This is the cabin I spent my first six summers in. (My branch of the fam owns the cabin next door to it now.) I have written before about how one of my earliest memories (6 months old or so) was the susurration of the wind in the pine trees when we approached the cabin.

As our families grew cousins (we are 11 in all) the old cabin became a bit too small for all of us. Fortunately our grandparents owned enough land to be able to divide it so all four of their children could build their own places. A “compound” if you want to call it that but don’t think “Kennedy Compound” because we are much more rustic than that.

My youngest aunt (still living, thank you very much) and her husband (My Dear Uncle Harry) ended up with the Old Cabin and they did some renovations a few years ago. The Old Cabin was built in 1924 and to quote Harry, “Some people have cabins but I have a Museum.”

We took our guests over for an Old Cabin tour last evening and My Dear Uncle Harry was happy to oblige. I remember things about being a small child there but Harry remembers things that happened well before I was born. He is a wonderful tour guide in his own museum.

When I was a kid, the Old Cabin had a front sleeping porch and a back kitchen/dining porch. The kitchen/dining porch was changed to be a more modern kitchen/bathroom/bedroom/dining area a while back and the front sleeping porch is still a sleeping porch but has also been remodeled.

As we were doing our tour, The Marquis asked if I had the infamous “feeding” pic. Yes I did but I knew that I couldn’t find it quickly last night. So here it is. We all look pretty dorky in this pic. What can I say. Depending upon where you were sitting, if you had to get out (to go to the outhouse), you “submarined” under the table. The adult back there serving people is The Commander and this was a Community Dinner where the whole fandamily ate together even though a couple of families had their own cabins at this point in time.

We don’t often do Community Dinners these days because our families have expanded to children and grandchildren of the original four siblings (my dad’s generation) and it is just not all that easy. But we love each other and remain very friendly and those old Community Dinners were soooo much fun.

A little marital discord anyone? This marital discord involves windows at the moomincabin. It is a really windy day with the wind out of the northwest, which means it is coming straight onto the beach with big waves, etc. The ambient temperature is not all that cold and if Uber Kayak Woman were here, she would’ve dragged us all into the lake for body surfing.

On a beautiful warm sunny WINDY day like today it is perfectly comfortable to sit down on the bank but at a certain point, the wind kind of wears you down and eventually you feel like you need to get inside. So when I came up to the moomincabin after a sojourn of sitting on the moominbeach, the GG was nowhere to be seen (nap time) and I made a ‘hattan for me and a freezer ‘hattan for the GG and went out to sit on the deck. The kitchen window was open pretty much as far as it goes, as is shown in the pic.

Then the GG surfaced from his NAP. And proceeded to mostly close the window, as you can see in the second pic. Grrrr… Today was an okay day for most of the windows to be closed and for the glass to be in the front door. The kitchen window and the back door? We need those to be open. We argued about it for a bit and then he went in the bathroom or wherever and while he was there, I opened the window again.

We have guests in the moomincabin so we kept our marital discord as quiet as possible and I am kidding about sic-ing Mocha the dog on him. As if I could get Mocha to obey any command I might give her. She is a loverly little doggie but she seems to exist to bark, be cute, and steal shoes and socks. We love her anyway. The cutosity helps.

Oh, by the way, when I was a kid, there were a few times The Commander managed to lock us out of the moomincabin and I got us inside by crawling through the window in the pic, across the kitchen sink and onto the floor to scamper over to one of the doors to unlock it. I can’t remember how we did this without breaking the screen but we somehow managed it.

Today I drove Mooon Yooonit more than a few feet for the first time and I debated about whether to tell the GG about the adventure I had with it. Nooooo I did not crash it or lose the fob (fob fob fob).

I drove Mooon Yooonit into town to do laundry. The washing part of laundry got done and I put everything into dryers except for my Keen sandals and two long skirts because I don’t put those in dryers. I took those out to Mooon Yooonit. I beeped the car unlocked and tried to open the rear passenger side door. It didn’t open “out” like I expected it to, instead it started slowly sliding. Hmmm… Do we have a slider on this side of our new vee-hickle? I don’t remember anything about that…

I put my skirts and shoes in the car and went back in the laundromat. A few minutes later, some lovely ladies came in carrying my skirts and shoes and asking if they were mine! I was very confused until they said I had put them in THEIR CAR! Jeebus! How the heck did I do that? In fact, I think it was because I went out a different door (of the laundromat) than usual and approached the first gray SUV-like entity I saw.

