Twitter play

The GG: I gotta get OFF the computer.

KW [silently]: YES!

[A few minutes later, keys are clicking at “the computer” again.]

KW: Are you at the computer again?

The GG: Yes, but only for a minute.

KW [silently]: Jeebus Kee-reist.

I’m trying to figure out if this snow capped mushroom resembles a classical music composer from days gone by or an aging punk rocker or something else.

I wish I had a pic of the little ice rink across the street from my family’s shabby little bungalow on Superior Street in Sault Ste. Siberia when I was a child. It was a basketball court for the most part but in the winter, the city or school district or whoever turned it into an ice rink. My parents definitely bought me figure skates so I could hang out over there. I learned a few eensy weensy tricks on my skates but mainly I raced across the ice and crashed into the big snowbanks that ringed the rink, laughing uproariously and flipping onto my back to gaze at the star-studded winter sky. Thinking about it a bit, for a few years, a hockey dad lived next door to us and he made an ice rink between our houses. So two ice rinks next door to my house.

I wanted to learn to skate with the “pretty” girls who took lessons at the Pullar Stadium, where the Red Wings used to practice when I was a kid. My mom did not let me do that. The reasons were complicated but I think she didn’t feel like she fit in with that particular mom crowd, even big city (Detroit) girl that she was.

I always envied my figure skater friends but in the end, skiing was more my thing. My parents always supported that sport for me and my brother and all of our cousins skied.

In the end, The Commander came out ahead in life, so to speak. After a number of years of being a stay-at-home mom for me and my little brother, she eased herself into teaching, then got a masters degree and taught high school a number of years. In her later years, she became a revered elder in the community. I am so proud of her.

The year my dad spent a few weeks at the Henry Ford Hoosegow, the Olympics were on. It was 2006 if I remember correctly. I would drive over to the hoosegow and back every day and crash out in front of the Olympics every night. After dinner (which was often Dexter’s Pub) and my blahg and an email to family and friends.

At that time, I collected a lot of family and some friends who wanted to hear updates about my dad. Sometimes people would ask how I could write these daily emails. Well, first, writing helps me think things through and process them and writing those emails helped me as much as anything else. I was AMAZED at how many people wanted to hear about our journey through my dad’s injury, surgeries, and eventual death. It helped me that people seemed to care about this. When I was writing those emails, we were optimistic that my dad might survive but a few weeks after we moved him back to the yooperland to a rehab facility, he succumbed to sepsis and made his exit. Actually I wasn’t all that optimistic throughout any of this journey but I was holding the world on my shoulders and all I could do was think positively and carry on.

Tonight the Olympics are on again and I was a bit ambivalent about watching. We’ve been watching Andy Griffith and when we heard his whistling, I kinda wanted to watch that. But we turned to the Olympics anyway and whaddya know, it was giant slalom! I downhill skied a LOT as a kid and I love to watch skiing on TV. I was never really any good but I could manage my way down ANY hill, no matter how many moguls, if not elegantly. So we watched giant slalom and then some pairs skating (and learned the word “twizzle”) and now we’re watching what I think is slalom (gates are closer together than giant slalom).

I am not falling asleep in front of the TV tonight but I will probably not last all that long.

G’night, KW

After a couple weeks of kvetching about the SuberbOwl, the GG now has it on and plans to watch it. I do not know who he’s rooting for. I am rooting for the Seahawks of course, not that I’ll actually watch the game, as if I could follow it…

I am rooting for the Seahawks for two reasons. 1) Because I have two cousins who live in the area (and their families) and some bloggy friends I have known so long they almost seem like local neighbors. Just to say, one of my cousins is hosting a SuberbOwl party, the other one couldn’t care less about football and I don’t think she even has a TV. 2) Because I kinda hate renaming teams things like “Patriots”, although the GG informs me that the team hasn’t been renamed. That is its original name, I guess. Fair enough.

I have mixed feelings about renaming teams in general, especially if for “politically correct” reasons. I don’t really like “patriotic” names. I *am* patriotic, believe it or not. Just that “patriot” is taking on some different connotations in this day and age and I am not a fan. I am not a big fan of renaming teams with Native American names but I think that the Native American communities should have some say although I gather that the Native Americans’ opinions sometimes vary. Now. My high school was (and is) the Blue Devils. I thought that was a cool name and fortunately any attempts to change it were foiled. I think there *were* such attempts but am terribly fuzzy on the details. But who wouldn’t want to be a Blue Devil? I was proud to be one. “We are the devils, the mighty mighty devils…” Memories of being on the band bus and SING-SHOUTING that to the world. We did that when we rode the junior high bus, the high school bus was more subdued. For one thing, as cool a name as Blue Devils was, our team did not win a lot of games. Needless to say, we were a bit cynical by then.

