The CO monitor in the Lyme Lounge is beeping again but it seems to be quieter so I’m ignoring it. Today one of the FOUR (yes, really) Landfill smoke alarms within about a six foot diameter space started beeping: “hallway” and three adjacent bedrooms.

A number of years ago we were out of town and a tree fell on our house. Actually when our neighbors alerted us by email, we were sitting in Penny’s Kitchen in Sault Ste. Siberia with my mother, watching an April snowstorm dump a foot of snow or so. But that’s a whole ‘nother story.

As part of the process of repairing the tree damage, we were required to upgrade our smoke alarm system. I have NEVER been crazy about the new system. It is hard-wired, okay. But we also have to use batteries, okay. I don’t really understand how it all works but one of the problems is that with the alarms as close together as they are it can be difficult to tell which one is beeping unless you are standing directly underneath it. I GET the reasons for this but since we never close our interior doors, it seems like overkill in our particular situation.

So today one of them started beeping. At least it wasn’t 3AM. I figured out that it was the one in my bedroom. I grabbed the kitchen stool. The alarm is on the ceiling. There is NO WAY I could reach it with that stool. What should I do? I needed a ladder. What kind of ladders do we have and where are they. Bingo! I found a nice sturdy late-model ladder in the She-Shed.

I climbed up and got the battery out. A few minutes later? Beep beep beep. Oh dear. Except it wasn’t coming from that smoke alarm, it was coming from one of the GG’s lairs. I dragged the ladder into the lair and climbed up and removed THAT battery. Aaaannnnddd… You guessed it. A few minutes later the alarm in mouse’s old bedroom started beeping. I was about to drag the ladder into that room when. It. Stopped. KNOCK ON WOOD BIGTIME there has been no beeping all afternoon. They seem to communicate in some rudimentary way that I also do not understand.

Oh yeah, there was a little problem about batteries. I could not find 9-volt batteries in the Landfill to save my life. We may have some but if we do The Pensioner has squirreled them away somewhere. I used to always keep batteries in the kitchen. I ordered some from Amazon and I am going to keep my own stash from now on. He can do whatever squirreling he wants but I HAVE to be able to get my hands on batteries. In the meantime, Rodent Delivery Service brought me four 9-volts after work today. I feel guilty about asking her for stuff like that on short notice but then again, I have lent her the Ninja a couple times recently as they catch up on some automotive repairs so I guess I have actually been returning the favor a bit.

I have been lobbying for one of those Nest alarm systems for years. I’m not sure what all they do but I think you can use your phone to tell the alarm to shaddup if it runs out of battery at 3AM. Seems like a really bad thing for anyone who is normally asleep at that time to be up on a ladder. The Pensioner is not a Nest fan because $$$ and I’ve never argued even though I disagree (ya gotta pick yer battles). I think I will put it on my xmas list this year. He LOVES to spend money at xmas 🐽

Oh we’ll probably needs eggs again fairly soon. Today I made my first successful swipe at the freezer since pre-COVID. Everything out. Everything back in. In some kind of organized fashion. I know I’ll still lose things in there but it’s better than it was. At least there’s a blasted light!

Next up, refrigerator door. Everything out. We have three jars of horseradish, three thingies of sriracha, and I didn’t count how many mustards because I only got to the top two shelves today. There were two on those and I’m gonna guess more is lurking on the bottom shelves. I’ll get to those tomorrow. And then there’s whatever is at the moomincabin…

Two grocery orders today.

1) Delivery from Meijer. I’m not even sure which Meijer. I shop at two, both within delivery range. One is the Jackson Rd. Meijer, which I use used on weekends. The other is the Saline Rd. Meijer which is was on my way to/from Cubelandia. I had Cameron again and he’s fine. I hope these young folks (most of them are young) are getting paid a living wage because they are a lifeline for us baggy old Covid Chickens. They had pretty much everything I needed wanted except pita chips but I just added those to my afternoon Plum order and all was well.

2) Curbside from Plum. I know a weeeeee bit about the internal workings of the Plum. I wanted pitted Kalamata olives and what I really wanted was the olive bar olives. I know that self-serve food is not available as usual but I asked my personal source if they had any pre-packaged things from the olive bar. Yes but. They do but they didn’t show up when I searched and I couldn’t find a reasonable way to ask for them so in the end I settled for some in a jar. They’ll be fine. Then I wanted chicken thighs and I searched for “chicken” and I found thighs but then I was astounded when Carolina chicken salad popped up! That’s the salad with grapes and celery and walnuts, etc. and pre-COVID I bought a mid-sized container of it just about every weekend I was home. I crossed my fingers and ordered it and voila! They HAD IT!

Y’know, people are sooooo STUPID. At the beginning of COVID, Plum dumped all of its make-up “testers”. Guess what people started doing. If you guessed “opened up the for-sale make-up”, you win the prize. I dunno what the make-up section looks like nowadays but they did have to figger out how to keep customers from messing with it. Me? I do wear make-up but it hasn’t much changed since 40 years ago and with the pandemic, a little Cover Girl foundation is about it. Occasionally a touch of eye makeup but not often. My “routine” takes all of 30 seconds and I don’t think the GG can tell whether I’m wearing it or not. And I have been ordering it online for a few years now.

