We hosted my next door neighbor-cousins for dinner tonight. They are leaving tomorrow for further journeys before they head into the sunset back to Seattle. I love to have people over for dinner the night before they are leaving. Even though I am working this week, it is easy for me to cook and clean up and saves them a couple more tasks in the midst of packing.

We made the dinner party plan yesterday afternoon and so it was the GG who ended up doing what shopping needed to be done. It was BBQ chicken thighs, pre-packaged potato salads from Meijer (they have some good ones), green salad because I have tons of lettuce, etc., from last Thursday’s farmers market over on the res, and peas that I shelled myself on Saturday, also from the farmers market.

It all worked out very well. We spent hours on the moomindeck eating, drinking a wee bit, gabblety-gabbling and watching the sun go down. Fun fun fun and I will miss them when they leave. More family will be coming over the next few weeks. I don’t necessarily believe in “heaven” or that people who have passed St. Peter’s gate can see what’s going on here on the planet Earth but on the off chance that my grandparents could see us here this summer, I think they might be happy.

Not to get maudlin or anything. And g’night!

The eastern yooperland is pretty much trumperland although I have a bunch of friends in the area who, like me, are not and have NEVER been fans of Trump, MAGA, or DOGE.

I am living in a “mixed” marriage. I totally don’t understand how anyone in their right mind could support Trump (and MAGA and DOGE) but I know I am not alone in my mixed marriage. And yet, we somehow get along. Today the GG hooked up the North Country Trail (NCT) utility trailer with the DR mowing musheen and we took off up the shore to Bark Dock, where the GG mowed for about an hour.

After that we headed south to M28, a main artery across the northern yooperland. We needed to turn east at that point and somehow I looked back and saw the DOGE sign. Double-take? Yes. We were looking for a Chippewa County Road facility where the NCT tool trailer was situated and after some fumbling (like going west first instead of east), we found it. I made the GG drive back (a tenth of a mile) to the DOGE sign so I could get a pic. We do not agree “politicallee” but this was too much fun for for him to deny me a photo op, even though he knew I would probably use it to disparate Trump/MAGA/DOGE.

After that, we headed east on M28 and he suggested getting lunch at the Strongs Tavern. Yes yes yes. My BLT and mini bottle of merlot were fantabulous. Home to the moomincabin and eventually the beach. A northwest wind made it ultra cold down there today but my smartwool leggings, shirt, and socks along with a polarfleece jacket kept me cozy.

I was up early and left the moominbeach at 7:13. Dumped off a load of load of recycle, did the laundry, and got a few grocks at Pat’s.

When I was a kid, Pat’s was the A&P. It was probably the grocery store we went to most frequently although we also went to the Red Owl and less frequently the Piggly Wiggly. The A&P was only a few blocks away from my Grandma’s house on John Street but I’m pretty sure she also shopped at the Red Owl and the Piggly Wiggly sometimes. Those stores were all well within the inner perimeter of the small city of Sault Ste. Siberia.

Nowadays the major grocery stores in town are Meijer and Walmart and they are on the outer perimeter of the city, 3-Mile Road. I don’t shop at Walmart (it makes me “dizzy”) but I am a regular Meijer shopper both here and on the Planet Ann Arbor. I didn’t feel like dealing with Meijer today for the few items on my list so I hit up Pat’s instead. It’s much smaller and an easy in-and-out. They always play music from my childhood there. Today it was the Raspberry’s “Please Baby Go All the Way” (I knooww) and I fergit what else.

I did end up at Meijer, sort of. I realized that Cygnus was a bit under a half tank so I gassed up at Meijer. I wasn’t really worried about running out of gas but with the Bay Mart gas station in Brimley being rebuilt I thought I would just get ahead of things.

Back out to the moomincabin to put the laundry and the grocks away and hose out the scummy recycle bin and clean the toilet and wash the lettuce I bought at the farmers market a couple days ago. And… I was about to take my pea shelling operation down to the beach when it started RAINING. Okay. I will never complain about rain and shelling peas on the deck during the rain was loverly.

The GG arrived as scheduled at around six and we ate filet and asparagus and little potatoes and salad and then went over to the Old Cabin to visit those next door cousins for a bit.

The pic is inside the Old Cabin. I spent the first six summers of my life there and many many many more times, us cousins running back and forth constantly from the moomincabin to the Old Cabin. We had so much fun.

