I met up with MMCB₁ for coffee yesterday (MMCB₂ is on bubbe duty until further notice) and after a recitation of all the latest Ain’t-It-Awfuls, we were getting up to leave and she was going through her schedule for the next couple weeks. Taiwan next week and the week after. “And then it’s Thanksgiving.” I think I SCREAMED when she said that! Even though I KNEW all too well that turkey day was coming up.

This weekend, if all goes well, I will cook up some Make-ahead Gravy and freeze it in two parts, one for Thanksgiving and one for xmas. And we’ll go from there. At least Thanksgiving does not require the stress of gift-giving. Because I just dunno what to give independent, successful 30-somethings with their own independent lives and collections. [That was not a hint, just an observation.] Somehow The Commander managed to send me and my family gift packages for gift-type holidays until, well, I’m not sure when she couldn’t really manage that any more but it was probably after my brother died and dad got depressed and [more] frail and fell and [eventually, after stuff I don’t wanna remember] died nine months later. I was 51-52 when that stuff happened. The Comm’s packages were always full of thoughtful gifts but I certainly understood when she stopped doing it and it was also right around the time I started flinging.

This is November 1. It was raining lightly when I took my 0-skunk-30 walk. It was raining pretty hard when I drove to work. It rained pretty hard all day and it was still raining pretty hard when I drove home. And it is still raining pretty hard a couple hours later. I am still in pluviophile mode but it’s supposed to rain catz and dogz tomorrow too and then? I haven’t looked any further than tomorrow. I guess I should be glad it’s not snowing because it certainly could be at this time of year but it is a whopping 42 degrees, so no snow, thank you Zeus or whoever.

You do not really want to know about the work hangover. It was just that FZ and I were “yelling” over the wall about some “pictures” (flow diagrams, more or less) that I had sent him. “Am I in the weeds or not?” No. But. Maybe. And then we both kinda went, “hmmm…”. I was about to ask another question but I stopped myself halfway through… Nope, I won’t ask this today. I’m gonna go home and I’ll let it percolate overnight. He agreed and I am soooo glad that one of my main work buddies is such a mensch, as my Jewish friends say. He respects my intelligence even though I am a *woman*. I know that doesn’t happen in every employment situation and I wish I knew how to change it… … …

We haven’t done a whole bunch of decorating for Halloween this year. The black light is outside as are a couple of thingies from the cFam house in about the 1950s. And we did plug in the xmas lights. No Vandergriff suit stuffed with leaves, no orange lights (except for a few in the kitchen but they are always there). No flashing skeleton lights (they are all burned out).

It’s okay. This has been an unusual October featuring an LSD-type rocket trip to Crazy Old Florida and various trips to Grand Blanc and a trip to drop off the Lyme Lounge and do the leaves at the Group Home and help the Lord of Linden take his new Bote out of the water for the season. So. Halloween? We are doing the best we can.

And so, the GG was vegging out on a couch in the back room when I got home so I was a bit surprised when THIS SCARY BEING appeared in The Landfill Chitchen. Complete with K-niffies! Jeebus! Where did THAT come from?

I almost thought he had obtained it somewhere downtown today but it turned out this was one of the items we hauled up from a certain trailer home in Fla. When we arrived back on The Planet Ann Arbor, the GG pulled everything out of the U-Haul trailer and inspected it in the driveway. He did his best to fumigate anything that seemed to have “palmetto bugs” and washed clothing one to three times, depending. Most of the clothing went to Grand Blanc but the GG kept a few items, including this costume and a bunch of NSFW items of the underwear sort. I think the NSFW stuff will eventually and quietly make its way to GB. I am hoping the costume stays here. Some of the trick-or-treaters have exuberantly identified him as a dementor (think Harry Potter). I’m not really sure that’s what the costume is but who knows what our Florida Man has been getting up to all these years.

I’m actually not wearing this costume to work this year. I might take Froggy over there tomorrow, if I remember to. Once back in the day, our release celebration coincided with Halloween and the LSCHP took one look at Froggy and said, “He could be a centerpiece at the luncheon.” And so he was but I don’t take him in there every year. But maybe tomorrow. We’ll see.

The year I wore this gilly suit googly-eyed costume was three years ago. We were in between Building Moms then and, in addition to my regular job, the LSCHP asked me (and a few other folks) if I would mind hanging out at the Window (aka the receptionist’s desk) for a while. Some people might’ve filed some sort of grievance with HR but I just did it. I had a Window job for a while at my childhood job back in the day and I was good at it. I wasn’t all that good at this window job but I could at least sign for packages and things.

Anyway, I don’t usually wear costumes to work on Halloween but that year I put on this googly-eyed gilly suit and the LSCHP was totally gobsmacked when he saw me. Of course I took it off directly after he saw it. There was no frickin’ way I was gonna wear that HOT thing all day. Jeebus.

