. Like some of our MAGA folks. I think most Ukrainians want schools and coffee shops, etc., and free access to them. That’s what I would want. Peace please.

From one beautiful nest to another and of course, this was one of the first things unpacked and set up. So a pair of “o stalls” can be made 🐽🐽🐽 I won’t say any more about this as it isn’t really any of my business except that I am very proud of how my children navigate adulthood with such aplomb. I can’t take credit for it. I’ll let y’all guess what got auto-corrected to “o stalls”. If you want.

This particular urchin is very talented with her hands, especially but not limited to needlework. I can remember when she was five and we went over to the Henry Ford Museum one weekend. There were little workshops for children and one of them had to do with a small hand-sewing prodject. I’ll never forget her sitting there neatly and carefully stitching. The teacher was really impressed with her and so was I. And a bit amazed. She took up knitting at some point and became expert at that, making her own lace patterns and whatever.

I’d like to say that I am also talented with my hands. My hands are very agile (even with titanium pinky) but… 1) I focused mainly on musical instruments when I was young (NOT a bad thing) and… 2) I AM NOT PATIENT!!! I made a lot of my own clothes as a teenager, with my sewing musheen going 100 mph. As you might guess, some things turned out better than others.

I will never make my own clothing again. Even having gotten rid of TONS of bizcaz and other stuff, I have plenty. And nowadays my taste runs to easy-to-wear stuff that I order from the internet. Size medium. No tailored suits. No pants or jeans. No sweatsuits. Skirts, various tops, and tights if it’s cold enough, which it is most of the year in the Great Lake State.

My fave plum cashier knows enough about my life to know I telecommute from a saggy old couch (and that a relative works there too). Yesterday I was in there and she told me she was impressed that I always “dressed up” for work. I had to laugh. Turtleneck, polartech vest, skirt and tights. “So many telecommuters wear sweats.” Not me. But if she had looked closely at the skirt, she might’ve noticed that it’s on the verge of falling apart.

I am itching to get back into fiber arts again. I can’t explain why I don’t just dive in. All I can blame it on is procrastination. When I do tiptoe back in, it’ll be SLOW STITCHED small prodjects…

’tis the season. Way back in 2020 when the pandemic started, I had a “murder hornet” stuck inside my front window. I mean, he wasn’t really a murder hornet but he looked like he could probably sting. We coexisted for a couple days but finally I went over and opened the front door and somehow he sensed there was a way out. Goodbye murder hornet.

This weekend I was plagued by a different bug stuck inside my windows. I couldn’t tell what this bug was. It seemed to be the same shape as a stink bug and I do not want those in my house but I didn’t want to kill it either. We don’t have a lot of poisonous “bugs” here in the Great Lake State but we have plenty of stinging insects and I am not allergic to those.

I do not have a generalized “bug” phobia except for a *very* weird (but not all that uncommon) insect phobia that many people do not understand. They’re harmless! Yeah, I know but… If you know me well enough to know what it is, please DON’T reveal it. If you don’t know and want to, comment (or just email me) and I’ll reply privately.

I know what stink bugs look like but I couldn’t see this bug’s markings because every time I saw it, it was silhouetted against a brilliant Mr. Golden Sun. Today it was buzzing around again. I don’t THINK stink bugs buzz, another thing that was puzzling me. And then, I went to take a drink out of my water glass and… There was a BUG in it. It was the same shape as the bug that was trying to escape my house. It was NOT a stink bug. GG says it was a Box Elder Bug. Apparently we don’t want THOSE in our house either. Nevertheless, I’m sorry I didn’t try to stage manage it out.

Not here at the Landfill, except for the Henrys. The GG just said how tarrrred he’d be tonight. Me? Yes. Me too.

Himself came home late this afternoon and I already need to be space-i-fied. Sheebus. What is this green glass in the driveway? Okay. The green glass was the last in a series of minor catastrophes in the Key Fob Saga. I dumped the recycle cart out at 6:30 AM on Thursday morning. I knew that a couple things rolled under Mooon Yooonit. I grabbed all of them. I thought. Turned out that I missed a WINE BOTTLE. So the next morning, 24 hours later, I managed to run over it with one of Mooon Yooonit’s taaaars.

I was really pissed at myself but I’ve been driving Mooon Yooonit ever since and everything seems fine. No taaaar lights or anything. I cleaned up the glass mess right away. It was mostly crushed glass, not a bunch of big shards. I bagged it up in a paper grocery bag, taped it up with mailing tape, and wrote “broken glass” on it. Wouldn’t you know, when the GG came home today, before I had a chance to tell him about the broken glass, he FOUND a couple pieces of glass that I missed.

So I was put through the third degree about that or at least it felt that way. I am sorry. I am human. I err. Next time maybe don’t leave the fob in the Lyme Lounge? Which IS where it was finally found today. Gaaaaah.