G’night, KW

The GG is coming back tomorrow (he’s lonely👀). I don’t have anywhere near the amount of laundry shown in the pic. That is from a long-ago year when the beach urchins were at the moomincabin and every blasted beach towel in the place had been used. Tomorrow I am mainly going because I have no clean underwear left. I even washed one pair out today. TMI?

Going into town from the moomincabin to the laundromat has always been a fun thing to do in my life. When we were little kids, we would go with The Commander to the laundromat and then various shopping expotitions and I fergit what else. Food (homemade PBJ probably) and soda pop were usually involved. We could have just done the laundry at our winter home, a shabby little bungalow down on Superior Street, but there were multiple loads so The Comm wanted to do them in parallel, not serial.

Fast forward to when the beach urchins were little. We went to a different laundromat then and LUNCH at a RESTAURANT was usually in the mix by then, paid for by The Comm. Kids are kids and I vaguely remember one time when the lady who ran the laundromat stepped in to settle a little tiff between my beach urchins. Was I embarrassed? Yes.

By the time the beach urchins were teenagers, The Comm backed off from these excursions. She washed her own lingerie at her winter home, Dillon Street by then. TMI? I wouldn’t want anyone else to wash my “lingerie” either, although mine is basically black smartwool bikini underwear, which is neither sexy nor old lady style. Again, TMI?

Nowadays I do mine and the GG’s laundry and any linens that we use, mainly towels, bathmat, and dish cloths, etc. So usually one laundry basket and tomorrow’s will be a lightweight one.

The second pic is our teenage beach urchins minus one who didn’t really want to do laundry with her baggy old aunt at 0-skunk-30 in the morning, preferring to sleep instead. I certainly don’t blame her for choosing sleep but it was fun to have the other urchins with me.

I switched laundromats *again* a number of years ago, to the fantabulous Up North Laundry, first laundromat in town to install free WiFi (long ago). It also has benches outside so I can do my word puzzles out there while waiting for laundry. And an app to pay for the washers, which are $6.50 a load. A lot of quarters. I am happy enough doing the laundry alone but I miss the days when I had kiddos with me.

It began last night when I texted my next door cousin Jay (I have more than a few next door cousins) that if she texted me in the morning, I would freeload some coffee at the Old Cabin. And so I did.

After that it was a work day in which the dev team once again went rogue on me and did some design work that I wasn’t crazy about. It’s okay. I love the dev team and our application is SPRAWLING and inconsistent in so many ways I can totally understand when things like this happen.

I worked through all of that and then it was 3:30 or so and the Brimley Bay Mills farmers market started at 4:00 and I sorta had to drag myself out to go there. Afternoon is not my time of day to go out, probably because on The Planet Ann Arbor, the roads are clogged with traffic. Not so much here so off I went. And. Score. The two bags on the left are filled with SHELLING PEAS!

It turned out that a facebook friend was there but I missed her. I did encounter a couple of beach neighbors but I am such a focused shopper (asparagus in this case) that they had to just about knock me over to get my attention😵‍💫

The pic also provides a glimpse of the kitchen The Commander designed when we built the moomincabin in 1960. I think it has stood the test of time. I showed a pic of this kitchen to Certified Kitchen Lady when we gutted the Landfill kitchen and she raved about the yellow counters. I chose white and teal for the Landfill but these yellow counters work and Magic Eraser helps keep them clean, especially when somebody spills Angostura bitters on them.

It wasn’t really a beach day today. Windy and chilly but I had a lot of work to do and the moomincabin was a great place to do it. The work “synergy” of everyone being in the same room be damned. Working in the office I worked in was fine but our meetings often started with 15-20 minutes of discussion about vampire movies or video games. Work synergy?

I have been alone here at the moomincabin for a week or so now and nobody has been in the Old Cabin. This is okay with me but there isn’t a lot of traffic around so when somebody drives into our parking area I take notice. Especially if it’s 11:00 PM and a party van drives in but we’ll go there some other time (or not🤪). So when this vee-hickle “droven” in last night (it was still light as you can see), I was like whoooooo?

And then a woman got out of the car. It was my cousin! One of the family of cousins who own the Old Cabin. Also a great big mouse (her husband). OMG! I was out the door! They drove cross-country from their home in Seattle, stopping at Pickles for a late dinner and baseball on TV before they got here. I knew they would be here at some point this summer but I had lost track of when, if I ever knew.

