Years ago, I was up at Hoton Lake when I received an email message from my globetrotting friend MMCB from Viet Nam: Greetings from Ho Chi Minh City! That was the *first* time she visited Viet Nam… I looked around at my surroundings and couldn’t resist sending the pic below with the message: You may be in Ho Chi Minh City but *IIIII* am in Fish Fly City! 🙃

That was a long time ago and the fish flies in the pic were attached to the Little Princess trailer that we used to have. The Moldy Old cFam Cabin was still in existence then and I definitely did not use an iPhone to take this pic.

Anyway… We didn’t really see many fish flies when we arrived Friday night and there were only a few around the cabin when I left to take my walk Saturday morning. When I got a few cabins down, I saw this mailbox.

The fish flies got worse throughout the day and this morning they were EVERYWHERE! When we tried to load up the Ninja to leave for Megalopolis, a whole bunch of them got INTO the car, which was a fun start to the trip.

Just to clarify, these insects are absolutely harmless to people. They do not bite or sting. They are extremely fragile bugs that hatch, mate, and, die within 24 hours. (Disclaimer: I have not fact-checked this so it may be an “alternative fact”.) They freak out people who don’t like insects in general and are mildly annoying to anyone who has to clean their carcasses up or shoo them out of an automotive vee-hickle. If enough of them die on a road, I think it can become slippery but that may also be an alternative fact. Once, I was at Hoton Lake in MARCH and I decided I didn’t want to ski that day so I cleaned out the refrigerator. I found a (dead) fish fly in one of the veggie bins. It had been there since the last summer.

Below is what remains of the carcass of a fish fly that made it all the way to the Planet Ann Arbor (we don’t have them here) and into the Landfill by way of a grocery bag.

A final disclaimer: I usually call these insects “fish flies”. I do not know their Latin name. Some people call them “May flies”. That doesn’t work for me because at Hoton Lake they hatch in June. When I was a kid at the moominbeach (where they hatch in early July), I can remember my granddaddy calling them “Canadian Soldiers”.

As we were driving up to Hoton Lake yesterday, the GG asked me if I wanted to stop at Best Choice Market on the way to the cabin. I did not, for geographical reasons I won’t try to explain. There have always been decent comprehensive grokkery stores here at HL. It’s a large inland lake, I think something like 27 miles in circumference. The shoreline and some adjacent areas are heavily populated so there are large and small stores sprinkled here and there. Everything from mom-and-pop party stores to Walmart and Family Fare.

And then there is Best Choice. It opened 15 years ago and we have been shopping there ever since. It is (was) a small store renowned for its meat and deli departments, and some of the best produce I’ve encountered anywhere, locally sourced whenever possible. They were overflowing with asparagus today but I had to decline because I happened to have Farmer John asparagus from Cubelandia. Oh, and a deli with all kinds of fancy salads and spinach pies and their famous feta spread.

I could never complain about this place in any way shape or form. But if there could be a complaint it is that there is was no public restroom. I suspect, given the size of the place, a public restroom is was impossible. Knowing that as an adult, I have always made sure I planned my Pbreaks somewhere besides Best Choice. I’m sure it could be difficult for parents of young children or, well, you know, people with issues.

Soooo. Best Choice has expanded by annexing the empty building across the parking lot. The butcher and deli are in the original building and there is still a lot of produce, etc., there. The new building has a greatly expanded produce area, an ice cream shop, coffee shop, and I couldn’t even process what else. Oh yeah, and PUBLIC REST ROOMS!

It is a bit bittersweet that the empty building they expanded into was the former Whitehead’s Restaurant. It was one of The Gumper’s (my f-i-l) faves. Of course they had a Friday fish fry and there was a “wet burrito” that he liked and some sort of “special” where you got three kinds of meat (chicken and a spare rib and I fergit what else) and some sides. We went there with Gumper often and I *fondly* remember him wandering around peering into the kitchen area as he would do. What a character. I loved him and I have definitely lucked out on the in-law crapshoot.

Whitehead’s closed and opened once or twice over the years and maybe it even burned(?) but it’s been vacant for quite a few years now. I’m happy to see it repurposed by a business we and many others love. Best Choice is ALWAYS busy.

I asked permission to take a couple photos in the new building and it was happily granted. Gratuitous photo of the GG buying Trenary Toast in the first photo. The mural in the second was painted by a high school student. I think it is beautiful!

I am soooo taaaarrred of telling the GG that he is not Mario Andretti and the I75 SUV Speedway, as nutso as it is, is not the Indy 500. I don’t think I have the writing chops to simulate the sound of somebody winding the Ninja up and down through her six gears like a race car driver, not to mention all the times he had to hit the brakes. I can wind it up if I need to but I generally drive like an “old lady”, sticking to the speed limit or thereabouts. Also, as I drive, I am always mindful of how close I am to the vee-hickle ahead of me so I can downshift if I need to slow down rather than slam on the brakes. This afternoon there was a little more lurching up and down than I was comfortable with but we did make it to Hoton Lake. I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t ever get airborne but that would be a story for some other day. (We’ll see if the GG reads this 🐽)

I have to say that after spending the late afternoon down by the water and then dinner over at the tiki bar, I am pretty dern “dead”. The lake was flat this afternoon and it was hot (82) and we really wanted to take the Pontoon Bote over to the tiki. In the end we drove a car. Sometimes there aren’t enough bote parking places there and we didn’t want to get all the way over there and not be able to park and have to come *back* to get a car. That turned out to be the right decision because the wind came up while we were there. The bote would’ve been fine in the waves (and there was plenty of empty bote parking) but it would’ve been a kind of a long windy ride home. When we got back here, the GG totally crashed, which is another reason it was probably good we didn’t drive the bote.

