I can’t write about the election today. My gut feeling that my preferred candidate would lose came true. I will say that, like many other liberal elites sane people who can do critical thinking, I was pretty devastated when my prediction came true. But oh man, what a day 🤣

Morning was basically nutso as the Michigan version of the Cajun Navy mobilized here at the Landfill for a trip to Asheville. Yes, the North Carolina city that was devastated by Hurricane Helene. Long story why they are going there. They did not take a bote although between the FinFam and the cFam, we own plenty of botes. But botes are not really needed in Asheville. Instead, they took chainsaws and other tools and clothing donations, etc. In fact, they went OUT the door, then the GG came back *in* to ask me if I had anything for the “good will”. Well, yes, I do, but I am in a meeting and I can’t organize it in 30 seconds. Why didn’t you ask me last weekend?

I will thank the MAGAt Twinz of Terror (who WELL KNOW what I think about Trump) for treating me kindly and not jeering at me or rubbing my face in Kamala’s defeat. Or calling her names, although the GG did do that on a cFam group text thread. A third brother also stopped by to drop off some donations but last I knew he is not a MAGAt. (Families are complicated.) The Twinz went out for breakfast before beginning their trip. I had intended to accompany them but I needed space. It’ll be fine, everybody says. It’d be fine if y’all weren’t in the Trump Cult! And make no mistake, it *is* a cult. It is NOT the Republican party that many of us grew up with.

After the chaos of packing stuff (the GG had sooooo much stuff), it was calm here but the rest of my day was spent being totally unable to focus on my job. And then since it is STILL warm here, a whine in the back yard watching the waxing crescent moon traverse the sky. Sorry ’bout the power line.

More on the election (probably) as I process the soup that’s in my database aka brain.

I don’t have a Kamala magnet but I really am with her. As I was with Hillary. And I am ALWAYS with Lady Liberty.

Alas I am not very optimistic. As I tried to explain (not very coherently, I don’t think) to MMCB at Zoom Coffee this morning, it is a *gut* feeling. It is not based on polls, as if I could even begin to interpret polls. I mean, I am a big ol’ nerd but polls are not in my techie bailiwick.

It’s just that no matter what awful things Trump says and does (and I’m not gonna list them today), he always seems to be forgiven. Okay, one example. The trope “Biden sounded like a doddering old man in the debate”. Guess what? Trump sounds like that almost every time he opens his pie-hole (unless he is name-calling or spewing hate speech or talking about how great he is or…). But who was forced to drop out of the race? So much for not listing Trump’s horribility.

That turned out okay (for me), because I really like Harris. I’ll list those reasons another day. Really.

I got the weird feeling that MMCB was looking to me for, I dunno, reassurance maybe, that it would all come out okay and Kamala would win. This kind of surprised me because both women are very well educated and actively participate in local politics. Which I don’t really except to research and vote. For school board candidates this election, I sent the candidates MMCB₂ has been working with for MONTHS to anyone who asked who didn’t know which school board members to vote for. Maybe MMCB is wondering what my ancient Celtic spidey senses are telling me? Ook, not anything good.

I couldn’t provide reassurance but again, it’s just my gut feeling, not based on data except maybe the previous experiences my own personal database (aka my brain) keeps track of. Yeah, I know Trump lost the last election but a lot of weird things have happened since then and whatever the Orange Baboon does, people seem to enable him and his cult continues to adore him. And it IS a cult. “Oh that Trump. He is such a card. He’s just funnin’ you.” Vomit.

For better or worse, seeya on the other side. Whenever that may be…

Confidential to the GG, who has just turned on the TV: I will still love you no matter who wins but I may need some space…

Sing it. You know the tune.

At this point, I can’t even remember what photo I was searching for but this Froggy playlet somehow popped up. I’m not sure if this is the whole play. It seems to end a bit abruptly🤣 but who knows. A disclaimer on the penmanship. The writing is a bit hard to read. I can read it because I am well familiar with the names of the cast and crew. By middle school, the playwright had developed an extremely neat, artistic looking script.

