This is not what the Back Room looks like right now. The boxes are in the Landfill Dungeon. I will be ecstatic when they go OUT the door but at this point it isn’t really my prodject.

The GG spent the morning wrangling FlaMan and the afternoon helping the UU and his young grandson remove unwanted items from his son’s house (not the father of this particular grandson). I’m sure they had a grand old time loading up yet another trailer and it was GREAT for the GG to spend some time with his great-nephew. But the whole thing made me a bit taaared just thinking about it. At this point in time, if I had my druthers I would hire somebody to move or dispose of whatever.

My preference at the moment would be Schlepper’s Haulaway. He’s a local guy who went to high school with MMCB₂‘s son and she has also hired him and given him great kudos, which he also gets on good old next door neighbor. What I particularly like is that he tries to dispose of things thoughtfully. Instead of just dumping everything off at the landfill, he tries to find new homes for valuable/useful things. I’m gonna guess he makes a little cash selling stuff and that would be okay with me. This is not a commercial. Just my own thought processes.

Yer gonna hear about embryos anyway because I somehow got revved up. I don’t understand all of the science behind IVF but I am kinda standing here agog about the Alabama supreme court’s decision. Do any of these people understand anything about “science” and did they think this through? Probably not.

I mean “science” is a BIG TOPIC and I sure don’t understand it all but if I were an elected official of any sort, when faced with an issue like this, I would definitely consult people who have dedicated their careers studying the related branches of science before I cast my vote or even express an opinion. Alas I don’t think any of these folks give a crap about science even though it SHOULD drive decisions like this one. Not to mention the excruciatingly difficult individual decisions so many families make when they aren’t capable of easily conceiving and/or birthing healthy children. This is scary for our country not to mention mankind.

Disclaimer: I was not a person who had trouble conceiving or giving birth. Ready, aim, faaar, baby. Was I ready? Ha ha ha. I had to be. But I have empathy for others. My mother included, although that was way earlier than IVF technology. I was her first-born 11 years after she was married (at 22, WWII bride) and my [late, alas] brother a few years later.

Braving covid again, I met up with the rest of the local fam down at the Griz. They went on to a concert at The Ark. I came home. I almost always fade in the mid-to-late afternoon and I did so today. I perked up for dinner (salmon BLT, half of which is now in the landfill refrigimatator) but I knew I wouldn’t last through a concert. I am not a big fan of concerts anyway. I have always been much happier being involved in the works of staged performances than watching them. A player when I was an active musician. A jill-of-all-trades as a play production manager. I would sneak into the back of the auditorium to watch my kids on stage then get moving again. On to whatever I needed to attend to next.

I haven’t driven *to* downtown a whole lot since before covid, except the farmers market. There are weird bike lanes where there didn’t used to be and many of the long-time one-way streets are now two-way. It’s okay. I managed. They’ve also changed the parking lots and the one by the Griz is now plastic card only. Which I am ecstatic about. But. For whatever reason, if I can’t just tap my card, I am forever putting my card in backwards or sometimes upside down. This is not really an issue at Meijer but I think they need to install some sort of little LED light above the credit card slot because leaving in the dark, for the life of me, I could not see the graphic that showed which way to put the card in. And couldn’t remember how I did it when I entered the parking lot. (You put your card in when you enter and then the same card upon exit.)

But I did it. The GG had walked down and he actually offered to MEET me outside the restaurant to “help” me park. I actually thought about that for a split second and then decided to hell with it. I can handle this. And I did. And then ALMOST turned into the goddamn bike lane that didn’t used to be there…

I do think about all the years I used to shop downtown ALL THE TIME. I had my fave parking lots. The lot by the Griz. The Library Lot. Palio’s lot. Sometimes Kline’s. I knew the funky pattern of one-way streets like the back of my hand. I will learn this new stuff too. I am a fan of parking apps, etc. Except when they don’t work and they sometimes don’t and when they don’t I don’t have quarters hanging around in my console any more. Assuming the parking meters even take quarters these days.

Enough gibberish. G’night!

It woke me up just after 6:00 AM. Actually it didn’t wake me up. I was already awake and trying to jump-start myself outta bed. I thought it was thunder. But I had visited the water closet not a half hour earlier and there is an indoor/outdoor thermometer in there and it proclaimed 22 degrees. A little too cold for thundersnow. Plus, it wasn’t snowing. Starry skies.

After I got up and started looking around on the intertubes… Well, crap. It was (another) house explosion. A mile and some away down on S. Seventh St. I lived on N. Seventh a bazillion years ago.