It’s all okay. As they own it they are free to “access” it (crappy lawyer speak) whenever they want and don’t need to tell me when they are coming. I was just ecstatically gobsmacked that someone was next door. I was not exactly lonely (I am working and talking to India and Amazon Woman and my new colleague* all day, after all) but it always feels good when others are here at our homeland. When we were kids we were all running around all over the place all summer.

So here’s a twitter play from another time when someone had “droven” in. Characters are Mouse and Kayak Woman and my dad, a supporting character. Scene is the moomincabin main parking space (where Cygnus X-1 is backed into in the lower right corner of the pic.)

[Mouse runs out the door and across the moomindeck on her way to the beach. But. A car drives in and she stops dead and runs back in to the moomincabin.]

Mouse: Moom, someone has droven in!

Kayak Woman (peering out the window and seeing her parents’ car): Come here and LOOK at who has droven in.

Mouse (after looking out the window and seeing HER GRANDDADDY get out of the car): Oh, it’s just a great big mouse.

The End.

My cousin’s husband is his own person but he has some characteristics that remind me of my dad, that great big mouse. I couldn’t put this into words if I tried but he is a wonderful person and all I could think of when they got out of the car was, “Oh, it’s just a great big mouse.” (And my cousin, of course.) Welcome home youz guyz. We won’t talk about the doors🤪

*I will have to come up with a blahg name for my not-so-new colleague. Florida Man is not the right thing even though that’s where he lives but also I already have a Florida Man (FlaMan).

A Duke Nose Beetle that is, at least that’s what I think it was. I wish I had gotten a photooo but every time it climbed up into my chair, I got freaked out just enough to swish it away.

So, my uncle Duke (my aunt Radical Betty’s husband) was about as fearless as they get. WWII pilot for one. Not sure what all he did in that war but I believe he was involved in the Berlin airlift. He became career Air Force and when Viet Nam rolled around he spent a year over there, flying helicopters in and out of Da Nang, if I have it right. Don’t quote me on any of this! I am not a war historian. I remember hearing about Da Nang ftom the TV but didn’t know my uncle was involved. Probably nobody in the fam knew. I don’t remember WWII at all. I wasn’t born until *years* later.

Duke and Betty met a few years after WWII in a bar somewhere. California maybe? I dunno. “Can we buy you ladies a drink?”. Radical would always slur the words while telling the story.

They married and he fit in well with the FinFam, especially my old coot, who was also a WWII pilot. I can remember them talking about left-wing “something or other” after a plane taking off from O’Hare took a tragic dive. Ugh. After Duke’s service ended, they moved to the moominbeach and built a beautiful ski chalet. My cousins and I were young adults by then and we all had too many good times to tell about in this blahg entry.

Anyway, Duke was not a man who got discomfited easily. But one day a bunch of us were sitting on the beach with Muksaslooie probably slinking around hunting grass snakes or whatever. Suddenly the never discomfited man was totally freaking out! Why? There was a big black beetle climbing into his NOSE! (Dukie was a handsome man but he had quite a large schnozz.) Sand was flying everywhere as he clawed at his nose to get the beetle out of it.

What inspired this post was fighter jets from the Canadian airport flying around our bay this afternoon. I was in a meeting so couldn’t run down to the beach to watch. Like my dad and Duke would have done.

I don’t have a pic of Duke at hand, so that’s Muksaslooie in the pic. Another fearless soul and great friend of Duke, his own personal cat doorman.

This morning, almost six AM. All kinds of crazy bird noise out in the back of somewhere. I couldn’t figger exactly where. It wasn’t crows. It wasn’t seagulls. It wasn’t song birds (a weeeee bit too early for those but they came out a little later). It was not The Raven (GROK GROK). I was thinking it might be our neighborhood turkeys but nobody was gobbling. Just making noise. I opened up the Merlin Bird app on my phone and held it up to the open window. Wild Turkey. Yes. That’s what I thought it was.

After I got up, I glimpsed somebody walking down the beach out the front picture window. I didn’t catch who it was but it had a weird head shape for a human. A few minutes later, I realized that it was NOT a human, it was a TURKEY and it was walking across our front yard. Not a human on the beach. I wanted to get a picture of it but that was not in the cards. I love having turkeys in the neighborhood even if they sometimes gobble at me at five AM.