The play lit a bulb in my head in that it had inspired me in a photoshop assignment when I was taking community college classes in web design/development. Actually I’m not sure if it was this exact story. For one thing, Clammy (who is in my photoshop pic) was not around when the play was written. For another thing, Froggy was constantly gallivanting off on wild adventures to the moon and other places in those days and I may have just been thinking about the general Landfill elementary school “vibe”.

Anyway, my assignment was to create a “postcard” commemorating a holiday or event or whatever. I could’ve probably figgered out a holiday postcard but I wasn’t feeling it but then somehow this popped into my head. It didn’t seem off spec so I went with it. My mouse was still in high school at the time (I think) so Froggy and Clammy were still likely up to various hijinks.

My *wonderful* teacher Kelly gave me full points on this although I later found out she HATES “starbursts”. She put aside her prejudices and judged it on whether I met the assignment specifications. Which I did. A relative who very occasionally reads my blahg (I posted it way back then) thought that the “spaceship” was an artifact in my back yard. Um… It is a shipping navigation buoy in the St Marys (no apostrophe) River and I don’t think it would FIT in my backyard, not to mention how would I get it there? 🤪🤣😵‍💫

P.S. Thanks to the beach urchin I had lunch with today. At a restaurant. The Session Room to be specific. It was uncrowded, which I expected, and I needed some “girl talk”. Oh don’t take me too seriously. My adult daughters and I do not agree on absolutely everything (that’s healthy) but we do agree on politics, locally and nationally, so it’s a safe subject for us. There are other subjects we talk about but, as family things, they aren’t blahggable. My daughters are both uber-busy adults and I hate to ask them to spend time with me. But this worked out and I needed it.

As I have said before, when I married the GG, I thought our politics were similar. We are both from Republican families but we were also teenagers and young adults in the 1960/70s and we were NOT for the Vietnam War, etc. I went along with some of what my parents believed for a while, after all, the GOP party of that day was NOTHING like the Trump party. I dunno what my dad would have thought about Trump. Probably not much but not necessarily because of politics. The Commander loved Obama and her ashes have been churning since 2016.

Fast forward, I don’t think I will EVER vote for a Republican again. They are not Republicans any more, they are Trumpians. But what I am really trying to write about (probably incoherently) is that I live in a divided house. But. Apparently there are a LOT of married couples who are in the same boat.

This morning’s NPR “This American Life” show explored this. Lo and behold, the first segment featured a couple familiar to me from an episode of the podcast “Left Right and Center”. They were struggling to discuss politics AT ALL and she was feeling “lonely”. I am in the same boat albeit I don’t really feel lonely. I am approaching this whole thing with black humor at this point although I may not feel that way if Trump wins, which my gut tells me he will. Sigh. Another four fr*ckin’ years of idiocracy.

The couple on This American Life did some research and found Isaac Saul’s Tangle newsletter. I have written about this newsletter before and have signed up to receive it. And have been enjoying it. Each day focuses on a topic. Isaac researches what the “right” and “left” are saying about it and also heavily fact checks everything. At the end, he provides his own opinion, identifying his own personal biases. We all have our own biases.

This newsletter provides transparent, nuanced information about the difficult issues we face today. It isn’t just some stupid facebook meme saying “Kamala is gonna take away your health care and give it to the ‘immigrants'” without citing sources and providing context. Health care what? Insurance? Clear language, context, and fact checking. PLEASE! Don’t just hit “share”.

