Another summer at the moomincabin, that is.

I thought the GG was gonna stay with the UU and TBG in Gaylord tonight but apparently he drove all the way up to the yooperland and look at the moomincabin all opened up! Storm windows taken down and deck chairs out already. And a ladder…

Usually by Memorial Day we still have a couple of small snow piles in the surrounding woods. This is waaaay before Memorial Day (but it’s coming up quick) and I’m not even gonna ask if there are any snow piles. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any this year. A couple years ago I drove up a couple days before Memorial Weekend and it was 54 degrees and SLEETING when I got there.

Part of me wants to be up there with him but he is taking off to hike with the Softies this week. The Softies are a group of women who enjoy hiking but like to have a “guy” with them. I don’t blame them. And I mean a non-creepy type guy that they aren’t afraid will try to enter their sleeping bags at night (although I think the Softies stay in hotels).

The GG is a woman-friendly kinda guy. In the first place, he grew up with five brothers (one an identical twin) and four sisters and has two daughters. He “gets” women more than most guys do. Although he doesn’t always “get” meeeeee or my political views. But he also doesn’t try to tell me what to do or who to vote for. After 40-some years that’s where you kind of get to.

When the GG shoved this pic in front of my face yesterday, I had trouble processing it. Three of the eggs are not *exactly* close to robin egg color but somewhat close? Or naw. Our robin eggs are dark teal. That big speckly one? What the bloody hell is that?

Turns out a house finch (we *think*) has nested on top of an old robin nest and is apparently incubating three eggs of its own plus a cowbird egg.

We do have a robin nest “around the corner” (of our back yard) but those birdies hatched a while back and he was unable to get a good pic of them without disturbing the robin parents. Just to be clear, he waits until the parents are momentarily off gathering food and uses a selfie stick to get pics.

In his heart of hearts, The GG doesn’t want us (me) to use the back yard during bird nesting season. I get it but I also think that this is an urban/suburban environment where humans and birds need to coexist. And we do. While the GG was taking a nap this afternoon, I snuck around the back of The Landfill to hang out a few feet away from the finch nest. When he woke up, he came out and was surprised to find the bird on its nest with me in the yard. Well. I am QUIET! I probably scared the heck out of the bird when I came around the corner (I did not notice) but once I sat still for a bit, it had no problem returning, even with meeee in the yard. I am not a threat. I am not a raptor.

We welcome all bird parents, even cowbirds. But we live here too.

It’s pollen season and the GG was complaining about that (maybe that’s why he was coughing last night?) even though it doesn’t seem to be dragging him down at all. I am NOT affected in any way shape or form by pollen. I am NOT allergic to pretty much anything. That said, as soon as I told him that, I had a blasted sneezing fit. But it was a *dry* sneezing fit, one of those random ones that a lot of people get every day or once in a while or whatever. It went away and I haven’t sneezed in a couple hours, pollen or not.

I was out bright and early (as usual) to get the few remaining grocks I needed to help put a family dinner together. You know the occasion. The Plum was already loaded with people, mostly dads and little kids laden with flowers, etc.

I don’t need gifts for this greeting card holiday (although I don’t think it actually *is* a greeting card holiday). I did get flowers albeit in the form of impatiens to pot. I get those every year. This year, the GG got on a roll. He not only bought a TON of them, duplicating a beach urchin’s effort, he potted them himself. I am happy about that but had to redirect him a bit. The extra plants will go to the moomincabin in a couple days. I hope they survive.

Although I always love the flowers. my fave “gift” this year was help sorting out the massive mess of moomincabin sheets and pillowcases that I brought down here last fall. Waaaaay too many. I washed EVERYTHING last fall. Then I tried to sort them out. Although there were a few complete sheet sets, there were also MANY incomplete ones and about a bazillion random pillowcases. The Commander used to have all this stuff sorted out but in her last few years things got a little crazy and I had too much on my plate to be of much help.

So now we have five or six complete sets of sheets to take north this week (the GG will, I won’t join him for a bit). We definitely kept the “sleeeeeeeep” sheets. We are all fond of those. Heirloom hand crocheted or embroidered pillowcases will be kept and maybe repurposed. At least one of the beach urchins snagged a sheet set or two for her own house. And I will recycle the rest. So glad to have that stuff mostly off my radar screen. I basically have ONE set of sheets (for the “master” bedroom) here at The Landfill. I wash them more or less weekly and put them back on the bed. Of course I have my own laundry facilities at The Landfill and don’t have to take them to the laundromat.

