Am I nuts or what? I want to talk about what I *think* are called “saddle seasons”, times of the year where popular vacation spots are not crowded. I am getting zilch from The Google. The results are mainly turning up stuff about horse saddles, which I couldn’t care less about, having not had particularly fun experiences riding horses in my life. And some sort of “Saddle Club” TV series. Am I using the wrong search term? Do I need to deploy some sort of AI search?

Aaargh. I tweaked my search terms and The Google turned up the correct phrase, which is “SHOULDER season”. Gah. My dear old brain came up with the tweaked search terms, not AI. I am not anti AI, just haven’t processed it yet and also think We The People need to be careful when using it. There’s enough dis/mis-information out there even without AI. AI is on the radar at work though so I may have to focus on it sometime soon.

So. It is mid May and the GG is at the moomincabin and it has been HOT up there. But. There are still a few bitsy little snow banks (piles) hanging about. Like this one by the propane tank. The propane tank and snow pile are in between two parking spaces. On the left is a small space that I often parked in throughout the years when my parents had a car in the actual driveway. To the right is a bigger parking space that fits two cars if necessary but also accommodates a car and trailer. When I was a kid, our Sherman friends would occupy this space with their VW bus and pop-up tent camper for a couple weeks each summer. Good times with their five kids. The Sherman dad grew up with my dad in Sault Ste. Siberia but drove from the New York state Niagara Falls area to visit us.

The Scamp trailer in the pic (the Lyme Lounge), is in the actual moomincabin driveway and beyond it is the front yard, the beach, and good old Gitchee Gumee.

This guy (or gal, who knows) travels the sewer system, exits in front of our house, scales a tall fence in our yard into a neighbor’s yard, then emerges under their fence and here he/she is. That is what the GG observes. I’m guessing he/she is sniffing out baby henries (our word for rabbits).

I hissed at this character a couple times. When I hiss at feral cats in the yard, they skedaddle PDQ. This raccoon, not so much. I finally yelled at him to GET OUT (but not before I got the pic). He did skedaddle when I yelled at him.

But that was yesterday (but yesterday’s gone). I didn’t see Rocky Raccoon today but Henrietta (rabbit, remember) was was hopping back and forth throughout the yard all day. Or at least late this afternoon when I wasn’t working any more.

Back in the day when the older beach urchin was a toddler and our mouse wasn’t even in the pipeline, the lizard was standing at one of the back doorwalls. A raccoon came up to the screen and acted like it wanted to EAT her or whatever. No, you are not gonna eat my baby. The GG mitigated that situation PDQ.

Tonight, a feral cat emerged outta nowhere and was chasing Henrietta (rabbit, right). Oh, no. I hissed at that cat and it skedaddled PDQ. As they do. I do not know what will happen to any baby henries/rabbits in my yard overnight but I don’t think I can control that.

All right! I got a notification that there is a new episode of Handmaid’s Tale and I am gonna watch it.

There’s still snow in the woods at the moomincabin but the beach was scorching hot this afternoon and this is what the GG sent me this afternoon. If you don’t know our bay, that is Round Island in the middle. The land on the right is Canananada and the land on the left is the USA. The waterway is the St. Marys (no apostrophe) River, which leads NW into Whitefish Bay, yes the Gordon Lightfoot Whitefish Bay. There is a downbound freighter on the left and an upbound freighter on the right. Heading up to and down from Whitefish Bay as freighters do. Embiggen a couple times to see the freighters a wee bit better.

The back door (into the kitchen) apparently lost an argument with the gas grill so one of its (four) window panes has been replaced. People may wonder why I put up with MAGA. It’s because he fixes windows (and terlets, etc.). I mean my own personal MAGA, to be clear. In general MAGA can go to hell.

He called me from the beach and I got to talk briefly (via iPhone speaker) with Cap’n*Queen*Leila (who has probably outgrown that moniker) and cousin Judd (who lives next door to the moomincabin). In his immediate future is a dinner decision – he’s taarred of eating dehydrated camping-type food. I suggested driving up the shore and if the Cozy wasn’t open, to try Pickles, which probably *is* open. In the next couple days he is chainsawing, etc.