If I get it right, he tries to reach readers “where they are at” (you’ve heard that phrase before, no?). He doesn’t try to make them feel stupid by leading with something like “that’s a lie” (subtext, “you are stupid to believe that”). He does call out lies but not after carefully stating why. Since Trump first took office in 2016, I have been DIRECTLY called stupid by a few relatives that disagreed with me. It hurt. I may not be the brightest light on earth but, for one thing, there are people who seem to still be willing to pay me pretty well to do a complex tech job. Stupid? Naw. Except when I am… 🤪 because we are ALL stupid sometimes. But I’m not stupid about my hatred for another Trumpian Idiocracy.

Iff’n y’all are doubtin’ me, subscribe to the newsletter (there are free versions if you don’t have $59 or whatever it is, you just don’t get all the content) and check it out for yourself. And journalists (Isaac is one) need to be paid. Otherwise we don’t have reliable news. Because they may have to take jobs as McDonald’s french fry fryers or garbage truck drivers. I know those things are just part of the Trump schtick but jeebus.

I loved Margaret’s comment yesterday and it got me thinking/remembering so I’m gonna respond to it. So my mouse (younger daughter) is actually smiling in yesterday’s photo. I can see how that could be misinterpreted. She loved that costume. I made a mouse costume that matched Her Mouse, a puffalump aminal that still exists. She carried that mouse and an identical mouse (long story why we had the second one) around all night. I think one of them got dropped in The Burke’s Yard of Dynamite next door but the GG was on the ball and grabbed it.

My mouse was 2-1/2 in yesterday’s pic and 1-1/2 in today’s. She received her mouse for her first xmas (8 months old). She didn’t totally bond with “Speedy Water Janet Pop Mousie Mushroom Ears” until her second xmas. We were at a cFam xmas party and she had her mouse and her cousin GRABBED it away from her. He was innocent in that he is a few months younger than my mouse, had received the SAME mouse for HIS first xmas, and he thought SHE had HIS mouse. Someone mitigated the situation and my two mousies (human and puffalump) have been inseparable ever since. There is a third kind of mouse, a Scurry Mouse. Y’all probably know about those.

Where the heck am I going here?

The Halloween before yesterday’s pic she was 18 months and I made the awful mistake of making her a Tiger Costume. Why did I not know that she was a mouse? I am not sure. I mean she seemed to have a tiger’s personality, right? She still does. The mouse that roared maybe!

So I don’t think she cared what her costume was that much but who knows. I don’t think she totally understood what Halloween was all about that year. Every house she trick-or-treated at, she noticed the shoe pile by the front door and yelled “Shoe on, shoe on!” The reason for that would be too long a story for tonight or maybe ever. But she definitely figured out what was going on as she collected candy.

I think she mainly hated wearing the hat, which she has obviously pulled off. This kid. It would be 10 degrees and windy as all getout and I would bundle my kids up in snowsuits and hats and boots and mittens and all to go to the grocery store. By the time we made the short walk from the Exxon Tanker Valdez (1989 Plymouth Voyager) to Kroger, my mouse would have pulled her hat off. Okay, call Child Protective Services on me if you will but when you have a spirited child, you pick your battles.

Yes. Yes we do. The GG asked me that when the candy bowl started to look a little low.

I can’t believe how many trick-or-treaters we had tonight. Back when the beach urchins were little kids, we had a lot, then for many many years we did not. I used to try to count and there might be seven or 10 or whatever. I dunno why we got more this year. It may be because we had a ghoulish display in our front yard.

The weather looked really iffy for trick-or-treating this afternoon. Big fugly looking storm clouds and high winds and a bit of rain. Somehow things settled down around the time trick-or-treating started and we handed out candy to many groups. Don’t worry. Even though I had to replenish the candy bowl, there is still plenty of leftover candy for the folks who usually take my leftovers.

Kudos to the young girl who refused a Reese’s peanut butter cup. “I can’t eat that.”

Our first Halloween at The Landfill, our first born was eight days old. When kids trick-or-treated we (jokingly) offered her up as a treat. There was much oohing and aahing but no takers. She’s in the pic in one of the most complicated costumes I have ever made. Cardboard fairy wings covered with gold lame fabric and hand-sewed sequins all around the edges. Her kindergarten teacher cautioned that it would be destroyed but the wings still exist to this day.