The good news is NO ONE DIED this time. The sole occupant of the house (an “elderly” man) was taken to the horspittal with non-life-threatening injuries. I heard “burn unit” on the radio at one point but your mileage may vary with news stories and random social media scuttlebutt.

What seems to be pretty clear is that his natural gas connection had been shut off a while back (maybe water too) and he was heating his house with propane. I think *most* people on The Planet Ann Arbor heat with natural gas through DTE Energy. Propane is more likely to be used in the rural areas where DTE doesn’t have infrastructure butcha never know. The details about what actually happened are unclear but it doesn’t sound like a meth cooking incident (which came up on next-door-neighbor right away). My totally uneducated guess based on other folks’ social media speculation is his gas got turned off and he couldn’t pay and was too proud to reach out for help. I think DTE and other organizations have programs to help people who can’t pay their utility bills. But he did a DIY fix.

We “heat” with propane at the moomincabin but we do not have central heat there. It’s just a little stove that takes the edge off in the yooperland shoulder seasons or on cold summer days. It is turned off throughout the winter. Our propane tank is well away from the moomin and Amerigas (our cabin propane provider) is proactive about checking the tank and the stove and all the connections and replaces the tank periodically.

Breaking news: this morning’s victim apparently had *two* propane tanks INDOORS!

There hasn’t been much follow-up news (that I’ve seen) on the house explosion to the north of us back on December 30. It was much farther away but also MUCH louder, although loud isn’t quite the right word. In the end, the house belonged to a grandfather. He was hosting his daughter, son-in-law and their three young adult children from out of town for the holidays. The owner/grandfather is alive and recovering. The mom, dad, and two of their children died. Their youngest child survived. I haven’t heard the exact cause but I believe it was propane related. That’s an area that is likely not within DTE’s natural gas line infrastructure. Sad sad sad.

Today was a gorgeous day and the GG walked downtown via the explosion area and got these pics. He also hit up Kerrytown and brought home lamb stew meat, hanger steaks, and smoked mackerel.

Take care and be careful handling propane gas and any flammables!

A day of picky little chores. Yesterday the GG alerted me to something going on in the water closet, namely tattered bath towels. Yes, I’m aware of that. I think they are even too tattered to take to the Humane Society.

His idea was to go out and physically SHOP for them. And that would’ve been okay albeit stultifyingly boring. But I got to thinking… I do that sometimes. Where on earth would I go to buy towels? The only local bricks and mortar store I could think of that would have high quality cotton towels was Macy’s. Problem? I did NOT want to go to the mall.

My next thought was either LL Bean or Land’s End. Hmmm… I have never been in a bricks and mortar version of either of those stores. I was vaguely aware that we had a Land’s End in town for a while. All Land’s End stores in the SE Great Lake State are permanently closed according to goomaps. There is an LL Bean way on the other side of megalopolis. I was not feeling inclined to head over there today. In other words, I did not really want to go shopping at all.

So let your fingers do the walking. I looked at what Macy’s had. Didn’t have my preferred color. Looked at LL Bean and a couple other mainly on-line shops. Didn’t have my preferred color. Land’s End had teal and bingo, that is my preferred color. The Landfill water closet has white tile, countertop, and walls with a black cabinet and beige floor tile. The main nod to color is the accent tile in the pic, which shows up in a couple locations.

The GG expressed a desire to interact with the towels in person before buying them but I think Land’s End’s cotton towels will be fine and I managed to convince him of that. He actually admitted that he hadn’t thought of looking for towels at LL Bean or Land’s End.

Our shopping landscape has changed since covid. The last time I bought new towels I *did* go to Macy’s and if the clerk hadn’t noticed I was buying a *lot* of towels, I would have bought *12* towels instead of the six I wanted. She was kind of snarky actually but in my defense, the towels were folded together in a kind of a weird way.

I did a few other chores that don’t merit a mention and the GG replaced Cygnus’s veeeendsheeeeld vipers. She still feels new to me but she’s going on three years so surely there is some wear and tear but I also think our January ice storm may have accelerated the damage.

Making chicken shawarma, the Baggy Old American Moom kind (on a sheet pan), and reading The Covenant of Water, which I am enjoying a lot. I also really liked West With Giraffes, which I finished last week or whenever. And Family Family, which may not be everyone’s cup of tea but I liked it.

Here is Mr. Golden Sun setting after 6:00 PM. Today was one of those days when Ma Nature supersedes Old Man Winter to give us a glimpse of the summer to come. Brilliant blue skies under a northbound sun.

We have a long way to go before summer or even spring happens but both of those WILL happen.