As I always say, every day is mother’s day but today was a good excuse to get together and we had fun and so g’night.

I canNOT take credit for this pic. The country mouse took it out at her place in the, uh, country. I was aware that we might get an aurora so I immediately ran outside and headed over to the schoolyard.

And. Nothing. It wasn’t cloudy. The waxing crescent moon was brilliant. But there was no aurora visible. The country mouse is only 6-7 miles to the north so I dunno why the northern lights stood us up here on The Planet Ann Arbor. Yes we are in the city so there’s more light but I’m not sure that was the issue because other astronomical objects were visible, even to the naked eye.

We get the northern lights on the moominbeach occasionally. It is way north of here and our skies are pretty dark when the steel mill seven miles or so down the river isn’t lighting them up throwing slag or whatever it is they do. Usually up there, the aurora appears as a green kind of curtain-looking thing.

I have once before seen a light show like the one my mouse captured last night and it was down here on the planet. I was driving my old POC to Metro to pick up the GG. The sky lit up just about like this and the lights were dancing all over the place. It took me a few minutes to process that it was actually the northern lights. I had never heard of them showing up as far “south” as Detroit. I didn’t get a pic then either. No iPhone in those days.

Anyway asking mouse’s forgiveness for posting her pic without asking permission. Of course I’ve been posting her sister’s Ireland pics without permission for the last couple weeks 🐽

P. S. As it turns out a lot of people saw the lights in the city and they had probably faded by the time I got outside.

I don’t have a lot to say tonight but want to put something out there so various people know I’m alive.

Life at the Landfill? The GG spent a lot of time dispatching garlic mustard and other weeds and now his hands hurt. It isn’t a terminal condition but still. Personally I would like to pay someone else to do that kind of crapola. I have done my share of weeding and I DO NOT enjoy it. Especially when I get laced with poison ivy. I like the IDEA of gardening but I don’t actually enjoy DOING it AT ALL and have never been successful at it. So why should I do it? I’m good at a lot of other things that I DO enjoy. Can I please just stick to those things? I even get paid for one of them…

What I really want to do is hire an expert to consult with us about what native plants would do well in our yard given that we are horrible gardeners and are also not around a lot of the summer. I don’t really have agreement on this. Sigh.

I don’t think this is a lighthouse, more likely the staircase to a turret in a castle somewhere in Ireland. But something about climbing the spiral staircase in the Iroquois Lighthouse up on Whitefish Bay always makes my legs feel funny for a couple days. So I could relate.

*That* is where I’m at in the spelling bee today — one ga8 down (out of three) from 👸🐝

I was reminded by a family text from a beach urchin this morning that it is my dad’s birthday. He would be 105. I didn’t exactly forget. It was on my radar screen but I didn’t post it anywhere. Not for any specific reason and I was glad to see the grandchildren remember their sweet granddaddy. He was sweeter to them than he was to me but then he lived through my teenage years. I wasn’t totally incorrigible but I was a spirited child and an angsty teen so I had my moments, which for a while included Bad Boyfriend. I did eventually land on my feet, married the right guy, and became a successful failure.

I always have a secondary thought when it’s my dad’s birthday, which is that it is also my childhood/facebook friend The Beautiful Mimi’s birthday. I wouldn’t remember that except that years ago on facebook, I posted my dad’s birthday and she commented that she always remembered that because they have matching birthdays. Why does she remember that? Who knows? It’s one of those random factoids that some people store in their memory banks for no good reason. I must have said (on her birthday at some point in our childhood), “Oh, it’s my dad’s birthday too.” I remember weird factoids too (it actually helps in my job) and I am happy to know that Mimi and I have brains that operate in a similar fashion, at least in that way. She is MUCH smarter than me overall but I love her anyway.