I can’t believe it was almost 80 degrees in the afternoon here at the end of October on the Planet Ann Arbor. I ended my day sitting out in the back yard.

And that is about it for tonight.

An hour or so ago, the GG was looking for a box (or bag or whatever) of baseballs and associated gloves. Did I know where it was? I actually have a vague memory of what he was talking about but I was like, “WHY are you looking for that NOW?” Because I have no clue about where it is and there was no way I was gonna start jumping around looking for it NOW. Jeebus. Dooya think one of the kids took it? No I do not. I think the last time one of the kids played baseball (softball) was when they were in about 2nd grade and a (wonderful) neighborhood dad organized an informal team. Our kid liked it (I think) and she was pretty good at it but she (and we) quit when it migrated to a city-based organized league. Organized team sports for children is not our family style. Although if we’d had a kid who thrived on that, we’d have supported it with bells on.

Then. What version iPhone do we have? Is it the 15 Pro? I mean… As far as I know, yes. If there are different versions of the 15, I’m sure we bought whatever was the top dollar, which would be the Pro. Rummage rummage rummage… What are you looking for now? The iPhone boxes. I looked it up ON my phone. Yes, it is a 15 Pro. To be fair, he did not look it up himself because his phone was tied up in a backup, which I did not know. But why didn’t he *tell* me what was going on and ask me to look it up on *my* identical phone instead of rummaging for empty boxes? I do not know.

And. What ever happened about that police station that got shot up in Sault Ste. Siberia last year? (Or was it two years ago?) This question came out of nowhere and I have no clue. I don’t routinely follow local Siberian news (maybe I should?). The “droven ins” (my parents’ name for police blotter and that would be a blahg entry for another day) in the old paper version of the Sault newspaper used to be fun. People got arrested for P-ing in public and fighting and other stuff and were always “lodged” in the Chippewa County jail.

Other than that I replayed a work meeting from last week a couple times and, well, people were yammering away in accented English from different countries (including the American English of a couple of us!), plus technical jargon from various years throughout our product’s history. I get the overall arc of our project but the details remain elusive. I miss the Long Suffering Cat Herding Person and Amazon Woman in these moments as they could kinda “MAKE IT STOP!” (so we could slowly sort out the complexities) better than I can. But we’ll get there and now I think I can articulate some questions. Maybe.

I have a huge mishmash of other stuff in my brain but it’s mostly political crapola and I don’t trust myself to write about it tonight. Or maybe ever🤪

First pic is where he selected this year’s batch of pumpkins. It was a beautiful day if a bit (or more than a bit) past peak fall color and we were rattling around somewhere southwest of Saline (pronounced Suh-LEEN, not SAY-leen), a small satellite city south of The Planet Ann Arbor. A mini-mission on our excursion was to buy some pumpkins and this pretty little self-serve stand totally fit the bill. Glad Doc Pumpkinstein had cash ’cause KW certainly didn’t.

Here he is “performing zee cloning”. (Say it in the worst fake German accent you can muster.)

Four new pumpkinheads are born.

Out for delivery.

Delivery 1.

Delivery 2.

This photo would not win any awards but I like how it turned out. It was a quick-before-the-light-changes point-and-shoot out Cygnus’s passenger side window. The GG was driving and we were waiting to make a right turn and I couldn’t very well ask him to back up to get the sign outta the pic because (hello) there was a car or two or three behind us.

I like the colors, although they are not vivid. I like the bare tree. Most of the trees in my neighborhood, a couple blocks away, are still leafy. I don’t know much about trees but they are oaks and I believe they keep their leaves longer than other trees, although they are certainly coming down. I even like the sign. Sometimes I think pieces of, well, “infrastructure” enhance photos of natural phenomena. Not sure I can adequately ‘splain what’s in my head.