I explained that I was driving a new car for the first time ever and was totally unfamiliar with it and we all had a good laugh.

The conversation went on for a bit. They love to vacation here and I mentioned that I had grown up here and still owned a summer cabin in the area. At that another person got interested in the conversation. I refrained from mentioning my name or saying anything much about my family. Certain people (he knows who he is) have a tendency to try to name-drop my family name and it drives me nuts. We were once a rather prominent family in the area and while there are a few folks around who still remember the name, I think most people don’t and I prefer to keep my identity private for the most part. Especially when I have just done something as stoopid as putting my laundry in someone else’s car! 🐽

In the end, I wished all my new friends a good day and left – with MY laundry in MY car!

It’s always loverly to entertain people at the moominbeach when we have actual Beach Days. I mean the ones where it is so hot that going swimming actually feels good.

We have had a few days like that and then there was yesterday during which two severe thunderstorms rolled in. The one in the pic is the morning storm. Can you see the rain coming down over there by Mission Hill? It eventually hit us here at the beach. I was puzzled when I heard the tornado siren go off in Brimley though because this was not tornado weather. But then one of my weather apps reported a marine warning for the area, meaning the water was not safe for small craft so I think that was why they blew the siren.

The afternoon storm was not quite as pretty in terms of color but it did kick up the water in our bay with great ferocity and it got dark enough that we lit a few Cocktail Lights. A couple of our guests live in San Francisco where thunderstorms are rare so I’m sure this was a treat for them.

The other great excitement (not) is that I managed to snag the only iPhone XS in Sault Ste. Siberia this morning. My iPhone has been in an intermittent failure mode for a month or so. It would 1) [sometimes] open and close apps or move to different pages or type random characters in the text entry box all by itself and 2) [sometimes] not respond to my touch. Once (of many times) I tried to re-a-start it, I found myself on the shutdown page unable to get it to respond. I was terrified that it would decide to dial 9-1-1.

Yesterday I happened to look at one of its edges and realized the screen was kind of bowed outward and separated from the side. This did not seem good. In fact it seemed downright dangerous. Bad battery maybe? So I spent f-o-r-e-v-e-r backing it up to iTunes on my laptop and we headed in to pick up a new phone. The GG fake-cried when I handed over the $1000 plus payment.

Our guests have left for a couple days so we did a good sweep/vacuum and I sorted out the refrigerator. It really wasn’t all that dirty here. It used to be AWFUL when my brother’s dogs came here (I liked the dogs though). And the refrigerator yielded enough leftovers that we’ll be able to get by on those until the crowd comes back.

And what a GREAT crowd! Nine adults in this rustic little cabin is a tight squeeze but all of our guests were cheerful, good at taking care of themselves, and making positive contributions to our little community. The youngest among us is now old enough to buy beer and she did when we thought we were in danger of running out (not). I miss them and I’m glad they are coming back 🧡🧡🧡

The GG is crashed out somewhere recovering from his strenuous morning of watching me spend a bunch of money and my new iPhone has been loading up apps for HOURS. Mostly apps that I never use… Note to self…

When I was a wee girlie, my dad owned a wee sunfish sailbote. Here’s my dad and there’s no sunfish sailbote in the pic but there is a gratuitous shot of one (of many) of the old forts us kids built out of the paper pulp logs that used to wash up on the moominbeach.

Here is the sunfish sailbote. One of the blokes is undoubtedly my dad, not sure which one or who the other is.

Here is yer fav-o-rite blahgger suited up and ready for a sail.

Back during the summer of 1961, there were a few folks along Birch Point Beach who owned sunfish sailbotes and someone organized a RACE! It was soooooo exciting! My dad and his sunfish WON THE RACE! Here is the plaque he was awarded. The loon feather is a recent adornment.

Yesterday a neighbor arranged a modern day version of our old sunfish race. We did not participate in the race because we no longer have sunfish sailbotes (and don’t really know the neighbor). I do not have any pics of the race because I limit my photo technology to whatever iPhone cam I have (X at the moment). The botes were far enough away that there wasn’t any point. Click here for a couple good ones including my cuzz Pooh’s pic of the one bote that capsized (all was well).

Yesterday was a totally fun day with people on the beach ALL DAY, including the race watching denizens (and their photobomber) in the pic below. Most of our guests had such a good time that they did not leave today as was sorta planned. I am happy about this (daughters and friends). Teriana did have to leave (sadly) but we all ate lunch at Pickles before their departure.