This is my dad (on the right) having a “shootout” with his best buddy Jim Sherman. They were probably in the woods somewhere in the area of the moomincabin and I’m sure the only shooting that was going on was whatever the photographer was doing, who was probably one of their friends in The Veteran Greenhorns “club”. These guys were in high school (I think) when the photo was taken. It was pre-WWII and as far as I know, all of the Veteran Greenhorns served. Dad was stationed stateside in the American southwest as an Army Air Corps flight instructor.

Oh, not the pic. Since I didn’t get any pics today, I’m still running photos from Ireland that my beach urchin put in a shared album for me.

I didn’t get any pics today because I didn’t exactly wake up on time and was pretty grumpy when I did. I mean it wasn’t that late or anything but I had planned to go get grocks this morning and bagged it because I was too “tired” but probably grumpy is a better word. You’d think I had experienced a 5-hour time zone change although traveling westward is usually easier on wake-up time.

Anyway, the GG gets sooooo excited about stuff like this. The first day they were in Ireland, he texted us (including our niece Pengo) with something like, “Let’s move to Dublin!”. I retorted, “By the end of the trip you will want to be home and you will be missing the North Country Trail.” BTW: I would never blahg any details of Pengo’s life, not that I know a lot of them, but she travels to much more exotic places than Ireland – all the time. But she is a beloved member of our family and we include her when it seems appropriate, meaning we are careful not to spam her with whatever trivial crapola is going on. (I doubt she reads this blahg of blather, at least not frequently.)

What did the GG do today? Various things including spending a few HOURS trying to fix The Chirper (dead smoke alarm). I figured this out when it started chirping this morning 😵‍💫 How can it do that when I removed the battery? Because he put a NEW battery in it of course. Did he hear it chirp? No he did not. He didn’t want to give up on it and expressed frustration that he couldn’t just put a new battery in it and make it magically work again. The reasons for that are (I’m sure) too complicated for this post but at the end of it all, The Chirper is now residing un-batteried by the front door with the ones we replaced with Nest alarms, waiting to be taken to toxic waste recycling or whatever.

And speaking of missing the North Country Trail, by the end of the afternoon, he had written and posted an email to our chapter this afternoon detailing the upcoming events, sneaking in a couple photos of Ireland.

And so it goes…

It was a nitzy kind of day because I didn’t really know flight schedules, therefore didn’t know when people would arrive home from Ireland. Adding to my anxiety was the threat of severe storms at some unknown point during the day.

My mouse ended up picking up the travelers and they did not have a difficult drive home at the time although we are now hearing thunder. I had eggplant parm ready to serve by the time everyone got here. All six of us.

So the Master Of The Universe is now home and available to deal with rodent control and dead smoke/CO alarm batteries.

What I did NOT blahg about was Saturday night. It was 10:20 or so and I was soooo ready to chill out. But then… Chirp chirp chirp. F*cking goddamn. We just replaced all of our old alarms with Nest smart alarms. So what the bloody hell? I spent 20 minutes or so trying to figger where the chirping was coming from. I checked my Nest app. Everything was all right. I stood under every single blasted alarm to figger if it was making the noise. Eventually I determined that the chirping was coming from an alarm that the GG had unplugged and placed by the front door to be recycled or whatever. Problem? He did not remove the battery. So it died and the chirping began. Eventually I figured out how to remove the battery and EVENTUALLY I managed to get to sleep. Man do I hate those f*cking alarms.

Last night, I was all settled in and ready to go to bed when, rustle rustle rustle SNAP!!!

Oh jeebus. You know what those sounds mean, right? They were coming from the cabinet under the sink. I figured the victim had been dispatched by the big SNAP. So okay, I could deal with it in the morning. But no, there was a whole bunch more rustling noises and then ANOTHER BIG SNAP! And THEN! MORE RUSTLINGS AND BUMPING AROUND and you name it.

I am not normally the person responsible for taking care of “Mickey” around here but I can do it in a pinch. Since I was the only one here, I knew I would have to pull up my big girl panties and deal with it. So I did. At this point, I was starting to think, “How many of them are under there?”

Turns out it was only one but this customer had somehow gotten snagged by TWO (count ’em) traps and remained alive and active. These traps are the enclosed plastic kind. The traditional ones were not touched. I grabbed some kitchen tongs and somehow picked up the whole shebang. I took it all outside, put it down on the patio, and carefully UNSNAPPED first one trap and then the other. The customer seemed injured but scurried away so not sure if it made it or not. I hate when any living thing dies on my account (except for biting insects) but I do NOT want to clean up rodent crap in my house. If you did NOT make it, Godspeed little creature.