What to watch on the boob tube tonight? We’ve been watching Joe Pera but the last time we tried, it was a struggle to control which episode it would play. After much futzing, the GG thinks it may be an Amazon login issue. Don’t ask. It defies description. I actually think many of the streaming services need to hire “meeee”. I mean they need to hire a business systems analyst. Business analysts do all kinds of things. I have a young cousin who is a business analyst and her job does not look like mine one iota🤣 What I do is user experience design for a web application. For some of these streaming services the user experience totally sucks. I want to be able to start watching a series and have the interface automatically queue up the next episode for the next time I watch it. Unless I WANT to change it. Like last week I dozed off during an episode of Bad Monkey and wanted to re-watch it the next night.

Anyway, if we can’t figure out where we are in Joe Pera, we have a couple other options. One is the Umich-MooU football game. If we can find it on TV. I probably won’t watch that, just bask in the ambience of football on TV. The other is Svengoolie, which I love but the last time we watched that, it was riddled with long strings of commercials every 10 minutes or so.

Actually it was pumpkin cake but it turned into banana cake but somehow I misheard pumpkin as Trumpkin. I wonder why…

My hearing is acute but I was struggling to hear anything at dinner at The Session Room (“Sessions”) tonight. “Process” is probably a better word than “hear”. People were interrupting each other and not always clearly enunciating words and at times it felt like I was listening to about a hundred Trumps reverberating about the room. That is NOT to DIS Sessions. It is one of my favorite restaurants on The Planet Ann Arbor. But it is Friday and tomorrow is the Umich/Moo-U game here on The Planet and the place was slammed, which I knew it would be. It is a pretty big place and so can accommodate the numbers but it was loud.

Tonight was a restart (of sorts) of our pre-covid Old Town Friday night dinners of porterization, just not at the Old Town (“Oscar Tango” or “OT” to locals). They texted to ask if we wanted to meet at Sessions. I have been wanting to dip back into dining out. I mean on a regular basis. I have been dining out throughout and “since” covid, just not frequently. (A reminder that covid is NOT over but it isn’t randomly killing people at anywhere near the rate it did before it mutated into a milder disease.) I thought about it for 10 minutes or so and then texted back, “That could work”. I was glad Sessions was the proposed choice because as much as I love the OT, it is a smaller restaurant and gets very crowded on a football weekend. I am not ready for that yet.

So how did I do? Fine. Except. When it was time to gooooo, it was time to go. And I don’t mean go to the water closet. I mean go HOME! I did need the water closet but Sessions is about a five minute drive from home and I had no problem getting to Eco-Terlet in time. Always an introvert, the covid years have made me discover how much alone time I need, particularly in the evening when I need to decompress for an hour or so before bed.

Sessions is interesting in that for many years, including my entire time on The Planet Ann Arbor up until maybe the last 10 years or so, the building was a nondescript brick machine shop. Since it’s on Jackson Road, I drove by it umpteen bazillion times, often noticing it but not thinking much about it. I’m not sure why the machine shop closed (or moved?) or who had the vision to buy the building and turn it into a brewpub but whoever it was did a beautiful renovation. The pic is the glass block window next to my seat. I’m trying but failing to remember if the old machine shop had glass blocks for windows.

In this case, “ping” is short for pee-ing. Outside. Something I have done my whole life, mostly but not always with aplomb. Embiggen to see what’s on the mug.

First off, I have also had access to indoor plumbing my whole life, just not in the summers of my childhood and early adulthood. I have blahgged about this before (a few times or more🐽) but I spent my very early childhood summers at the Old Cabin. The moomincabin aka the “other cabin” (I *love* my very young emerging talker first cousin twice removed’s name for the moomin) was not yet built. There was cold water in the kitchen sink via a garden hose and an outhouse.