I don’t know if The Commander is canning in this pic or just cooking something. This is the shabby little kitchen in the shabby little bungalow I grew up in on Superior Street in Sault Ste. Siberia. She has utensils in a big apple juice can (on the stove) and you can see the broom closet behind her. That’s where Gertrude lived. Gertrude was a little cartoon woman taped to the inside of the door. She was an exhausted “suburban housewife” 🐽 collapsed on her ironing board. I have looked high and low for that cartoon but she must’ve thrown it out and The Google hasn’t been any help so, to honor Gertrude, I named my stove after her.

It wasn’t until I encountered this photooo a few years ago that I remembered our white cabinets had RED interiors. Not sure if The Comm painted them or if they came that way when the parents bought the place but I kind of like the idea. I do remember the floor was red patterned linoleum with the bathroom floor being green of the same pattern. If you embiggen, on the left side of the bottom shelf of that open cupboard, you can probably see wooden salt and pepper shakers. I have those. I have probably 5-6 other salt/pepper shakers but those are the ones I use. I wish I had the apron even though I don’t use aprons.

I am not sure The Comm liked that house all that much. I think my dad bought it without much consultation. But it had a big beautiful yard and nice neighbors and Stinkin’ Lincoln (my elementary school) was across the street. The Comm made it our home.

So here is my mouse in my own bee-yoo-ty-ful recently renovated kitchen. No linoleum for me! This pic is from a few years ago and she was using my kitchen to can about ten gazillion tomatoes. Her apartment kitchen at the time was a bit small for that size operation.

I am a decent cook as long as I stick to basics, meaning things I throw together without thinking too yard hard (yard?). I used to try fancier things and bake, etc., but we never finish any kind of baked goods except maybe chocolate chip cookies and I just can’t be bothered any more. Needless to say, I did NOT contribute to the flour shortage in the early COVID days. And I do not can, outside of some teenage experiments with my cousins and our Piedy/Mc friends in the summer at the moomincabin.

The Comm did not have a large canning repertoire, at least not by the time she was a busy mom and teacher, etc. She grew up on a multi-generational farm in the Detroit area and I think her family canned a LOT of stuff (a Burger King eventually replaced her childhood home). Later on, she mainly canned tomatoes and strawberry jam (freezer jam in her later years). I benefited from big jars of tomatoes every year and would dutifully save and return the jars so as to get MORE! I can’t remember at what point she stopped doing that. It was okay (of course) but I miss her canned tomatoes.

This year my mouse couldn’t use the Landfill Chitchen for canning because pandemic but also she now has a nice kitchen of her own and therefore doesn’t need mine. I miss her canning sessions but I’m guessing I may reap a couple jars of tomatoes and maybe even some pizza sauce. I’m ordering it from Amazon now, although the sauce I get from Amazon is actually pretty dern good sauce!

I don’t have allergies AT ALL. I like to say that anyway. Every once in a while I get a sneezing fit. It’s usually in the evening. I THINK it’s usually in the summer months but I don’t keep track. It goes on for a while but eventually stops and I don’t have any trouble breathing or anything. So I had one 15 minutes ago. My brain of course went COVID? But no. Just the regular garden variety sneezing fit. Over and done now. Gah.

I always have vivid REM dreams and I won’t bore you with the details of the ones I’ve had recently but I am starting to find myself in gatherings of people without masks (including me) and at some point in the dream, I freak out because why the heck are we not social distancing and wearing masks. Usually I wake up at about that point.

Writing? I am a writer only in that I write (very specifically) for work and (not very specifically) for my own entertainment (i.e., this blahg). I know that there and their and they’re (for example) sound the same but have different meanings. Homonyms. Somehow I sometimes STILL manage to mix them up, even though I know the rules. Randomly, I was heartened to hear during a meeting today that other very smart people (including Amazon Woman) sometimes do the same thing.

I have very clear memories of learning about homonyms in grade school. Was it second grade (Mrs. Bishop) or third grade (Mrs. Ala)? Probably both. Mrs. Bishop was one of the best teachers in our school system at the time and I will never forget her. I think she even kept me after school once. Probably because she recognized that I needed other kids to know I wasn’t always a goody two shoes. Well, I wasn’t really always a goody two shoes but at school I was a good student who followed the rules and always did well. Just ask my grandma (if you can contact her). I pushed the envelope outside school but probably needed to push a bit *inside* school too.

So I am at the end for tonight. I may have to write a memoir… Just kidding. It would be boring as all getout!

I have not been watching the online Democratic convention but maybe I should be. When I got online with a friend this morning, said friend was kvetching that AOC had nominated Bernie Sanders for president. What? This sounded fishy to me. I know that AOC has been a Sanders supporter but I believed that she (and Sanders) were now supporting Biden because “Bad Orange Man Must Go”.

If you have randomly found this boring blahg of blather, I cannot stand Trump or his sycophants, I am voting for Biden, I voted for Obama and Hillary Clinton and although I am not as far “left” as Sanders or AOC to support them, I greatly admire both of them.