Our older beach urchin hiked with the GG and the Chief Noonday chapter of the North Country Trail Association today. I was blissfully alone here at the Landfill and I needed that. This beach urchin came back over for dinner, which was beef stew, garlic bread, and leftover broccoli.

G’night. I am gonna start on season 4 of the Crown.

That’s what today was. I spent a lot of the afternoon listening to LAWYERS streaming from the GG’s lair. I am not sure what the hell they were talking about. Over and over and over and over again I heard, “I don’t remember”. If you are a lawyer it seems you should be able to remember things, right? I am not a lawyer and I remember a LOT of things, sometimes annoyingly so. So you are probably lying.

I am remembering senate hearings about whatever from waaaay long ago. White southern senators kept saying, “Ah don’t recollect”. I was annoyed as all getout. Whaddya mean y’all don’t recollect?

Out of the FIVE (count ’em) lawyers that tried to dig their fingers into The Commander’s stuff, one was a decent lawyer. Two were incompetent (mom hired them but I am guilty of keeping them on). Two were carpetbaggers hired by a former in-law. They lost, as they deserved to. The fifth cleaned the whole mess up. So one out of five was competent and honorable.

The GG FINALLY turned off the non-remember-ers and took a walk. I gave him a mission to get some broccoli. From the Plum. Well. He went to Kroger. It was a MESS over there. The produce was totally picked over and there were long lines at the checkout. He did come home with broccoli and I had to ask, where did you get it? Thankfully, he got it at the Plum, as he was INSTRUCTED to do in the first place. Whew!

The excitement of the day once again involved online banking confuddlement. It involved a new account we set up at the same financial instution that holds my 401K. Of course my 401K is completely separate from any other accounts at that institution. Except not…

There was some name confusion but I won’t go there in order to protect the innocent (not). The thing is that when the GG tried to log in to the account, it didn’t accept his password. In the process of changing it he had to do 2-factor auth (2-factor auth is a GOOD thing albeit annoying). But. The only phone number he was presented with (he thought) was not one he knew. He called out, “hey do you know anything about this phone number ending in [insert 4 digits here]?”

Yes. Yes I do. I started working for [big-fintech-company] in 2007. I was issued a landline. I NEVER used it. Actually that’s not totally true. In the early days I occasionally used it to contact company tech support. Other than that it was used for TWO purposes:

1) Our telephone numbers were very close to the numbers used by the local court system so we would fairly frequently get calls from people asking about their court dates or other issues. I was always politely but quickly dismissive. Sorry, I can’t help you [terse explanation]. W1.5 (over the wall from me) was uber polite and once or twice people tried to make THEIR problem (wrong number) HIS problem.

2) Cubelandia denizens would call each other if we detected that Brooosie was haaaanging around in someone’s cube taaaaallllking in order to rescue the “victim”. I try to be kind to weird people so I tried to politely listen to Brooooosie’s “stuff” when he cornered me. He is a weird guy but a lot of that is because he has a genetic disorder that wasn’t discovered until he was in his late 20s. He was nice, kind, and not creepy, at least not to me, as an old mother by the time I hired on. A younger, more naive woman may have been freaked out but I’ve known lots of weird harmless people in my life and I don’t think I have EVER been naive except maybe about boyfriends. Still. I was always happy when someone “rescued” me from Broooosie’s little rants.

So somehow my company probably ported my work phone number that I never really used over into my 401K account. And somehow it got attached to our other account(s) there.

Problem? I have been a permanent telecommuter since you-know-when. i dunno what’s going on at our old building now but all of our old landline phones are definitely long gone.

In the end, faced with 2-factor auth choices again, we discovered a small link under the “bad” phone number. “more options” or something. Clicking on that, voila, there were our iPhone numbers. All is well now.

Other than that, it has been a fugly day featuring a couple hours of snow (that more or less melted) and high enough winds that “stuff” was falling on the roof. Nothing worrying. In other words, a fairly typical winter day.

P.S. I didn’t steal the pic from the internet. It was an actual (hacked) sign on The Planet Ann Arbor back in 2011.

This year’s “Valentimes” Day card features robots. Aren’t they cute? I also received an exquisite “Be mine” necklace 🤣, a fancy dark chocolate bar, and a dollar bill. I’m rich! I reciprocated with a box of Kilwin’s chocolates and a special limited edition bag of Roos Roast (local coffee brewer) *Bourbon* Butter Love coffee beans. Utility coffee for me is Roos Roast *Lobster* Butter Love but the GG buys good old 8-o’clock Coffee when he is over at Kroger supplying himself and FlaMan with provisions.