In the blueberry patch, that is. I have (more or less) permission to post this pic but I did not take it. Blueberry picking DNA missed me and I sat this expotition out. I love to go inland into Chippewa County but I don’t have the attention span for blueberry picking so I stayed back at the moomincabin and put a lasagne and some garlic bread loaves together.

I asked people to take butts up pics and send them to me. This is not always the posture for blueberry picking but it can happen but I suspect these photos were staged 🐸. I love them anyway.

Many mooooooons ago, I went on a blueberry picking trip with Lewie, Uncle Duke, Radical Betty and Uber KW. I was basically along for the ride because I wanted to spend time with UKW et al, not because I like to pick blueberries. Uncle Duke was CRAZY about picking blueberries and after about the fourth stop we had to kind of put our collective feet down and say something like, we are not stopping again. On that trip I got the song “I got my thrill on blueberry hill” into my head and it hasn’t ever really left me.

Other things I remember from that trip is when Lewie, a lifelong yooper, was going on and on about a cathouse in the small town of Raco. Radical Betty thought he was talking about a a a you know, whorehouse and she was wondering what the heck her childhood friend knew about a whorehouse. It turned out that he was talking about a place that stored bulldozers, which made much more sense given that it was Lewie. There was also something about carnivorous testicles but we won’t go there tonight.

And oh yeah. I got distracted and didn’t finish this post last night. I’m not sure I can count how many people were in the moomincabin living room but it was enough that we had to bring some of the deck chairs inside. Cousins of all degrees on both sides of the fam, friends, and significant others. The Commander would’ve loved this.

So we decamped to the moomincabin deck.

I adore the “intermittent” railings the GG designed and built a number of years ago when my parents were still alive. When we first built the moomincabin back when I was six years old, we didn’t have a deck. You walked directly out the doors and down the steps. Or, if you were a six-year-old athlete, you launched yourself out the door and jumped to the ground at the end of the steps.

I don’t remember when we added the deck but it was probably only a few years later. We had no railings anywhere in those days and with the deck, you could get a running start to jump over the steps.

Many years later, my parents were starting to get a bit fragile. We began worrying about my dad falling off the deck during one of his nocturnal deckP expotitions, not to mention general falling incidents. So the GG built railings for both sets of steps and the intermittent railings along the sides of the deck, like the one in the pic. I think he did a great job. I did not allow him to put a railing on the front end of the deck. There’s a water view there and I didn’t want to disrupt it.

I bagged off work a bit early today. Teriana (my MacMu cousin and her daughter) arrived a little earlier than we expected them (which was FINE). I emailed Amazon Woman telling her what was going on and that she was welcome to text me if she needed anything from me this afternoon.

And so, I am officially on two weeks of vacay. We’re going to have a crowd this weekend and I’m sure there will be moments when I will panic about our overstuffed refrigerator and lament that I do not have Master Chef Uber KW to help me manage the menu planning but it’ll be FUN.

Here it is. Our newest version of financial suicide. 2019 Toyota RAV4 Adventure. Lunar Rock. We were eyeballing a red color for a while. The GG knows I like colorful cars and things. In the end it was me who flip-flopped to Lunar Rock. I have to admit my switcheroo was partly due to the naming opportunities.

We ordered this loverly vee-hickle a couple weeks ago and it became available earlier this week so the GG drove the Frog Hopper down to The Planet Ann Arbor to pick it up. I *think* I will be able to drive this vee-hickle into Meijer tomorrow morning for a grokkery run. It has a fob. Fob. Fob. Put your foot on the brake and push the start button. I am not accustomed to this kind of functionality although I did manage to drive npJane’s VW down from the yooperland last summer without incident. As for communicating with my car with an iPhone app, I will muddle through that as I go. I do NOT need “lessons”.

So. Why Toyota? I think American vee-hickles are great if you are going to lease them for a couple years or whatever. We do not do that. We keep our vee-hickles FOREVER. We both have memories of our beauteous Island Teal POC (Chrysler minivan) and how it plagued us with issues in its older years (and even when it was relatively new). We bought our first Honda while we still owned the POC and have been going with Japanese vee-hickles ever since, driving them FOREVER with minimal problems.

The GG researched Honda, Toyota, and Subaru SUVs and determined that the RAV4 fit our needs because it has a bigger towing capacity (3600 lbs.) than the others. Our towing requirements do not require a 5th wheel outfit but we do tow things so towing is always a consideration.

Honda remains my fave and I love the idea of a CRV but not just yet. (Ssshhhh, don’t tell Ninja I am even whispering about replacing her.) But maybe that’s my next vee-hickle. It will tow lightweight things like kayaks and small botes and maybe the Trash Trailer if it doesn’t have a heavy load.