So I did a wee bit of googling. What I understand is that: 1) Yes AOC did nominate Sanders. 2) Sanders had acquired enough delegates that procedural rules required he needed a nomination. 3) The DNC asked AOC to do it and she agreed. 4) She (and Sanders) support Biden. Also. I do NOT IN ANY WAY believe that a Biden presidency will turn our country into “socialism” or “communism”. Great Big Bugs invading from the planet Zephron III would probably have more of an influence on me.

A national news organization then sent out a misleading tweet and that went viral before it was deleted, explained, and apologized for. That was a stupid thing to do but what is really the problem here is so many of us (INCLUDING MEEEEE) do not comprehensively understand how our own government works, including the procedures for electing the president. Before mindlessly sharing political stuff on social media, please READ it through and do some fact checking not to mention self-educating via the google or whatever.

I am missing my yooperland/Atlantian friends this evening. They stopped by for some social distancing whine/cocktails in my backyard and are now on their way south and probably somewhere in O-hiiii-o. See their empty chairs and glasses? They are 20 feet or so from me. We were so busy talking that I didn’t get a pic of my actual friends! They don’t usually visit at a time of year when we can hang out in the back yard because weather. Usually we have a faaaar in the faaaarplace when they are here.

So I am SEEEEEETHING about all of the colleges that have “opened up” and immediately had to “close up”. What were they thinking? Our own Moo-U abruptly moved their classes online today. I wonder how long it’ll take for UMich to follow suit. I hope they do because I DO NOT WANT all of those folks in my town spreading COVID as they will. I am pretty happy hanging out here at the Landfill indefinitely but someday I might want to actually want to visit a few stores again so please y’all, stay home!

Anyway.

I could go on and on about that but WTF is this whole House Dress trend that I’ve been hearing about. I remember my grandma ALWAYS wearing a dress and usually it was one of those silky-type patterned dresses. I barely remember her dressed in anything else except once in a VERY early memory a black bathing suit, swimming at the moominbeach. Pants? Maybe but I don’t remember. She was the bestest grandma on earth and I didn’t care what she wore 🧡

I have disconnected memories about what The Commander wore when I was a little kid. There may have been a House Dress or two when I was really young but they were a little different than Grandma’s (Google House Dress 1950 if you’re interested). And she also wore pants. Sometimes.

I wore pants a lot as a child but then all of a sudden I had to wear skirts to school in junior high. I always thought wearing pants was because it was frickin’ cold in the yooperland in the winter and walking to school was inviting frost bite but then why did they make us wear skirts to junior high? I dunno. We won the battle to wear “slacks” to school in 10th grade and the next year we moved to a newly built school and all the rules fell out the window and we wore jeans and hot pants and whatever we wanted. Bigger fish to fry…

Here we are in 2020. Apparently people are making money selling House Dresses to women (and maybe men, why not?). Yes, we are apparently calling them House Dresses here in 2020.

Although I have often worn pants in my life, long ago I decided I preferred skirts. And so here I am with my own personal 2020 version of the House Dress. It is a tie-dyed t-shirt above a beautiful blue flouncy skirt. It isn’t anything like the House Dresses my moom and grandma wore. But nobody seems to care what I wear and this outfit is really comfortable and you can guess at what might be underneath it (or not) 🐽

Beep beep beep… … … Beep beep beep… … … Jeebus what IS that noise? It was coming from the driveway. It almost sounded like a bird… Except it was always the same and seemed like it was coming from the same location. But where? By late last evening I had convinced myself it was a bird. The GG? Couldn’t hear it! This morning? Beep beep beep… … … I was just about ready to set up a stopwatch on my iPhone and try to determine if there was a regular interval between sets of beeps when the GG came in the front door holding a carbon monoxide detector. From the Lyme Lounge. I guess he could finally hear it. Of course maybe he went *inside* the Lyme Lounge. I hope it didn’t disturb the neighbors’ sleep…

Blahggy friends and cuzzints were kvetching about garden hoses. Can I just say that garden hoses are one of the banes of my existence? They are heavy and they leak and the connections between them SPRAY and can we talk about PermaKink? I have three pots of impatiens in my back yard. They are pretty much the only thing I water (I knoooowww). They are close enough to the backyard faucet that I SHOULD only need to uncoil the first of the THREE hoses that are linked together and attached to said faucet. But guess what? Because of PermaKink, I have to uncoil a whole bunch more than one hose. Why? Because PermaKink completely shuts off the water supply and I cannot seem to coil its host hose back up on the holder without PermaKink forming again. What I really like are those ultra light-weight expandable hoses and maybe when the GG returns from his next back-country boondoggle with his womb-mate and their girl friends, he will find a new expandable hose.

SOME GOOD NEWS! A couple days ago I was lamenting the seeming demise of my fave donation drop-off spot, the Kiwanis Thrift Shop. They take just about everything under the sun but the last time they posted anything was back in June. They were opening “soon”. And then NOTHING. I feared the worst until today when they suddenly posted that they were opening in September! Yay! I do hope they are being exceedingly careful. Today Amazon Woman mentioned the PTO Thrift Shop, which is another popular local spot for donations. I know about it from my PTO treasurer days but it’s not generally on my radar screen any more. Alas, they have had a COVID case and had to temporarily close.