I am here at the Landfill, where I am immersed in an intense training course for a new (to us) software tool. Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? It is hot here but not as hot as at the beach because of the cloud cover and plenty of breezes.

The moomincabin is open for the summer and the north shall rise again!

The GG sent this from the moominbeach tonight and I do not think I have ever seen a wild turkey on the beach before.

I don’t ever ask for or expect mother’s day stuff. For one thing, I believe every day is mother’s day. But people wanted to come over for dinner anyway and I engineered BBQ chicken and potato salad(s) and local asparagus and garlic bread. I did the shopping at the Plum (for most of the stuff) and Argus Farm Stop for the asparagus. I was home from all of that by 8:37 AM and spent the day picking away at food prep. I did the salad, garlic bread, and BBQ sauce (Joy of Cooking recipe). Mouse manned the grill for the chicken and asparagus and Lizard did the cleanup.

The beach urchins did a few other things for me. Liz re-potted a plant I have been sorta successfully nurturing since she gave it to me for my 2024 bday. It needed a bigger pot. I sidled up to Mouse at the plum this morning to ask if she would bob my long straggly hair. Yes. We got that outta the way PDQ. I love when pros do my hair but this was soooo easy. 15 minutes in my back yard. Mouse does a good job and my hair is forgiving since it is kinda “bushy”, which can hide imperfections in length. Remember the old “shag” haircuts?

My mouse also helped me with my bedroom window. I woke up at that batscope hour (three AM) unable to go back to sleep. Yesterday was pretty hot and I could open the actual wooden window but I couldn’t lift the storm window to save my life. It was off its track! So I couldn’t expose the screen. I mitigated this whole thing by manhandling the bathroom storm window open and then the temp outside went down to about 40. Whew. My mouse took the whole damn bedroom storm window OUT so now the screen is exposed and if it gets too cold, I can just shut the regular window. I dunno if this all makes sense. It doesn’t to me and I WROTE it. It does seem like new windows may be in our future.

The plan for today was for Lizard Breath to “pick me up” for lunch and a wee flower shopping trip. (She drives over and drives Cygnus, which has more room than Ruby for hauling flowers.)

I was a little surprised (but shouldn’t have been) when we were texting yesterday and she said something like, “I’ll be at your house at 10:45. Sessions opens at 11:00 and that’ll get you home before the witching hour.” And then, “Neither of us likes the late afternoon.” LOLOLOL! Does my kiddo know me or what? I knew my own mother pretty well but not sure if I knew her THAT well. But my kiddo is a crackerjack.

So we got to Sessions right around 11:00 AM (and that’s fine, I had been up since before six and prefer an early lunch). WE WERE THE FIRST PEOPLE AT SESSIONS. Jason/Jacob/J-something was our server and when I asked if we could have a booth he (appropriately and we were all joking) said something like, “You can sit wherever you want.” Indeed. The other thing about this is that my beach urchin ALSO tends to like to eat lunch on the early side.

After lunch we headed out to Hilltop Greenhouse and Farms, out on Liberty past where there is deep water over the road at the moment. We were getting meeee impatiens to pot for the Landfill back yard and various flowers and a huge fern for her front porch.

I decided I would be the Cart Lady. There were other mother/daughter shoppers there today and at one point, I moved our cart so that another baggy old Cart Lady could get through the aisle. She said something like, “Women are better drivers than men.” I replied, “Yes! We were just talking about that at lunch.” And we were but that’s as far as I’ll go with that.

Anyway, not to say that my daughter(s) are my clones. They most certainly are not. Thankfully for them (and me), they seem to have inherited some of my better qualities? And not some of my “other” qualities…

I got home before the witching hour and spent the dreaded late afternoon in beautiful sunny 75-degree weather in the Landfill back yard.

Musing: I remember when Becquet (intentionally misspelled) next door was a pre-schooler and she and her dad played frisbee in the yard between our houses. Tonight, years later, she is shooting baskets into the portable hoop they have set up in their driveway. She is out of my sight but I can hear the basketball bouncing and I love it. I wasn’t bad at basketball when I was a grade school kid. We lived across the street from my grade school and there was a basketball court directly across the street from my house. Ice rink in the winter.