I don’t have much else to say. There was a guitar duo covering songs from back in our day and a group of very tan “older” folks that I eventually guessed had recently returned from Fla or somewhere. When I say “older”, I couldn’t figger out if they were older than *us* or not. That is, they were *definitely* older than The Beautiful Becky but they *may* not have been older than us. I guessed Fla because of the tans and because they all had tank top type clothing on without anything covering their shoulders. Even though it was 82, we are just edging into warmer temperatures here in the Great Lake State and wearing a tank top still feels like nudity to me after a long winter of multiple layers.

As we were leaving, there was some kind of kerfuffle going on that I didn’t understand and apparently some people were getting thrown out of the tiki bar (not the Fla folks). This occurred at around 7:00 PM so I suppose it’s shaping up to be a wonderful night for the good people who work at the tiki bar.

That is, I love *software* developers. Real estate developers are the devil incarnate. Actually I would put them one step *below* lawyers.

I have at least dealt with *one* good lawyer in my life. To all the rest of them, starting a hostile, passive-aggressive (and unnecessary) letter with “I hope this finds you well” and ending it with “Warm regards” is absolute total bullshit. This was all a long time ago but it rears its fugly head every once in a while if only in my memories.

What else? I finished a *sweet* book earlier in the week, Voyageurs by Margaret Elphinstone. I need to report the author’s name because there are probably a bazillion books, fiction or not, titled something like Voyageurs. In this book our traveler, a young Quaker man (that’s important to the book), came from England seeking his lost sister. I loved reading about his [mainly] canoe travels to and throughout the area I come from. Sault Ste. Marie, Mackinac Island, Bois Blanc (Boblo) Island (I’ve never been there), the northwest coast of the northern lower peninsula (I recognized the geography of Petoskey and Traverse City), and South Manitou Island (I’ve never been there either).

Except for the moominbeach, where we can go out to “meet” passing freighters in our putt-putt botes and kayaks if the water is flat, I mostly know our waterways from little road trips along them. Nowadays, there aren’t that many places you can get near the water via an automotive vee-hickle because so much property is privately owned. That includes the moominbeach and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Why was the book “sweet”? Partly because I loved reading about the stomping grounds of my life. Partly because I loved the main character. A young man who, well, I don’t want to say too much here but I loved how he befriended people from other cultures and was accepted by them throughout his travels without leaving his long-held beliefs behind. He often questioned those beliefs but didn’t lose track of them. He also wasn’t shy about expressing his more negative feelings in general, hatred etc.

Oh yeah. Once upon a time, the GG and Lizard Breath and I took a trip up to Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, leaving Mouse at the moomincabin with my parents. They took her into town (Sault Ste. Siberia) to a historical presentation about the voyageurs. One of the voyageur presenters noticed my Mouse because she looked a lot like his own young daughter. And yes, my kids have some French blood.

MMCB was just arriving for coffee at Barry’s this morning (she was at the counter making the musheen freeze up) when I checked my phone and there was a facebook direct message from my cousin up on the moominbeach. He had sent me a video… …of a BEAR *galloping* down the beach in front of the cabins. I grabbed this screenshot of the bear in full-tilt boogie marathon mode. (My 1st cousin once-removed sent me the video. His niece, my 1st cousin twice removed, took the video. 1st cousin twice removed means my cousin’s grandchild, and she is, uh, in college. If nothing else, that means we are lurching along into old and baggy.)

I couldn’t resist showing the video to MMCB. She *hates* aminals as a rule. She likes “cute” aminals (deer and their babies, etc.) as long as they aren’t too up close and personal. She went on an African safari-type trip and enjoyed watching exotic aminals from a safe distance. She refused to accompany her husband to India because “elephants P in the street” (and probably humans too). No thank you. I’m not going. She does NOT like dogs and cats, not one little bit. Of course, her friends’ dogs and cats sense this and go straight to her as dogs and cats do. I love MMCB. I love aminals. I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND how she feels about uncontrolled pets.

I totally enjoyed showing her the bear video. Once I showed her a series of pics from a hike me and UKW and Radical Betty took on and around our family property. Lots of woods, etc., etc., etc. MMCB peered at the pics and asked, “Are there animals?” I (rather incredulously) replied, “Yes, all the way up to bear!” So here is a bear running along the beach. I have never seen a bear at the moomincabin although I know they are there. They get into unsecured garbage and bird feeders, etc. But running down the beach? Do I have to re-think my early morning beach-walking habit?