I mostly don’t have bad memories of grade school Valentine parties. I don’t remember not getting a full box of Valentine cards. I don’t remember (or even know) if other kids were shorted or not. I *definitely* put one in every other kid’s box. The Commander would have killed me otherwise. I do remember being very careful about which card I gave to who. Will Nancy be offended if I give her a card with a bubble bath on it? I hope Steve doesn’t misinterpret my card to mean I like him like him. (’cause I don’t, even though Steve likes me likes me. (And my moom was not one of his fans, cue up Leader of the Pack… (But I was in FIRST GRADE…)))

In first grade, I somehow missed that I was supposed to decorate a shoebox for collecting cards until the 11th hour. I was my parents’ first child and maybe The Comm didn’t know either. I was totally freaked out and had a big tantrum but my moom came to the rescue with some fancy white tissue paper with purple flowers on it and doilies and I fergit what else. I was terrified that my box wasn’t RED, which for some reason I thought was one of the “rules” for Valentine boxes. My mom was quite artistic and she made a beautiful box for me and wouldn’t you know, the teacher GUSHED over the white/purple box and even called over some other nearby teachers to look at it. (Thank you mom)

Last but definitely not least, today is my lovely (late) mother-in-law’s birthday. She would be 99. Here she is on a bote in the Detroit River. That’s a Royal Canadian Mounted Police vee-hickle parked behind so they must have been hanging out on the Canadian side. Best mother-in-law ever. Well, only mother-in-law for me but honestly why would I have wanted to divorce the GG when I’d already won the mother-in-law roulette. Ten children, nineteen grandchildren and I’m not gonna count great-grandchildren tonight 🐸

Today’s “excitement” involved a knock-down drag-out fight with my 401K login. Why? Because someone (not me) muffed the password. The GG does have login credentials for my 401K, which is okay except for the time he muffed the 2-factor auth number enough times that they locked “us” out and I had to CALL them to straighten it all out. I was STRONGLY LECTURED about letting “someone else” have access to my account. Um, it is the guy I’ve been married to for umpteen bazillion years and YES HE CAN HAVE ACCESS TO MY DAMN ACCOUNT! Jeebus.

Woodpeckers are much more interesting. Comments to yesterday’s bird blahg mentioned woodpeckers pecking on chimneys, etc. Well. I know about that, oh boy oh boy oh boy. Back in the day when the beach urchins were munchkins, for a couple of years (in season) a flicker decided it would be a good idea to peck on our METAL fireplace chimney. Every day. At 6:00 AM.

This sound reverberated throughout the entire Landfill, startling the heck out of anyone who wasn’t familiar with it and some of us who were. It scared the beejeezus outta the beach urchins until the GG trained a spotting scope on it and was able to convince them that the horrible metallic drilling sound was coming from a BIRD.

That was in an era when The Commander and Grandroobly would fairly frequently drive down to visit and shop, etc. They slept on a fold-out couch in the same room as the fireplace. The first time they visited during the Woodpecker Era, I warned them that they would be awakened by the bird at 6:00 the next morning. “Oh it won’t wake us up,” said The Comm. “Oh yes, moom, the woodpecker WILL WAKE YOU UP!” And it did.

I think there’s a (crappy) pic of that flicker somewhere but it is down in the dungeon in the mess of old film photographs and I’m not gonna knock myself out today. Instead you get this LOVERLY photo of seagulls taking off from the beach on Long Boat Key. I got this by sneaking up with my iPhone cam in burst mode. This was 2017 and burst mode was simply holding down the button (I think). Nowadays you have to slide right or left or whatever and I am not impressed.

P.S. Peckerwood was one of my old coot’s “pet” names for The Commander late in their lives. I can only guess how he came up with that one and why she tolerated it 🤣

I heard what I thought was a Carolina wren this morning. We have birds around all winter including (I think) Carolina wrens but they don’t really SING much until February. Cheep cheep cheep, etc. is what we hear in the winter. This morning’s wren was not in full operatic mode but it was song rather than noise. A little after this, the GG identified a Carolina wren at the back feeder so I was not wrong. Yay for me!

Later in the day, a bird with an ORANGE breast visited “my” feeder. I was wowed by the color but couldn’t identify it. So I called in the GG. It had moved around where he couldn’t see it well but he made the wild guess that it was a Baltimore oriole. We get those but apparently it is way early. I dunno. I looked it up but I am no expert. It did look somewhat similar to the iBird pic but I didn’t get a good enough look at it to even begin to match it.

I am using iBird Pro and Merlin Bird ID on my phone. I bought iBird when I had my first iPhone back in 2007 but had to resurrect my subscription to it. I got Merlin Bird ID last summer when I was hanging out on the moomindeck and heard a very unfamiliar bird. UKW and Lizard Breath pointed me to Merlin and it was some kind of cuckoo! I am still not good at identifying MOST birds via sight or song.