I spent the whole day on and off the phone with a couple people on my team. A dev wizard and our new colleague. All of us except the new person made mistakes and there was a lot of starting over on various things. I can’t ‘splain it all and y’all do not want to know.

This was interspersed for a while with texts with the beach urchins and we won’t go there either except to say there were some benign weekend activity discussions.

I’m not Catholic (or even religious) but I guess I can have an opinion about the pope, right? I liked Francis. Leo the 14th seems promising too. I know there are dissenters on this opinion. I support any pope or any religious figure who follows Jesus’s teachings, meaning that they care about all living beings no matter what color or even species they are. My early view on this pope is that he may follow through on that. I’m not sure if my (non-practicing) Catholic husband agrees with me. We don’t agree on everything. We do agree that children need to be loved and nurtured and we need to live by the Golden Rule and within our means.

Is Pope Leo the 14th a jazz trombone player? Some people are speculating that the new pope played jazz trombone in Chicago as Bobby Prev. I dunno and the intertubes including Trombone Chat are inconclusive. I am interested in this because my (late) little brother was a talented jazz trombonist. I can envision him participating in Trombone Chat. But I kinda side with the intertubes that say the new pope did not moonlight as a trombone player in Chicago. But who knows.

P.S. I saw somewhere that the trombone pope pics were probably AI generated.

I’m gonna bend your ear AGAIN about modernizing “legacy” computer applications. Trump’s pick for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Sean Duffy, seems to think he can modernize the FAA in FOUR YEARS!

NOPE! You are not going to do that. Not without planes falling outta the sky. You are still using floppy disks.

I have said this umpteen bazillion times before but I have spent the last 18 years of my life working on an online banking development team. Most of my time at this company has been focused on building out our web application to handle what the old “legacy” system did. Green screen and mainframe emulators. Guess what? We are there now. Sometimes there is some tweaking but that’s easy. Usually. The thing is, errors in on-line banking applications can create all kinds of chaos and havoc. But they usually don’t make planes fall outta the sky or crash into helicopters.

Yes, the FAA systems ABSOLUTELY need to be modernized. Floppy disks? I actually managed to get the GG to get rid of OUR old floppy disks a few years ago. But we need careful planning by people who know what the hell they are doing. Anyone who says this transition can happen in four years does NOT know what they are doing.

Today, I spent a lot of my time untangling one of the most byzantine javascript files ever. I finally had to hit the nuclear option. That means I deleted everything except the stuff that WORKED. I learned this back when I self-taught myself FORTRAN back in my childhood career at That Darn EPA. Today, I was carefully putting things back a bitsy bit at a time with lots of testing when a few other folks usurped me for other stuff so… It’s okay. These are the fun work days.

Re-reading yesterday’s post in the cold clear light of day, I may have made it sound like I don’t like Sesame Street. That’s not exactly true. While I have never really cared to watch it, that’s because I encountered it as an *adult*. Its target audience is not (necessarily) adults. Its target audience is mainly young children.

I think Sesame Street’s main audience is young children but also the sometimes under-prepared parents who are struggling to raise them. I think one of the show’s missions is to help with early childhood education for children who live in places that don’t have Reading Chairs (or even toilets) and/or parents who have the time and patience to sit in a Reading Chair with their babies and read book after book after book to them. And maybe those parents also cannot read.

Although the GG certainly can and did read to our babies, I was the main reader. I read to my kids until they were well past being independent readers. For a summer or so, I read chapters of “Indian in the Cupboard” aloud on the moominbeach to several generations of relatives. I miss those days but they are “moiles” away.

I enjoy reading aloud. I like to put at least a little “feeling” into the words. I will act out the voices of some of the characters if there is dialogue. I even do that kind of thing when I am presenting functional specifications at work. Maybe there is an actor buried inside me somewhere? I do get tired when I read books where a FROG is the main character because then I have to use a raspy voice and I get pretty hoarse.

So I get what Sesame Street is trying to do and I support it. Also Mr. Rogers, RIP. An early savior of public broadcasting. It’s long but it’s good and f*ck Trump, whose children have had all the advantages money can buy but still seem to be idiots.

Alas. At our daily stand-up meeting this morning one of our Indian colleagues reported that another Indian colleague could not attend because his area was under a blackout. I think everyone is okay and it sounded like this was maybe a drill of some sort but war is hell and I wish we could just not do it.