I had my own little aminal encounter this morning. When I woke up and checked the weather, my iPhone proclaimed a big bunch of ugly-looking crapola approaching. And a lightning alert. Walk? Nope. I think I’ll watch the storm roll through from the safety of the Green Couch. I opened the interior door and spied movement right outside. It was this raccoon family. I *think* there were three. It was pretty dark because of the impending storm.

Aside from those aminals, Henrietta Rabbit has been hopping around and a chippy or two and members of various bird families. Aaaaand… A buzzing, stinging insect of some sort has found its way into The Castle and is stuck up on the clerestory* windows above the double door and cannot figure out that he has to go DOWN to get OUT. I feel bad for not helping him but am not sure he would interpret any actions on my part as help. I am not allergic to bee stings but better to leave him alone.

*I learned this word from Agate Gal, who has beautiful (high) clerestory windows in her house and sometimes hummingbirds get trapped up by hers. The Castle’s clerestory windows are nothing compared to Agate Gal’s🐸

When I showed this pic to the folks at Cubelandia, they were all totally amazed. One of my co-workers said, “It’s a She-Shed.” Well not really but ain’t it purty? Windows everywhere and doors front and back.

We celebrated by doing cocktails in these beauteous chairs today. We sat like this in the crappy old tin shed umpteen gazillion years ago when the first beach urchin was on the way but never again because the crappy old tin shed was quickly filled up with crapola and whatnot.

An interior view

A view of The Landfill. Yes it needs a paint job. And maybe some repair outside the chimney.

It would not be a cFam outbuilding without a bunch of gas cans. This is nowhere near the number of gas cans in the Gumper’s old garatchkey at Hoton Lake but it’ll have to do 🧡🧡🧡

This quick iPhone point-and-shoot photooo is probably hard to process, dappled with light such that it is. It documents the fact that our crappy old tin shed is completely gone. The one on which the previous owner caught elementary school boys doing roofP on their way to school. The one in which I bumped my head on the “rafter” more than once or twice. We won’t talk about rodents and their poop. All told, we have received $15 or thereabouts for the metal. The GG says this about pays for the gasoline to take it to wherever it is that he takes old metal.

My brain is fried today after a marathon (but very productive) defect triaging session with Amazon Woman today. As in, this is already specified but it has been deferred umpteen-bazillion times so I will dig up the spec. Or I can do this one. Or I can do this one with an FZ reality check. Or WTF this makes no sense, we need more info. Or (maverickly) we’re canceling this one. Or we need to set up a meeting with [insert whoever].

We at Cubelandia almost NEVER discuss polly-ticks. We all earn good livings and are treated well and we want it to stay that way. Occasionally, in a private situation, a few of us will sometimes privately express disgust, angst, or whatever about the current state of affairs if we know enough about each other to know we are on the same page. When AW reacted to a news alert about the stock market diving today, we went off on a BRIEF anti-Orange Baboon rant. I don’t know where the stock market ended up today. Did it recover?

I know how stooopid this is but I hate the OB sooooo much that I almost feel happy when the stock market drops because I believe he thinks that its high performance has everything to do with him and his ridiculous presidency and nothing to do with the crap shoot that (I believe) the stock market’s performance is actually based on. I am not against the stock market but I think it is only one of many economic indicators. I am not an expert on any of this but I do have common sense.

We both reminisced BRIEFLY about how bad the 2008 crash was and how the subsequent recovery began YEARS before the Orange Baboon came along, so why he thinks he can take credit for it, I do not know. Back in 2008, we were all quaking in our boots wondering when we would be handed a box. I had only worked there a year. A lot of folks in our huge company lost their jobs in that era but our product was okay back then except for an occasional RIF. It wasn’t until much later that we began to bleed*. Okay, back to work!

I really didn’t mean to get off on that tangent but it’s probably better than a fugly memory that the sun-dappled photo dredged up.

*I do NOT blame our recent blood letting on Trump but that would be a whole ‘nother blahg entry.

Did I want to go to the dump? Well, I am Garbage Woman so I always like to go to the dump. It is my fav-o-rite date with the GG. But wait. The dump is not open on Sunday so what the heck? Turns out it was a bird watching expotition. I love nature but like music, I like it to roll along in the background. Birders sit still for long periods of time. I love them but I cannot do that. So I declined.

So here he is in his bird watching getup. I also do not dress like this. I mean some of it might’ve been necessary for slodging around at the dump. It’s the colors. Khaki? Nope.

My major accomplishment today was to clean out the refrigimatator. It had gotten to the point where I had no clue what was in there and these days that doesn’t happen often. I threw out a weeks-old portion of garlic bread that was hard as a rock and a partial dozen eggs that expired May 7th. The garlic bread could probably have been turned into croutons and I’m guessing the eggs were probably nowhere near rotten but we had TWO OTHER DOZEN EGGS in there so what the bloody hell.