As of today, I have droven Mooon Yooonit from its location in the pic to a parking spot literally feet away. Tomorrow will be my first real test drive.

Oh yeah, if you are one o’ them thar Buy American folks… I’m not sure where the RAV4 was built but only one of our Hondas (the Ninja) was built in Japan. The rest were built in the USA or Cananananada (in one case). These Japanese companies are employing plenty of American workers.

The Tadoussac is a great lakes freighter but Tadoussac is also a city in Quebec. One of the perks of telecommuting from the moominbeach is that I can walk down to the beach to watch freighters as they pass. The Marine Traffic iPhone app is of great help to this endeavor. I use this app to check out which lake boats (and salties) are in the area and when they are approaching, I can walk down to the beach to check them out. In a way it’s kind of a stupid activity since I have seen many of these botes a gazillion times before, even some of the salties.

When I was a teensy tinesy little girl, we would often drive from our shabby little South Side Superior St. house in Sault Ste. Siberia downtown to the waterfront to watch botes go through the Soo Locks. I learned early on to demand that we go “Down Boat”! It was okay. My parents loved to watch boats go through the locks too.

Some people think I wasn’t very nice to my mother as a young person (teenager, mostly). I don’t want to go in to that in any kind of detail tonight or maybe ever. My moom and I had a complicated relationship like most mothers have with their daughters but we got along better than a lot of people might realize.

A couple years after this loverly pic was taken, my baby brother was born. I was 3-and-a-half (demanding 4-year-old straight pickles for lunch) and I can still remember asking my mom where the baby was when I finally saw her again, a week after she went to the hospital. I had been staying with my grandma and aunts and cousins at the Old Cabin but I heard the news at my uncle Don and aunt Katie’s cabin.

Mom told me that my brother might not come home. As it turned out, my brother lived and thrived for 47 years and life went on for me. But there must have been some trauma for me as a young child. And since I am a “spirited” person, it must have been hard for my mom to deal with meeeee and a potentially fragile child. I feel very very lucky that both of my children were born without any problems and my mouse could come home after 24 hours and therefore begin bonding with the whole family including her older sister.

So the last time I took my shoes off I left them on the moomincabin deck like I always do. This morning I went out to get them… And. There. Was. Only. One. I immediately came up with a suspect, the cute little rapscallion in the pic, named Mocha. This is the best pic I could get.

The reason I guessed the culprit so quickly was due to a sock stealing incident earlier in the summer. In that incident, the loot made it all the way back to the culprit’s lair. My shoe was located nearby. I suspect it was not as easy for such a small culprit to carry as the sock was.

And then, after an interesting morning in which I spent more than an hour on my phone in meetings… During which my phone kept doing weird things like turning off the speaker or turning off mute or switching to the phone keypad and randomly selecting numbers… Phone failure mode anyone? And NOOOOO it is not drunk. We eventually got everything sorted out and I took a beach walk.

It was a windy day and I was lucky to catch this seagull. I’m not sure whether he is healthy. He seems to be hanging around on the beach. Seagulls generally live on the island. This time of year is when seagulls that are not going to successfully migrate die. They often die on the beach and sometimes it takes them a while to do so. Way back when, when we were all young, I watched a dying seagull struggle for a week or so as I walked the beach. My brother finally came up here and I knew he had a gun. I wanted to put that seagull out of its misery so I asked my brother to walk down with me and shoot it. He agreed but by the time we got there, it was already dead.

I’ve talked about the Bird List before. It is a [usually] loverly email list where people can post sightings of birds in their own backyards or wherever.

When I was a kid bird watchers were often portrayed as the Epitome of Nerdosity. On TV at least, think the Beverly Hillbillies character Miss Jane [Hathaway], who occasionally dressed up in a boy scout-ish khaki outfit in hot pursuit of the Yellow Bellied Sapsucker, which is an actual bird, if I am not mistaken.

Actually bird watchers or Birders in today’s lingo are all over the map including but not limited to nerdy people. I am a nerdy person but I am not a Birder. I identify as a Casual Nature Observer. And so although I have been on the Bird List since back in the Wild Wild West days of the intertubes, I have never contributed to it. I use it to learn about places to hike, etc. If an unusual species for our area is sighted, I am all about it. We once saw an ibis. We failed to see whooping cranes both times they were posted.