My relationship with MAGA continues to evolve although I am NOT AND NEVER WILL BE MAGA OR pro-TRUMP no matter who I live with. But. A Sault Ste. Siberian facebook friend shared a post from a local animal shelter yesterday. An older gentleman cat’s family had experienced a sudden major disruption and the cat needed to be re-homed. The shelter posted that they were waiving the adoption fee to try to get this cat a new home as quickly as possible. Well. Within an hour, my MAGA “friend” Mushie had snagged the cat. (For clarity, Mushie is not the same person as the woman who shared the post from the animal shelter, just a commentor.) He tried to pay the adoption fee *anyway* and when it was refused, he made a donation. Later he posted a pic of his wife and their (now) two cats in their cozy living room. People are complicated.

Other than that, we met up with Little Cat Z for lunch at The Griz. Haven’t been there for a while and the mac’n’cheese side tasted good, especially loaded up with bacon.

This is inspired by my cousin Jay’s latest post.

She was breaking up and jettisoning an old box. I do that frequently. When my father-in-law was alive, he saved all kinds of boxes at the Moldy Old Hoton Lake cabin (since rebuilt). Every once in a while (when he wasn’t there), the Twinz of Terror would rampage through the cabin gathering old boxes. They would build a big bonfire and burn baby burn. They also cleared the cabin of old pieces of wood. If you are a mechanical engineer of a certain sort, you keep little pieces of wood because they can be “useful”. And I guess they were, to the Gumper. Me? I am laughing so hard writing this that I can hardly stand up.

Do not get me wrong. I loved my father-in-law dearly and I think he reciprocated that. That said, he had a whole lotta people to love with 10 kids and 19 grandchildren. But I landed in a good place in terms of in-laws.

So the Dewar’s box I will NEVER get rid of! It is wooden and it had been around since before I was born and I think it moved from the Old Cabin to the moomincabin when we built the moomin. It is also the box that my cat Twinkle’s second litter of kittens (I knooooow) was born in. We knew she was pregnant and one morning, her water had broken. I was maybe seven and my mother did not explain this to me in detail. But suddenly there was a tiny orange kitten in the box (Butterscotch nee Butterball). That was the signal for us kids to run down the path to the Mullin cabin to get the Mullin kids to come and watch the rest of the litter get born. They had a phone but we didn’t.

And then there’s the Red Owl box. This is a close up and you can’t see that it isn’t an exactly rectangular box, the top is larger than the base and there are handles on each end. I think this box is in the moomingarage and I hope to hell “no one” has thrown it out or burned it. When I was a kid, there were three “main” grocery stores in Sault Ste. Siberia plus some smaller ones and bunches of mom-and-pop stores. We most often went to the A&P but fairly frequently to the Red Owl and occasionally to the Piggly Wiggly.

The Red Owl handed out free stuff on a weekly basis. We got the Currier and Ives “china” from there, which we still have in the moomincabin. I think that’s also where we got the Golden Book encyclopedia set. The one with pictures that I read as maybe a second grader, up until maybe about the “E” book. I do remember reading about daguerreotypes (but don’t really remember what they are).

Tomorrow is the 57th I-500 snowmobile race in Sault Ste. Siberia.

The first race lasted all day and way into the night. I went there with Bad Boyfriend. We had a stoopid fight and he left me way on the other side of the loop in the damn dark. I walked around the rest of the track alone, wondering how I would get home. I mean, nowadays, I would just WALK home but I was a little high school girl then and I was terrified about who might be lurking in the dark. When I got back to the grandstand area, of all things, THERE WERE MY PARENTS! What the hell were they doing there? I dunno. Bad BF told me later that he had been looking for me. I believed him. He was not really a bad person and I think he felt some remorse.

I may have gone to the I-500 a couple more times before I left town. I do remember playing my piccolo (with glubs on) with the high school band once or twice.

The next time (after childhood) I went to the I-500 was when The Commander was in hospice care in 2012. My sister-in-law was visiting (yes, that one…) and I took her there. At that time, it was an easy walk from The Comm’s house, where we were luxury camping. It was a weird year though. The temperatures were approaching 40 and it turned out to be more of a mud race than anything.

This year, temperatures are c-c-c-cold and there’s a lot of snow so conditions are much better for a snowmobile race.

Today featured gray skies and snow flurries ALL DAY. Oh, Mr. Golden Sun peeked out for 15 minutes or so but otherwise… At least the flurries were actually flurries and the roads stayed easily navigable.

It was a little angsty around here today (again). I’ll just lay it out there. It was time to roll over my 401K. I mean, I’m not sure there is a time limit exactly, just that it needed to be done and my “Landfill” financial manager decided it was time. This involved a trip to [insert financial institution here] (a car trip, I mean), a call to a relative, and some monkeying around on the financial institution’s website, which had been a bit inscrutable on a previous visit. I suspect I would’ve been able to bash through the user interface, “retaaared UX designer” that I am but I had no interest in dealing with the whole thing (and did not even go in person to the financial institution).