I also threw out some off-color pepperoni but kept all of the lunch meat packages after carefully inspecting the expiration dates. I am not a fan of packaged lunch meat in general and I am not the person who buys it. There are some kinds of lunch meat that I like well enough but it always seems to go bad before it gets used up even if it’s before the expiration date. That’s my supernose in action and it hasn’t changed since I was a little kid, which was before food came with expiration dates. I didn’t like bologna sandwiches then and I do not like them now. Sorry. I have no clue why we have hooot dooogs because we NEVER EAT THEM unless the cBear is around to grill them.

I did some of my own bird watching today. In between all of my chores today, I was riveted onto my current booooook “Voyageurs” and sitting on the other side of the front window (on the Green Couch) reading and being still, the parent birdies felt free to flit here and there and feed their babies. They’re just Little Brown Birds but still fun to watch.

I love FlaMan. I love GB. I love Little Joe’s. Ohmigosh. We sat at the bar for lunch and the bartender on duty I swear looked like he was 15. He was FANTABULOUS and I had the distinct impression that he’s been around the block more than a few times. I hope he is not a smoker (I have no reason to believe he is) but if he *is*, maybe seeing the not-that-old guy hooked up to oxygen will give him pause…

At any rate, when we first got to Little Joe’s, a tornado siren started blaring as soon as we got out of the Frog Hopper. It was VERY nearby and I could almost not function. Don’t worry. There was no tornado anywhere in the vicinity. It was a test. It was hot and sunny when we got to Little Joe’s and there were motorsickles roaring up and down Saginaw for quite a while. And then… The tornado siren did not go off again but severe storms rolled through and the motorsickles disappeared.

We were at Little Joe’s a weeeee bit longer than I tend to want to hang out for lunch. I mean, it would be really fun to sit around a barrroom all afternoon drinkin’ but we had to drive back to The Planet Ann Arbor and be functional, etc. But it was all good because the worst of the storm happened while we were warm and dry and by the time we had to head southward, the worst of the weather had rolled through. Our adult children were a bit worried and so was I. Our family experienced a direct hit by a tornado on the I75 SUV Speedway and we have also had a couple of trees fall on our house. But today everything was fine.

So we have been home for hours and we have had two weather alerts and so with the first one, the GG turned on every light he could possibly turn on. I didn’t want all of those lights on so I used an app to color the LED lights.

Cassowary sequel? We learned today that the Manatee County sheriff owns a flock of emus. Apparently the sheriff occasionally cooks one… I will not divulge how I learned those interesting facts. [wink]

1) POPOVER ADS! Especially POPOVER ADS with LOUD, SELF-STARTING VIDEOS! Your stooopid ad is not going to get me to buy your product. We in the web user experience biz have been railing against this kind of crapola for MANY YEARS! Somehow it seems to get worse. Jeebus!

2) Facebook “friends” who post inflammatory articles without (apparently) reading past the headline. A “friend” of mine posted a news-ish video this morning with the comment about how stupid people are in Lansing. “Lansing” being code for the “liberals” who are slowly (THANKFULLY) worming their way back into our state government. The content of the video? Our newly elected Secretary of State talking about expanding the new technology used by some of the (DMV) offices to ALL offices in the system. What is stupid or bad about that? That she is a democrat? I LOVE the new technology. When I had to renew my license in person a few months ago, I could get in “line” via my phone and even tell it when I needed a little more time (because I arrived there withOUT my phone). In other words, the tech worked fine, it was KW who was dysfunctional. I also do not see this as a partisan issue in any way, shape, or form. I’m sure both Republican and Democratic lawmakers have had a hand in this. I did not comment on this person’s post.

3) People who leave used “tissues” and paper towels all over the place. I am not concerned about the germs involved because I live with said person, therefore we already share germs. It’s just that I am not said person’s mother and said person is an ADULT and how hard can it be to pick up a used paper thingy and throw it into the garbage? Heck, said person could even make a game out of this and try to make a “basket” with it like FZ does with his empty crunched up Doritos bag after every research team meeting.

Okay, I can probably think of more peeves but I think three is enough for one day. Got any peeves? Pet or not.

P.S. the glubs… We went to Knight’s tonight and the GG walked over ahead of me. When I got across the first street, I encountered this pole with my fave color knit glubs nailed to it. Um, okay. I took a pic. When I got to Knight’s, I showed it to the GG. OF COURSE, he had found the glubs in the street and put them up on the pole. He thought they might be mine. Nope. Not this time.

That’s what my great aunt Elizabeth used to call the irises that grow wild along the Cabin Road. She could be a wee bit cross with wayward smartassical children sometimes but she was a good soul and I remember walking down that road with her as a very small child. I also remember sleeping with my cousins on the front porch [it was enclosed] of The Old Cabin when a big thunderstorm rolled through. She came out to reassure us that it was just Thor, God of Thunder, rolling his bowling balls around. She died when I was in second grade, my first funeral.

Speaking of thunderstorms, I had heavy rain commutes both to and from Cubelandia today. When I got there this morning, there was so much lightning that I didn’t park over by the pond and in fact I didn’t even get out of the Swamp Monster until it had settled down a bit. Long driveway moment. Fortunately no tornadoes meandered into our area but coming home I was sitting trapped (by a stoplight) on the Scio Church bridge over I94 thinking a tornado could easily pick the Swamp Monster up and flip it over onto the freeway. Yes, I have an wild imagination.