Usually the Bird List is extremely focused on BIRDS and very polite. Over the weekend someone got a bit incensed that disclosing the location of a nesting site incited many people to come out to see (and photograph) the birds. That caused the nest to fail. A list member who is very knowledgeable used an unfortunate choice of words that managed to pit “birders” against “photographers”. And it went from there.

Fortunately things calmed down and eventually someone with a lick of sense opined that pet CATS probably kill more birds than birders disturbing nests, not that anyone should disturb nesting birds. Except in my back yard. I mean, I OWN the property and if they decide to nest there – in one of our loverly birdhouses – they need to learn to put up with my comings and goings.

So the pic is my afternoon break beachwalk from telecommuting to Cubelandia. And wouldn’t you know, my new work laptop arrived this morning. Building Mom I/M’d me when I first faaaaared up my laptop in the Lyme Lounge. I told her where I was and thanked her for locking it up until I get back. Hopefully I won’t get a BLACK SCREEN OF DEATH (WITH CURSOR) that I can’t recover from while I am telecommuting this week.

Lemme see, grocery stores yesterday and today: Kerrytown (Planet Ann Arbor farmers market/Monahan’s Seafood) yesterday morning, Best Choice (Hoton Lake) yesterday afternoon, bonus trip to Best Choice on the Flote Bote noon-ish today (second pic, more cherry brats), St. Iggy Family Fare (just north of the Big Mac bridge) for more stuff than I thought we needed but we probably do need it.

I have been to enough grocery-type stores in the last two days that when we finally got to the moomincabin this afternoon and discovered that we did not have KETCHUP (or cider vinegar or brown sugar), I decided I was NOT going to go to another grocery store to get those ingredients to make BBQ sauce for the chicken I bought in Iggy, even though the park store is only a few miles up the road. Nope.

What the heck, the GG is coming up with another strategy involving balsamic viniagrette and paprika and bread crumbs and I dunno what else. We will still be cooking the chicken on the grill but it’ll probably be more like baking than grilling. It is actually almost too hot here to run the oven. The first thing we did when we got here was open all the windows, put the screens in the doors, and turn on the mini-fan.

We had the best time at Hoton Lake with JimC and The Beautiful Becky. I was so focused on our upcoming sojourn at the moominbeach that I didn’t really have anything for US to eat at Hoton Lake. I figgered we would go out to eat. Instead, THEY FED US!!! We had the most loverly omelets this morning, so good that I am only now getting hungry again. I think it took her like five minutes to cook them.

Then we took a LOVERLY morning flote bote ride! All of the people on the bote who used fishing poles have licenses. Those who fished caught Weed Fish. Those are the best kind of fish because you don’t have to worry if they’ll die while you are trying to dig the hook out before you throw them back. We were going slow-as-she-goes when I took this pic of dragonflies doing the deed on one of the fishing poles. It was as hot as Hades and eventually we sped up and I dunno where the dragonflies went.

As we were leaving (1:00-something), the Hoton Lake “crowd” was fixing Bloody Marys with ZingZang (which I have never tried). It was gorgeous there and I wanted to try a ZingZang Bloody Mary but I had to DRIVE. Plus, I need to be butt-in-seat tomorrow morning in the Lyme Lounge, hooked up to Cubelandia.

We arrived at the moominbeach to a beautiful afternoon and after we jumped around unloading all our crapola and flushing the water heater (the GG does that), I shelled peas down on Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench. It was a beautiful beach day and C*Q*L skipped in and out. Life is good.

I was slow to drag myself outta the rack this morning and indecisive about going to the farmers market. The GG got up and I asked him what he thought. He said, “Go ahead and go”. (I think he was trying to get rid of me for a while.)

I had two things in mind: shelling peas and swordfish kebabs. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find either. It’s very very late for shelling peas and the swordfish kebabs often sell out before Saturday. When they’re out, they’re out. GUESS WHAT? I found BOTH! Plus I got lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, and a couple of gorgeous eggplants.

We mobilized and hit the I75 SUV Speedway, driving tandem in the Ninja and Frog Hopper and arrived at Hoton Lake before noon. Best Choice Cherry bratwurst for lunch thanks to JimC and The Beautiful Becky and those were sooooo good that I made a run over there to get some to take north. Probably shouldda got more…

Gorgeous rain storms in the afternoon, then JimC talked us into schlepping up to Grayling to watch the start of the Au Sable Canoe Marathon. This 120-mile race (Grayling to Oscoda) starts at 9:00 PM and runs overnight. 9:00 is a wee bit too close to my bed time for comfort but I went along with it and ended up having a good time although I probably won’t go out of my way to watch it again.