So that got taken care of with a minimum of shouting (actually no shouting) and the landfill guy even apologized to me if the whole thing was causing me anxiety. It was but I was okay and I appreciated his thoughtfulness. I worked for Corporate America for 18 years and the only time I remember doing anything with my 401K was when my “official” financial advisor (the one I pay) said, “kick it up to the max that they will match”. He was right and I did. Pronto.

I was fine with the whole thing but it is a little weird when you have to “close out” (roll over or whatever) something you have been basically ignoring for 18 years.

I hesitated to write about this because it’s kind of private and I am careful about what I share. But everybody (at least those of us fortunate enough to have first world problems like 401Ks) has to do this at some point, so I’m just one of the many trying to protect (and hopefully grow) their retirement income as long as they can (and our currently shady government will let us). I have sanitized this as much as possible to provide an “every woman’s” experience.

But yesterday? Look at that sky! Mr. Golden Sun doesn’t always show his face but he is swinging up again!

P.S. My brain (at the moment) cannot think of a better word than “shady” for our current federal government. There is shadiness but “shady” doesn’t begin to comprehensively describe what’s going on. If you can think of a better word, I’d love to hear it!

Wednesday chili and whine lunch sitting at a bar somewhere?

Once a week lunch (more or less) might not always happen on Wednesday. But it was a beautiful (if cold) day and I wanted to get out into the countryside. I encountered a little, uh, “friction” about it at first but that was due to some computer room “stress” that I interrupted. Who knew? Words were exchanged, including the F-bomb (me, pretty quietly actually), and a few things in the kitchen were slammed around a bit (not violently) but life went on. As it does. I don’t really get computer room stress. 99% of the time working on spreadsheets or code or whatever is zen for me.

We chose Dexter’s Pub for chili today. I actually got chili, the GG got a BLT. As we were mustering to leave, who walked in? The Grinch (the real Grinch, not my cousin), The Cat in the Hat, and I dunno, was it Yertle the Turtle? And others. I didn’t recognize all the characters. I was puzzled about this gathering at the pub until the GG reminded me that there were Seussical (the musical) signs all over Dexter. Oh, duh. We’re guessing this group had done a school presentation. That brought up memories for me of the YAG Lydia Mendelssohn Friday morning school performance. Good and bad memories but we’ll go there some other day. And I can laugh about the bad memories.

Oh, and then. I turned on the oven so I could put a baking tray of American Mom Chicken Shawarma in and turned it on. Or so I thought. I mean I did turn the oven on but, after not hearing the ding telling me preheat was done (which is important on Gertrude), I turned around and was greeted with this chicken nugget display. That thingy on the left ROTATES! I was like, what the hell am I looking at? Is Gertrude broken? Nope, cooking in the “dark” like I often do, I hit the wrong button. I owned Gertrude for at least 15 years before I discovered her ovens have a chicken nugget setting.

Cooking in the dark? I like to live by ambient light. There are LED lights on over the sink and if I need more light, I can turn other LEDs on. These days we don’t really need great big overhead lights (although I have some). I use small twinkle (LED) lights all over my house, my phone and laptop screens, and my Nest smoke alarm lights my way on middle-of-the-night visits to the Water Closet.

I took this photooo in February 2012, a few weeks before my mother The Commander died. I don’t want to talk about all of that for now but it was a very warm winter and there usually isn’t open water between the moominbeach and Round Island at this time of year. In 2012, there was open water. Ice walkers beware.

The yooperland has gotten a lot of snow this winter and it might take a while for it all to melt but it is February and that means we are on the downside. We’ll get more snow and frigid temps but the birds are already trying out snippets of their SONGS (as opposed to noise) and if the sky is not cloudy, it almost looks like a summer sky.

Note to the GG (and me). Do not schedule a vee-hickle for an afternoon service appointment. Man oh man. Cygnus went in yesterday morning (actually it got dropped off Sunday afternoon) for routine maintenance (we did let them replace the rear brakes). Mooon Yooonit went in at 3:00 PM today for routine maintenance and a new battery (deedly-deedly-deep). I was not enamored by the fact that the service area was open until 8:00 PM and we hadn’t heard from them about Mooo Yooonit’s status by about five. I like to be home at The Landfill by 6:00 PM unless we are going somewhere for FUN, not picking up a car from service.

The GG ended up walking over to the dealer while I cooked salmon piccata. It wasn’t their fault. It was ours for not mindfully scheduling a car appointment at a convenient time for *us*.