I finished the 40th book of my Goodreads challenge today at lunch. Yes, I read at lunch sometimes. I was reading “The Man in the High Castle” (by long-time sci-fi writer Philip Dick) and I am still processing it. The idea is that the allies lost WWII. There is a recent TV series based on this 1962 novel that one of my friends recommends and I think I need to check that out. This friend happens to be Jewish so I have been curious about why she would be enthusiastic about a show that portrays a world in which the Nazis won the war… The next time she is off bubbe duty, I will ask her!

Random-ish thoughts: I liked the book. I wouldn’t give it the topmost rating. That’s complicated. It wasn’t what I expected. I didn’t totally understand it. I glimpsed some little shards where characters experienced moments of unreality throughout the story and I may have put more meaning into those than necessary. Or not. Did the Axis *really* win the war? Or…

A goodreads reviewer pointed out that the characters were not emotionally fleshed out. In other words, it’s a bit hard to get attached to any of the characters. I noticed that when I read the book but it didn’t totally put me off. I was thinking that one of the major characters *was* a woman and I struggled with her but I also thought she ROCKED!

Another thing that was a bit difficult was that the syntax often left out articles. I mean parts of speech like “a”, “an”, “the”. If you did you not have Mrs. Pratt for English, this may not have bothered you. I think this was intentional but might have been more effective if it was limited to dialogue and non-native-English speaking characters. Anyway, I thought it was worth reading (and I will seek out more of his novels) but I think I am also interested to see what modern TV producers have done with a 1962 sci-fi novel whose author died in 1982.

Next up is “The Voyageurs” by Margaret Elphinstone. A beach urchin was reading it at the moomincabin last weekend and I am interested in just about any novel that talks about Sault Ste. Marie at any time in history. John Johnston house? Yeah, been through/walked by that place many times. And donate to the local historical society that keeps it up 🐸

I almost forgot to meet up with MMCB today even though she texted me a reminder yesterday. I was soooooo sure it was Monday when I woke up this morning. We used to have coffee on Monday but it is *usually* on Wednesday nowadays.

I got there first and when we were getting up to leave, she said something like, “You can sure tell your car lives outside.” It does but I couldn’t process what the heck she was talking about until I remembered that we had some sort of huge tree drop of long stringy seed thingies or whatever and they were all over the Ninja this morning. And they were WET because we had thunderstorms sometime in the night. I turned on zeeee veeeeendsheeeeeld vipers to try to clear zem off zeeee veeeeeensheeeeeld and about all that zee vipers did was push them off to the sides. I thought maybe the wind would clear them off over at Cubelandia but nope. I am currently driving a swamp monster.

Anyway, yes the Ninja Swamp Monster lives outside. I know I have written recently about why we lack a proper garatchkey so I won’t bore y’all with it again.

It took me a while to get out of Long Weekend Fog over at Cubelandia but eventually I did and by mid-afternoon I was off on an archaeological dig of epic proportions. Fortunately I like when I have to dredge through old specifications, etc. For many years, I was part of a team of three who wrote these things. Nowadays that team is reduced to… me… I can usually remember *exactly* how something I specified works but not necessarily what someone else wrote. So, “Can you find the rules for this?” was the question. I was close by the end of the day, after a lot of digging.

The photo? Taken at 8:59 PM on Saturday at the moomincabin. We have a few weeks until the summer solstice. I’m not sure what time sunset happens on the solstice but if it’s clear around that time up at the moomincabin, you can still see light on the horizon at 11PM or so. One of the reasons I like daylight savings time.

I’m not sure if my old coot had become a lef-tenant by the time this pic was taken. I’m not really sure he was ever a lef-tenant but that hat sure looks like something a lef-tenant might wear. Or maybe just a fly-boy.

I posted this pic and a few others yesterday, Memorial Day. I don’t *usually* post pics of my dad that day on social media, at least I haven’t for a while. I sort of understand why other people do. I know many people had to endure the sacrifices of their fathers (mainly fathers but women died in that war too). I am happy that Germany and Japan, etc., did not win the war, in fact I am currently reading a sci-fi/dystopia-type book about the US if Germany/Japan *had* won WWII. I have to admit that I don’t totally understand the book but that’s because I did not live through WWII and am not a history buff in general. But I am working my brain overtime to understand this book. Maybe some further historical excursions will ensue.

I did not lose anyone in WWII. My dad and his brother Don and my Uncle Duke were all in the war. As I’ve heard the story, my grandfather was on the local draft board and got upset about sending other people’s kids to war. My dad was in college and his older brother was in med school. My grandaddy told his boys to get their affairs in order, go downtown and volunteer. And they did. Our fam didn’t know Uncle Duke then. He met up with Radical Betty somewhere out west and became one o’ them thar outlaws. Most outlaws fit in with the Fin Fam though and he was one of them. He joined the service for his own reasons and ended up retiring as an Air Force colonel after service in Viet Nam.