Thanks to my sis-in-law Liz for the whine. I love it. You didn’t need to give me anything though. That trip to Florida was difficult and crazy but it was also FUN!!! I LOVE road trips and this one was fun. Even though it involved car problems and hurricanes, etc.

Man oh man, it was dark this morning. Not stormy, just dark. The sun rose at 8:04 AM this morning. Yes, really. 8:04 AM. Let that sink in a bit. Five days from now, we will switch to Eastern Standard for the long hard winter and we will get a lot more light in the morning. But not in the afternoon. But we’ll talk about that another day.

We used to switch back to standard time earlier in the season but at some point people got all freaked out about the precious little snowflakes (aka children) who have to trick-or-treat in the dark. If I remember accurately, this change was related to possible deaths by automobile accidents. I get that it is dangerous to be walking around in the dark but we (aka the GG) ALWAYS accompanied our children on trick-or-treat (in the dark). I don’t think I have ever handed out candy to a child under about 12 who didn’t have a parent or a whole gang of friends or both. And the parents always seem to be hanging out watching *who* is handing out the candy. Are those baggy old people okay? Is it poisoned? Did they put needles in it? Traffic? What traffic?

Folks, we hand out wrapped CHOCOLATE candy, straight from our Meijer grocery store. Twix, York Peppermint Patties, M&M’s, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, etc. (I leave it up to parents and/or intelligent kids to weed out peanut stuff if necessary). And we hand out multiples. Here, have a few or 10! We are not cheep and we are not out there trying to change people’s dietary habits by handing out apples or carrots or granola bars or whatever. Halloween is a FUN and decadent day for kids and we want to keep it that way. Most kids are gonna stay up late and do a short-term overdose on sugar. So what? In my experience, the kids eat the chocolate candy and some of the other candy and then there’s a whole bunch of crappy hard candy (suckers and slowpokes, etc.) that haaaannng around forever and by about Easter, I always threw it all out. And bought CHOCOLATE Easter candy.

Back to the time zone, nowadays we get this weird little space of time at the end of October when it is darker than all getout until I get about halfway to Cubelandia. Especially when it’s cloudy, like it was this morning. And I’m not sure what happened when aliens landed at Houghton Lake last night.

Why have I never encountered this author before? One of her books (We Have Always Lived in the Castle) has been on my Goodreads list for a while. I was on a bit of a hiatus from reading this month. Something about taking an LSD trip to Florida is not exactly conducive to sitting and reading books. Constantly checking the weather and traffic, listening for bumpity bumpity noises, and googling for Subaru dealers makes it hard to do Escape Reading.

This morning, I was looking for what to read next and “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” by Shirley Jackson showed up. While I was considering that book, my daily email from the New Yorker linked to three stories by Shirley Jackson. All right, the planets have aligned. I read the book (it was a short book) and the three stories from the New Yorker.

I did love the rain today, especially the heavy rain we got in the late morning.

I also cleaned out my refrigimatator and… No sooner than I did that, the New Yorker had a link to a Reddit thingy where people can post the contents of their refrigimatator and others get to guess who you are. I mean like how old you are and what you do for a living. I did not post this pic to the Reddit thingy but here it is for all of you.

Yes, there is quite a bit of beer in there. The two of us do not drink a lot of beer but we try to keep it around for visitors. And we had SOOOOOO much fun over the summer. We had a Beer Refrigerator on the moomincabin deck most of the summer (think dorm-sized fridge). This was especially fun during Rey & Becca’s wedding when all of the boyz (of all ages) hung out on the moomincabin deck before and after the wedding (which took place on the beach). I always love having lotsa boyz around.

After the wedding was especially fun. I was sitting there on the deck next to the Grinch and a fun millennial-type guy and I told the Grinch there was beer in the fridge if he wanted to get one. He said he wasn’t all that crazy about beer so I asked, “Would you rather have a little snort?” Well, yes, he would! The millennial-type guy’s eyes bugged out a bit and I realized he thought I was offering cocaine! Uh, nope, just a ‘hattan. Bourbon, don’tcha know.

Normalcy for us. We had lunch downtown at the Grizzly Peak today. It isn’t the first time we’ve been down there since our infamous LSD trip to Floriduh but it’s the first time we had a chance to actually talk to our bartender friend there. The first weekend we were home, we ate down there but it was a home football game so the place was slammed. Last weekend we visited FlaMan in Grand Blanc. Today? There. Was. No. Football game. Anywhere. Michigan did not play. Downtown was pretty busy anyway but the bar we eat lunch at in the Griz was not busy. So we got to talk to our fav-o-rite gal and unload a bit of the crap that we dealt with earlier this month. And laugh. Because that’s about all you can do.

Not so normal a day for my Jewish friends with the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. I have been meeting two women for coffee since our kids were in middle school (20 years ago? Yikes!). They happen to be Jewish. I am not. We are friends anyway. They have been nervous about going to their synagogue since Trump got elected. My beloved former boss, the LSCHP, is also a rabbi. He has been nervous about going to his synagogue since Trump got elected. Yes, I know Trump’s [privileged/entitled] daughter has converted to Judaism. Somehow that does not seem to comfort the Jewish folks that I know.