Of course, y’all may know how pessimistic yer fav-o-rite blahgger is about “opening up”. Yeah, open up those schools. Yer just gonna hafta close ’em back up. Stay safe people!

The Red Thing is the GG’s new favorite grill toy. I ordered it on impulse from an Instagram ad. Actually it’s from Le Creuset and I *saw* it on an Instagram ad and then went over to the LC site and searched for it. I don’t USUALLY buy things on impulse and sometimes when I do they end up being duds. This has not turned out to be a dud. It works on the gas grill. It works on the little stove in the Lyme Lounge. It was loosely a father’s day gift and he likes it so much he won’t even let me wash it. I guess that’s a good thing although I have always been a compulsive dish washer.

If I water my flowers doo-ya think it’ll rain? The GG washed Mooon Yooonit yesterday and that didn’t make it rain. There was a lot of thunder this morning. It went on intermittently for a couple hours and some of it was pretty close. Rain? Five minutes of light sprinkle. We aren’t really in a drought or anything but I want it to rain.

With renewed flinging energy, I somehow fell roly-poly pell-mell back into list-making. I am intermittent about list-making and my strategies vary wildly from Winging It to elaborately detailed spreadsheets to post-it notes everywhere. Can I just say that Winging It has not worked very well as a pandemic list-making strategy? And I don’t really buy office supplies any more so I am down to maybe one pad of small post-it notes. I used to buy TONS of those! A spreadsheet is fine for my address book but overkill for grock and chore and fling lists. I can remember back in the day when the beach urchins were little I did use a spreadsheet organized by aisle per store.

I switched over to making grock lists, etc., on a simple iPhone app years ago. My grock list strategy *still* continually morphs and it CERTAINLY has during the pandemic. When I used to do my own in-person shopping (until early March 2020), I would make a list for each store: Big Store (i.e., Meijer/Kroger), Plum Market, farmers market (seasonal produce and meat/seafood from Kerrytown shops).

Nowadays I put everything onto one big list and when I have enough stuff to put an order in at one place or another, I order the stuff from my list I think they’ll have. I won’t bore you with the details because it involves the “soup” in my brain to manage it and it is sometimes fun and sometimes exhausting. If I am picky about a brand/form-factor or don’t want to have a text conversation with a personal shopper about, say, deoderant deodorant, I order it from Amazon.

I’ll leave you with two things from both ends of the spectrum: 1) I won’t be needing deodorant for the foreseeable future because I accidentally ordered two sets of four (that’s EIGHT) deodorants early in the pandemic. 2) It’s highly unlikely my onions are tainted with salmonella because they came from the Argus Farm Stop, which is produce from local farmers (and lots of other interesting stuff).

If you know me or are one of my five long-time readers, you know I started a flinging prodject somewhere around 15 years ago. Some people call it Death Cleaning but I wasn’t planning on going anywhere any time soon when I began and still am not. I just wanted to get rid of a whole bunch of crapola that I didn’t need or use and simplify my life. I did pretty well on that for a few years and then The Commander died and, well, you know I ended up with a bunch of her crapola. She *had* been Death Cleaning during the six years since my dad died but they had lived in their house since I was in college and things do accumulate, even if you try NOT to accumulate them.

And yes, we could have had an estate sale but she lived in my paternal grandparents’ house and there were certain valuable heirlooms going back to the 1800s that needed to stay in the family and I just wasn’t gonna go there.

In the last few years I’ve been a little stymied. I can’t articulate why. I’m not sure I even know why. I could blame how busy my job got after the company laid off a bunch of people but it wasn’t really that. Maybe I just needed a break?

About the second weekend after the start of COVID telecommuting, the GG was peering around the Landfill and asked something like, “I wonder if there’s something we could fling?” I know a lot of people cleaned their closets back in those early days. I was NOT READY. I was living in a state of low-level anxiety at the time. When am I gonna wake up in the middle of the night coughing? Is that a touch of a sore throat? I couldn’t even listen to the news although somehow reading it via Twitter was okay. Young grocery-worker relatives reporting mild symptoms did nothing to reduce my anxiety.

Eventually I found contact-free ways to obtain supplies without over-taxing my Rodent Delivery Service and things kind of settled down at least for those of us who were willing to comply with the stay-at-home rules. I still wasn’t ready to re-start flinging. Where would I start? I did not know.

I became a full-time telecommuter a month or so ago and TODAY I finally figgered out where to re-start my flinging! I flung [most of] my biz-caz clothing! I will never wear [most of] that stuff again! I started with the summer weight knit jackets I [used to] wear over tank tops. Except for the Red Plaid jacket. I got rid of some skirts but not ALL of them. I love some of them too much. When you are flinging, it’s okay if you keep some things for later consideration. Then I bagged up a whole bunch of hangers (clothes hangers, not steaks).

The only issue now is where to dispose of this stuff… Our fave drop-off Kiwanis Thrift Shop seems to be dormant. I hope COVID hasn’t killed it forever. I dunno if anyone anywhere wants my biz-caz castoffs anyway. Maybe they will end up being recycled as cleaning rags? Who knows. I don’t really care. I just don’t want to recycle them myself.