In my old coot’s later years, one of the beach urchins interviewed him for a school prodject and he told her something like, “If you wanted to pick your job, you volunteered.” And he did. He volunteered to be a pilot and that is what he became. He was a very humble man and I never thought about this when I was young but I wonder whether he was a pilot they did not want to lose because for all of the war he was stateside teaching other pilots (not to say that there were not fantastic pilots who flew combat missions). But they were about to send him to fly missions in the South Pacific when our country dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. My old coot did not continue in the service after WWII and after various gyrations, ended up in Sault Ste. Siberia working in the small town banking biz.

While lighting up cocktail lights at the moomincabin last night, a beach urchin found the “yearbook” for one of my dad’s flight training classes. His scores were “very satisfactory”. I do NOT know what “Polish sir” or “Flying Finn” mean. My family is neither Polish or Finnish, although I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some sneaky Scandihoovian DNA somewhere in me. I think those quotations are the result of a “fraternity” of young men teasing each other. As they do.

So my dad (and uncles Don and Duke) made it through WWII intact and went on to have families and careers and love and lots of laughter. So many soldiers did not. And do not. In every war we have fought before and since WWII. In the US and in countries all over the world When will it ever end YouTube link.

P.S. I see a bit of one of my first cousins once removed (Rey) in that photo of my dad. It’s in the eyes somehow. <3

We are greatly missing the UU and TBG today. They took off with Daisy and their trailer this morning. npJane headed southward too.

So today was a day of rain. I made a trip into Meijer early this morning and I kind went nuts thinking we don’t have any lunchy stuff at the moomincabin so maybe we should eat at Penny’s Kitchen, knowing that would require a SECOND trip into town. I am savvy enough to know that some small Siberian businesses close on Memorial Day so I took a ride downtown to check up on Penny’s. Yes it was closed. So I drove over to Portage Ave. to see if the Palace Saloon might be open. It wasn’t open yet but there was no indication that it might be closed for Memorial Day.

Back out at the moomincabin, I checked facebook just after 11 and The Palace Saloon posted “we are open!”. Yes!!!! So that is where we went for lunch. It is a loverly place to eat lunch on a dark fugly rainy day. We ate ala carte enchiladas and then we traipsed over to Das Gift Haus to buy… Postcards! Then home for a sleepy afternoon.

Eventually we lit the cocktail lights (Liz did this) and became porterized for a while. A nice end to a wonderful weekend.

All three of us can legitimately call ourselves cFam gals. Only one can claim actual heritage. So here are me and my sister-in-law, The Beautiful Gay (in the “Nope” shirt – you go girl!). We are married to the Twinz of Terror and so qualify as cFam outlaws. The young woman is my daughter, child of the GG and therefore a biological cFam member. We are at the FinFam moomincabin and we are having sooo much fun and I love this crazy reflective type pic.

That was last night. Today the Twinz of Terror took off on a hike and the rest of us all kind of slugged around for a while. We met up for lunch at Pickles and then my BFF and JCB met up with us for the late afternoon and dinner. They drove over to the Sault Ste. Siberian Meijer from the Green Cabin. We cooked a HUGE piece of salmon that has been in my freezer on The Planet Ann Arbor for a couple months. There was quite some discussion about how to cook this (even though the GG and I successfully cook salmon ALL THE TIME!). We grilled it tonight (after cutting in two so it would be easier to flip – quite some discussion about that toooooooo) and we determined that it turned out fine, in the middle between Ruby Tuesday and a certain horsepittle board meeting.

I had a LOT of help today for such a simple dinner. The Twinz did the salmon. I cooked rice. Lizard Breath worked her asparagus magic. And TBG Salad Master reformatted salad for about the third night in a row. We also reheated some leftover chicken and steak for a couple people who aren’t crazy about fish. TBG and Lizard Breath did the disheosios and I greatly appreciated that because it gave me some time with BFF and JCB before they left. And I think we have enough leftover food that we’ll be able to reheat it for dinner tomorrow night.

I’m not sure I have much else to say. I’m mostly posting this for posterity and so that people know we are all well. It’s kinda late for me so I hope I can suppress Second Wind Syndrome. My mission tomorrow is to buy some postcards and maybe make a mini-run to Meijer. Love y’all. KW

“Now some days they last longer than others. But this day by the lake went too fast.”

Lemme see, this morning. We were a little slow to get moving. By that I mean I didn’t get out of “bed” (I was sleeping on the couch) until after 7:00 AM. We did have a decent brek, no thanks to me. The Twinz of Terror took care of that. I did do some disheoshios but I DOOOO disheoshios.

The Twinz of Terror then mobilized to take a wee trip to the Land of Porterization to remove the window covering of terror.

Eventually the GG and I mobilized with npJane to take a trip into Siberia. We had three errands. One was to drop off an old beeceeclette at the Salvation Army. It is a good bike but needs some work (taaaars, etc.) and npJane and I found ourselves having to talk the GG off the ledge of salvaging it himself. No. No. No. No. You do not ride beeceeclettes. You are a hiker. Not to mention you do NOT have time to renovate this bike. We put it on a small boat trailer and drove it into town to donate (and the Salvation Army was more than happy to receive it). And then. We picked up a couple 4x4s of plywood to solve a problem at the Old Cabin and those went onto the trailer for the trip back out.