I am mightily struggling with how anyone can say something like, “I hate Jews, let’s kill them all” or whatever. What? By the way, insert any religion/nationality/gender/whatever into the hate statement I just quoted. I was brought up in a mainstream Protestant religion but I was also brought up to respect those who practice other religions. Or no religion, like I do now, although I would not call myself an atheist. It’s more complicated than that.

We MUST treat other people as individuals and NOT label them by nationality or skin color or religious persuasion or gender or whatever. There may be folks who read this who may push back against this statement but I strongly believe that all human beings need to be treated equally. I will not EVER back down on that.

Just sayin’.

But that said, @FloridaMan for the most part does not send bombz to people of any sort, polly-tishuns or not. He’s more likely to end up naked on the top of an opened up drawbridge or blowing his arm apart trying to make faaaarworks in his kitchen. In other words, he isn’t necessarily politically engaged.

I’m not sure what our own personal @FloridaMan thinks about polly-ticks. I do know that he did NOT like the guy the GG was listening to for a while on Patriot Radio as we were driving up from Florida. But I am also not sure he knew 1) who it was or 2) what the topic of conversation was. I was kinda letting the GG listen to whatever for the moment. He worked his butt off in Florida and although we don’t always agree on polly-ticks, we manage to work together to keep our life on track. So if he wants to listen to “Rush Limbo” for a while, I can handle it. Sometimes. But I was snorting with suppressed laughter at how ludicrous we might have seemed to an outside observer. Right wing/libertarian husband, Planet Ann Arbor librat wife, and oxygen-dependent @FloridaMan (brother/-in-law) in the back seat thinking about where his next smoke/beer was coming from and grumping about what was on the radio.

On a rather converse slant, Florida has a lot of crazy characters, hence the @FloridaMan twitter handle, but it does NOT have a monopoly on nutso. I mean, how about Alabama Man or… Michigan Man. I don’t know if there are twitter handles for either of those or not but they do exist. If anything, it might be easier to act on craziness (benign or otherwise) in Florida only because it is almost always warm there. I think our northern winters keep a lot of potential crazies inside. Or maybe some of them manage to get to Florida.

Anyway, I thought all the false flag talk was crayzee and when I heard they apprehended someone with a MAGA plastered truck in Florida, I wasn’t surprised.

Just sayin’.

The first baby is always an experiment but my first baby got subjected to any number of things that the GG wanted to try out. My best VAGUE memory of one of those “experiments” is returning from a walk or whatever and seeing her happily rocking herself in her rocky seat on the floor* in the back room with some sort of photographic? and/or telescopic? devices focused on her. I cannot for the life of me remember what the heck he was doing.

Oh, no no no no no, it wasn’t anything abusive. I mean, he gave that baby *all* of her baths and most of her diaper changes for the first couple weeks of her life with me and/or The Commander in attendance (yes, he is a keeper). I had a very easy birth experience overall but had to take a break from my usual nuclear powered life while some exterior stuff that required some serious stitches healed (TMI and 🐽). Plus, he was infinitely more experienced with handling babies than I was, given that four siblings were born after him and many nieces and nephews, some of whom he helped care for. Anyway, every time he got her bath ready, he would make a Dr. Frankenstein face and say “And now I veeel perform zee cloning!” She had no clue what he was talking about but she loved all of the attention. We had so much fun back in those days.

After all these years, he has “run” any number of experiments on whatever and I can’t for the life of me remember them all at the moment. Maybe I have used up my memory at work today by all of the product functionality I looked up today. As the sole remaining business systems analyst, when did we do that and why? I found most of it but man did I have to do a lot of archaeological digs. It’s okay, I like doing those, especially when I can say “AHA! This is why we did it!”

So this week’s experiment involves palmetto bugs (cockroaches) and their life cycle. I’m not sure if we have figured out whether we are infested with these loverly buggies or not. We did see one but I hope that was an outlier. If we are, they have come up from Florida. We have never had palmetto bugs here before although I know they do infest homes in northern cities. I do know that when you NEVER clean your living space, I mean in 30 years or so, they are MUCH more likely to move in and not leave and down in Florida, the climate is a lot better for them than here in the Great Lake State.

I am not the best house cleaner on earth but I do keep the kitchen and bathroom clean and I dust and vacuum when it seems necessary. The GG sometimes gets into Suzie Homemaker mode and deep cleans and between the two of us, our house is pretty clean most of the time. I cannot imagine in any way shape or form living in the kind of squalor where nothing is ever cleaned, including food and dishes. Some people get along with that but we don’t and if we have palmetto bugs in our small but beauteous home on The Planet Ann Arbor, they have come from Florida. Of all things, I am actually missing that trip 🧡

P.S. I once put my mouse in that rocky seat on the table we used to have in the Landfill Chitchen and she was rocking away like crazy and… Then… She rocked a little too hard and she flipped the seat and fell on the floor. She was okay but JEEBUS that was awful.