Am I on a roll? A flinging roll, I mean. I do not know. I hope so.

Kebabs (beef filet from Sparrow plus veggies) here at the Landfill tonight. I caged/skewered everthing HOURS ago and told the Grillmaster that we were having kebabs and then MUCH LATER he said something like, “I am cooking that?” Yes. Yes you are. I do not cook kebabs in the oven and you know that. JEEBUS.

I guess I could be in the Lyme Lounge tonight since it’s currently in the driveway here on the Planet Ann Arbor. But I guess I’ll sleep inside the Landfill (our house) tonight. At the moomincabin we’ve been sleeping in the Lyme Lounge. Not sure why we don’t sleep inside the moomincabin. The LL is somehow comfortable.

I don’t really have anything to say tonight so I am only posting so people who actually care about me know that I’m okay.

It’s a little weird getting used to working in an environment that isn’t constantly temperature controlled. My house could be. Like every other modern house in the Great Lake State, it has central heating and as of about 2005, it also has central A/C. I certainly use the heat when I need it but I don’t know if I will ever get used to the A/C but it was a hot, swampy week so we’ll see.

Virtual Oscar Tango-ed with our friends of porterization tonight and so G’night, –KW.

I’ve written before about how squirrely the mail has been in my neighborhood this summer. A few days a week with no delivery among other things. The last time I can remember this level of squirrely-ness was during the Polar Vortex winter (2014) and THAT winter it was a matter of getting mail trucks started in sub-zero temperatures, not to mention the difficulties involved in slithering around on our Ice Road Asteroid.

This year it’s a different thing. I don’t know what’s real but we have missed many days of mail this summer. As I have said, I know because I sit and watch from TeleCubelandia aka The Green Couch. (I could order a company-financed desk and office chair but I have no clue where I would put them in the currently overcrowded Landfill. The only spaces I can call my own are the chitchen and what I once thought would be my “studio” in the Landfill Dungeon. That did NOT work out because of horrible light and terrible clutter.)

I am not going to speculate overly much on whether or not there are politics behind the current postal service problems. It feels like there are but I read news a bit haphazardly and sporadically because I use Twitter as an aggregator. This gives me a variety of sources but I also miss things. And I am BUSY so I don’t always read things in depth. So I am not necessarily well informed.

What I WILL say is that I do NOT agree with making any changes to the postal service’s procedures, staffing, equipment, and whatever else I am not thinking of until the pandemic is over. Whatever problems there are, and I’m sure there are some, we MUST keep the mail running as usual for now. I don’t mind if I miss a delivery of crapola that I’m gonna file in the recycle cart before it gets into the house but mail piling up because carriers can’t deliver it is not acceptable. It’ll just compound as the days go by, eventually creating a total state of chaos. Any “businessman” should be able to foresee this.

All that said, one of the main reasons we did not get our mail until a week after my return from the yooperland is because yer fav-o-rite blahgger put the wrong end date on her mail hold request. I supposedly canceled the hold when I got home but apparently nobody got the message or did but were too overwhelmed to react to it. But I mainly have myself to blame 🐽🐽🐽

P.S. My moomincabin terlet bowl cleaner came today!

P.P.S I had another pic here but then 🐭 randomly texted me this from near Rudyard in the yooperland. Wow! She had not read my blahg!

“”Moom can I borrow the Ninja, Daisy is making a terrible noise and we are taking her in.” Daisy is 15 years old and she is a Honda Civic but maybe she’s nearing the end of her long Honda life. Anyway, the answer was “Yes of COURSE you can borrow the Ninja. I am not driving anywhere and if I DO need to drive somewhere, I can take Mooon Yooonit.”

So I left the Ninja’s keys on the porch and the beach urchin walked over here from work (a few blocks away) to pick her up. After a short masked convo through the front door screen, we bowed goodbye and then I heard, “Moom, do you know there is a spider web INSIDE your car? Well, hmmm, noooo. (LOL) When was the last time I drove my Ninja anywhere? It was Saturday when I did a couple curbside pickups. Except no, it was Sunday. I moved it out into the street because I knew that Mooon Yooonit was on its way down to the Planet Ann Arbor pulling the Lyme Lounge, which needed to be backed into the driveway.

No one was freaked out about Spidey. We have two poisonous spiders in the Great Lake State, the black widow and the brown recluse. They are dangerous but they are rare. I dunno what kind of webs they spin buet but (buet?) this was a familiar looking web that I see everywhere all the time and I don’t think it was made by either one of those spiders. Embiggen to see the web better.

We don’t own Daisy any more but we are her original owners and we bought her just after my brother died in June 2005 and sometime I will (again) write about the craziness of that whole crisis, including buying a new car in the middle of it. It is actually my brother’s birthday today. He would’ve been 63. Miss you buddy.

At the end of all yesterday’s heat and humidity, all kinds of fugly storms were predicted for the Chicago area. I wasn’t wishing for a tornado or derecho but I was hoping a little bit of the associated rain and maybe some thunder would come our way. Alas, it all petered out well before it got to us. So a pretty swampy night.