So here I am on the beach at the end of my work day. The sun is over the yardarm and it is visibly starting to move south again. At the moment there is the thrum of a lake freighter passing by out in the channel.

We’ll talk about air quality alerts and E. Jean Carroll vs. Donald J. Trump some other time. I don’t have the bandwidth for that tonight and neither do you. If the scummy Epstein list is what takes scummy old Trump down, I will be happy but I doubt that it will. He seems to slip out of all kinds of crapola. Not E. Jean though. Badass woman.

Love y’all, KW.

Made another mini-grock run today, this time to Meijer. I didn’t have lima beans on my list because I had kinda given up on them. But when I was done and heading up to the u-Scan, my path took me by the end of the freezer cases that had frozen veggies so what the heck, I’ll check? Lo and behold, the top shelf was stuffed with bags of frozen lima beans. Chicken with succotash is in my future, although they are also good to just pull out of the freezer and boil if you need a quick veggie.

On the radio was a discussion about audio books and whether they counted as “reading” or not. As a “new” consumer of audio books, that caught my ear. I say yes, but. I largely agreed with the consensus. The caveat is when young children are learning to read they need to focus on oh, I dunno, phonics or whatever the kids are being taught these days. I am a phonics fan but I am also not an expert on teaching kids to read. Old bags like me don’t really need practice deciphering the written word so read or listen, whatever floats your bote. I plan to do both going forward.

Although I agree that kids should learn to read words, etc., I don’t think it’s terrible for them to listen to audio books occasionally. Heck there were times when I let my kids park themselves in front of the boob tube. But I am a particularly huge fan of people reading to kids – parents, teachers, older siblings, etc. I’m thinking that kind of listening to books is even better. If you are sitting in you mom’s lap while she is reading to you, you might get the idea that the words on the page are connected to the words you are hearing among other things.

I love to read aloud and loved to read to my kiddos. And anyone else who happened to be around, thinking of reading Indian in the Cupboard to multiple generations on the beach long ago.

There were a lot of people around then but there aren’t this summer, at least not yet, so I am experimenting with audio books. What am I reading right now? Glad you asked🐽 “Not My Type”. It’s a memoir by E. Jean Carroll about a certain businessman politician ugly old asshole who raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid 1990s. In my opinion, E. Jean is a badass. She also reads/narrates her book.

I first heard about her… When did I first hear about her? I don’t remember the year (I think it was pre-covid) but I was driving home from the Jackson Rd. Meijer and NPR was rolling along and this woman was talking about being raped by Trump. I think she was saying at the time that she was coming forward about the incident to let the public know about it but not suing because she puts things like that behind her and moves on (I tend to do that too). Later on she was convinced by various people (George Conway for one) to sue and she did and won.

I am not some kind of E. Jean super-fan but she caught my attention for various reasons too long and complicated to write about. For one thing, she seems totally sharp and articulate (and FUNNY), much more so than her idiot attacker, who can’t open his mouth or keyboard without vomiting a bunch of angry word salad. I VERY loosely followed her trial and I occasionally stumbled upon her long-time advice column, which I loved but never “subscribed” to or whatever. I am greatly enjoying this audio book. I’m sure it would not be everyone’s cuppa, especially Trump sycophants.

Uck, I woke up at that Batscope Hour and never really got back to sleep again. The original issue was a need for the water closet and then. I dunno. I was a little hot (I had the windows in “my” bedroom open and it wasn’t hot outside, so I dunno). And then I couldn’t get my brain to turn off. It was silent outside but I heard three or four jets pass over us. These jets were not loud at all. They are waaaaaay up high when they pass over us but my hearing is acute. It was a still night with no rain (yet), otherwise I wouldn’t have heard anything like that. Foghorns and freighters thrumming along I do hear but they are comforting sounds. The waaaaay overhead jets got me thinking about the Air India crash and the lack of thrust and what caused that. Was it human error? Or…?

Anyway, as I have probably said before, I usually sleep pretty well and when I do have a night like last night, I do not feel any more tired the next day than any other day.

So one of the things that was bugging me was there was an odor. It wasn’t a strong stench but it took me a while to identify what it was. Was it meeeee? Or my sleeping bag? Nope. Oh yeah, it’s the garbage.

So. Up at 6:00 AM. Shower. Always my first thing.