No, it is not the best pic, hanging my iPhone out the Ninja’s window. Which I was able to STOP because there was nobody anywhere near me. I took a single photo and then I took a 51-photo burst. Somehow the best of *all* those photos was the singleton and I deleted the whole frickin’ burst.

I will never be a wildlife photographer. In fact, I will never be anything more than an amateur iPhoneographer. When I first got an iPhone (11 years ago, just before I started working over at Cubelandia), I still had a digital cam. I kept that around for a while (it’s probably *still* around) but eventually I figgered out that the iPhone cam was pretty much as good as the digital. Oh, not that the digital was all that fancy a cam. In fact, somehow with the iPhone, I was doing stuff I wouldn’t have thought to do with the traditional cam, like for a while I found myself taking photooos on a slant. Not a good thing to over-do but it did expand my artistic repertoire a bit, artistic used loosely.

I started my diet in those years. I mean the diet where I get rid of all the extraneous possessions in my life. And yes it is a yo-yo diet. You get rid of a sh*tload of stuff. Then. Parents die and you inherit their stuff. You get rid of their stuff (not all of it). Adult children move back to town and temporarily store stuff at your house. They take their stuff and/or give you permission to get rid of it. I still don’t know what to do with all of the stuffed aminals in the Landfill Dungeon but we’ll get there. Binge and purge. Lather, rinse, repeat. But I like to travel light and one thing I do not need to carry is a camera, since my iPhone fits in my pocket and does just about whatever I need it to do. Often times, that is just a photo to document something – sandhill cranes were at Cubelandia today or even “here’s a piece of mail for you”.

I crack up every time somebody compliments me on my wonderful photography. Y’know, if you take 10,000 photooos, a few of them turn out pretty okay. In the digital age, you delete the rest. Theoretically anyway… But I am not gonna quit my day job in favor of iPhoneography any time soon. That said, I can see me taking up drone-ography as a hobby if I ever get around to executing the R word, aka retaaaaaaring. For now, my work is too sweet and I don’t have the time to learn how to fly a drone. Butchya nevah know, Novembah is right around the corner. Dun dun dun dun… My cube is (and has always been) largely empty and my grocery bag is ready to go 🐸

Two of my fave photooos ever. You can’t really embiggen them much because these are from scans that I saved at lower resolutions than I would EVER do nowadays. I keep thinking I will find the originals and re-scan them. I have them. But then I get busy…

So this one gained my beach urchin her 15 minutes of notoriety as it was included in an “environmental quiz” (built by her dad using hypercard, if I remember accurately) that made its way to Warshington DC. I’m sure no one remembers this by now. Except us.

And then there’s this one and it’s probably a goooood thing that you can’t embiggen this one too much because the butts would just look bigger. Except for the weeee skinny li’l baby butt, which you can’t see anyway because it’s under water. I wanted to link to the old Bertha Butt song but I can’t find a decent version of it so y’all can do your own damn googling.

In other news, no, Michigan laws do not allow smoking anywhere inside bars or restaurants (as of 2009) and dogz cannot accompany their owners into barrrooooms (and sit in their own seat) unless they are trained service dogz (cue lotsa complicated laws and regulations about that whole subject, ones that I do not know). I do know that Fla has its own laws but there are a heckuva lot more outdoor barroooooms there and they are open pretty much year-round and maybe if you are kind of a local “character” with an oxygen tank and a sweet little dawg, your dog might be welcome to his own seat on a quiet night. Alas, not so much in Michigan.

P.S. “Warshington” was NOT a typo. Make whatever you want to outta that 🧡 but Go Blue and this time I am not talking about the University of Michigan’s football team.

What to write about? What to write about? What to write about? It was a regular Monday and, after a few months of not being anywhere near the Hot Seat, I now have stuff that people are actually asking me about. It was a GOOD THING to have that s-l-o-w period. It allowed me to take a week off at the end of the summer and it allowed me to take that crazy Rocket/LSD trip to Fla. It’s good to be back into the groooooove though and I am even temporarily invited to the weekly Research Team Meeting. (What happens at the Research Team Meeting *stays* in the Research Team Meeting.)

But groovin’ along in my uber-cool job (knock on wood big-time because November is coming up) leaves me with not a lot to blahg about. Therefore, I was ecstatic when Our Northern Correspondent started texting me pics of moominbeach erosion from her late afternoon beach walk. Oh WOW! So here they are at the Doelle (prounced “Doley”) end of the beach and that dog is Charlie, if I have it right. We don’t usually have a “cliff” there. (I have permission to post these pics.)

Here’s another view minus dog. Wanna climb that thing? When I was a kid I’d’ve been ON IT! What fun!