What is the demented despot doing today? Making an executive order to defund public broadcasting. (Was it today?) NPR has rolled in the background of my life for many years. I used to listen to it at the moomincabin and when they had fund drives, I would harass The Commander to call in and make a donation (I couldn’t afford it then). I dunno if she ever did (she kinda brushed my young ass off) but I do now support three NPR stations.

I remember when my kids watched various children’s programming on PBS. In fact, I even remember when my first child was pretty much too young to process TV (butchya never know what they are processing). There were some kind of serious senate hearings (or something) that preempted Sesame Street shows. A beleaguered mother of pre-schoolers quoted her kiddo saying, “He not Cookie Monster”. I don’t remember which senator was speaking at the time but I’m sure he didn’t look anything like Cookie Monster. There was also a lot of “Ah don’t recollect.” If you cannot recollect things, maybe you shouldn’t have run for office. “Ah don’t recollect” was in a southern accent but all of these sleazers find ways to say this in their own regional words and accents.

Just to say, one of my children was not all that crazy about Sesame Street and referred to Bert and Ernie a bit derisively as “those silly guys.” I was never crazy about the show either but I always liked The Count because Radical Betty would always say, “I am zee count and I veel count zee (whatevah)” and I am good at counting things.

What’s weird is that Sesame Street didn’t start until my beloved aunt Radical Betty’s children (my beloved cousins) and me were teenagers. So I dunno why Radical was watching it

The snow is at the moomincabin and the GG is there and that green thing with the googly eyes is the propane tank and behind that is the shed. This snow is not yellow but I bet umpteen bazillion aminals (including one particular human) have peed there so don’t eat that snow. Frank Zappa here.

Oh, just from my work day. I had umpteen bazillion meetings today and I had to be on my toes in every one. I did not always accomplish that very well but we made it through and we will move on from here.

My brain loves being stretched to teach a new person our sprawling product. I’m more accustomed to refreshing long-time colleagues and often my own memories about how something works and where the hell it is, etc. So I am constantly readjusting to the fact that I have a new audience for the stuff I write. Functional specifications and email questions and whatever. This is a good thing for an old bag. And my new colleague is a self-starter with some really good ideas. Today’s ideas didn’t really fit into the scope of our next product release but we are excited about maybe incorporating it in a future release. This has been “escalated” and We’ll see what happens. I am on board.

Unrelated to the rest of this, re-open Alcatraz? Say what? Is our president in full fledged dementia? I certainly think so.

This red flower pic is from the Landfill backyard, not from Hawaii.

We have two red-flowering trees/bushes in the landfill yard. They are in bloom right now and I will have to get pics of them. For now, you get this tropical bloom sent by a beach urchin from Hawaii.

We were threatened with a rainy day today. It took quite a while for the rain to start but yes, it’s been a rainy day. It was also one in which the GG was on the prowl. Looking for weird things that are around somewhere in the house but nowhere to be found. Like his dad The Gumper used to say, “I’m always missing 10% of my stuff and it’s always a different 10%.” Something like that.

So a number of years ago, probably pre-covid, I bought some kind of fancy mop from the internet. I WISH TO HELL I HADN’T DONE THAT. Why did I not ask myself, “Will I use this thing?” The answer turned out to be NO and I think I knew that from the moment I ordered it. A Swiffer works for me for the minimal mopping I need to do (kitchen and bathroom and we won’t talk about the basement utility room). Note that, in a nod to our environment, I don’t buy those presoaked Swiffer throwaway wipey things. I soak a microfiber cloth with water and detergent and attach that to the Swiffer. And then WASH IT.

Anyway, today, the GG dredged it out from wherever it was and figured out it was missing a part. Nothing integral to how it works, just an extra “bottle” or whatever. Where is that bottle? I do not know. After much rummaging, he kinda gave up. Whew! Other rummaging ensued but that ended up a win for yer fav-o-rite blahgger for a couple reasons. 1) He went to the Apple store (which gave me a wee break) and 2) he bought me a second charging thingy for my MacBook Pro so I can move that laptop from the kitchen to my “office” without hauling the charger along. So I can have my laptop next to me to stream whatever NPR station I want to. Why did I not figger this out five years ago when I first became a full-time telecommuter. I do not know.