I’ve been told to shut down because there’s a light show across the lake and my screen is keeping people from seeing it. G’night and typos be damned 🐸

So last night was a cFam party. Tonight we met up with some FinRegen cousins at The Griz on The Planet Ann Arbor. No babies or little kids this time although we had grandparents-to-be among our crowd. Congratulations to them🧡🧡🧡

That is about all I have to say. Home now and chilling out for one last high summer evening on The Planet Ann Arbor. I’ve said this before and I will say it again. It is always hard to leave The Planet to go to the moomincabin. And then it is excruciatingly hard to leave the moomincabin to go back to The Planet. I am a dual citizen. My deepest roots are at the moomincabin but I have grown some deep roots here on The Planet too as happens when you work and raise your children somewhere. My dad was from the yooperland, my mom from the Detroit area. I have managed to make my life in the best of both worlds.

Sappy? Yeah. Okay, shaddup KW. Will I make a quick trip to the farmers market tomorrow morning or not? I may not make that decision until tomorrow morning.

I almost didn’t go to the party. It happened 40 minutes north of us and I had to take part of the afternoon off work and I have sooooo much to do in order to blast off to the Great White North in a couple days. I couldda stayed here and gotten some packing done.

I am so glad I went to the party. It was a cFam party. Not everyone was there. That wouldda been fun I guess but we number at least 50 people nowadays. This was The Lord and Lady of Linden and most of their kids and grandkids (except for the Seattle fam for hopefully obvious reasons). And our niece J and her girls. Cousins and second cousins. And us.

I had so much fun. I started out being my shy self sitting in the kitchen drinking a bit of whine and catching up with the Lord and Lady of Linden. The younger kids were bouncing off the GG in the living room. I’m uncomfortable when people try to get young children to “say hi to Auntie” or hug me or whatever. I would rather little kids approach me if they are interested. I recently (randomly) read something that rang true for teaching children that it’s okay to not want to be smothered by some evil-smelling old person that they don’t know and it turned out that J USES it with her children. “Do you want to hug, wave, or high-five?” That works for me and it would probably have worked for me as a child who sometimes encountered benign but unwanted physical attention from well-meaning folks. As most children do.

The children in this new generation of the cFam range from infants to incoming college freshmen. They are all wonderful and a few of them are spontaneous huggers. Once I gained my party feet, I especially enjoyed talking to their parents, the children of our generation. All intelligent successful adults and wonderful thoughtful parents.

I started nudging the GG a half hour or more before I wanted to leave. I knew it would take him a while to extricate himself. We got home a while back and it’s late for a School Night but I can’t help but bask a bit in the loverly Planet Ann Arborness of my own back yard, which is live with the sounds of insects and birds and with faaaarflies winking and blinking around. Life is pretty dern good tonight, knock on wood.

— Cubelandia: I have spent at least a week navigating my way through a labyrinth of custom processing functionality in a wee little corner of our product. I now have a document that tracks every bit of this crapola. What it does (if I can figger that out) and where it was specified (or not…). My pretty little document is strewn with “pictures” and annotated with detailed questions. All wrapped up in a speshul little package for FZ when he returns in a few weeks. Which is when I return. Except I haven’t left yet. Got done with that at 4:00 and circumnavigated Cubelandia via the parking lot while I pondered what to start on next. When I got back, the dev team was a-knock knock knockin’ on my door. Problem solved.

— Mail: Got home and @tmotu was waiting for me at the door. Oh dear, I really need to be spacified when I get home so WTF was he doing haaaannnnggging around by the door. Well, I received a package today and HE WANTED TO OPEN IT! What was in the package? A couple of new iPhone charging cables and a solar charger. He was sooooo excited! I said, “Go for it!” You almost can’t ever have too many of those things.

— Food: What’s for dinner? I wasn’t sure if there was ANYTHING for dinner tonight. It is a dance trying to empty the refrigerator before a vacation and still have enough to eat without having to go out to eat all the time. We’ll squeak by for tonight and I might even get a wee leftover lunch tomorrow. I have a lot of stuff in the freezer but that’s gonna be packaged up to take to the moomincabin.

— Neighbors: Henrietta has been haaaannnnging around for something like 15 minutes now, eating up a storm and seemingly oblivious to our presence. She seems to be avoiding crossing the line into full sunlight. Not sure exactly what’s she’s thinking. Is it because she’ll be more visible to predators in the sun or is it simply that it’s cooler in the shade?