Also, that last pic shows the old lighthouse keeper’s house, which we have always called Doelle’s. The first pic Our Northern Correspondent sent me showed part of a building wrapped in Tyvek. I kind of knew that it was not the lighthouse keeper’s house but I still thought something like, “I am not ready for the lighthouse keeper’s house to be turned into a bed and breakfast.”

And here’s a close-up showing the tree that was uprooted.

It kinda reminds me of when I was a little kid and there was a big round hole in front of the Old Cabin (my grandparents’ place where I spent my summers before we built the moomincabin next door). A storm created that big round hole. It happened before I was born but The Commander told me about it quite a few times. “Water was going up the back road”, etc. It wasn’t until my parents were getting older that The Comm told me that she thought a tornado may have touched down there. Tornadoes are rare in the yooperland but they do happen. Weather forecasts were different then… Anyway, us kids loved playing in that hole with the tree roots draping over the edges and nowadays it is overgrown but still a great place to sit and whine in the afternoon on a cold day.

Finally, on the moomincabin section of beach, Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench and the small Motor Bote look okay. We are on more or less the middle of the beach and tend to have a wider beach (usually) than either end so I’m not sure we were hit as hard as some others by the crap Gitchee Gumee threw at us.

I dunno why I’m not able to sleep with a goat during the afternoon. Even with a big bright light over my head.

We met up with npJane and the beach urchins and their SOs at H.O.M.E.S. this afternoon for beer/whine and Asian style brunch. I had Korean BBQ chicken wings and I came home with two out of six plus whatever was left of Mouse’s fries. npJane was wondering something like what the heck was going on with that crazy “LSD-like” Florida trip? She had mainly seen the bits and pieces I posted here and there on the internet. Alas, she did not get a linear story about it today. Like so many of the other things that happen in my life, I couldn’t tell a linear story if I tried. So many bits and pieces in all different directions with characters of all descriptions. People too complicated to describe in a few sound bites… … …

For about a split second there, I was thinking about what it would be like to write a novel based on some of the things that have happened in my life. How would I portray some of the characters without inadvertently identifying them and maybe hurting them? Where and when would I set the story? How would I organize the rambling map of details and what would I leave out? I doubt I will ever write a novel of any sort. I am a, well, a, um, “different” kind of a writer and I have no aspirations to write such a book and, in the grand scheme of things, I’m not sure that the occasional craziness that invades my life is really worth putting into a book. So my stories will continue to come out in whatever bits and pieces I can manage to find words to spit out in some kind of intelligible sequence.

npJane had places to go and people to see today. The rest of us retreated to the Landfill for the afternoon, where the GG built the first indoor faaaaar of the season and promptly fell asleep, under his light and next to his goat. We eventually had lasagne and stuff for dinner and then the younger generation decamped and we are hanging out here alone. *Everyone* has to work tomorrow. That includes the GG although he will not be paid for his work, at least not in dollars.

One cockroach is one more than we want to have. Yes we know that they can multiply quickly. The GG has become a veritable expert on cockroaches. I was hanging out in the Landfill Chitchen this morning, washing lettuce and spinach that I got at the farmers market. I saw an unfamiliar insect running across my beautiful quartz countertop. I did not immediately recognize that insect so I called the Resident Cockroach Expert to come and inspect. He observed the insect and stood transfixed in horror! He ushered the cockroach into the sink and flushed it down into the drain with hot water. He said something like “It’s dead now. That hot water killed it.” I said, “Maybe not”, then I turned on the garbage disposal and said, “*That* killed it!” We now have Roach Hotels around the house.

We used to go to Grand Blanc a lot. My brother and his family lived there for many years. He died (in 2005), and eventually his widow moved back to her “homeland” (Bay City area). I was not told when she moved but I figured it out via cryptic messages/comments on Facebook and we once drove past her new house. I never figgered out why this was such a big frickin’ secret. I mean c’mon, what do you think I’m gonna do, send anthrax to your house? Naaawwwww. That said, as of a couple weeks ago, we have another relative in the Grand Blanc area.

So we went up there today and we kinda wanted to take our relative out for lunch and a beer but that didn’t really work out so we eventually left and ate lunch at Little Joe’s Tavern. This is a place that opened in 1932 and is still going. They did a big renovation recently and it was a wonderful place to eat. We sat at the bar and I ordered some kind of fancy chili and I have some of it here back in the Landfill Chitchen refrigerator. And we had great fun talking to various other couples eating at the bar. We were all watching the crazy weather that was happening this afternoon. Yes we got some snow (if you want to call it that). And there was thunder. Say yes to Michigan!

I think this will be one of our go-to restaurants when we travel to Grand Blanc.

Can you stand another goose/sunrise pic from my parking spot at Cubelandia? I know you don’t want me to rant and rave and talk back to the news media. Fake or not. I don’t feel as though we have landed on an intelligible definition for “fake” in this context, same for words like “collusion” and “due process”. It would be a lot easier to talk to each other if we shared common understanding of the vocabulary of the year. The Chief Twit doesn’t help that with his propensity for spewing out volumes of Word Salad. Where I work, we get into the greatest difficulties when we are all speaking different “languages”. That’s when people like meeeee channel our former leader, the LSCHP, and clamor to slow down and define things. I need a PICTURE!