I did take Cygnus to Meijer today where I got things I can’t get at Plum or other fancy stores: Triscuits, frozen lima beans, frozen potato patties, and drumsticks, the ice cream kind. I also picked up a couple filet mignons (individually packaged), some salmon filets for tonights piccata, and I scored some lamb stew meat. Filets and lamb stew are in the freezer.

In other words, I stuck my head up, saw my shadow, and hunkered down for another six weeks.

I’d had sorta plans to hit the grock store this morning but Cygnus was in for scheduled maintenance and Mooon Yooonit needs a new battery (scheduled for tomorrow afternoon). So no viable car. And it was SNOWING. I mustered enough psychological energy to wash and change the sheets (they needed it, I’ve been a bit neglectful) and empty the dishwasher, and that was about it.

Oh and, I did my NYT word puzzles. Wordle (SPOILER) not a problem if you hang around occasional cigar smokers. I got queen bee on the spelling bee. And the xword was easy since it was a Monday. It was also weird (SPOILER ALERT) because all of the theme answers were “Ground Hog Day”, i.e., the movie. It was weird enough that I checked out what Rex Parker had to say about it. Like Mikey in the cereal commercial from my childhood, “He hates everything.” He had some words to say about it but (surprise) he didn’t seem to totally hate it. We won’t talk about the Connections puzz. I got yellow and green and put it aside. Will I get back to it? I do not know.

After I wrote last night’s blahg entry, I remembered the Stable Bar on Portage Ave. in Sault Ste. Siberia. It was a pitcher-of-beer/peanut-shells-on-the-floor type place and it could get wild. I used to go there frequently with my second high school boyfriend and his friends beginning when I was a high school senior and he was a college sophomore. He had grown up in Sault Ste. Siberia, so we went to the same high school (*probably* didn’t know each other but I think he asked me to dance at a mixer when I was a freshman and he was a junior), and he was attending the local university (LSSU). We drank beer at the Stable illegally at first but on January 1st of my senior year, the drinking age dropped to 18. He was immediately legal and I became legal on my birthday a couple weeks later.

In the winter when it was snowy (and it was ALWAYS snowy), snowmobilers mobbed The Stable and it was always a huge party. I dunno exactly what clothing snowmobilers wear nowadays but it is surely a lot more high tech than it was then, which was kind of a one piece snowsuit with a hood. I *think* people wore helmets? I was in the bathroom one night and in the stall next to me, I heard a splash and then some kind of expletive. Pulling her suit down to use the toilet, that poor woman had dunked her hood in the bowl. I bet she had a cold ride home that night.

The Stable burned down not too many years later, then the adjacent Northview Lounge. They had the same owner, a guy who lived about a block away from my family. He was kind of a weird guy, not in a good way. Once when I worked the cash registers at Tempo, I thought he was gonna KILL me when I made him wait until the customer ahead of him got their credit card approved. Those were the bad old days when us cashiers had to CALL THE STORE OFFICE, which then had to make a call to a credit card “hotline” (or something) to get a “code”. I was as annoyed as he was but there was not a god damn thing I could do about it. Some people in town (including my dad probably) suspected arson, i.e., he had burned down his own bars.

P.S. That’s my dad in the pic. It’s a scan so not sure what year it was. He was in his early 70s maybe?

Where do I start with this post? I dunno. A facebook friend I have known since probably kindergarten (a popular guy I have never known well) posted a picture of some snowmobiles with commentary that people who complain about snowmobilers should think about what visiting snow-mobilers contribute to the yooperland economy, which is and has been very depressed for many many years. My lifetime and before. And still.

I don’t know this “friend” very well and I don’t think we agree about politics but he also seems to actually CARE about people, etc. I am trying desperately to find any little bit of common ground with MAGA folks so I wrote a polite comment agreeing with him. Because I DO agree with him. Tourists of any sort help struggling economies. My comment was well received by him and others.

I *have* complained about snowmobilers throughout my life. But life is complicated and so are people. As a high school kid, my brother was dying to have a snowmobile. My brother became a mechanical/automotive engineer and snowmobiles were right up his alley. So we had one for a while. I actually drove it once or twice, across the schoolyard and back. I had a guy named Nick Sherman (cousin of my friend Danny Sherman from yesterday) riding behind me. He was apparently impressed with my ability (as a girl) to drive a snowmobile. I was much less impressed with my snowmobile driving abilities. He may or may not have had a bit of a crush on me and vice versa. But he was only visiting us for a few days and his cousin Danny will always be the first “love of my life.”