“When Grandma snaps the trap, she takes the mouse outside.” This is what one of the beach urchins said when we were visiting her Florida grandparents and there was a rodent problem going on and a LOT of snapping. And yes, the mouse went outside but it was no longer alive. Grandma Sally was a lot less concerned about dispatching unwanted rodents than yer fav-o-rite blahgger is.

Subsequently, I took EVERYTHING out from under the sink and washed everything including the cabinet floor or whatever you call it. That was so much fun.

Did some of my ancestors live in a place like this? Naw. I’m sure they were peasants or whatever they call them in Ireland. I know the most about the folks that emigrated from Scotland but I have Irish ancestors too. And maybe in six weeks or so I might have more insight into what I’m made of because I (finally) did a saliva spit-take and dropped my sample off at the post office early this morning.

What do I expect to get out of this? I dunno. I don’t really expect any surprise siblings. My parents were really tight with each other for all the years they were married. Butchya nevah know. I also did not select to share my results with others in Ancestry. I have friends who have done that and they have made wonderful connections. I’m not sure I’m ready for that. I can change that if I want to. And… The GG (thinking of conspiracy theories I guess) was like don’t they ask you a lot of questions? Well… They do OFFER questions you can answer BUT you can opt out of them and I did. Again, it’s a setting I can turn on later if I want to. Or not.

So I guess I’m just curious about what my DNA says about my heritage. I will take the results with a systems analyst’s point of view. Like, I dunno, I might need more data. In other words I am not taking this all that seriously. That said, I am probably mostly northern European WASPy stuff.

Okay Shogun. I finished Shogun today. Or so I thought. Nope. There is a second half of this book. (I am not reading a “brick book”, I am reading it on my phone.) As I approached the end of the book, I was starting to realize that there was NO WAY it could be wrapped up in the next I dunno five pages. And of course it wasn’t. The book I downloaded was the FIRST half of the book. I downloaded the second half but I think I will read a couple of quicker books before I do the second half of Shogun.

It was our beach community friend Barb who got “us” (beach folk) into Shogun back in the 1970s when it was first published. She also taught every kid on the beach how to swim but that would be a whole ‘nother story. So she got us into Shogun and a lot of us are readers so we read it.

There was a Shogun TV mini-series umpteen bazillion years ago. I’m not sure I watched all of it or not but I remember the actor Richard Chamberlain playing the part of the “anjin-san”.

That was then, this is now and there is a new series (not a mini-series) and I am geared up to watch it. Maybe the GG will like it when we are finished with the newest version of Fargo? So I am reading the book first. I gather that the series does not exactly follow the book. That’s okay. One of the reasons I’m re-reading the book is so I can compare it to the series.

Love y’all KW

The farmers market is in full swing and I knew (because I follow the market on facebook) that asparagus was available. I mean LOCAL asparagus. It seems a wee bit early but apparently it’s not because I got two beautiful bunches at 0-skunk-30 this morning.

I had to figger a new place to park. “They” are building a new “affordable” housing unit on the parking lot I have been using for umpteen bazillion years to shop at Kerrytown and the market. Sigh. I am all for making housing in the city more affordable but a lot of this seems to be left to developers to figure out. I don’t think developers care much (in their greedy little grinch hearts) about providing “affordable” housing. I am also not too sure that most people who are looking for housing, “affordable” or not, desire to live in seven (or 14) story buildings. When I was looking for “affordable” housing back in the day, I also wanted a back yard I could WALK out to without taking an elevator.

This is a hot button issue in our small, expensive city. I do not have the answers to this conundrum but the trolls on Next Door Neighbor who meet every person who questions high-rise developments in our city with “let’s welcome our new neighbors” leave me a bit cold. High-rise housing may have a place in our city but these places are NOT all “affordable” and I won’t even begin to get into the transportation issues of getting to a comprehensive grocery store. The farmers market does not sell toilet paper…

Okay I am done with that incomprehensible rant. I had company for dinner tonight. It was a gorgeous evening for eating in the back yard (which we could WALK out to without taking an elevator) and the conversation was loverly. I needed that.