I don’t remember the term “fake news” being front and center during the 2016 election. What annoyed me at that time was what I was loosely calling “clickbait”. That term meant a couple of things to me. One, links to news articles that when I clicked over to them either had nothing to do with the headline that led me there or I had to read all the way through a bunch of unintelligible gobblety-gook to get to the one sentence that had to do with the headline. I am no journalist but I think that’s called a “buried lede”? Something like that. Secondly, I used “clickbait” to refer to articles that people (mainly on facebook) were sharing without reading. At least it seemed that way to me. After it (the election) was all over, I shared one myself. It was a link to a Huffpo article with a headline saying something like “Bernie Sanders can still win the election”. Well, I knew that wasn’t true but I clicked over out of curiosity. The first paragraph explained how he could win. The second was haha, gotcha! No way! The article went on to explain exactly what I experienced over and over, people sharing an article without READING it, then going along on their merry way. Clickity-clickity-click. Disclaimer: I was not a Bernie Sanders supporter, but you can damn betcha I’d’ve voted for him over the Orange Baboon!.

I am annoyed in general with people who do nothing but share other people’s content on social media. I have muted a few people because of that. I could almost see them sitting with their computer or phone, having their first cup of coffee or a cig, surfing and clicking share over and over and over again. Polly-tickle articles, cat and dog “funnies”, you name it. That said, I may mute people but no one has ever done anything awful enough to me that I have *unfriended* them, even a person who sent a couple creepy direct messages about the huge crush he had on me in high school. Unfriending is Middle School Behavior. Plus, you don’t know if someone has unfriended you unless you actively investigate whether or not you are still friends so what’s the big deal? If FB sent a nasty message to the unfriendee, like “Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyaaaaaah-nyah, so-and-so has unfriended you”, that would be different. As it is, it’s just sorta like, “Okay, whatever, buh-bye”.

Here I said I wouldn’t rant and rave and that’s exactly what I did. No worries, I am actually in good spirits. It has been a difficult week for me to process the news so I guess this is a bit of a “meta” take on news media. From someone who is NOT a journalist. Anyway, we are heading over to Knights (in the rain) tonight and I gotta get goin’.

See y’all later. -KW

Not the best pic but I did do a burst and therefore was able to choose the best out of something like 60 or so. Working at Cubelandia all these years, I am able to watch the geese go through their life-cycle. Goslings turn into teenagers and then one day I get over there and a flock is taking off as I am parking the Ninja. Like today. That is about it.

Finding hotels on a road trip is easier than it used to be now that we have GooMaps and online reservations. Lemme see. 600 miles from here to Chattanooga on a Friday almost a couple weeks ago and when we got there we had a reservation at this loverly Best Western. It doesn’t look very special in the pic but it was really okay, in some ways my fave of the trip. It was hot out and after walking up to the Roadhouse Up The Hill for dinner, we chilled out a bit with the door open. I love this kind of ambience.

After that super-easy reservation experience and finding out that Best Western had pet-friendly rooms (most hotels probably do nowadays though), we aimed for that chain for the rest of the trip. We managed it except for the next night. We planned to stay in Gainesville so we could take my niece and her SO out to dinner. Unfortunately, it was a FOOTBALL SATURDAY! As a Planet Ann Arbor resident, I am well familiar with FOOTBALL SATURDAYS. Best Western Gainesville? $370? No, I don’t think so. I would pay $50 extra or maybe even a little more but $370? Nope. We did get to Pengie and cBear’s house and they fed us wonderful snacks and a couple adult beverages and we took them out to eat and then we got on down the road, staying in a chain that I am not crazy about although it was okay this time. At least it was not at the end of an airport runway.

Okay, Bradenton, Fla. Technically we could’ve stayed at Uncle Ed’s house. We love him and he has a nice house but FlaMan was gonna be staying there too and there were a couple of dogs and I love them both but… and I was planning to telecommute and we had umpteen bazillion things to do and a new problem seemed to crop up just about every other nano-second or so. Nope. We needed a space of our own to retreat to at the end of the day. I found a fancy new(?) Best Western right in the middle of megalopolis (just off the intersection of Cortez and Tamiami Trail) where most of our business was shaping up to take place. Trailer park, big box stores, U-Haul, Subaru dealer 🐽. Not the most picturesque location but very comfortable and the folks on staff were wonderful. Anyway, this was *not* a trip to the beach. Even if we’d had time to spend even a few hours at the beach, as soon as we parked outside Home Depot upon our arrival, some weather app sent my phone a red tide alert. Okay, eating at the beach is probably not gonna happen. So two nights in that place (Sunday and Monday). Our hotel was mostly empty and prices were very reasonable because Red Tide.