Organize all of the garbage into the already started Green Bag, tie it up, and put it next to the “front” door.

Wash out the under sink garbage container and put it outside to dry.

Which it didn’t do because the next time I looked outside, it was raining cats and dogs.

Mini-grock run into Sault Ste. Siberia. Why doesn’t anybody have frozen lima beans any more? They seem to be missing from every single blasted freezer case from The Planet Ann Arbor to Sault Ste. Siberia for MONTHS. What the heck? That was not the only thing on my list but I went to Pat’s instead of Meijer because I was hoping they might have some? Nope.

Okay. Back out to the moomincabin for a wee brek and then,.. Waited out MORE heavy rain before heading off to Brimley/Bay Mills. I had garbage to drop off at the rez and there is an attendant there (because they don’t want random people throwing their green bags willy nilly any old place). I didn’t want the attendant to have to come out in the rain for my blasted garbage. When the rain slacked off a bit, I did drive out there to do a dump. The attendant suited up a bit to come out but he was very friendly (and so was I). And he told me where to get Green Bags since Bay Mart (where we usually get them) is being rebuilt.

Oh, I also filled out my absentee ballot and dropped mine and the GG’s off at the Brimley PO.

And then I went online to pay our Planet Ann Arbor property tax bill.

I am hearing severe storm warnings on the radio right now but nothing like that is happening here. It’s all downstate.

I was in a reading slump and then one of the NPR shows (1A maybe?) had a segment about audio books. I’ve listened to those very occasionally over the years, mostly long ago but I was entranced by this show and had an epiphany that I might try them again. And so I have. With quite some success. Depending on what else I’m doing, I can successfully multi-task.

If nobody else is around, I just use the sound on my iPhone but I also decided I needed some earbuds. As it turned out, the GG wanted to upgrade his earbuds for enhanced hearing, which I don’t need. Like, TURN IT DOWN! Anyway, I managed to “inherit” his current pair. Now to rename them from “Bill’s Earbuds” (something like that) to something more appropriate to me. I am not in a rush.

I wasn’t sure earbuds would work for me but they seem to be mostly okay. My ears get a little itchy sometimes and one afternoon I got a little sleepy (it wasn’t a work day) and next thing I knew, I jerked awake by the sound of my earbuds falling on the floor. Okay then. I don’t normally nap in the day time.

I may blahg about what I am listening to another day. Right now, since I have been notified that season 3 of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Apple TV series starts tonight, I am deciding whether or not to start watching it. It’s a little late for me so we’ll see. This series is NOTHING like the old sci-fi novels but it’s pretty good. Also VERY VERY VERY violent.

Grocks and garbage and a mail run and paying the A2 proptaxes tomorrow. And I dunno what else.

I dunno. I really prefer that people text me to “schedule” phone calls or at least alert me that there will be an incoming call. My daughters do that. My co-workers do that. I mean for pretty much most of my life, if the phone rang and I was in the bathroom, I wasn’t able to answer it because it was a landline out in the kitchen and on a very short cord at that.

Nowadays, the damn phone is usually in my pocket and I am so attuned to be responsive to it (yes, I knooooow), that I start to whip it out without thinking about where I am. When colleagues want to connect via a Teams phone call, if they alert me first, I don’t even have to say, “I have to P, be right back.” I can just say, “3 mins”, and then “back” when I am back.

So, Michigan’s Designated Helper is with his sister Lizard Breath hanging out in front of the Group Home at Hoton Lake and I am here, working. Yes, I am lurching along slowly toward retaaaarment but hope to do some serious succession planning although I well know that when I have left, people will do whatever the hell they want with all my years of careful, thoughtful work, including ignore it. That’s just how it works😉

This is a quick-and-dirty point-and-shoot of one of the picture window views from my current work space. If others are here (besides the GG), sometimes I work in the Lyme Lounge. If Lizard is here telecommuting, she often works from the Lyme Lounge. Since I have mostly been here alone during my workdays this year, I’m just hanging at the moomincabin dining table. This view is looking out the west picture window into the parking area and surrounding woods. Cygnus X-1 is parked just off the deck there and the Lyme Lounge is a little further out and over. Out of frame to the right is the Old Cabin. It’s a terrible pic but it’s reality with the power strip and all the lucky-shuckial stuff and YES YES YES, the deck needs to be repainted. We are well aware.