We checked out the new half-finished but usable roundabout at the dangereuse old US2/3-Mile intersection and then hit up Meijer for various things. That was kind of nutso and we forgot a few things but then… We were halfway back out to the moomincabin and we noticed that it was 12:14 PM. Yikes! It felt like about 10 AM.

We got back to the moomincabin and it turned into a beach day that was so hot some of us had to take a break once in a while. Until. In the late afternoon, a beautiful little Tstorm rolled through and we high-tailed it up to the moomincabin.

So here are the Manly Men drinkin’ and smokin’ on Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench. Disclaimer: They did not do this all afternoon and they do not smoke anything other than the VERY occasional cee-gar.

I hitched a ride with npJane this year but I’ll be riding back down with The Sawyer aka the GG. Smoothest ride EVER today. Until. We got to the last major intersection of the trip. And major is a relative term given that this is the end of (the very short) highway 221. At Brimley. Normally we would make a right turn at this point but our plan was to have lunch at Pickles and that required a left turn. Due to road construction, we had to wait something like 10 minutes to make that turn. The good news is that the road will be totally open in both directions for the Memorial Day weekend.

So we got here. I am not as well organized as I would like to be but I think we’ll manage. And we are having COMPANY this weekend! The UU and TBG are on their way up and I *think* a beach urchin is arriving tomorrow and BFF and The Guru are scheduled to day-trip over here on Sunday. Fun fun fun! npJane is not “company”. She is FAMILY and she is opening the Old Cabin, which her branch of the family owns nowadays. I have no clue when people are leaving and I am just gonna ROLL with it all. Dish detergent? I don’t have any. I’m not sure npJane has any (that I can borrow) either. Maybe UU/TBG have some in their fancy trailer. If all else fails, I can probably beg some from C*Q*L’s mom next door. Just enough to get us through tonight and b’fast. I will be making a big Meijer run tomorrow and we will NOT be lacking for dish detergent (or anything else) all summer.

It was HOT and SUNNY when we got here via an off-shore breeze. Sun-deprived as us Michiganders can be, we slugged on the beach for a while, shirking our chores. I won’t try to describe all of the gyrations that led to the double sawyer situation. One person was using a handsaw to cut up driftwood. Another was overjoyed to use his chainsaw to cut up a deadfall between the Old Cabin and the Old Cabin Outhouse.

The UU is approaching the area of the moomincabin and the GG is going out to meet him to make sure he doesn’t get lost. I don’t totally understand this but since I am being spacified, I’m not sure I care.

Love y’all, KW

First of all, Mouse took this frooog pic, along with a bunch of others.

So tonight talking to the GG on the phone was almost like talking to The Commander on the phone the last couple years of her life. As Uber Kayak Woman once said about phone convos with HER mother at the end of her life, “it’s kind of like being in a Fellini film.”

I would be trying to ask a very specific question about something and The Comm would be rambling along on her own tangent. At one point, she had received a couple units of blood during a bout in the hoosegow. She was on the mend and we returned home and I was on the phone with her at Cubelandia. I asked her if she was feeling better after getting the blood. She could not process the word blood, at least not coming at her through our iPhones. I was practically YELLING “blood, blood, blood” over and over walking around Cubelandia’s lunchroom. And people at Cubelandia think I am mild-mannered and quiet… FINALLY I said something like, “You know, that red stuff that runs through your veins.” Oh. Yeah. Blood. Was her reply.

The Comm was not always like that. When the beach urchins were young, I called her because it was *fun* to talk to her. She was sharp as a whip and would dish up all kinds of stuff. My brother used to refer to her as something like “The Birch Point Beach Telegraph”. We would gossip forever and I am NOT a telephone talker so that says something.

Mom never lost her marbles so to speak but she did have trouble processing language at the end of her life. A speech therapist friend of Liz’s once put a name to this for me but I can’t remember it. Oddly, I could *usually* understand her. Like one time she landed in the hoosegow and we made an emergency trip up to the yooperland. We expected her to be gravely ill but when we got there she was talking a blue streak and at one point sung the praises of the local university. “It has a wonderful bicycle program.” I think I was the only person in the room who knew that she was talking about the “nursing” program. And then there was “the woman with the two boys.” I eventually figured out “the woman with the two boys” was Mrs. Wilcox and her two boys had taken classes with my mom when they were in high school. Mrs. Wilcox also has two daughters.

I am not writing this stuff to disrespect my mom. This was hard to deal with for both of us and I was her only living child although I had wonderful hands-on help from the GG and some of my cousins along the way. What got us through it was that we were able to maintain a sense of humor. Mostly anyway, there were some fugly moments but that is life.

The GG is not anywhere near in the same shape as The Commander was. He is up at the moomincabin to open it and will be doing North Country Trail maintenance tomorrow. With luck he will not be there when I arrive so that I can orient myself a bit. Our phone/text miscommunications are more related to typical male/female stuff or engineer/designer stuff, if you will.