I did not pick a horse for today’s Kentucky Derby. I didn’t watch it and don’t know who won but the names totally sucked. Did Corporate America pick them or what?

I mean I did not do ANY dishes ALL DAY. Do you have any idea how unusual that is? I am a dish “processor”. I am one of those people who grabs your used water glass as soon as you put it down even if you were planning on using it again. Sorry, that’s just how I roll.

Anyway, I am about at the end of the never-ending leftovers. Or so it seems. I am now into some prepared food from the Plum. So. I really did not get anywhere near a significant number of dishes dirty. I will probably do a round of dishes in the morning. At least those that don’t go in the dishwasher.

I lived for YEARS without a dishwasher in the Landfill. At one point we had a dishwasher that was kind of past the point and wasn’t really getting the dishes clean. For whatever reasons (complicated) I just decided we didn’t need a new dishwasher at that point. I grew up washing dishes by hand and actually enjoyed it so I just washed them by hand for a while. Quite a while.

When we finally gutted the Landfill Chitchen, I decided it was time for a new dishwasher. We headed off to Big George and the GG proceeded to open EVERY DAMN DISHWASHER on the showroom floor and pull its drawers out. He was expecting me to choose what I needed based on that? Nope. While the GG was rummaging around with the dishwashers, I approached our nice young salesman and said something like, “Mid-priced dishwasher that’ll get the dishes clean.” He pointed me to a Bosch, I bought it and it has worked just fine for 10 years. Overthinking things drives me nutso. Not that I don’t ever do it.

My main household chore today was hauling the garbage and recycle carts up to their home after pickup. Okay. When they picked up the garbage cart, it was raining. When they dropped it back down by the curb, the lid stayed open. Then it began POURING rain. When I finally got out there, there was a few inches of water in the bottom. So… I hauled it up and tipped it over to let it all drain out.

Just a day in the life. Orange ya glad I didn’t blahg about pollyticks today?

THIS was in the grocery store parking lot this morning. Actually it wasn’t in Plum’s lot exactly. It was in the greater Maple Village lot in an area that is almost always totally empty and mainly used for driver’s license testing and things like popup fireworks tents. “Pave paradise, put up a parking lot.”

This is not the best pic but I approached this vee-hickle very tentatively. Is there anyone in it? It didn’t look like there was anyone in the cab but who knows who might be in the cargo hold or whatever you call it. I’m not really sure what kind of vee-hickle this is or why it’s here. Maybe it’s a bus? And is it legal to park in what I think is a private parking lot overnight? If indeed it was parked there overnight. I do not know. So I kept a bit of distance.

I shot this pic over to MMCB and MMCB₂ opined that whoever parked the vee-hickle in a parking lot on the Planet Ann Arbor had a lot of nerve. This is not a city where the Orange Baboon has a lot of supporters but they do exist and if you drive 10 minutes out into the county, you may encounter huge Trump signs. At least I did in 2016. In 2020, I saw a lot of “Bye Don” signs and this year, I haven’t seen a lot of signs at all. Are people totally fed up? I am.

But not too fed up to not vote or to vote “uncommitted”. I do not and haven’t EVER seen the appeal the Orange Baboon has to people in our country. I could make a long list but I won’t (today anyway). I didn’t like him when he was a “businessman” and I didn’t like him when he was a “reality TV star”. I laughed at his abortive attempt to run for president back in 2012 but he ended up having the last laugh. I didn’t vote for him in 2016 or 2020 and I will NOT vote for him in 2024. He is a grifter who doesn’t care about ANYONE except himself. My opinion is that we need to keep him out of the presidency and any other kind of political role.

So I WILL vote for Biden again.

If you want to park a bus in my neighborhood, let it be the Bread & Puppet Circus bus. (Pic from March 2010.)

Title credit to Willie Nelson who, as near as I can get from Google, originally wrote the song. I have mostly heard Arlo Guthrie sing it. This is one of the songs that eased me into expanding my music horizons from esoteric classical and acid rock into country. (Although I still like those genres and STILL need to curate my own Spotify “helicopter music” playlist.)