And then. Michael is coming! Michael is coming! We gotta git outta this place if it’s the last thing we ever do-ooo. Girl, there’s a better life for me and you… And FlaMan and Jax Junior… But not until we arrange stable sources of oxygen for our passenger for the trip. It was Tuesday and somehow after many crazy gyrations we (the GG) got the oxygen arranged and we got out around noon and somewhere along the line, I made a somewhat educated guess that if we spent the night in Macon, we might outrun anything Michael had to throw at Georgia. My BFF lives in Atlanta and I knew we would be welcome at her house but that was quite a bit further than we thought we could travel that day and I also didn’t want to saddle her with our passengers. So Macon it was and it was another place where we could walk right outside (first floor because oxygen) and that was good for FlaMan and Jax.

Finally, we drove a long day from Macon, GA to Kettering (Dayton), OH. At one point the GG was kind of thinking about whether we could actually make it all the way to The Planet that night. I nixed that and he agreed. I was thinking through the entire arc of the day, knowing that we were all tired and I had no food at home and if we didn’t get back here until late at night, well… So another Best Western. First floor room with no immediate outdoor access but it worked out. And people loved Jax (dog) and I fell asleep with him snuggling up next to me in bed, which is not something I usually let aminals do.

I have stayed a few times at hotels I couldn’t wait to get out of (yes, last March in East Lansing and a few years ago at the end of the runway next to the Knoxville airport). Mostly, I am mobilized and ready to go when it’s time but we had some good experiences this trip in places that we felt comfortable and at home in. Still glad to be home.

…I will turn National Petroleum Radio on and you KNOW that I will be talking back to it! I always listen to NPR in the morning. I listen to the news but I am really more interested in the weather and traffic. I don’t really have to deal with traffic, at least not in the morning. I have taken to doing the “back roads” both to and from work. It’s a Zen Drive in the morning. In the afternoon not so much, especially since they have converted the major road a block away from my house from four to two lanes with a center turn lane and bike lanes. I am all for accommodating bicycles but these seem dangerous and I have rarely seen a bicyclist use them. And then there’s the part where the four lanes of traffic have to merge into two at either end of our stretch of road. Traffic is now frequently backed up all the way *before* the major intersection I have to navigate to get to where we have to merge. I dunno what to do. I can only imagine it’ll be worse when the snow flies.

Anyway, sometime this summer, I guess the GG got tired of me talking to the radio because one day I came home from Cubelandia and he had some folk music or whatever on the smart speaker thingy. That has become the new normal to the point that if there is no music on when I come home, I wonder where it is. I guess I could figger out how to turn on the dern thing myself but I’m just a girl and I don’t even shoot a blowgun. [Cue major sarcasm here.]

I was actually enjoying the 85 to 90-degree temperatures we had throughout our entire LSD trip to Fla and back. The GG, who was doing the slave work, not so much. He would make use of our hotel shower at the end of the day following trailer duty or broken vee-hickle duty or whatever at the end of our couple of days down there. Temperatures here are taking a turn toward you-know-what. This oogly is me in my new Smartwool hoodie vest and this morning I dredged out my balaclava for the first time. It was 33 when I took my 0-skunk-30 walk. It’s not predicted to be quite that cold tomorrow morning but it’s coming. Are you ready?

Soooo good to get back to a regular routine of trundling over to Cubelandia. I am involved in various archaeological digs lately. I love that kind of work. How does this piece of functionality work? How did we design it? Did we change it? If so, when and how? Is it working as we designed it?

I originally spec’ed out the report I was digging up today. It was one of my earlier BIG prodjects and I was still learning my job. I had specified several report columns that I could NOT for the life of me make show up in the report as it works today. Nine years later. Other people have changed and added things along the way. I looked back through all of the relevant specs one more time and, lo and behold, all I had to do was change a certain report setting to get those old fields to show up. Now I have to figure out how to coherently write about this massive mess of functionality.

Okay, work babblety-babblety. Don’t even try to understand it. Just know that it keeps my baggity old brain going 🐸

You’re wondering about the pic? I could not narrate my “LSD” trip in a coherent linear story if I tried (and most of the details do not belong on the internet anyway). But I can do little bits and pieces and this is a pic of my little family when my Mouse was a baby. It is a VERY familiar pic to me and I *think* we are sitting on a log at the bottom of the steps over at our fave Reedsburg Dam. Aren’t my little beach urchins cute? But you want to know what all that stuff is all over the pic, right? Well, it is the result of spending something like 30 years in a trailer in Florida. Apparently it was a xmas (or whatever) gift back then and the person who received it has treasured it all these years, much as he has treasured other artifacts picturing or made by his nieces and nephews when they were young. I got out of our rental truck and looked down and there it was at the edge of the driveway, rescued by the GG. Embiggen it if you dare and remember that people are complicated 🧡

I hit a wall this afternoon. I had the stamina to make a 6-day rocket trip from here to Fla and back, work a day and a half at work and most of a day at home, walk, do chores (except I am not totally unpacked yet), and listen to the GG rattle on and on and on about cockroaches and how to (hopefully) eradicate them.