Yes. We await the asparagus season here in the Great White North. Today there was asparagus EVERYWHERE at the farmers market. I don’t like to spend a long time at the market so I grabbed it at the first booth I came to. The vendor had it bundled into thin and thick stalks. I took one of each.

I also bought red onions and carrots. I bought them from Donahee and was surprised when I was presented with a choice of payment! Yes, I’ll use a card. Problem? My card ran through without a problem but when I tried to enter my phone number into their device (iPad I think) for a text receipt, the top row of numbers did not respond to touch. I assured the Donahee folks I did NOT need a receipt and lo and behold when I checked my bank stuff this afternoon (which I do EVERY day), the $8 dollars I spent there showed up just fine. I’m sure they get a lot of difficult customers. I am not one of them.

I had to take a pic of what it looks like heading east at the market at this time of year when the sun is up and out. It’s hard to see who’s coming the other way and I was lucky I didn’t slam into anyone. In another week, the sun will be in a different place at 7:00 AM. Or it might be raining. Who knows. We got wonderful rain 2-1/2 or three times this afternoon. It’s not all that dry around here yet but we’ve had warm/hot weather this week and I felt like we needed rain. If nothing else to water my newly potted mother’s day impatiens since there isn’t an easily accessible garden hose set up out here right now so I’ve been watering them from a Copco bowl 🐽🐽🐽

This was last night.

It is hot here but not oppressively so although in the mid/late afternoon I have to move teleCublandia away from the sunset window or quit working for the day. (Or turn on the central A/C. Ugh.)

I read To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ve read it before, I think in high school? I liked it as much this time around as I did the first time. I am now reading Go Set a Watchman. Hmmm.

There are a couple of people with the same last name as mine who I (long ago) accepted friend requests from on Facebook. These are people I don’t know from Adam and don’t think they are anything but DISTANTLY related to me if at all. I’m not talking about my third cousin Janet who DM’d me to check in and had verifiable information. We ARE related although we don’t share the last name.

I am lately flooded by folks on my “you may know” feed with TONS of fins (people with my last name). A whole bunch of these folks live in Idaho/Utah and there is some evidence that they have roots in New Zealand. That doesn’t surprise me since Scottish folk migrated all over the world and Australia/New Zealand are notable destinations. Open borders anyone, you MAGAts?

As a caveat, I don’t agree with “open borders”, lefty lulu that I have become. But migration has been happening forever and will continue to happen. I believe we need to handle it with humane rules. I think most of my Scottish ancestors brought positive contributions to our country and I believe folks from other countries are doing that too. Even those who aren’t Caucasian like my ancestors were.

I have not pursued friendships with any of these Facebook folks. I am curious about them but they are not requesting me as a friend, just floating by. And I have enough to do.

If you got an error trying to read my blahg yesterday, I’ll just blame it on Froooggy. I think he waited until I was asleep, grabbed my blahg and took her off on a drunken spree. Londry detergent with a chaser of Listerine are his go-to intoxicants. By the time I woke up, my blahg was back, if a little bleary-eyed and there was loud snoring coming from the londry basket where Frooog was sleeping it off in the dirty londry.

I found myself in the driveway at 6:30 AM dumping the contents of the recycle bin out. Why? Because I still cannot find the missing fob. There was only an infinitesimal chance it could be in the recycle cart but I had to be 100% sure. I don’t need any man-‘splainin’ to tell me that fobs are expensive. I’ll spare you the details of my system for handling recyclables and its proximity to the key basket. The fob wasn’t in the recycle cart, which is now out at the curb for tomorrow’s pickup.

I couldn’t get into the Lyme Lounge to look because it is locked and I could not find a key that opened it. Turns out the key is in a really odd location. If it’s a location I have once known about, I have long forgotten. Anyway, the key fob saga continues. It’s kinda like the time (long ago) when, for WEEKS, I could hear a smoke alarm beeping somewhere. It was faint and not one of the ones we were relying on. Eventually, we found one from our co-op nursery school buried in the front closet. You know the one. It’s where all the tools and car stuff and vacuum cleaners are stored🐽🐽🐽

A happily divorced friend is dealing with lawn services, etc., and was kvetching a bit that it might be nice to have a husband if only to deal with that kind of stuff. She is totally capable but it’s hard to manage a house single-handedly and I’m sure she gets tired of doing it all herself, including dealing with multiple contractors. I laughed like crazy and shut that talk down pretty quickly by providing a LOVERLY vision of meeeee in my driveway at 6:30 AM sifting through the contents of an upturned recycle cart. Because of something my beloved husband did, inadvertent as it was.

No fob but at least it wasn’t in the recycle. I wasn’t worried about the garbage cart because it was EMPTY until I put two half-full kitchen bags in it. All carts are down at the curb. G’night. KW

No, it’s not outside! I said that to the GG after my second trip outside to look for one of Cygnus’s fobs today. I also looked INSIDE and even emptied the grocery bag I collect recycling in until it’s full and I take it outside to dump it.