I actually loved the rain today. Our planet always needs rain.

Actually the farmers market posted that some vendors had it last Saturday but because facebook’s timeline is so random, I didn’t see the post until well after I like to go to the farmers market, which is EARLY. 7:00 AM when it opens.

I had a few kinks to work out of my farmers market procedure. First, Miller is closed from Newport to who knows where. I hung a louie at Pinetree, wended my way through the Water Hill neighborhood over to Summit and on down to the market. Once there, I snagged a parking place right next to the market. But. My parking app wouldn’t work. After a few minutes of futzing around with it, I remembered! The parking meters aren’t activated until 8:00! It would have been nice if the app had posted a friendly message indicating that parking was free for another hour or whatever but oh well. Free parking is free parking I guess.

As luck would have it, the vendor closest to Cygnus had asparagus so I grabbed two bunches and some green onions. At least I thought they were green onions. As I was chopping them, I realized they smelled like garlic. Whatever they are, they’ll be good. I didn’t buy a lot today because it’s another weird week ahead cooking wise. I was home by about 7:10.

Lunch at Casey’s Tavern (where my parking app *did* work). As much as I love asparagus season, I love shelling pea season even more. A little more than a month to go.

Well, for a few seconds, I thought I could end this post by saying that one of my horses (Neoequos) won the derby but instead the GG’s horse won. We aren’t betting for real money this year (that I know of, I don’t really understand “our” system) and I pick horses based on their names, not the odds. Which I don’t wanna bother putting any brain power into understanding.

You know, the RTO (Return To Office) “synergy”. I am not under an RTO mandate but I actually felt some of that synergy today.

I dragged the GG to a retirement party for a co-worker. It was at another co-worker’s beautiful house in the country. I was TERRIFIED about attending this party. It wasn’t because of covid. It was my social anxiety kicking into high gear. I have seen exactly two of the attendees in person since you know when (2020).

I really really wanted to bag out of this thing but I also knew that I couldn’t really do that. In the end, it was the absolute right thing to do. As often happens with me, once I got there, my social anxiety melted. A wee bit of whine helped with that of course. But also it was absolutely amazing to see all of these people again. Of the people who attended, I am still the newcomer at “only” 18 years of service. I suspect I am also the oldest. As I have said before, we are a “mature” team and I figured out PDQ after I was hired that I had landed in a good place. You didn’t get hired if you didn’t seem like a good fit and people treat each other with respect without fail.

The GG was a bonus. He is more of a social butterfly than me and quickly made friends. He played a bit of shuffleboard with Mr. Bear (neither of them know how to play) and promoted the North Country Trail with great success. Telling stories and showing pictures and maps. Wouldn’t you know, he had a few brochures stashed in Cygnus to leave behind. But people *were* actually interested.

We didn’t stay for the whole party because we had another engagement at Dexter’s Pub for dinner but I had a hard time dragging myself out of there.

Cheers to my company and team!

I observed robin nesting behavior a couple weeks ago. I think they nested in a place I can’t see from where I usually hang out in the back yard. We were in and outta town and I’m not sure what happened with that nest.

This egg is something my mouse found in the church woods. Or maybe somewhere else. It doesn’t seem to be in a nest. So maybe it fell out of a nest?

The church woods is across from the mouse/racc house. It’s a woods adjacent to a Black Lives Matter kind of protestant church. Which means anyone from the non-religious (but live by the Golden Rule) parts of my family would be comfortable living across from it. One of the reasons I hate Trump is because he does not live by the golden rule. He’s more an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth kinda guy. Bad Orange Man.

A billion years ago I took an ancient history class in college and the prof called me out (silently) in that there was only one student in the class who understood what he was saying. I had written a paper or answered an essay question on a test, I fergit which. He didn’t name me but I knew I was the student he was talking about. The issue was whether or not Jesus was a “divine” messiah or just a person trying to be a messiah. I can’t go any further with that tonight although I would have “argued” for the second option. I don’t think we even know if Jesus was an actual person.

P.S. Trump is in no way, shape, or form a messiah.

So, topics I wanna talk about more in depth but won’t for various reasons.