Just brain cobwebs, not real ones. Although I have shared my shower with a spider a couple times lately and a “murder hornet” got stuck in my house yesterday. Flinging itself repeatedly into my front window trying to get out. Eet eez glass and it will have to find another way. Today it is gone and I haven’t found its body. Not that I’ve spent a lot of time looking for it. Maybe Rooooomba will find it and suck it up this weekend. Or maybe it escaped through a hole in a screen somewhere? But “murder hornets” don’t spin webs.

When we bought The Landfill (forty frickin’ years ago) we didn’t pay much attention to how it was situated. The front of our house faces west. Okay. We didn’t really spend a whole lot of time thinking about this for many years. But here we are. I have been a full time telecommunter since you know when. My fave place to work is in the front living room by the front window. Today it was 78 degrees in the late afternoon and Mr. Golden Sun was out in full force. Not only did I have trouble seeing my laptop screen, it was frickin’ hot.

I am not complaining about this. I could move to another room or even outside. Just thinking that back when we bought this loverly place, we had no clue about how our lives would roll out. Well, except that our first baby was on the way. But who knew that I would one day be working a tech job totally from home.

Hairy Lemon in the pic. Dublin. I dunno if they ate/drank there or what. They are in northern Ireland now.

I didn’t actually ask but I got a text that said he apparently is, more or less.

Himself called me today. I was kinda like whut but it was just to say hi. This kind of gobsmacked me though. Because I’m not sure how international calls work with the iPhone in this era but… Uh. He just. Called me. I remember when my kids were doing study abroad. We didn’t call often at all, don’t get me wrong. Email was much more reliable.

When I once called Lizard Breath (in Spain), it took me a few tries to figure it out. I still had a flip phone at the time (2004-5) and I think she was using a phone her host mom kept for students. But email worked the best. I was taking web design/dev classes at the community college at that time and I would arrive early in the morning an hour before my first class to chill out in the library, slugging along doing young actors guild business and reading emails from my kid in Spain. And once from a friend of Ray Bradbury (yes that Ray Bradbury) and it was not spam and I almost fell outta my chair.

Dakar (second beach urchin) was a bit different. We called ONCE. It was xmas day and we arranged (with her) a call. We managed to get to her and we talked for 47 minutes. Guess how much it cost? $470.00. Yes. I’m trying to remember if we tried to protest this. If we did, we gave up quickly. That amount of money did not break the bank and it was well worth it to talk to our far away daughter. Her host family was Christian (Catholic I think) so they celebrated the holiday but I don’t think in the big way Americans do. Which is certainly fine for us secular American Christians.

But now here in 2024 it seems like we can just call internationally on our iPhones without a problem. Of course, Ireland is not Senegal. I don’t really understand phone charges any more but if we do get some kind of charge, I doubt it will break the bank.

Himself is at Guinness. Because they arrived much earlier on Monday than their hotel room was available, Lizard Breath had scheduled a Guinness tour. The pic is apparently taken via a reflective surface so the sign is backwards. I can read English words both backwards and upside down🤣

Very few words were spoken at The Landfill this weekend but I could just about cut the atmosphere of tension with a knife. No it was NOT a marital fight. There was no fight at all. It was the GG in packing mode for his Ireland trip with our daughter and me trying my darndest to STAY OUTTA THE FRAY! But I was a nervous wreck suppressing all that negative energy.

They are there for 10 days and they didn’t check any bags (I wouldn’t have either). Our daughter came over Saturday afternoon while he was still packing and “steered” some questionable items out of his luggage (in her poised, calm, graceful way). Nothing dangerous, mind you. A phone charging cable that doesn’t fit the outlets in Ireland (so why take it) for one. And then there were a couple of weird handmade items that, while totally harmless, might raise alarms with the TSA, like what the hell is this? Whatever you think about the TSA, they are people doing a job and they inspect umpteen bazillion people every day (at least at Dee-troit Metro) and I can understand why they don’t have a robust sense of humor when they encounter weird things. I’m sure they have great stories to tell when they are off work. (Like the time FlaMan was flying back to Fla from a trip to Hoton Lake with the Beautiful Suzie (his late sister) and they x-rayed his checked luggage and found big round objects. Bombs? Nope. Houghton Lake rocks.)