Late in The Commander’s life we helped her obtain an iPhone. Her friend Barb (from down the beach) had an iPhone with iBird on it and my mother commanded that she wanted “bird” too. Okay moom, you’ve got it🤣 This phone was a godsend for the most part because she learned how to TEXT in her late 80s. This was much easier than phone conversations at that point. One problem with the *phone* part of the iPhone was that the GG initially set her ringtone to match an old-fashioned telephone. Brrrinnnng! Since she still had a landline at that time, she couldn’t always figure out which phone was ringing.

I searched through my photos using the simple term “bird”. Birds are hard to photograph if you are not PATIENT (which I am not although much more so than I used to be). So I couldn’t find the right kind of bird pic. A wildlife photographer I will never be. I did find this old pic. So okay I will tell multiple stories today. I think this is my third already.

SAY6BIRD ANDHOUSE. I remember this felt board so well. It was soooo cool with letters and shapes. My kids probably would’ve liked it but you can’t save everything (and we do have The Bumper Book). I was trying to remember if I was five or six when this pic was taken but then I upped the light levels a bit and I saw a little “6” between SAY and BIRD. I’m not sure why that “6” is there but I think this was on or around my sixth birthday, which happened in January of first grade. I had reading pretty much totally decoded by then.

The GG this afternoon: Going to hike SW of Gaylord and then come home for the Super Bowl with you. I’ll bet you are excited. (Well something like that.)

Oddly, I am not a football fan but I like the ambience of football and WEIRDLY tonight I actually have been watching and kinda get how it works. I used to know, at least the system of “downs” but lost track at some point. At this particular moment, the game is not over yet. It’s in OT. That could end any time.

We were kinda loosely “rooting” for SanFran. No particular reason really. Our daughter did live out there for six years but she’s been back here for many years now and she isn’t a particular football fan. We don’t have any kind of connection with Kansas City at all and I am nonplussed about the whole Swiftie thing. The GG did some weird kind of head calculation that made a Niners win somehow make up for the Lions? I don’t totally understand it.

OMG the ads! I could not follow them. A lot of the time, I couldn’t figure out when one ad ended and the next one started. What are you promoting? Put your company name or url out there please.

I was (again) lamenting that they don’t do a marching band halftime. I’m not sure that the NFL ever did do marching band halftimes but I am totally not crazy about pop music. But then, wait a minute, is that a guy in a marching band uniform playing a tuba back there? There was a quick nod to marching band shows, although this band did not really march. It more or less danced.

I was reading a really good book when the game was starting (West With Giraffes) and didn’t want to put it down but couldn’t focus between getting dinner ready (skillet chicken with lemon, feta, and orzo, etc.) so I’ll have to squeeze that in over lunch tomorrow.

Plum Market early, then a little recon mission down by the farmers market to scout out a new parking situation for when “they” close my fave lot sometime this spring so “they” can build some sort of big “affordable” housing thingy.

Then, when Cost Plus World Warehouse opened at 10 I took a little drive out there. I have some wire mesh drawer organizers that I *thought* I bought there many years ago. Last weekend I was cleaning out one of my junk drawers, the one that holds fancy little utensils for serving stuff like smoked salmon and goat cheese, etc. It was a horrible mess but there was *one* little mesh thingy in there and I decided getting a couple more would help. I got on the internet… And didn’t really find what I was looking for. Alas, Cost Plus didn’t have such a thing. Thinking about it some more, I wondered if I’d actually gotten them at Bed Bath and Beyond, which I don’t think has a bricks and mortar store here any more (although they are online). I doubled down on my search terms and found what I was looking for on good old Amazon.

Affordable housing. Of course I am for affordable housing. Who isn’t? I am not sure my city is approaching it thoughtfully. It seems like most of the new (tall) buildings downtown are real estate developer driven. Since when do developers care about anything besides enriching their own pockets? Oh yeah, we’ll put some affordable units in our upscale apartment building. Um, where are you going to put them, in the dungeon? Also why does big tall apartment buildings downtown seem to be the only option? I’m not sure all the folks seeking housing WANT to live in big apartment buildings.

There are a lot of people yammering away about affordable housing but to me it feels like the city is relentlessly trying to fill up downtown with big buildings. Once it was office space, now it is residential. The writing was on the wall long ago when they razed the Sunshine Bakery and built a big glass and steel behemoth in its space. The Sunshine Bakery was a small approachable store. Is there a store or bar or restaurant on the ground floor of the big glass/steel behemoth? I couldn’t tell you but it is not a welcoming space. The old wannabe hippie in me is missing the old Sunshine Bakery (even though I don’t think I ever patronized it).