— And that’s all. Except WHOA! I finished my 2019 Goodreads reading challenge. A beach urchin has suggested that I extend it to 100. We’ll see. I’ll blahg about that some other day.

I guess we all take turns as restless sleepers. This morning it was the GG’s turn. This was okay. I start up a waking/sleeping cycle around 4:00 AM or so most mornings. I am used to it and it’s almost kind of comfortable for me.

The problem is that sometimes crazy REM dreams accompany this Batscope stuff and it can be worse when I am dealing with a restless sleeper. This morning it was BIGTIME Shoreline Dreams albeit most of the action took place *inside* the moomincabin, not on the beach. My parents were alive and mom was burning some sort of plant in the sink and I dunno what that was all about but I wanted to go upstairs. Problem? The stairs/ladder had collapsed!

I won’t bore you with any of the other details of the dream (I can’t actually remember all of the details). This is not the best pic but it is not a dream. It is a real pic of the ladder that we use to get to the second floor of the moomincabin. My parents added a second floor to the cabin the year after I gave birth to my first daughter. Their first granddaughter of four. The writing was on the wall that the moomincabin needed more space.

In a lot of ways I love what my parents did but I kind of wish they wouldn’t have cheaped out quiiiiite as much as they did. This ladder is not in any danger of collapsing like it did in my dream. It is very sturdy. But it is not “to code”. I/we are thinking we want to change this somehow. I am not sure we will get rid of the interior ladder but some of us want to build an outdoor staircase leading to an actual upstairs *door*. Myself? I would like an upstairs *bathroom* but that is probably a pipe dream.

Soooo fun tonight. npJane came over for Shed Beer. Alas, Shed Beer didn’t actually happen because we had storms rolling through so we had to decamp to the Back Room. After much talk, I cooked rainbow trout from Monahan’s and various sides and I think we all ended up happy 🧡🧡🧡

I think it’s about time to do a Book Blahg. The other day somebody was asking me if I was reading anything good but after the wandering conversations that had taken place that evening, about all my brain could pull out was something like b-b-b-b-b. Ahem, not that I am, ahem, the best person to go to for, ahem, book recommendations… But I do read and here is what I’ve been reading.

First, two “normal” books. I am oblivious to most TV series (that’s plural) but somehow, well, “somehow” being via a couple of PACNW blahggy friends, “Big Little Lies” got onto my radar screen. I have not watched any of the series but I did read the book. I was a little leery because it sounded kind of soap opera-y* but I found that I liked the characters a lot and the author told a good story without getting overly dramatic, etc. I LOVED the setting, which was a beach community in Australia. I’m told the TV series is set in Monterrey? Why? I know how far away Australia is but we have a lot of ocean beach towns in the USA. Surely they could pretend one of those was in Australia? Nothing against California, just…

When I finished that, I discovered that “What Alice Forgot” by the same author was on my Goodreads to-read list, so I devoured that. I enjoyed it a lot but I think I liked Big Little Lies better. I have to say, my brain was working overtime trying to figure out how the amnesia thing worked.

Before those books and after that awful snake book, I read “The Chain”. This was a scary book about “chain kidnapping”. It would be a spoiler to say anything more about that but I looooved it. Much better put together than the snake book and great characters.

I am now in the middle of a very weird book titled “Bunny”. At first it seemed almost too weird even for my weird tastes, so much so that I put it down for a couple days. Finally I forced myself to pick it up again and now I am having *trouble* putting it down. I don’t think it would be everyone’s cuppa. Goodreads reviews are variations on “Bonkers” and “WTF did I just read?” with various references to Stephen King thrown in for good measure. This book has turned out to be totally up my alley and filled my hankering for a weird book like the snake book did not.

When I do finish it, I will have read 51 books on my 52 book Goodreads challenge.

*Don’t get me wrong. Back in the day I was a HUGE fan of Dallas and other boob tube shows of that genre. We even had a Fisher Price cowboy hat person that beginning talker Lizard Breath named “JR”.

Yesterday was such an exciting day and when I left off my chronicle of yesterday’s events, I expected the only thing left was Shed Beer with Mouse but that turned into Back Room ‘hattans because rainstorms. But…

We had a sorta surprise visit from a wonderful set of travelers from a western state. Our niece and her three beautiful young daughters, 8, 5, and 2. Sorta surprise? We knew she was traveling to Michigan (most of the cFam lives in Michigan, including her mom, dad, and paternal grandparents). There was talk of her stopping here on the way over to Megalopolis (Detroit metro area) but it wasn’t until yesterday afternoon that we knew for sure she would be able to visit.