What mainly bothers me is when trails get mixed. What I mean is that snowmobiles do NOT belong on hiking trails. Those belong to pedestrian traffic. Most snowmobilers are responsible about this but there are always a few of those, “Well! I drive my snowmobile when I’m drunk!” folks. This is an actual quote from a (long dead) moominbeach neighbor at a county meeting where the agenda was supposed to discuss a part of our two-track road. (I was not there.) The road issue didn’t come up until another neighbor rattled along about, “I don’t like when those snowmobilers drive drunk” (blah blah blah). And that didn’t even bring up the road issue, it just prompted the drunk snowmobiling guy to get up and leave, hollering on the way out. My parents and Radical Betty were totally cracking up about this whole thing.

A cautionary tale. My uncle Don was a popular GP in Sault Ste. Siberia. He delivered about a bazillion babies and to this day, when people see/hear my last name (which I didn’t change when I got married), they ask if he was my dad. Nope. He was my uncle. My dad did not do anything involving blood, guts, or amniotic fluid. He was a banker (like his dad). A couple other things my uncle did… 1) Sew somebody’s nose back onto their face. 2) Deal with (in the ER) a person (maybe two, I can’t remember) who snowmobiled across a wire and got beheaded. I’m pretty sure he/they were dead by the time they got to my uncle at the ER. Jack of all trades…

Where do I end with this post? This pic is not from the yooperland. It is from Tip-up Town at Houghton Lake, an event we are not at this year. This event began long ago as an ice fishing event but now incorporates snowmobiles and helicopters and all kinds of stuff.

You might guess that this is an old photo. Even if you don’t know the age of the purple beach urchin (four and a quarter, I think), there is a vintage van (VW bus I think?) in the background that probably hit the junkyard decades ago.

Our snowbanks at the moment are sorta equivalent in size to the one the beach urchin is sitting on. The last several winters whatever snow we got didn’t last long. Is it global warming or weird weather patterns? I do not know. I do believe that using less energy in general is a decent strategy. I’m not sure I will ever be able to adapt to a fully electric vehicle though. It might work for me if I were just driving it around town and could plug it in at home. And if I also owned a robust gasoline engine vehicle to drive me up to the yooperland.

The VW bus belonged to our (late, alas) neighbor Hans’s son, who must have been visiting his parents at the time? The GG and I can’t remember what he did for a living but we think we remember it involved something to do with botes on the Great Lakes. The GG looked him up and apparently he went to the Great Lakes Maritime Academy and “worked the engines”. He also said, “like my dad”. The Gumper was the master mechanic on the Hornet in WWII.

Anyway, a VW bus is in my history but not via my family. We had VW bugs. But the Sherman family, who encamped at the moomincabin for two weeks a number of summers when I was a kid, could not fit their family of seven in a VW bug. So they had a VW bus and I rode in it many times. Usually us kids were on adventures with my dad and Pete Sherman, his childhood friend. The Commander and Esther Sherman would be back at the moomin, cruising through the Joy of Cooking, cooking up stuff to feed all of us kids plus community dinners with the relatives at the Old Cabin. Just a slice of my idyllic childhood.

Beth, Paul, Danny, David, and Willy. Beth was Beth Frances and her dad was insistent upon that as her middle name. I can only guess to honor my mother Frances. Danny was my age and also my first boyfriend (at age six). We play-acted our “wedding” on the beach many times. It took place at Niagara Falls (the Shermans lived near there) and there was something about “let’s go honeybunch!” at the end of it. Oh, we didn’t kiss or anything like that. We were little kids.

I kinda wanna say something like thank god but it’s all good fun to be oot and aboot (as the Canuckians say) in the dark and dead of winter.

Today was a birthday of porterization, JP’s to be accurate. We met at the Earle. They took an Uber to the restaurant (good choice) and we drove them home. I have never taken an Uber but I have taken a Lyft. It was right before the covid shutdown and Little Cat Z ordered one to show me how they worked (at my request). We were downtown and wanted to be dropped off at the Plum Market and we were able to show the Lyft driver (a woman, as we requested) the “shortcut” to the Plum. (Dexter instead of Huron.)

The Earle has a wide-ranging menu and I don’t remember what everyone else ordered but I definitely ordered a duck breast dish. I sampled some small bits of appetizers and took a bite or two of dessert. I ordered two ‘hattans, I swear I ordered the second one no fewer than THREE times. Other than that, the service was fine, as always.

It turned out that one of the beach urchins was at the Grotto, a block or so away. I figured out where it was PDQ. Nevertheless, a long conversation about the Grotto vs. the Zal Gaz Grotto ensued. Nope, not the same thing. The Zal Gaz has been there since before I even lived on The Planet Ann Arbor. It is (if I get it right) a Masonic organization providing support for various good causes.

My grandparents were involved in Masonic organizations but not my parents. I was in Job’s Daughters for a while but only because it was a “cool” thing to do in my little town and my much admired older female cousins were in it. I quit after having my stupid white shoes stolen and being forced to shame another girl (a pregnant girl before Roe vs. Wade). That is all a (weird) story for another day. I think two of my cousins did a turn as Honored Queen. Not me. I don’t really have the “right stuff” for that kind of position anyway. Same with Homecoming Queen.