It’s hard to describe this but there was a heavy wooden door between the kitchen and living room and when it was wide open, which it was most of the time, it hid a lot of things behind it. Clothing hanging on the back of the door and little kids pee-ing in a potty in there. The summer I was three and my brother was about to be born, The Commander was trying very hard to get me to go to the outhouse instead of using the potty. But moom, the outhouse is stinky.

Once she tried to shame me with “there are MEN in the living room so you can’t use the potty.” I looked around the room. There was my dad and my Dear Uncle Harry and my uncle Dcuk… And Lewie… My dad and uncles, “man’s men” that they were, were well accustomed to the potty (as long as they didn’t have to empty it) but Lewie was a bachelor friend of theirs and I’m sure Lewie was who The Comm was referring to when she said “MEN” are there…

Anyway, I can use outhouses and I can pee outdoors without a problem. Woods pee is almost always easy. Urban pee is a bit more difficult because you can be arrested for indecent exposure. But I have done it, usually in the the small woodsy parks that dot The Planet Ann Arbor and always looking carefully in every direction for interlopers and voyeurs. And sometimes, even if you are an experienced female outdoor pee-er, dribbling happens. TMI?

My uber-smart daughter (they are both smart but this is the older one) gifted me with a pee cloth. If I have it right (and I may not), it absorbs “liquid” in such a way that if you can’t hide in a copse to woods-pee, you can just, um, go in the pee cloth. I haven’t used it yet but I will.

Update: The pee cloth is Kula Cloth and you don’t pee *into* it!

The first pic is one of my all-time faves. It wasn’t taken on my first-born’s birthday. That was today and I won’t tell you how old she is but when I turned her age, my parents sent me a card in which my father wrote “Unhappy Birthday”. He was not actually wishing me an unhappy birthday just wishing himself younger.

An alternate title for this photo might be “Mooooo”. It is meeee (in the striped bikini), Radical Betty, Baby Liz, and The Commander walking out into the water at the moominbeach. Note that the wee one was hanging on to me by one finger. That’s how much she trusted me, I guess. Once, a relative did not recognize me upon seeing this pic. Whose finger is Liz hanging on to? It wasn’t because of the bikini although I haven’t worn one for umpteen bazillion years (back in the day I probably owned five or six bikinis at a time, all hanging on the clothesline strung across the back of the partition between the living room and bedrooms at the moomincabin). It was because they couldn’t figger out who that “dark” skinned person was. Well. It was meeee. I used to use what limited time the SUN shone down on our beautiful yooperland beach to get tan and my purportedly fair northern European skin does in fact tan nicely. I don’t do that any more mainly because I stopped caring a long time ago.

My birthday girl started out today by taking her coffee over to the neighboring park. After a run and a shower, she and her partner walked downtown where they met up with the GG for lunch at the Oscar Tango and then toured some of the local museums, including the newest incarnation of the “dinosaur museum”, which opened shortly before covid hit. I haven’t been there yet but I am not a huge museum fan plus I fear I might miss the “old” dinosaur museum, the one I visited throughout my and my children’s childhoods.

We took gifts (Dyson vacuum cleaner and a couple other things) and ‘hattan makings over to their house, then headed down to The Earle for dinner. She has never been to the Earle before!!! In response to that statement, I told her that we couldn’t afford the Earle when she was young 🤣

I didn’t include a recent picture of the birthday girl today except for the coffee in the park pic that she sent me. She is beautiful and looks a lot younger than her age.

I was hanging around in the back room watching a TV show. I think it was Hill Street Blues. Oops, I think that was a contraction. A meaningful one. I won’t report all the gory details but by morning, our family had grown from two to three. It was an easy journey.

If you know me or have been of my reglear nucular taggers (aka blahg readers) you might know that I am rabidly against Trump but I live with a pro-Trump (or at least pro-MAGA) person.

I have lived with this person for umpteen bazillion years. He is a wonderful person. He was (and is) a fantastic father. I love his family. He gets along with all of my relatives and takes care of the moomincabin and when The Commander was in her later years, he took care of her better than I did.