Oh man, this was certainly not what I planned to write about tonight but then I had a phone convo with the GG in which he said he had bought Zesty Italian Hotdogs and my brain went from there.

I have complicated feelings about Black History Month (and history education in general). I understand why we designate a particular month to educate our children about the contributions of black Americans. I don’t understand why we don’t fashion our history curriculum to include the contributions of all people, whatever color/gender/whatever.

I did not get along well with history classes when I was in high school and I did not take them in college. Whew! Some people feel that way about mathematics. Not me! Gimme more math! History was mostly (to me) memorizing dates and generals and battles and presidents and whatever. Old white men all of them, oh, not that all of them were not important or anywhere near any of the fossils that we keep electing to office in this day and age. I think I would have been more interested in history classes if they had discussed the experience of poor/female/black/whatever people in those times as a backdrop to the dates, etc. I do know that most of our country’s written records come from educated folks, therefore most of our information is from rich white people. A lot of poor/female/black/whatever people were illiterate. This is a conundrum that probably cannot be solved.

So, I cannot find Harriet Tubman today. I mean the papier-mâché Harriet Tubman that I thought was in the Landfill Dungeon. I was looking for her because I saw some news story about how Harriet’s image on the USD twenty dollar bill was being delayed or whatever. I don’t know if this is because of the typical Trumpian Crapola or if there is an actual business reason that makes it difficult to change images on currency. I would love to see Harriet on US currency but I do understand the need for adhering to business rules. After all, it’s just paper money and I use plastic for almost all my transactions. But still.

I am remembering the Haisley upper el Black History Month prodjects. One of the beach urchins chose Harriet Tubman a couple years in a row. That was fine with me. I did have to laugh when she told me that one of the teacher’s requirements for the prodject was that they could *not* do the prodject on what she called “some magic guy”.

OMG! Has anyone ever heard of Magic Johnson? Basketball Star? Yes. My beach urchin had NO CLUE who Magic Johnson was. Her teacher (Mr. K of Multiplication Blues piano playing) gnoffed and gnoffed when I told him about that. I regard the fact that my kid didn’t know a basketball star as a parenting success.

Especially since… Before Magic Johnson became a Laker, he grew up in Lansing. He was a star player at Moo-U and sometimes visited the Big Boy near where I once lived in East Lansing. A friend of mine was a waitress there and reported that he came in there expecting free food. He was a star and had received free food there before. Nope. But he was still a poor kid then. I doubt he asks for free restaurant food any more.

I could not for the life of me figger what to blahg about today. I know that you guys don’t want to know anything about non-reporting accounts and BAI codes. You would prob’ly rather let us on-line banking folks keep that world running for you as smoothly as we possibly can. We aren’t perfect but our system is much better designed than the phone system at the car dealership I kvetched about yesterday.

So this is The Commander. She was a high school “home economics” teacher at this time of her life. 40-something. I don’t feel like doing the math right now. This photo is from my brother’s and my friend Matt. I highly doubt that Matt reads this blahg and if he did, I’m pretty sure he would be okay with me posting it. That dark thing just above her lip is not some sort of ugly cancerous growth, just an artifact of this old b/w photo.

Without going through The Comm’s whole life story, the year I began high school was the year she became a high school teacher. The subject she taught was called “home-ec” back in those days. I think it is called any number of things now. I took “home-ec” in junior high (boys took “shop”) and I remember it as cooking and sewing and that was about it.

The Commander did teach cooking and sewing skills but she also helped carry the program into new frontiers. I remember when she ran a child-care situation in her classroom. I mean with real children. Thinking about how daycare works nowadays and even when I had children, I can’t remember how these children were recruited. I doubt this program could’ve lasted more than a few weeks. But they were likely children of friends and co-workers who trusted my mother (and most people in town trusted my fam in general).

The other thing that she did was help spearhead a school store. You could buy school supplies and a limited supply of Blue Devil clothing there, some stuffed aminals and things. Without going into too much detail about mom’s education, after graduating from college, she began her career as a buyer at the downtown Detroit J.L. Hudson’s store. When she moved to the yooperland with her new husband (my dad), she worked for the local Montgomery Wards store. Until she FINALLY birthed a child after 11 years of trying — meeeeeee.

Mom could be kind of a snob. When I was about six, I had a sometimes friend (Wanda) who (according to mom) “didn’t even know what a J was” [the letter J, I mean]. In other words, she didn’t really want me to hang out with this child. When she began teaching, she learned to understand the children of the eastern yooperland – and their families – in a different light. The kids and their families warmed up to her too. “You honky”, said one Native American girl, affectionately. Mom felt honored.

I can’t leave this story without mentioning about how, when I was a senior in high school, a bunch of guys on the football team took the child care class with my mom. These guys were [mostly] good students who were taking an elective to finish out their senior year (my elective that year, besides band, was math-related, wish I could remember what it was but jeebus). I’m sure the football guys figgered my mom’s class would be an easy A and it probably was! What I remember is that they LOVED hanging out with the small children and my mom and she had a lot of fun “teaching” them.

Love you moom and thanks to Margaret Stargazer Teacher Woman for inspiring this overly long bunch of blather.