DISCLAIMER: I do NOT know all of the issues surrounding the affordable housing problem and it IS a problem. I certainly don’t know all the answers. I just don’t think we should let real estate developers drive the solutions. But lots of unfinished thoughts here.

First of all, it broke 60 degrees here again today and this photo was taken by my mouse, who did not have to work today, so she and the racc went kayaking! I think this is the Huron River.

Me? I have been ANNOYED ALL DAY at listening to crapola about elderly men who confuse names! The first I heard this was in Cygnus on the way to and from the hardware store! Yes. I went to the hardware store today. Woo-hoo! The main thing on my list was a new white Rubbermaid dish pan since my current one is stained (tomato sauce). I had another couple of things on my list but our otherwise loverly Ace store didn’t have exactly what I wanted. So more shopping this weekend maybe!

Anyway. I don’t have a lot of steam for polly-tickle stuff tonight. My ducks are not in a row. But I strongly suspect that most elected officials end up with classified documents in their garage or wherever. The question is do they surrender them willingly, allowing officials to search their property? Or do they cling to them for dear life, ranting and raving about witch hunts?

I know all kinds of people of ALL AGES who confuse names and dates and any manner of data items, especially when they are in the heat of the moment speechifying about something or other to an audience. Radical Betty remembered my grandmother (as a young mother) running through all of her four childrens’ names plus the dog before landing on the culprit she was after at the moment. I try to sit on my hands or stick a sock in my mouth so as not to correct people. Because I am pretty precise but I do make mistakes. I am human. I err.

I think that comparing an 81-year-old to a 77-year-old is kind of pointless. I don’t think either one of them has dementia. Biden is a life-long stutterer. I think people forget that. Trump just spews whatever word salad comes into his fugly orange head in whatever moment he’s in. Nobody ever seems to even notice that.

The title? That was Radical Betty’s late in life substitution for “tornado”. Both The Commander and Radical in their sunset years would sometimes substitute words. They couldn’t necessarily pull out the precise word in the moment but they were able to make themselves understood. The “tornado” thing was (I think) on a Petoskey boondoggle, me driving them and mouse and UKW in my Honda Accord. The Commander, on that same trip, referred to their friend Cam’s Second Head of Hair. Which was a wig. When we got home that evening, The Comm concocted “gin” margaritas. I’m sure there were many other times when Mom and Betty could easily pull “tornado” and “wig” out when needed.

I wish for younger leaders for our country. But (again) I don’t know who can beat The Orange Baboon besides Biden and I do not trust the Orange Baboon. He was terrible during his first term and I believe he will be worse if he wins a second. He has learned that nothing will happen to him if he pulls the “old Trump bullshit”. Ask his biographer.

I will be voting for Biden without holding my nose.

Disclaimer: this photo is NOT from today. It is from sometime in Feb 2008! It was 60 degrees here today. We fairly often have temperatures in that range here in the winter although they usually don’t stick around for long.

Okay, so I walked outta work at the end of that day to a totally iced up car. The dogha was a 2001 top-dollar Honda (dogha = Dirty Old Green Honda Accord). Great car (V6 vroom), up there in my top three, but it didn’t have remote pre-heat functionality. If I wanted to pre-heat the dogha, I had to go outside, get IN the vee-hickle, start the ignition and turn everything (heat and defroggers) up to high. That was okay in the Landfill driveway, which is in a very low crime area (knock on wood) and I can easily see what’s going on in the driveway from the front living room and kitchen. Also, I was usually outside too, shoveling snow. At Cubelandia I didn’t pre-heat my car although it would probably have been safe there too since it was in the remotest part of a backwater business park with no traffic unless you want to count water birds and things.

Fortunately I am well equipped with ice scrapers and experienced at using them after spending a lifetime in the Great Lake State and childhood in the yooperland. So I don’t remember this at all but what the heck, it is a common enough occurrence that I knew the drill. Get in the car, start it up, put everything up to high, make sure not to lock your keys in the car, grab your ice scraper, and START CHISELING.

By the time I got out to the main road (South State north toward Ellsworth if you know Ann Arbor), my veeeendsheeeld looked like this. Yes, I can see. I don’t remember if the ROADS were slippery that day. I’m sure they were iffy but not total sheets of ice. There are times when your vee-hickle can be totally encased in ice (like the dogha was) but the roads are kinda okay. Looking at the long line of traffic I had to sit in (and I was *obviously* sitting because I took a photoooo), I’m guessing people were taking it easy. But also, the notorious State/Ellsworth roundabout had not been built yet. Before the roundabout, traffic on S. State was often backed up like that at that time of day even when the pavement was bone dry and the sun was out. The dogha and I just chugged slowly along in zen mode.