Anyway, I’m not sure the GG and I were *ever* totally aligned in terms of politics, but we never really argued about it much until Trump.

I’ve been listening to a show that NPR airs on WCMU (which I get at the moomincabin on Sunday mornings). It’s called “Left Right and Center” and participants from different points of view cover political issues politely. I’ve been streaming it since we returned to the Landfill and yesterday they talked about (among other things) a couple who were totally opposed (like the GG and I are) about Trump and Harris. This couple somehow found a news/commentary source called Tangle that looks at things from both sides and in between. You get opinions from the left, right, and center and then you get the website’s owner’s own point of view, which is clearly labeled as his own opinion and seems balanced. When the site happens to post mis/dis-information or errors, they disclaim it right at the top of the page.

Tangle did not dissuade either of these people from their political positions but it did dissuade the husband from his mistaken belief that the 2020 election was stolen. I do not think the GG will try to follow Tangle or, if he does, it might not change his opinions on anything.

There are a lot of married couples out there who are totally opposed about Trump and Harris. I don’t really understand why Trump appeals to anyone but I am resigned to the fact that I have to live with one of those people. And some of his relatives. The married couple listening to Tangle that Left Right and Center interviewed seemed to be kind of coming together a bit although I bet he will still vote for Trump. Not sure there’ll be any coming together here but I think I like Tangle and its approach so I’m giving it a try. If anything it may give me some insight into where the “right” is coming from. Er, not that I am on the “left” exactly…. I prefer to call myself a pragmatist.

Yes, there is a new Matlock series! It stars Kathy Bates. I love Kathy Bates. I heard about this on the radio (National Petroleum Radio, (don’t ask)).

So when I started writing this, I thought the new Matlock was a “reboot” of the old series from the 1980s-1990s? Apparently it’s not (but?) What I heard on NPR the other day seemed to make it sound like that. But I was probably working and not listening closely.

I didn’t watch the old Matlock at all. Looking at the years it was on, I was in the throes of raising young children. Our TV was more often tuned in to things like Mr. Raj (Rogers) and Sesame Street, although one kid was NOT entranced by “those silly guys” aka Bert and Ernie. This was waaaay before they came out so it didn’t have anything to do with that. And then they were getting to be tweens and there was Clarissa Explains It All (which I greatly enjoyed) and then, I dunno, Nick at Nite and I’m probably forgetting a whole bunch of stuff. Then again I was watching things like 30-something, Dallas, and Dynasty. Yes, really.

A thing I don’t remember about the old Matlock? That Andy Griffith played Matlock.

A thing I do remember about the old Matlock? There was a Detroit Free Press columnist back in the day that I enjoyed reading. He was an older guy named Jim(?) Fitzgerald. The name is interesting because he was somehow related to the person the Edmund Fitzgerald freighter was named after. You know, the one that sunk and Gordon Lightfoot wrote a song about it?

His column was not usually *serious* in that it was mostly slices of his life as a retired reporter. What I remember is when he wrote about walking (in Detroit) past a man sitting next to the sidewalk drinking out of a bottle in a paper bag. The paper bag bottle drinker looked up at him and said, “Lookin’ like Matlock.” I dunno why this cracked me up so much but I still remember it all these years later and it still cracks me up🤪 Sorry.

Doing some googling, I feel like the “jury” is out on whether the Kathy Bates series is a reboot of the Andy Griffith series. I dunno but I think I might have to watch both of them (the Andy Griffith Matlock is available on Netflix or somewhere) and try to come to my own conclusion.

Love y’all, KW.

So COVID kicked my natural introvert tendencies into high gear and I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with having a lot of Alone Time. Which I do this weekend as the GG is outta dodge.