OMG what a morning! Himself is traveling again. Just a quick trip north this time. Long weekend. I mean every day is a weekend for The Pensioner, right? There was a Mad Scramble of last-minute packing and I could hardly hear MMCB on our weekly facetime call because of all the bag rattling and ice clinking (packing a cooler) and door opening/shutting going on.

At the penultimate moment, Himself was standing by the entry saying, “I’m sure I forgot something!” Yeah probably. My attitude about that is that if you are traveling to Hoton Lake and the yooperland (he is), you are in the Great Lake State and there are plenty of places you can buy just about anything you’ve forgotten. Or if it’s a quick trip like this one is, you can do without until you get home.

Unfortunately, he did forget something. Unfortunately, it was an important thing that he can’t buy at Walmart or somewhere. I cannot find it here even though our finder-type app shows that it is right next to Mooon Yooonit’s fobs. Which are IN THE BASKET. Where they belong. It is NOT. I’m sure it’s somewhere here. If I don’t find it this weekend, I am not looking forward to whatever rummaging activities ensue when Himself returns.

I maintain that packing not to mention cleaning would be a helluva lot easier if we weren’t always dealing with so much crapola. We have made progress but still.

I love him anyway.

I haven’t read that book but I recently read another one by the author. I liked it well enough (rated it 4 on goodreads) but it didn’t knock my socks off, probably because I wasn’t totally crazy about the characters.

He mainly writes YA books if I’m not mistaken and I get the teenage angst. I mean being a kinda high-strung person, I lived through enough of it as a teenager. The one thing that saved me from crawling into a hole somewhere (besides the moominbeach) was music. I was good enough at playing the flute that when I was in 8th grade, I challenged a senior in high school and WON. (When I was in junior high, our school was connected to the high school by a long hallway. There was no junior high band so if you were good enough, and you didn’t have to be very good, you played in the high school band.)

Was I proud of myself for beating Georgia? Yes, I sure was. What do I think about it now? I have mixed feelings. On one hand, if you are good at something, you should try to accomplish whatever achievements you can if it is fair, and this challenge was but later challenges under a different band director were not. On the other hand, I was aware she felt awful about losing her seat to a little junior high kid and I haven’t forgotten that.

I dunno what the answer is. For one thing, in a small town like Sault Ste. Siberia, the high school band was about the only place a talented musician could aspire to. I couldn’t be snuck out of public school band and placed in some fancy youth orchestra or whatever. The best I could do was the Interlochen All-State (2-week) summer camp program and I couldn’t audition for a scholarship to that until I was a junior. And scholarship was the only way kids could get in their first year. The short story is I think they didn’t want wealthy folks to buy their kids’ way in. Which is a great philosophy (and it was a great place).

So a couple days ago, the GG texted this turtle pic to us (me and our daughters) and I was like, “when the heck did you take that?” We had been driving around that morning and I had glimpsed a similar scenario on the river but we did not stop to take a pic. I surmised that he’d taken it a couple days ago. Nope. I heard him take a little bowl of chips out to the back yard and I’m sure I heard him eating them. Turned out he snuck his eBike out without me noticing and drove it down to West Park where there were turtles galore 🤣🤣🤣

I am such a blank today after a series of rabbit holes. I got inspired by something at the end of the day but by that time Mr. Golden Sun was soooo bright in teleCubelandia that I couldn’t really see my screen and I didn’t feel like relocating outdoors so I bagged it. It’ll be a lot easier to do quickly and accurately in the morning when teleCubelandia is on the shady side of the house.

Here’s another photo from my cousin Judd. It’s from last weekend and maybe the dog Bo (I think that’s his name) will help show the scale of this behemoth. I’m taller than the propane tank but not by much. Our glacier looks like it is steadily melting though. The north shall rise again.

And that is about it for today. You do NOT (some of you) want to know what I think about some of the political directions our country taking these days. Hint: I am more and more Lefty Lulu every moment. Why? The reasons are complicated but in short, MAGA equals MEAN in my opinion. Read their tweets. Listen to their speeches. Note the tones of their voices.

Blahg administrivia. For a LONG time, comments on my blahg have been landing in a spam folder. This is an EMAIL spam folder, not part of my blahg software (wordpress). So if I see I have a comment, I can usually go and fish it out of the spam folder but I can’t find a way to flag these comments as non-spam. The last couple days, I’m not getting blahg comments emailed AT ALL, not even in the spam folder. Just saying that if you comment and I don’t reply to it, I may not have seen it (although I do tend to refresh a couple times a day). Also, I don’t always reply to comments for whatever reason. Laziness or distraction or whatever. I love comments but as I have said before, I am not a comment whore. I mainly do this as a brain dump for meeeeee. Also this is a first world problem 🐸🐸🐸

Love y’all, KW