Of course we eventually acquired cars that can be remotely pre-heated. That’s all fine but Cygnus (our newest) limits pre-heat to two five minute periods. After that I can’t pre-heat her again. It isn’t always enough time to de-ice zee veeeendsheeeld enough to avoid using a scraper. I am not a climate-change denier but c’mon, we live in the Great White North and we don’t really have to egregiously idle all that often even in the winter. Most winters, anyway. Your mileage may vary.

Since the future of teleCublandia arrived, I have not had to deal with winter driving conditions, at least not to get to work.

My usual disclaimer is that covid isn’t over but even us covid-cowardly introverts are slowly working our way back into public life. I am still not ready for jam-packed restaurants at high traffic times but I do manage to get out at least a bit.

This pic of our beloved (but expensive) Earle restaurant serves two purposes. One is just to show how empty it is. This restaurant is a basement venue, lined with bricks and corks and exposed plumbing here and there, nicely painted up. There is live music in a quiet, jazzy type way. I forgot what the other purpose was. I guess it was just that it is a beautiful space.

I took this pic is as we were leaving our (wine cork-lined) booth after a recent dinner there. It was a Tuesday night and pretty quiet for the duration. I’m not sure there was *anyone* besides us around at this time which is just as we were leaving.

We’d had snow that morning. Being a moom, I was worried about my more than capable adult daughter driving back from a conference an hour or so away. By the time she had to drive, the snow had quit and it was all melting. Driving downtown here was a piece of cake but there was a lot of water running around down there and we had to cross a “moat” to get to and from the restaurant. We won’t talk about our companions, who left an important tool for exiting the parking lot in the restaurant and had to RE-cross the moat to get back to the restaurant to retrieve it, not to mention jump through a whole other bunch of hoops.

Such is winter in the Great Lake State although it was something like 47 this afternoon…

First of all, his wiffe is ecstatic. When he announced that he was doing a load of laundry, his wiffe (meeeee) was banging her head against all of the work prodjects that have been ON HOLD FOREVER but then suddenly kerplunked out of the sky. I had actually been thinking I would do a load of laundry in the morning but when he took that initiative, I was like WOOHOO!

Except… He didn’t put my turtleneck sweaters in the dryer. He hung them up? I ALWAYS put those things in the dryer. They are made of synthetic blend yarns, not wool. They are expensive (Sundance and Coldwater Creek) but they are worth the price. I buy them in black and jewel tones and they do well in the dryer. But whatever. Somebody else is doing a load of laundry and I cannot complain.

A facebook friend posted a pic on facebook of the Soo High band and choir groups back in the day. This facebook friend graduated with one of my cousins and became a good friend of The Commander in her later life.

The facebook photo was from an old Soo High yearbook. I was thinking, my cousin is probably in this photo and yes she was. She was first chair flute if I am processing the picture correctly. At this time in my life I was really young and didn’t understand the concept of first chair flute but I admired her greatly (still do) and totally glommed on to the mechanics of the flute, which I looked up in my handy-dandy Golden Book Encyclopedia.

I emulated my cousin in playing the flute and yes, I sat first chair for a couple years in high school (and in college too). In the long run, my cousin was smart enough to become a nurse, which I think was her calling in life because she is very good at it.

It took me a while longer to find my true calling or at least one that would pay the rent. I’m not sure that business systems analyst was a “job” then. I’m not sure it is one now. But I’m doing it and I think one of the things that makes me good at it is my long ago intensive musical training. I can’t describe that tonight.

The pic shows Mr. Golden Sun a half hour or so before he rose today. We dropped off Moooon Yooonit for service at 0-skunk-30 this morning and this is on our return trip to home. There’s Sessions on the right. A wonderful bar/restaurant.

I have read some gooood booooks already this year. Some years I pick books that sound interesting but for whatever reason they aren’t all that well done. Lacking in character development or maybe plot I guess. DISCLAIMER: I am not qualified to critique books.

Today is probably not a good day to even try a comprehensive booook blaahg since I spent the entire day parsing, diagramming, and writing up an input file format so as to store pieces and parts of it into a data base built for generating files in *another* file format. I wrote a functional specification on the input format and what our product does with these files. I regard that document as my magnum opus at this job. But that was 10 years ago… Fortunately it’s all coming back to me like reuniting with an old friend.