Anaway (as the British say), HB to JP. Another trip around the sun for all of us frozen ice January babies.

Oh yeah, now that I’m retaaared, I am no longer limited to choosing to drive north (or back) on a weekend day or taking a vacation day to do it during the week.

When COVID was “over” — but it really really wasn’t — the unwashed southeast Michigan masses returned to their weekend mass migrations to and from the yooperland and the northern lower. This was in 2021 and I had a brand new car (Cygnus X-1) and my first couple trips driving down on a Sunday were horrific. I have never been a timid driver but covid somehow knocked me down a bit on that. And, man oh man if I wanted to pass somebody slow, I could NOT get into the passing lane to save my life. One Sunday featured MANY motorcycles (there was a motor-sickle event in Iggy that weekend). The motorcycle riders were driving safely for the most part. Just too many vee-hickles on the road and most of them going way too fast.

The GG and Little Cat Z were driving tandem with me in Mooon Yooonit. I can’t remember the exact logistics of what we were doing but they were ahead of me and at some point the GG “panicked” because he couldn’t see me. He called (doo doo doo doo doooooo… cue the Twilight Zone). His ring tone always startles me, even though I assigned it to his contact on my phone. “What mile marker are you at?” He was at mile marker 180. “I’m at 180 too. Y’know, I don’t think I’m that far behind you. I just don’t think you can SEE me.”

Anyway, we drove up last Monday and came back home today. If you are a regular, you may have seen that our trip up was riddled with black ice, etc., and all kinds of “crazy cowboys” going too fast and sliding off the road. Or crashing into somebody else. Once up there, we had a bit more snow but we were mostly dealing with smaller low traffic roads, not the I75 SUV Speedway. Part of me wanted to stay another day but we have a speshul event tomorrow night and we wanted to make sure we were home in time to attend it. This winter, that could’ve been dicey but our drive home was smooth and dry.

It was a kind of a slow “weekend” (except it wasn’t a weekend) and, after a few years of not hanging out much at the cFam cabin at Hoton Lake, I am looking forward to more.

There’s plenty of snow up at the cFam cabin but (obviously) this big pile is from a plow.

Where should we meet for dinner? We were meeting the UU and The Beautiful Gay (TBG). They drove down from south of Gaylord (Michaywe) and we drove up from Houghton Lake. Our drives were roughly equidistant (half an hour or so), with ours probably being a wee bit shorter. It was a snow drive but not the terrifying kind.

We met at Spike’s Keg O Nails and I wish I had remembered to take a photo but we were all gabbling like crazy and I didn’t manage it. You’ll have to make do with this reflection of the interior of the cFam cabin with some outdoor items. Kinda like a double exposure almost.

We had never been to Spike’s before but Little Cat Z went there a while back and gave it a good recommendation. I was encouraged that they (very happily) substitute gluten free buns for their sandwiches. I mean EVERY sandwich. There’s a small fee but nothing unaffordable and one of our party does not do gluten so that was a bonus. You can also order every sandwich as a wrap unless it already comes as a wrap (mine did). Spike’s Keg O Nails may not sound like the name for a gluten free friendly restaurant. It sounds more like an old sailor’s bar. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. But it was great and our servers were wonderful!

I don’t avoid gluten but I like wraps as opposed to sandwiches with big slices of bread or large buns. A little bread goes a long way for me.

That’s about it for today. I am just out of steam. Packing up and moving out tomorrow. Alas. It’s really nice up here on winter weekdays when there are no tourists around.

P.S. I just have to document this. At one point TBG asked our lovely servers if they had noticed the ID twins. One of them said she would have pegged US (TBG and KW) as the identical twins. I take that as a huge compliment because TBG is so much more beauteous than I am. But as my (late, alas) Jewish friend Sari once called me (even though I don’t think I deserve it), TBG is a mensch. We are (of course) not identical twins and in a lot of ways we are not alike. But we are kindred spirits and I am honored to be able to call her my sister-in-law.

Actually it isn’t exactly a beach here at the Hoton Lake Group Home aka the cFam cabin. This is an inland lake (albeit a LARGE one) so, unlike the oceans or Great Lakes, there aren’t long stretches of sugar sand beach. Mostly people have seawalls, like the cFam does. There are little pieces of sand beach but they are few and far between and some of them are man-made.

The moomincabin is on a 3/4 mile (or so) sugar sand beach on the Upper St. Marys River (no apostrophe in “Marys”). It is not quiiiiite on Lake Superior but faces northwest into Whitefish Bay (cue Gordon Lightfoot) which *is* part of Lake Superior. The moominbeach is a sunset beach.