If you bothered to click on the derecho link, it talks about a 1980 storm that I and many other long-time Planet Ann Arbor denizens remember all too well. The sky turned midnight green at 9:00 AM and trees went down all over town including MANY in West Park, which was across the street from the apartment we rented back in those days. I didn’t know the term derecho until about 2008 and like many other folks I still call it The Green Storm.

Lots of talk about various kinds of storms reminded me of my beloved aunt Radical Betty, shown here in her witch hat and bat glasses. She never lost her senses but toward the end of her life she, like so many other people, sometimes had trouble pulling out the correct word. We were puzzled for a minute once when she started talking about “things that spiral and create great devastation”. We quickly realized she was talking about tornadoes! We all (including Betty) had a great laugh and those of us she left behind are STILL laughing about it.

Cheers to Kamala! I couldn’t really “warm up” to her when she was running for prez but I agree that she’s a good choice. I *did* warm up to Stacy Abrams and I *love* #BigGretch but not sure either of them are quite ready for that high an office (at least in the current climate) and we need #BigGretch here in the Great Lake State for now. And NO NO NO NO, I am NOT a communist or even a socialist. And anyway, what do those labels really mean? I bet if you asked 100 people to define them, you’d get 100 different definitions. That’s enough for now. I have thoughts brewing about all this but I have not turned them into words yet. I am also not well-versed in political science but I can read and I have critical thinking skills and I am entitled to an opinion.

Soooo glad Radical Betty and her s-i-l (my moom) The Commander did not live to see the Trumpian Bombasty. They would’ve been foaming at the mouth. And they voted for *Republicans* when I was a kid, at least The Commander did.

That’s the sound of yer fav-o-rite blahgger thumping down onto the Green Couch for her first day back at teleCubelandia following some vacay. It was kind of a slow start but that was a good thing. This phase of our design/development cycle turned out to be a good time for me to take time off.

Eventually things sped up as people figgered out I was back. I think they had been cutting me a little slack but eventually questions, et al, started coming in.

I couldn’t help but remember coming back to Cubelandia after a vacation many years ago, back when the LSCHP was running the show. Since I have a work ethic that regularly knocks me upside the head, I made sure to get there bright and early on my first day back. Nobody else was there! Nobody else was there until something like 10 AM! The LSCHP himself didn’t roll in until maybe an hour after that. Why was I in such a rush to get there early? I do not know. Except maybe that I am a Morning Person and most mornings (there are exceptions), I am up and at it.

It was waaaaayyyy too hot/humid today to work inside without A/C. I didn’t wanna turn that on because I much prefer having the doors and windows open so I can hear the sounds of the birds and insects cement (or whatever it is) being poured on the next door neighbors’ new driveway. I eventually decamped to the back yard where there was at least an intermittent breeze.

🐭 texted this pic from the moominbeach so I stole it because the only photooos I took today were pics of the dials on the gas grill 🐽, which *I* needed to start and couldn’t remember the GG’s instructions. I am actually afraid of gas stoves and grills but I don’t think I am afraid of this one any more because after some confusion over “clockwise” and “counter-clockwise” vs. “right” and “left”, I successfully got it going without anything blowing up and I have now internalized the procedure for starting it. Yay me. And the pic is a “plassover” (another word in moomincabin lingo coined by Radical Betty). Cananananada is getting clobbered and the moominbeach is dry.

I spent the morning reorganizing my Pandemic Grock Stash and flinging cardboard boxes and empty returnables (and a kayak that was in my way) around. So I didn’t think I had much to talk about today. But then Facebook delivered…

Five. Five? Yes. Five years ago the GG retaaarrred from his long career as a government employee over at “That Darn” EPA. I was not ready to retire yet (still not) and I was NOT all that happy about him retiring. I liked our little routine where we both went to our jobs and I got a wee bit of SPACE at both ends of the day.

But whatever, he had been working since he was 10 or thereabouts, starting with a paper route, and getting held up at a gas station a couple times in high school, and factory work at Hamtramck Assembly during college summers, before a long career as a computer scientist. How could I complain if he wanted to step aside?

I did make two rules. 1) He could NOT hang around in his underwear. 2) No beard. Mustaches are okay until he starts resembling John Bolton 🐽

He retired during a spring that one of our beach urchins was between apartments (new one was undergoing renovation) and she was also playing Hamlet at the time so she decamped to a temporary berth in the Lyme Lounge, which was in our driveway, as it often is.

I arrived home from Cubelandia one afternoon to find a VERY INCENSED beach urchin. It was a hot early summer afternoon and the GG was doing yard work in the FRONT YARD. IN HIS UNDERWEAR. Not exactly tighty whities but pretty close. I mean. Our neighborhood is beautiful but it is also somewhat densely populated and there is a steady stream of dog-walkers and other folks going by.

It’s pretty hard for me to keep the GG from doing whatever he wants to do but being caught out by his DAUGHTER may have influenced him because I haven’t seen him out there in his undies since. (We’ll talk about our late neighbor Burke and his nocturnal nude forays into his back yard some other time.)