We were sitting on BBPBBB (Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench aka The Commander’s Memorial Bench) last evening when a rainstorm rolled in. We decamped to the Lyme Lounge, which is currently situated in the moomincabin parking area. Make no mistake, this is not your average paved parking lot. Packed sand surface covered by a layer of pine needles (and lots of sticks and things) and huge red pine trees (mostly) surrounding it.

The GG went out chainsawing again today. I don’t think he expected he would be chainsawing this time. I think he thought he was going to a meeting. Breakfast anyone? I don’t really know if there was breakfast. I know he took coffee with him in the F*cking Rabbits mug. (Read “The Bean Trees”.) Anyway, he was back in the early afternoon and he crashed hard for a while. Fortunately he took a shower first since he was napping in/on MY sleeping bag.

I cannot hold this in. The airwaves have buzzed all day with Trump FINALLY(?) realizing that Putin is NOT his good buddy. What was it? “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.” Right? Um, hey Trumpy, are you just figuring this out NOW? You keep calling yourself a wheeler-dealer but I don’t think you have a CLUE about people.

I am a WOMAN. I figgered out this kind of shitola at an early age. That college orchestra director who was sneakily touching my long blonde hair? Stay away from him, KW. A few years later he will be fired from his job because he made sexual advances to young women. For the record, I did NOT succumb to his advances. I greatly respected his work as our director but he totally creeped me out with that touch. I didn’t respond except to side-eye him big-time and he never approached me again in that way. He also knew better (somehow, I dunno how) not to demote me to last seat or whatever. I was first seat and I was good. And maybe a bit lucky somehow.

He was not my first rodeo (freshman year private piano teacher for one) but I don’t quite think I knew at that time that I had found my power but I know now that I was well on my way. When a cute little blonde clarinet player (very good player) complained about him in our women’s concert changing room, I gave her a friendly piece of my mind. “Tell him to go to hell,” except I was more polite than that. My daughters somehow learned all of this way earlier than I did and probably not from me.

Trump seems to be able to get his way with whatever women he wants but I don’t think Putin is his friend.

Elon annoyed the hell out of me today too but we’ll go there some other day.

Oops! Wrong movie. This is more like The Twinz of Terror go to Mackinac Island. Well, they did go to an island, roight?

They went there to meet up with one of the UU’s boys and his wife and children. Bikes were ridden and I dunno what else. Me? I made an early run to the Up North Laundry and then came back to the moominbeach and my loverly little job. I don’t want to blahg too much about this but I was so impressed with the work my new colleague did today I told him he could take the rest of the day off. Of course, I had to qualify that I do not have the power to give him an afternoon off, which he well knows. But he got the point. My team hires good people.

I had NPR rolling quietly in the background as usual today. The Guadalupe flooding? OMG. Fact. A facebook/childhood friend of mine lived on the Guadalupe River for 40 years and is familiar with its flooding issues. She lives in a nearby city now. I don’t think she moved because of the flooding, just relocated.

Scary? That camp. 28 kids, counselors, and the camp director? At this moment I am listening (on NPR) to a woman who went to Mystic Camp for many years as a child. She LOVED it and is (of course) devastated about the flood. I went to Camp Wikweia (a Campfire Girl camp) a few times as a kid. I didn’t really like it all that well but there were some good times.

Once when I was at Camp Wikweia, my cabin and some others were scheduled to actually camp in sleeping bags maybe a quarter mile down the shore for the night. This was one thing I was excited about. We got there and I’m gonna guess we roasted hot dogs and s’mores over a faaaar. And we went to bed. In the middle of the night, we were roused from sleep by camp staff in cars. There was a severe thunderstorm. “Get in the car”, a camp admin said to me. “Oh no, get some of the younger kids first, I’m not scared.” “Get in the car!” Brave [stupid] tomboy was one of my many childhood personas although as an adult, I don’t go outside in lightning. I got in the car and everyone made it back to camp safely that night but I have always wondered whether they made me get in the car because of who my parents were or just because I was THERE. I hope it was the second. It was just a thunderstorm and Clear Lake was a little lake that couldn’t begin to overflow if it tried.

The folks who died at Mystic apparently didn’t have a chance in hell and I am still processing that. Another news story that freaked me out almost more was about two sisters (11 and 13 years old) who drowned on their family’s vacation property. They were staying with their grandparents in a rental house/cabin adjacent to their property. At some point during the night the dad tried unsuccessfully to kayak to them. Later he discovered a text, “We love you.”