At one point yesterday, the GG was heading toward the front door with his birthday “microbes” (tick and Lyme Disease microbe). He asked, “Should I take these to Ireland?” No no no no no. Why do you want to load up your carry-on baggage with stuffed aminals? They belong in the Lyme Lounge here in the Great Lake State anyway. We do NOT want to introduce Lyme Disease to Ireland🤣 He apparently did put those entities in the Lyme Lounge (where they belong) but after I dropped the travelers off, I got this pic of Stowaway and Tagalong, who obviously stowed away and tagged along. I hope they don’t get lost in Ireland.

So everyone got safely to Ireland and I was able to relax and get a lot of work done today. I made a more or less unnecessary trip to the Plum this morning largely to hang out with our other daughter for a few minutes.

P.S. I HAVE been known to take Froooggy on a plane trip in my carry-on luggage. We went to SanFran to visit Liz when she lived there. We stayed in a gorgeous Victorian bed-and-breakfast a few blocks from her place in the Mission District. The proprietor LOVED Froooggy and his cleaning staff enjoyed positioning him in various places.

This afternoon at the end of a somewhat stressful weekend, oh just for stupid marital reasons🐽, I decided I needed to get out of my neighborhood and into the country. It doesn’t take long to get into the country here if you go in the right direction and pick the right roads. You might see some MAGA signs (although NOTICEABLY fewer this year than in previous election years) but there are also plenty of BLM and rainbow signs. Take your pic. If you know me, you know what I pick.

So I drove around the back roads in the country mouse’s neighborhood. There were potholes galore and some of them had muddy water in them so Cygnus is all dirty again. I could avoid some of them but not all and then there were some BFT’s (Big F*ckin’ Twucks) that occasionally passed me going the other who were NOT avoiding them. Clunkity clunk c-clunk. So the GG is gonna prob’ly grump about that even though he has driven me through some of the worst roads on earth with water holes up to the running boards or whatever they are.

I was about to turn on to one road and there was a BEAR down there. A bear? I knew it wasn’t a bear because we don’t have bears in SE Michigan. Well, there was the Dexter Bare Bear a few years ago but sightings were never confirmed and the local on-line newspaper never corrected “bare” to “bear”. There is a difference.

So I knew it wasn’t a bear. Could a cow have gotten loose? I don’t usually see many cows around that area but who knows. I approached this aminal s-l-o-w-l-y. It turned out to be a HUGE and VERY SHAGGY dog. I wanted a pic but I couldn’t figger a way to get one. This character looked really friendly but I’m not stupid enough to get out of my car to approach an unknown dog, especially a big one. I will say that the few occasions I have accidentally killed an animal (rabbit, squirrel) have never left me. Unavoidable both times but I am not comfortable with taking another creature’s life. Except for food but that would be a topic for another day.

It’s a beautiful evening here on The Planet Ann Arbor and I haven’t seen the customer in the pic for a while. If he/she gets a chance he/she ends up in my lap for a few minutes. Not today. Today, this character got distracted by all of the bird song in my yard and spent about 10 minutes listening, not moving. Don’t worry, I don’t think any birds were harmed.

We’ve had distressing news from the moominbeach that a life-long friend and neighbor’s cabin/house caught fire yesterday. The good news is that NO ONE WAS INJURED but it did suffer an as yet undetermined amount of interior damage. I am not going to say much more about this. For one thing I have no details. For another, although I don’t think they know I am a blahgger, I am sure they are devastated by this event and I want to respect their privacy.

What I am going to take away from this is that our own moomincabin desperately needs a better emergency exit strategy from the upper story. Currently the only way to get up and down is a “ladder” in the interior of the structure. It was not built to code and we all regard it as dangerous. My parents bought rope ladders but I can’t feature anyone trying to figure out how to properly secure and deploy one in an emergency situation especially in the middle of the night.

Another important issue can be seen from this picture I took from the moomincabin deck. The building you can see across the lot is the Old Cabin. It is one of the original three log cabins my granddaddy and two of his friends had built 100 years ago. See all those trees between us? Our property is in a forest and it is very dry this spring. If a house fire ever gets out of control you can guess what might happen next. There is plenty of tinder there in the form of a blanket of dried out pine needles and twigs. I know because I used to have to collect tinder to start wood fires in the moomincabin when we still had a wood stove. A forest fire is a nightmare generations of moominbeach kiddos have had. THANK YOU to the volunteer fire crews who got this fire under control🙏

All we can do to prevent a forest fire is continue to be extremely careful. But maybe it’s time to get SERIOUS about having a sturdy outdoor staircase built at the moomincabin to allow easy exit from the upstairs. We’ve been talking about it for years now. It’s time for action.