The GG is part of a litter, meaning he has an identical twin (the UU aka the Uncliest Uncle). The UU retired earlier this summer and today his wife, The Beautiful Gay, posted a pic of him working in his garage in his underwear. Their house is in the woods up near Gaylord and none of the neighbors have a good sight-line to their house or garage or yard so it’s a little different.

Pic is one a beach urchin sent me from the moominbeach, taken from inside the cabin I think. I am on The Planet Ann Arbor today.

So I’ll steal the Guru’s asterisk method (again) and you can pick and choose what you want to know about my extremely boring day. Or skip it altogether.

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Curbside pickup at Plum bright and early. They do delivery too but it’s like a half-mile drive from The Landfill. I’m learning to “leave a note” for my shopper in case items are unavailable: either “if not available, that’s fine” or “any brand will do”. That way they don’t have to text me to ask because I’m finding that 95% of the time, I don’t really care about the brand. They were out of Atwater Vanilla Java Porter beer (they frequently are) and substituted hamberder hamburger buns (whole wheat instead of white, fine!) but I did score some ground lamb so lamb berders lamb burgers are coming our way sometime soon.

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Curbside replenishment at the Whine Castle. They are wonderful (and BUSY) and no shame 🐽 Early on they masked up and pivoted to curbside for us virus chickens and they reliably have the “well bourbon” (Ten High) that we use for ‘hattans. And ALL KINDS of other stuff too!

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Amazon delivery of kinda random stuff I ordered YESTERDAY!

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Moved the rifles outta the Ninja’s trunk temporarily. I’m not sure exactly who they belong to, maybe meeeee??? Make no mistake, if they do, it’s because I inherited them. I have never used one. Actually the last time I saw the person I inherited that kind of stuff from *use* one of them, I was a little kid. And there he is on the right in the photoooo and it’s something like the late 1930s and that’s his lifelong friend Jim and they were horsing around out somewhere in the yooperwoods and no, those are not rifles and I may have inherited one o’ those too but I couldn’t tellya.

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Sheets and towels today. And masks. Didn’t get around to running roooooomba. Tomorrow.

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Actually read a somewhat encouraging COVID article. Among other things, some studies have found that the number of asymptomatic cases among closed populations (cruise ship, etc.) may be higher when people were wearing masks. This had to do with “viral load” and the implication is that masking keeps it lower, meaning people MAY not become as severely ill. “We” are still in the very early stages of understanding this virus and I am not an epidemiologist so take this with the appropriate grain of salt.

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Reading that article was better than reading all the articles about schools opening up for in-person education and the politicians that are encouraging that and even threatening to withhold funding for schools that DON’T open up. I want to say something like “a pox on their houses” but I can’t quiiiite go there.

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G’night, KW

After returning from the moomincabin to the Planet Ann Arbor, like just a year ago, I wouldda probly gone out to a couple o’ grokkery stores to stock up. I got back yesterday and I didn’t need to do any immediate grokkery shopping. That was a good thing because I was having a HARD TIME figgering out what the heck we needed, not to mention where/when to obtain it from. As much as I love grocery pickup and delivery, I still struggle a bit with it.

So I have a pickup order into the Plum Market for tomorrow morning and I’m planning to put in a delivery order to Argus tomorrow and I’ll probably hit up the Whine Castle for for some stuff and I hope nobody notices the, er, rifles in the trunk when I do my pickups. I guess I should remove them…

Experimenting a bit, I have set up an account with Daily Harvest for what seem to be prepared meals, sorta. I have not been entranced with the idea of services like Blue Apron. I’m not crazy about the idea of somebody somewhere packaging every little bitty thing in plastic or whatever and sending it to me. But this sounds kind of good and I got wind of it via one of my 1st cousins once removed. A young family that I am in awe of.

Poldark series? Yes. Reading the books and watching the series. On my phone.

Found this photoooo on my phone yesterday afternoon. I guess I “took” it Tuesday evening? It wasn’t intentional but it’s kinda cool in an almost painterly sorta way.

I am WIPED! Today was a driving day, at least for meeeee. It was fine except for when the maintenance light came on in my 12-year-old vee-hickle. I hate dashboard lights with a passion but I didn’t panic. I just hit the “select” button and it said oil life 10% or something. That means I need an oil change so not a big deal. This particular vee-hickle (knock on wood) has NEVER given us one iota of trouble. The taaaaar light used to come on with great frequency and usually that was basically nothing except a tire was just a weeeeee bit low on pressure. I grew somewhat complacent about it until the day it came on as I was driving to Cubelandia and when I left in the afternoon, I had a flat tire. Nail. I don’t really know how to change a taaaar so I had to call the GG. Well, actually I *theoretically* know how to change a tire but have never successfully changed one and didn’t want to spend the next hour dredging up the tools and figgering out to use them. He just, uh, changed it.

This was another non-stop solo pandemic trip down and I made myself SIT and DRINK a BIG glass of WATER when I got home. And then I kinda SAT for a while, eventually gearing up to throw some laundry in and move chairs around the back yard because my cousins were bringing My Dear Uncle Harry over for socially distanced pizza and whine. And that worked out well because the last thing I wanted to do this afternoon was cook, even though it wouldda just been meeee and I brought back a bunch of leftovers. PLUS! Two big refrigerator bags of frozen meat, etc. that I DIDN’T USE! Why did I think we needed so much food for a two week sojourn at the moomincabin? I do not know. It’s now in the Landfill freezer and I guess we’ll use it up eventually.