The cFam cabin is different than the moomincabin. For one thing, it is a totally modern HOUSE although it was much more rustic before the cFam parents died and the cFam sibs rebuilt it. The moomincabin is semi-rustic, mainly that it is not insulated. Nevertheless, it is pretty comfortable except when it’s frozen solid like it probably is now.

I knew the minute I first arrived at the moldy old cFam cabin, in the winter when we had to flush the toilet with buckets of water, that the GG was the guy for me. Go figger. Of course, meeting two of his brothers (including his ID twin), and his (late) little sister (18 or 19 then), The Beautiful Suzie, helped seal the deal. I remember Suze being a bit skeptical of meeeee that weekend. Like, “why is SHE riding in the front passenger seat. That’s MY seat.” But Suze and I bonded PDQ. We loved each other and I miss her greatly.

I watched the sun rise this morning and then we moseyed over to Little Boots Country Diner for breakfast. It’s my first time there since before covid. Before that, we went there all the time. I ordered my usual, the Smokin’ Gun Quesadilla. It is lovely and comes served in three triangular pieces with little containers of salsa and sour cream on the side. My pre-covid approach to what is kind of a lot of food for me was to eat two of the triangular pieces and box the other for breakfast the next day. I haven’t been eating big breakfasts since covid and I could only manage one triangle today. But that’s okay because we have TWO triangles left for breakfast tomorrow. One for meeeee and one for the GG.

17 what? You might ask. 17 accidents between The Planet Ann Arbor and Hoton Lake, that’s what. Can you say intermittent black ice and other various forms of frozen water?

We encountered the first two (slide-offs) within a mile of getting on the freeway. Most of the accidents we saw were slide-offs, including one semi that jack-knifed into the median. I didn’t see his face but the GG got a glimpse and said he looked very unhappy. There were a few two-car crashes and one that involved SIX cars if we counted right. I couldn’t tell if any of these involved injuries, etc. We saw one ambulance leaving a scene but couldn’t see what had happened because there was a barrier between the southbound and northbound. Maybe that was a good thing.

Did the GG slow down? Oh, yes he did. Disclaimer: he is a good driver but occasionally he is a little fast for my taste, especially in inclement weather. Today I was pretty comfortable with the speed we were going but kinda wished we would just get off the freeway and make our way back home via the back roads, although they were probably worse than the freeway today, just not a lot of traffic. The freeway was jammed with semis and recklessly fast pickup trucks. Guys, SLOW DOWN! When we passed a slow-moving pickup, the GG was marveling at its speed until I said, “It’s a woman.”

Nevertheless, we persisted, making a stop at FlaMan’s place after which the roads got much better. And after lunch at the Spikehorn Bar (we were both starving and the fish sandwich hit the spot), gas and windshield washer (low as you can probably guess via the photo), we got to the Hoton Lake Group Home aka the cFam cabin. The GG did a lot of snow-blowing (with my dad’s old blower). We aren’t sure what our itinerary is from here, weather permitting it might include Gaylord and/or Iggy (St. Ignace). But we’ll be back on The Planet at the end of the week by hook or by crook.

Replying to a comment by JP of Porterization a couple nights ago… JP and the GG tie for the title of King of Cryptic Text Messages. I mean, just today, the GG texted me from Sparrow Meats to ask if I wanted him to pick anything up. Yes. Lamb stew meat and do they have duck breasts? I was hoping for a yes-or-no answer. I got, “She does not have duck breasts (human I think).” Yes that is crude! It also doesn’t answer the question. The answer turned out to be no and while I was disappointed, it was okay. They have the best duck breast form factor in town and I had originally planned on duck breasts (from Sparrow) on my birthday but I got distracted and it turned out to be a no-go. But filet mignon worked out fine.

So JP of porterization commented “When we go out, we get our car started before we get back. (ibid)” The back story behind this is that it was uber cold on Friday night so we decided instead of making everyone walk a distance from parking to Dexter’s Pub, the GG and I would drive our friends of porterization out there and drop them and me off. They parked on the street in front of our house and transferred directly into Cygnus and we taxied them out and back. As it turned out there was a close parking space at Dexter’s (and we didn’t even have a Parking Guru in the car).

We took a river ride back and at some point somebody became sentient enough to realize that we could probably start the vee-hickle of porterization remotely from Huron River Drive. Some fumbling occurred but yer fav-o-rite retaared user experience designer figgered it out and when we turned onto our street, there was their car, headlights on and running.

I do not know what “ibid” means. I even looked it up but the definition was a bit obtuse. Plain English, please? I could have been an English major and at one point early in college I was actually (very casually) invited to be an English major. But I was gonna play my flute and I didn’t study English. But I am not stupid about English either (don’t ask me about the subjunctive or things like “ibid” 🙂 ) That said, one time an uber-smart colleague in India got all excited about the Oxford Comma. Yes yes yes! It’s a bit controversial. Such a fun conversation.