What did you do on your birthday? The GG could answer, “I took two showers.” It isn’t all that unusual for meeeee to take two showers but it is a rarity for the GG. His speshul day could be described in two halves. He circumnavigated the city this morning (leaving me blissfully alone to replay a meeting I recorded earlier in the week). This afternoon he mostly napped. That was also fine with me. I was more than fine about the two showers.

I did not get him anything for his bday. At least not anything exciting. He’s taking a milestone bday trip to Ireland with one of our daughters. I figger he doesn’t really need any boy toyz. I will have to recount his conversation with The Uncly Uncle this afternoon to his daughter. The conversation in which he said he was packing lightly and he would be okay with being “stinky” but he wasn’t sure how much of that his daughter would tolerate… TMI?

I did buy these stuffties for the Lyme Lounge. A tick and a Lyme microbe. I encountered these at the Quiet Water Symposium in March. A delightful young PhD candidate had a booth about ticks and Lyme Disease and she had some of these cuties as part of her exhibit. A tick is not a microbe and microbes do not have eyes (that I know of) but this one does (not shown in pic). So, GiantMicrobes.com if you happen to need a microbe or two. BTW I am NOT on a stuffed aminal buying spree. This is a one off.

So this week’s family birthdays are on the 23rd, 24th, 26th, and 30th and I’m sure I’m forgetting some. I was drinking my morning coffee thinking today was nobody’s birthday and here comes a Facebook notification that it’s cousin Austin’s birthday.

I did not respond to it. I love Austin. I haven’t seen him since his dad and step-mom were still alive here on The Planet Ann Arbor and their kids (Austin and his two siblings) would come to visit them. That was pre-covid so it was a while ago. We would meet for lunch at the Sidetrack over in Ypsilanti. Sometimes our cousin Terri would schlep over from the Lansing area too. We had so much fun!

Actually Facebook birthday notices kind of annoy me, which is why I don’t respond to them. And why I have turned that notification off for myself. The first year I had a Facebook account I didn’t know to turn it off so I got all these happy birthday wishes from people I haven’t seen in umpteen bazillion years and/or didn’t know them well in the first place. Or know them at all. Ladies PLEASE include your birth name as part of your Facebook name!

Anyway I turned off that particular notification. I do NOT need my birthday remembered by a bunch of random people who don’t really give a hoot about me or when my birthday is. I mean this year covid disrupted my birthday (I did not have it) so we ended up celebrating The Day After Groundhog Day instead. That’s how much I care🐽

I first met Austin when I was two and he was four. My mom and I flew from Sault Ste. Siberia to Ann Arbor (we probably landed at Detroit Metro) so mom could help out with Austin’s newborn sister, two years younger than me. I remember nothing about that trip except that the airplane down had round windows and the airplane back had square windows. Or was it the other way around? And I remember butterflies in my stomach as we made our ascent.

Here we are. My uncle and his first wife (Austin and sibs’ mom) divorced many years ago. I don’t think it was easy at first but they were amicable at the end and my family attended her funeral. My uncle and his second wife died in the early days of covid OF covid. They were in a fancy nursing home at that point and, as we all know, nobody knew what they were doing in those days. We were all breathing on each other but we were focusing on washing our groceries. Our beloved cousin Terri died a few years later, NOT of covid.

Of all things, the baby that my moom and I flew downstate to help with, the one that I don’t remember from then. Well. We certainly saw each other growing up, mostly at our grandparents’ house in Detroit but I never got to know her. I hung around more with the cousins my age and a bit older. We eventually met up on The Planet a few years pre-covid when she was visiting her dad/stepmom. Of all things, we are DOPPELGANGERS! We look a lot alike and we were finishing each other’s sentences. We certainly have some of the same DNA.

So happy birthday to my cousin Austin who probably doesn’t even know my blahg exists.