I will always be introverted but I was happy to receive a text from a beach urchin this morning wondering if I wanted company. And yes. Yes, I did. I always love to be with my adult daughters but they are both VERY busy and the last thing I would ever want to do is to take away any of their down time to hang out with me.

But okay! C’mon over and have a beer. And yes she did. We are having an extended bit of bonus summer here so we sat in the back yard. Did we talk about MAGA? Of course we did. How could we not? But we are on the same side of that issue and don’t understand what the f*ck people see in Trump. “The economy”? Whut? People who talk about how well he does with “the economy” are not remembering the havoc the covid virus wreaked upon “the economy”. Trump totally mishandled the covid pandemic and doesn’t have a clue about “the economy”. To be fair, I don’t think anyone could have handled that crisis. But Trump was probably the worst president to be in “power” at that time.

What else did we talk about? TV and books for one thing. There is a second season of Silo out (sci-fi stuff)! I am watching Bad Monkey (Florida crime stuff based on a book by Carl Hiaasen) by myself and Joe Pera (again) with the GG. Joe is a quirky yooperland guy explaining life, the universe and everything. I will be watching season 2 of Silo. I don’t think the GG would be all that interested in Silo. He might like Bad Monkey. We’ll talk about books another day but Jane Smiley was an author of interest in my backyard today.

A prism in our front window made the rainbow colors on one of our dining chairs when I walked into the front living room tonight. I figure there was about a 10 second interval for those colors to show up and I caught it and somehow managed to fumble my phone camera open to capture the pic.

I mean, I can play clips of Trump rambling aimlessly too but when I am hearing them from another room and know that the person/people playing the clip are all rah rah about him and his likely second idiocracy? I could NOT focus this morning. The GG? “She’s supposed to be working but she’s doing the xword.” Yeah, that’s because I can’t tune you MAGAts out. Plus you are jumping around in a frenetic way and I can NEVER concentrate when that is going on. At least the UU dragged the empty garbage cart up before he left. Thanks!!!

So are identical twins rare? I’m not sure “rare” is the word I would use but they are certainly rarer than singletons. I have always been fascinated by multiple births. I think I first encountered this topic reading about the Dionne quintuplets (identical) as a kid. I’m not sure what the highest number of multiple children have been born from a single pregnancy is. Was it “octo mom’s” eight? Or have there been women who’ve birthed more? I’m too lazy to look it up. (Nonuplets. I looked it up. Or is it decuplets…)

Recently I realized that my Instagram feed was getting filled with moms of triplets, etc. This was getting annoying. I mean, I have probably clicked on a few of these posts over the years. Like I said above, multiple births *are* interesting to me. (There is a set of triplets in my extended family and I have been married to an ID twin for umpteen bazillion years.) But it was getting to the point where multiple births were like every other post and they were all people I do NOT follow. I idly complained about this to a beach urchin and she showed me how I could mute all of that stuff. On social media, I really only want to see posts from people/entities I have made a conscious choice to follow.

So, how well do I get along with the UU’s wife (my sister-in-law via my husband’s twin)? We are friends and kindred spirits. We are not alike in a lot of ways but we *are* alike in other ways. Some of the ways we are alike are very subtle and when we first knew each other I would never have guessed we had those traits in common. I’m not gonna list any of those things because 1) it’s nobody’s business and 2) she may not agree with all of it, which is okay. We all look at things through different lenses. But I love and admire her and love having her in my life.

Can I tell the twins apart? Oh yes. When I occasionally have difficulty, it’s when I’m not LOOKING at a twin. And even then, at least after all these years, there are subtle differences in their voices and choice of words, etc.

Babies born to a parent with an ID twin? Hmmm, once we helped the UU move house. In the late evening after a long day, the UU and I went out for a beer at a bar. We left my daughter (a year old or thereabouts) with the GG (her DAD!). She didn’t have fluent words yet but complained BITTERLY the entire time we were out at the bar. Over and over the GG tried to explain that he was her DAD. She wasn’t having it😵‍💫