It snowed ALL DAY today. I’m not sure if it’s done yet. We are not in any kind of snowmageddon. This is typical southeast Michigan snow. I think we might get six inches by the time it finally ends. Our stores do NOT EVER run out of milk and bread and other staples because of a snowstorm. Covid maybe. Back in the 2014 Polar Vortex Winter, the Plum Market butcher at the time walked through deep snow down the middle of North Maple to get to work on one particularly challenging day. (He lived somewhere in the neighborhood.) I had walked too and was there to greet him at the meat counter, LOL!

Actually it’s Guenther Road, which intersects with Jerusalem but I like the name Jerusalem better. It’s also a prettier road, lined with old oaks or whatever, a bit like a tunnel, but Guenther is pretty too.

Moooon Yooonit did not start (again) this morning until her “younger sister” Cygnus jumped her but after the GG drove her around for a while, she has been starting without a problem. My personal opinion is that it’s still time for a new battery. Clearly this one is in a failure mode and a car battery is definitely not something we can’t afford. Fortunately I almost exclusively drive Cygnus (she’s “my” car), so I don’t have to deal with it.

A little car battery story to illustrate The Master of the Universe’s skills and ingenuity. Long long ago in a galaxy only blocks away — our pre-baby apartment on Jackson Ave. — the battery in one of our Ford Fiestas died. These were the old-school Fiestas from the late 1970s/early 1980s. *I* could actually (sorta) afford one at $5,000 but my parents bought me one anyway and NO I was not spoiled. My dad and brother were all excited about the Wenkel engine. Google it if you care. I was really excited about owning my first *new* (cute) car but I have long since moved on from my Ford Fiesta. My top three fave cars being the Dogha, the Ninja, and Cygnus X-1. Not in any particular order.

Anyway, in those days, the GG and I used to drive to work in one Ford Fiesta and I would usually walk home (We both worked at the Environmental Protection Agency). We knew the battery was in a failure mode so we went to Sears (why Sears, I dunno) to buy a new one. Problem. Some young punk at Sears refused to install it. I fergit what the “policy” was but they did allow us to *buy* the battery so the GG put it in the back of the car and we went home.

The next morning, the OLD battery started right up and we drove the few blocks from our apartment down to the Huron/Seventh stop light. And stopped. And the battery died. Right in the middle of all kinds of traffic and not to be resurrected. The GG opened the back hatch, pulled out the new battery, *jumped* the old one with the new one and voila, we were on our way (and so were all the people behind us, gah). This operation took a couple minutes.

The Twinz of Terror put themselves through college in part by working summers at the Chrysler Hamtramck Assembly Plant. The GG could take a car apart and put it back together and in our early days, he did a lot of DIY repairs, sometimes dicey ones. Nowadays we mostly take our vee-hickles in for service. In part (but not totally) because of all the computerized components.

There he is, all plugged in and everything.

So this is what went down this afternoon. Don’t worry, it isn’t all that exciting although the GG was a wee bit stressed out about it. We had a need to get Mooon Yooonit outta the driveway. Mooon Yooonit has been in the driveway for quite a while now and hasn’t been run for a long time. You can guess what happened next, right? If you guessed “her battery was dead”, ding ding ding, you win the booby prize.

So the GG got out his “jumper” (in the pic) and guess what? It didn’t work. Did it overheat or is it just dead after *45* years? I’m thinking whether or not it overheated, it’s probably time for a new one. And maybe a new battery for Mooon Yooonit at six years and I’m afraid to count how many miles. He did eventually successfully jump start Mooon Yooonit via Cygnus’s battery. But still.

I INSISTED that we take Cygnus out to Dexter’s Pub. Friends of porterization were riding with us. I KNEW Cygnus’s battery was fine. I didn’t exactly trust Mooon Yooonit’s at this point. What if we get done with dinner and the battery is dead *again*? Me and Cygnus won that sorta argument and all was fine.

And then. After he charged Mooon Yooonit’s battery this afternoon, the GG started trying to tell me a long story about Toyota design flaws (Mooon Yooonit is a RAV4) and his “jumper” and as it went on and on, I finally said something like, “I am not gonna EVER understand all of this.” He retorted with something like, “You have no idea about what kind of things I do around here.” No. No, I don’t. I am not mechanically or electrically inclined. But also, yes I do. I so so so do appreciate all the things he does that I have no clue about how to do or even that he is doing them.

By the way, the backdrop to all of this is the temperatures around here are now about zero F. and never got above five today. I’ll tell y’all (again) about what it was like to walk to high school in minus 32 degree temps some other day. And I am NOT talking about the wind chill factor, which wasn’t even invented yet. Minus 32 was the ambient temperature.