Today I drove to a lovely baby shower. It was a 62.9 mile drive to a town I had to look up on Google maps and it was a beautiful day for driving. GooMaps showed me two route possibilities, one through megalopolis on I275 and I696 among other familiar (in an awful sort of way) routes. Hey wait a minute? What’s this? It looks like a section of I696 is CLOSED for construction. I think I’ll take the other route. Which was about halfway on big straight fast roads and the other half twisting and turning all over the countryside. Because I was driving alone, I used the voice directions on GooMaps for the first time EVER and it worked like a charm.

I was happy to get to this shower at all given that a week ago we weren’t sure when we’d get back from Fla. The mom-to-be is our sweet oldest nephew’s SO and I’m guessing here but given the various twists and turns of nephew’s adult life I don’t think he expected he would ever have a biological child. I *think* this was a surprise pregnancy but it is a much wanted one and we are all very happy for them. This child will have fantastic parents. I didn’t know a whole lot of people at the shower and I’m no extrovert but there were enough cFam gals (so glad that Beck and a couple daughters made it!) that I found a “safe” place to be happily and quietly anti-social. As it turned out, most of the talk at our table was about my recent “LSD” trip anyway.

But then, about an hour-and-a-half into the event, I hit a wall. I was exhausted, mostly psychologically. I *hope* it was okay that I left when I did. This event was loosely scripted and the few available activities were largely voluntarily. There was no long gift-opening session. The mom-to-be had requested that gifts arrive unwrapped and they were displayed on a table so people could inspect them (or not) at their leisure. The one activity that we were specifically asked to participate in was to choose a ribbon and attach it to a dream-catcher to hang above the baby’s crib. Yes, I will *certainly* do that.

After that, I left. I turned on GooMaps again for the return trip and when I got home, I was ALONE! Woo-hoo! I ended up with at least an hour of spacification. Boy oh boy did I need that.

Oh, and no, we did not eat meat-lovers pizza today. We had a lovely brunch with bacon that was to die for and I had exactly one mimosa. The pizza in the pic was from last Monday night and it was soooooo gooooood! And no, the three of us couldn’t finish it but I boxed what was left and took it back to Uncle Ed’s. He doesn’t like to eat out and I didn’t try to guilt him into going with us. A few pieces of leftover pizza doesn’t begin to thank him for all of the help he gave us but I know he doesn’t want anything more so I’ll be paying it forward whenever I can 🧡🧡🧡

We have brought a lot of memories back from our Rocket LSD Trip to Crazy Old Florida. We have also brought back cockroaches. Or do they call them palmetto bugs down there? Neither the GG nor I have *ever* lived in a cockroach-infested house.

Here at the Landfill, the mice come in, the mice go out, the mice play pinochle on your snout. Mice come in seasonally and we are quite adept at keeping them out. Bugs? Occasionally some ants but mostly not since many years ago when Grandroobly resolutely spread diazinon around the perimeter of the house. Cockroaches? Hmmm. I suppose some people in the Great Lake State have cockroach problems. My house is sometimes messy and I wish we had less stuff but I *clean* areas where moisture might collect and I do NOT leave food out. We have never had cockroaches.

As far as we know, no cockroaches are in the house yet but the GG has set up a decontamination zone in the driveway where he cleans things and removes cockroaches before bringing them in the house. Since we returned to The Planet Ann Arbor on Thursday, he has become an encyclopedia of knowledge on cockroaches. I am a wee bit less worried about an infestation but I think he is a bit traumatized by some of the stuff he had to deal with in a certain trailer during our recent “LSD” trip to Fla.

The GG spent the morning decontaminating various things in the driveway. How the heck does a 3-week-old cordless phone become infested with cockroaches in that length of time? I do not know. I did my usual Saturday chores plus some online banking work, partly to make up time for the days I missed that I could’ve been telecommuting during the week but I didnt because I was in the Frog Hopper biting my nails (figuratively speaking) and obsessive-compulsively checking the traffic and weather and whatever and couldn’t concentrate on anything else except maybe the xword puzzle, which I can dip in and out of. Or driving. And yes, I did drive even though we were pulling a U-Haul trailer. I don’t really like to drive with a trailer but this was a small one and I felt pretty comfortable pulling it. I even pulled it through Cincinnati during rush hour traffic and up to Kettering, just south of Dayton. Yay me!!!

Early afternoon today we hoofed it downtown for lunch at the Griz, which was *slammed* with people because it is a football Saturday and a beautiful day (if a wee bit chilly). The game doesn’t start until 6-something but people were getting ready for it this afternoon, oh boy oh boy.

And now we are burning stuff on a nice li’l faaaaar in the back yard. Great rocket trip to Fla but glad to be back home.