All of the flooding is awful but that broke me. My daughters are 2-1/2 years apart, which means they were 11 and 13 once long ago.

We have a 3-year-old (and a newborn) visiting next month. Do we have life jackets? At least for the 3-year-old? Not sure. We found this child-size life jacket in the shed, which turns out to be quite a bit bigger than a 3-year-old and maybe not the right form factor. It doesn’t exactly fit the GG either.

We will all figger this out by the time our cousin-guests get here.

When we were kids we wore fugly old orange life jackets, old and faded. We wore those in my uncle’s speed boat and our family’s canoe. One of my memories is when we took the canoe out into the lake to watch an eclipse of the moon. We were halfway out into the bay when something came paddling up to meet us. It was my beautiful dog Tigger, swimming out from the shore where it was WAAAAY over her head because she in no way shape or form was gonna be left behind. I wish I had a pic of that but no iPhone in those days.

Then there was the time my dad and his buddy Pete Sherman took me and a bunch of the Sherman kids out in the canoe over to the sand islands in Mosquito Bay. Dad and Pete were paddling and there were like six of us little kids sitting between them. I was wearing one of those fugly old orange life jackets and a seagull shat on me. Lovely.

We won’t talk about the time the GG and my cousin’s husband put Lizard and my cousin’s son into the canoe WITHOUT life jackets and paddled them away. All of the women on the beach that day were LIVID. All turned out well but us beach women are a rather extreme force of nature.

Alas that we haven’t been able to eradicate f*cking MAGA but we are working on it, that is those of us who are still alive are working on it for those who have left us. The Commander and Radical Betty among others. They worked to help women gain equality and respect and thanks in part to them, I have always had that and I will work as best I can to pass it on to other women. We are just as intelligent and capable as men are and we deserve respect.

After our Friday afternoon party, WELL after because at this time of year, it doesn’t even begin to get dark until something like 10:00 PM, the Bay Mills Indian Community fireworks started up. I headed down to the beach and after many many many bloopers, I managed to get this pic. I was using optical zoom on my iPhone and it was also doing some sort of night mode thing that I don’t totally understand.

I have never been bothered by the sound of fireworks, at least not that I can remember. I empathize with people who are and aminals, who don’t understand what the noise is all about. Years and years ago when we were up here at the moomincabin on 4th of July, we used to take our kids into town for the Sault Ste. Siberia fireworks. One year I remember holding my niece at Brady Park while she stuck her fingers in her ears. She was pretty freaked out about the noise but she also had a big smile on her face. My own urchins were tumbling up and down the hill at Brady Park oblivious to the noise. I tumbled on that hill as a kid even up into my teenage years. It is closed to the public these days because there is a Native American cemetery atop it.

I’m pretty sure Sault Ste. Siberia still does fireworks but we have long stopped going in to town to see them there because we watch them from across the water at Bay Mills.

Although mostly we would drive safely into town to watch fireworks when I was young, I remember once when I was a VERY young adult and I rode in the back of a pickup truck with a bunch of younger children. No seat belts or anything to secure anyone. We made it there and back safely and the dad of a few of the children (and childhood friend of my dad) thanked me profusely for my help in that expedition. Heck, I was still just a kid myself. Only a few years later that kind of thing would be totally illegal.

I was hanging out on the moomindeck this afternoon when I heard/saw a vee-hickle drive in to the moomincabin parking area. Hmmm. It’s a white car but it’s too small to be the the SUV of porterization. Also a bit too squeaky. (Not to mention that it isn’t 11:00 PM🐽) So, yes, it is Radical Betty’s last Honda Accord, which my cousin Grinch (Betty’s son) drives when his big white construction van has issues. It does have issues at the moment and to make a long story short, he likes to fix his own vee-hickles.

He is an extremely intelligent person not to mention handy as all getout and if I get it right is known as the best dry-waller in Chippewa County. You might guess that by the condition of his clothing. He arrived here after a day of work, knowing that after a hot day working inland, the moomindeck might be picking up some good breezes. (He lives two doors down.)

I am blessed with the best set(s) of cousins (of all degrees). I love them all. This guy has always been extra close to me. My first truly sentient memory of him was when I was three and he was six. (I have told this story a few times before.) We were in our granddaddy’s car (a Studebaker) with both of our dads and we were out buying smoked fish somewhere up on the res. My dad always hated fish but Grinch’s dad (Uncle Duke) loved it.