Trump blaming BIDEN for the economy. Nope. You putchyer big f*ckin’ toddler thumb on a few “scales” here and there and you did this all by yourself. “Sleepy/Crooked” Joe had nothing to do with this.

RFKJR will find a “cure” for “autism” by September (or whenever)? Nope. Decoding what causes “autism” (a huge sprawling “spectrum” of issues) is (IMHO) not gonna be untangled until well after we are all dead, if it ever is untangled. It is much more complicated than changing legacy on-line banking systems to web applications. For example. Also, a lot of people “on the spectrum” do not want to be “fixed”. They want to be understood and treated with dignity. Like we all do.

Apparently our Great Lake State governor Big Gretch has “cuddled up” to the Orange Baboon enough to get a bunch of Democrats to give her “shade” for cozying up to the enemy. Trump IS an emeny, to everyone in our country, not just to Big Gretch. What did Big Gretch do? She helped her state out by negotiating with Trump to get a bunch of fighter jets stationed at an air force base in The Great Lake State. If Trump doesn’t change his mind (as he is wont to do, is he actually a woman?), this will be a good thing for my state. I dunno but I suspect Gretch has enough of an emotional quotient and savvy to figger out how to handle a cretin like Trump. But who knows. I do know that she has NOT changed her value system. This is the kind of thing we want in politicians.

The title is from when my niece Pengie was about four. She was standing in front of the moomincabin refrigerator in the morning thinking about what she wanted to eat for breakfast. That particular summer, the Old Cabin (next door) was uninhabited for a week or so and my brother and his family were staying there. Pengie was probably up earlier than her parents so they sent her next door to us at the moomin and we we were more than happy to have her with us. As a child I was constantly running back and forth between the Old Cabin and the moomin.

So Pengie was looking for breakfast. We (The Commander and my dad and me) sorta forgot about the brain spinning stuff and were talking in the background of Pengie’s brain. And then. She announced, “My brain just stopped. It stopped on salami!” Of course she was served salami PDQ.

I think it’s Mars. Initially I thought it was Venus but when I checked Skyview, Venus was already below the horizon and Mars looked like it was in the right place relative to the moon.

We have a surprise visitor tonight, at least a surprise to me. It’s okay, it’s someone who is always welcome here, the UU, other half of the Twinz of Terror. But it was a busy work day and I had been thinking I’d just phone dinner in by heating up leftovers, probably not enough for three people. So. What do I have? Well. I have some individually packaged seven ounce filet mignons from Meijer. Every time I go to Meijer I check for these little things. They don’t always have them but when they do, I buy a few to top off my freezer stock. They thaw quickly so I can pull out as many as needed at almost a moment’s notice and marinate them in Soy Vay or whatever I have on hand.

We also had fancy little multi-colored potatoes, peas, and a very simple salad. I wanted to make garlic bread but my work got totally crazy today and I totally forgot about the garlic bread.

Other than that, it was 86 (!!!) degrees today and I am kinda done done done. G’night, KW.

Guess what the GG is doing. He is on a ladder fiddling with something on the CEILING, right? Do you know what he is fiddling with? If you guessed “smoke alarm”, DING DING DING! You win the booby prize.

The last year has been a saga of chirping (and sometimes screeching) smoke alarms here at the Landfill. At my INSISTENCE, we installed Nest smoke alarms a year or so ago in the “hall” and the dungeon. They are fine. I tested them yesterday. But we have a complicated situation in which there are multiple other smoke alarms. THREE of them are within a couple FEET of the upstairs “hall” Nest alarm. You’ve heard me say this before. Multiple times. A neighbor’s tree fell on our house in 2008 or 2009 or so (not looking it up) and city building code required one smoke alarm per bedroom. Our three LITTLE bedrooms are clustered around the “hall” (a very small square space) so we have four FRICKIN’ smoke alarms within six feet of each other. You can’t even tell which one is chirping. Bureaucratic bungling run amok. Come out and look at the actual SPACE, you cretins.