J is almost exactly 10 years older than Lizard Breath and when Lizard Breath was a baby, J visited us for a week a couple of times during her school holidays. The GG had helped a lot with J when *she* was a baby so she was very comfortable staying at our house. She was a great help with LB. Oh, not that LB was ever any kind of problem to deal with, just that it was nice to have an extra pair of capable hands to help get her in and out of her car seat, etc.

We don’t see J a lot because western state and I was amazed at how well she remembered our funky little house. And that there was a REFRIGERATOR there where those red shelves are now, not to mention the WINDOW. Yes. There was.

The plan was for them to stop for a very short visit (grandma was *anxiously* awaiting their arrival) and I am soooo glad they did. There was a bit of angst on our part regarding their departure because severe storms were about to move in. We were anxious for them to get on the road and out ahead of the storms. But of course, a last-minute bathroom break was in order. When you are traveling with children and there’s a bathroom opportunity, you don’t mess around and that’s about all I will say about that.

We asked that J or her mom text us when they arrived safely. In the end, the GG was antsy enough that he called J and they were on their way in the door so we stopped worrying.

BTW: I cleaned and decluttered the entire chitchen including these shelves today. I am still not happy with these (cheap) shelves. I guess I need to get motivated to look around again… I probably won’t get rid of them, just move them outside.

I made it to the farmers market when it opened this morning but I also overslept. What woke me up was a text message from a beach urchin who wanted me to pick up a certain yellow umbellifer from a certain vendor. Okay, I am getting up. NOW! She told me where the vendor was located but not who it was. This can be a problem because most vendors are assigned space on a first-come-first-serve basis so their location can change weekly. Then I thought about the location I was told and… Oh! Wait! Does she sell out of a truck? Yes. I KNOW her! It’s Jenna Janna. We were WCC classmates. She *is* in the same location every week and she was there today and she had a bucket full of beautiful yellow umbellifers.

Among other things, I went inside to the fish market. I was looking for swordfish kebabs but they were out BUT they had some LOVERLY sashimi-grade tuna steaks. Two of them! Thinking back to last night’s tuna steak, I said, “I’ll take ’em!” (To freeze and take to the yooperland where you can’t usually buy things like that.) They were expensive as all getout but I had eyeballed the price and their size and figured they were a little on the high end but wouldn’t break my bank. Then my ears heard this total: $292. Whaaaaa? How much??? $82. Oh, okay. That’s much better. And we had a laugh about sticker shock at the fish market. (I estimate the two of us will each get two meals out of these things so it’ll amount to about $20 a person per meal.)

Most people I encountered this morning were pretty groggy so I think a lot of people were up late with the heat and storms and many folks lost power. Victoria of Protective Fish lost power and only got a few hours of sleep and said she needed to put some mascara on to make her feel human (trust me, if you knew Victoria, it would be funny). The GG didn’t get up until after I got back from the market.

Mid-morning I was humming along amid various cleaning-cooking-laundry prodjects. I was sitting in the still relatively cool backyard shelling peas (really surprised to see them this morning, it’s late for them) when I was asked out on a date! Where to? The Dump! I hemmed and hawed a bit. I had things to do. He said, “Oh c’mon, Garbage Woman, it’s yer fav-o-rite place.” It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. We dumped off a HEAVY load of the dirtiest cement blocks you can imagine. I guess the idea was to schlep them over NOW in the Frog Hopper rather than get Moon Unit all dirtied up when she eventually lands. And oh. When we got to The Dump, my date did not have any money so *I* had to pay for the date! (He was lucky I got cash at the market ATM this morning.)

I guess I will just post this. I have more chores to do this afternoon but am refraining because the GG is out cold on the couch in the back room and it is open to the chitchen and I don’t want to disturb him with all my banging around. To look forward to? Possible thunderstorms later in the afternoon / evening and Mouse coming over for dinner and a Shed Beer.

Oh but wait! How could I forget the anniversary of the moon landing? What were you doing on this date in 1969? I was SICK! Yes. I was at the Piedy cabin with all the other beach teeny-boppers and we had Ag’s little black-and-white (I think) TV on and I would NOT admit that I was sick (fever and sore throat cold virus). I think I even went SWIMMING that day! In Lake Superior! I wouldn’t admit that I was sick because I sooooo wanted to watch the moon landing with my friends rather than my square, uncool old parents. For the record, I was also sick when John Glenn orbited the earth in 1962. We were watching it at school (where did we get a TV from?) and I threw up all over my desk. TMI? 🐽