I’ll cut this boring bunch of blather off now because obviously I do not have much to say. You’re welcome. G’night.

Before I left on this vacay, because I am such a goody two-shoes, I told Amazon Woman I would check in via my work laptop to see what was going on with the building I have schlepped to for all these years and is now going away. The main thing was that there is a schedule for all of us to enter the building and remove everything we want from our cubes. There isn’t much in mine but that’ll be a story for another day and I’ll tell it then. I finally checked my email today. A plan is in place and my scheduled date is fine with me.

Mouse/Raccoon are checking in to the moomincabin later tonight and weeee are checking out tomorrow morning. Any other year we would all be together at least for the overnight but this is not any other year and it doesn’t seem prudent to share space with anyone you haven’t been isolated with for months on end, not to mention that Mouse/Raccoon are grocery workers. Fortunately we do not have to sleep in the same space because we can sleep in the Lyme Lounge, which we have been doing anyway because we LIKE to sleep in the Lyme Lounge. It’s pretty awful to not be able to hang out with your kids (not to mention grandchildren, which I don’t have but sooo many friends do and so hard). Any other year, we would welcome our children to the moomincabin with hugs and ‘hattans. This year freezer ‘hattans will have to do.

I had to laugh (what else can you do?). Mouse and I were texting about what food was here and what she might need to bring up. At one point I reminded her that Meijer does a great job on curbside pickup. I also said something like “this seems like a ridiculous thing to say to a grocery worker”. Mouse/Raccoon have been going INSIDE Meijer since the beginning and they work in grokkery stores, albeit “upscale” stores in relatively liberal areas. I don’t think they have personally had to deal with the mask policing issue but PLEASE remember that whatever you think about masks, grocery workers are risking their lives to provide you with food. It isn’t their fight to fight so wear yer damn mask and shaddup.

So it finally warmed up enough for me to take off my tights and socks sometime this afternoon. These pics are from the moomincabin living room over the last couple days. The first is the GG sitting in my dad’s regular seat back in the day. In the second, I was sitting in that rocking chair taking a pic of the GG. That is our not up to code stairway to the sleeping loft. The Commander always used to sit in the rocking chair in her later years, which blocked access to get to the stairway/ladder. It drove me crazy but now I sit there too…

Except not so much this summer because I have been outside most of the time.

I bet these would rate high on @RoomRater 🐽

When I was packing for this trip to the yooperland, I considered packing a pair of smartwool leggings. And made a conscious decision NOT to. I am a native yooper and a little nagging voice in the back of my head was saying something like, “Bad idea, KW!” Nevertheless, I didn’t persist. We had a bunch of hot humid weather and then August rolled in and the wind started coming out of the [frickin’] NORTHEAST. That’s a COLD wind. It shifted a weeeee bit to the NW today. That’s [usually] a warmer wind but it also increased in speed. Was it COLD on the moominbeach? Yes! It was even COLD on the moomindeck.

Oh, where are my leggings? Oh WHEEEERE are my leggings? Why did I not pack my leggings? I KNOW BETTER THAN THAT! Then… I was organizing my two suitcases into clean and dirty clothing and… Lo and behold, there was a pair of CLEAN red tights! I had packed those for the Memorial Weekend trip and never used them UNTIL TODAY. Nice and cozy.

What I did NOT fail at was mailing my absentee ballot in for the August primary. I can’t remember exactly what day I mailed it but I tracked it via ballotpower.org and it was received by the city clerk WELL in advance of the election.

I will not be mailing my November absentee ballot. Mail delivery started getting “squirrely” back in March when COVID hit. I figgered it would smooth out after a while but it never really did and it has been crazier than ever this summer. We don’t always get deliveries (I know there’s at LEAST junk mail). Mail trucks deliver at unpredictable times. Mail folks park in front of my house and hang out for like 20-30 minutes before getting around to delivering mail. Packages ordered spend uncountable numbers of days languishing at some facility in Detroit or wherever.

Now I’m hearing that the Orange Baboon replaced the Postmaster General with one of his cronies earlier in the summer? And the crony has changed a bunch of rules/procedures to “reduce costs”? Is this stuff true? I do not know. I do know that the mail has been squirrely as hell for months now and it has only gotten worse this summer. That’s a personal observation and not something I learned from NPR or Nancy Pelosi. I’ve been sitting on the Green Couch telecommuting since the beginning of this and I see what’s going on.

Therefore, I do not trust the postal service for now. Oh, I mean, it’s okay for junk mail and stuff like that. Almost everything I do that may have once required the mail, I do online now anyway. Probably 95% of our mail goes straight into the recycle cart without even entering the Landfill.

But… 1) I will vote absentee in the November election. 2) I will NOT trust the US Postal Service with my ballot. I will drop it off in a ballot box downtown at the City Clerk’s office WELL before election day, hoping there will not be a crowd of people doing the same thing because COVID… 3) Guess which presidential candidate I am going to vote for 🐽