So yesterday morning, I was enjoying a wee brek and some word puzzles when, CHIRP. 30 seconds or whatever, CHIRP. F*CK. I called the GG up at the moominbeach and kinda read him the riot act because I thought he had changed out the smoke alarms. Nope. New smoke alarms were available but not installed. The chirping stopped (because there was no blasted faaaar) and a beach urchin helped me change out the battery. I can do this kind of thing myself but standing on a chair or whatever and tilting my head *back* is not fun. These things didn’t used to be ON the ceiling. Anyway, my beach urchin fixed it and we had a wee ‘hattan in the back yard to “celebrate” and all of the alarms were silent all night.

The GG came home today and, as promised, got to work changing out THREE smoke alarms. They were OLD as hell and I think we should replace these things more frequently.

… to extract a wee bit of MAGA from my libtard/social justice warrior consciousness. I did that by meeting my adult daughter Lizard and our cousin npJane (first cousin to me and first cousin once removed to my daughter). We met for lunch downtown at the Jolly Pumpkin.

I won’t go into all the details but it was polly-tickle stuff (we three definitely agree) and cabin stuff and random family stuff. I have said this before but npJane was a young but full-fledged adult when Lizard was born. They formed a strong bond early on, one that continues such that they have attended conferences together for their work. How cool is that?

COBOL programming came up today. I don’t know COBOL but I do know FORTRAN. Are we gonna be able to change the social security system? The one that I actually get payments from even though I still work and have a salary I never dreamed I would ever have.

I have said this before and will say it again. Changing a legacy system (like social security or online banking) is very complicated. It takes years and a lot of careful design work. That’s what I do.

When DOGE says they are gonna re-do social security in a couple weeks, my take is, “Oh no you’re not.” Nope.

One of my Saturday night radio programs played Woolly Bully a while ago and I looked up the lyrics (again) because what the heck? Hatty told Matty… I remember being a young teenager and listening to this on the radio at the Old Cabin and wondering what the heck the lyrics were then too. I couldn’t google them then. Now I can but I am only semi-enlightened. It was a good song anyway

But I’m thinking about ferries tonight. The Lord and Lady of Linden are traversing Canada by automotive vee-hickle to visit their son and his family in Seattle. They are starting their trip by traveling through Ontario and texted pics to the fam today from Marathon, Ontario, and Lake Superior from the north shore. My fam’s moomincabin is on the south shore.

When I was a kid, my parents took us out of school for a couple days to travel around Lake Superior. I have MANY memories of that trip but I won’t bore you with them. The main point is that our trip started with a ferry ride. The Linden folks (the GG’s sister and brother-in-law) did not have to start their trip with a ferry ride. They were able to drive across the International Bridge.

The International Bridge was completed when I was eight. My dad drove us plus my neighborhood friend Laurie across it the first night it was open. I have gone across that bridge and back for many years.

The International Bridge handles a hell of a lot of traffic nowadays. I can’t even fathom how commercial traffic crossed the Sault Ste. Siberia border before the bridge. Of course, they took the ferries. The same ones we used to sometimes take on foot. We parked on the American side, walked on to the ferry, walked up to Queen Street, shop, ate fancy pastries at the Girl in Red (if we were lucky) and walked back.

I found a link to the old ferries. I think the Agoming might be one we took frequently. I didn’t pay attention to the ferry names back then.

Photo credit to mouse.

You deserve a break today. From KW style polly-ticks, not McDonald’s, although you are welcome to go to McDonald’s if you so choose. I am not the food police and we’ll talk about the food police some other day.

So the GG was hot to camp at the moomincabin this weekend. I think he’ll be camping other places over the next few days. He can plug in to lucky-shucky at the moomin and use the wi-fi. Terlets are not available but he is a maaaaaan so most of that is easy to take care of Nobody’s looking at you when you are on private forested land with big rotting snow piles everywhere. And if you have to do the dirty deed (everyone poops), there is a perfectly serviceable outhouse at the Old Cabin. Thanks to My Dear Uncle Harry for keeping it up all these years. I do contribute a roll of toilet paper from time to time.

There is still ice rimming the shore and some of the “hummocks” that form at the second sandbar. In the summer, we walk out to where those hummocks are in the water. After that the water gets over your head. At this time of year, the second sandbar is not a safe place to walk.

I think the GG is camping behind the moomingarage. Less snow but lucky-shucky and wi-fi are available.