Both Grinch and I loved smoked fish and after the fish was purchased, we “fought” in the back seat of Granddaddy’s Studebaker over who got to hold the fish on the way home.

The Mean Old Grunchie Old Grinchie is just about the sweetest guy on earth. I have loved him forever and will keep on doing so.

The main thing about today is it was the annual Piedy 4th of July party. I remember the first time I attended that party as a little kid. I think somebody grilled hamburgers and hot dogs and there was a huge bonfire pit on the beach and the Piedy boyz (high school and maybe even college) shot Roman candles over the lake. These days us kids are all old and baggy and many folks have grandchildren and even great grandchildren.

We all sat talking and I had a loverly meeting of the minds with two of the Piedy gals of my generation. We lamented MAGA and the fact that both our families are made up of people with mixed political opinions and that we have pretty much given up on trying to change their minds. I have long suspected that these gals are in agreement with me and now I know.

The funny part of the day… Except it was a complete pain in the you-know-what at the time. The GG walked to Brimley to watch the parade (and buy some junk food). He was hoping to meet up with our friends of porterization so as to hitch a ride home with them. Phone service was horrendous in Brimley today, resulting in a tangled web of text messages and phone calls that only intermittently went through. I got about half of them. The GG couldn’t find the Porters. The Porters couldn’t find the GG.

Eventually the GG called and through the static I was able to make out that he was on his way home and could I pick him up? So I did.

Tonight he was looking through the pics he took at the parade today. Lo and behold, there were the Porters! Just to the right of the flag. The GG was too distracted by the bugs and “pretty girls” in the parade to notice the Porters.

43 years ago it was a nice day for a white wedding. Or maybe it was just a beach wedding. Man oh man, my beloved mother was bugging me up the wazoo to wear shoes. On the beach? No mom I will not. She had been brought up “properly” in the Detroit area but she had also lived for umpteen bazillion summers on the beach by that time. Us kids always went barefoot here so I was puzzled about why she wanted me to put shoes on for my beach wedding. To hell with that. I went barefoot ANYWAY and when my dad joined me to walk with me down the “aisle”, he was barefoot too. I don’t really miss my parents all that much normally but I am tearing up a bit at that memory.

We have spent our anniversaries many places but usually we are with family, my fam or the GG’s fam or whoever, at home on The Planet Ann Arbor, Hoton Lake or the moominbeach. This year was a quiet one. We are at the moominbeach and the GG spent the morning in the Lyme Lounge reporting his 522 hours of volunteer time on the North Country Trail so far in 2025. We drove over to Barbeau for lunch at Cozy Corners, not to be confused with the Cozy Inn in Brimley. Both are good places.

Upon returning from lunch, the GG took a pretty straight trajectory to a nap. I did an audio book for a while, then dozed off a bit until my earbuds fell on the floor. That woke me up.

We finished off the day with a porterized happy hour on Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench. And so good night.

It’s the Alicia G with a Portuguese flag. If you do not know what a “salty” is, it is an “ocean-going bote”, as my parents taught us when we were kids. Ocean-going botes can “sail” in the great lakes if they can navigate all of the canals, rivers, and locks. Like you won’t see big container ships anywhere near here because they can’t get through all of that stuff. On the other hand, lake freighters are not really suited to the oceans. Long story about length and width and ocean style waves although I don’t remember the details off-hand. Ocean-going botes require a “pilot” aboard to navigate the locks and rivers in the Great Lakes (and probably other places but I live on the Great Lakes).

I got this photooo last night as I was heading up to the moomincabin to put myself to bed. Dominion Day faaarworks were just starting in Canananada, which is a mile or so away from the moominbeach (as I’ve said a few times before). I didn’t see any of them but I enjoyed listening to them as I settled in for the night. I don’t like loud sudden noises (like smoke alarms that screech for no good reason in the middle of the night). Fireworks have never bothered me but I do empathize with people suffering from PTSD or other mental health conditions. I mean, most of us suffer from some sort of mental health condition or other. For instance, I have a very weird phobia (but oddly, not all that uncommon) against a couple of completely benign insects. And some basic social anxiety. And some OCD, although I try to keep that over in the corner where it belongs. And probably some other crapola.