But I did recently finish a book I loved (and couldn’t put down). Greenwood. The subject is trees and the characters are members of a “family” (that is all I will say about that) who, over multiple generations, preserve and/or destroy trees. Douglas firs mainly although maples play lesser but significant roles.

I get the idea that some people are comparing this book to Overstory. I read that book a while back (and loved it). I can’t really compare them except for trees. Greenwood is a little more character-driven (in terms of people, I mean). I didn’t always like the decisions the characters made and I hoped for an alternate ending. But it was a really good ride.

As a FinFam bonus, one of the characters experienced a totally Grinchian incident. I mean my cousin The Mean Old Grunchie Old Grinchie, not The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. All I will say is my Grinch’s outcome was much more positive than the book character’s was.

My iPhone enhanced this photooo with a bit of a greenish tint. I like it. A wee bit of snow around the edges and some sunshine enhancing the grass with a yellow gleam.

It is that time of year when, if Mr. Golden sun is out and I don’t remember to do some dusting before my mouse comes over, she NOTICES it. I thought it was only MOTHERS that were supposed to notice that kind of thing. I mean like MY mother, although she actually either didn’t pay attention or was never here at the time of year this phenomenon happens. Anyway, she didn’t fuss about dust.

Actually, thinking back to when I was a kid, maybe The Commander didn’t always notice dust that much. There was the time when after weeks of eating dinner in our shabby old bungalow’s “dining room”, she suddenly noticed a dead fly stuck in the sheer curtains she favored. The rest of us (including my dad!) cracked up. We had been looking at it forever. She was NOT a bad housekeeper and our house was pretty clean overall. Kitchens and bathrooms MUST be clean. Hers were and so are mine.

I don’t really notice dust until it gets fugly. I do NOT have allergies so although I do have the occasional sneezing fit, it is more of a random thing. Maybe triggered by dust? But probably not.

As luck would have it, Mr. Golden Sun exposed my dust the other day and I thought, “mouse will be here this weekend so I need to dust before she notices it.” I didn’t dust. She noticed it 🤣🤣🤣. I dusted today, at least the front living room surfaces. I didn’t just dust, I WASHED surfaces with a soapy microfiber cloth. And did a bit of de-cluttering in the process.

I just heard Taj Mahal on my Sunday night NPR and he’s cake-walking into town so I think I will end this.

Our January birthday celebration got semi-hosed by covid. We do not celebrate birthdays in any kind of big way anyway so today was finally the day we celebrated. I refused to agree to calling it a birthday celebration. I am done done done with January birthdays for this year. What we celebrated today was the day after Groundhog Day.

Imbolc? That’s the name the google is giving me for the old pagan holiday. Somehow I thought there was another name but okay. Whatever the name is, it is halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. After a complete month of fugly gray skies, it gives me hope that warmer temps will arrive again. Actually warmer temps have arrived already and even warmer ones are on the immediate horizon. This doesn’t mean we’re done with Old Man Winter yet. He is more than capable of throwing snow and ice balls at us for the next couple of months and sometimes even into May. But we are now running down the backside of winter.

I spent the day getting a FinFam Steak dinner into the works for our celebration of day after Groundhog Day. I had the feeling that the GG thought I had overbought filets but there was just enough left for us to have a little leftover night.

A surprise was a care package from our Pengie out in Hawaii. Fran is my mom’s name (Pengie’s grandma) and she found some Fran candy somewhere out in Hawaii. There was a whole box full of goodies, including some salad “hands” that I used immediately to toss this evening’s salad. Pengie is a forensic anthropologist who is employed at working to reunite war victims’ remains with their families. That is all I will say, in part because I don’t know (or necessarily want to know) the details of her job. I do know that her dad (my brother) would be extremely proud of her accomplishments. As we are.

Oh, I don’t mean the orange guy (the one in the pic, not the Orange Baboon). While I was hanging out in teleCubelandia today, I looked out the window just as a Snot Rocket drove by.

What is a Snot Rocket? It is a certain yellow (with an almost greenish tinge) colored Subie Crosstrek. When I was scouting around for a new vee-hickle a few years ago, Crosstreks were not on my radar screen. I was thinking a Honda SUVie-type thing or maybe even a second RAV4. Then one day, I was in a meeting with Amazon Woman and an ORANGE DOODLY arrived in my driveway. I knew my mouse was also looking for a vee-hickle but I didn’t realize she had BOUGHT one.

This loverly vee-hickle totally swiveled my head in the direction of Crosstreks and Cygnus X-1 is the result. During the process of picking one out, my mouse told me NOT to buy the yellow one. In fact, I think it was the Racc who said that if I bought the yellow one, he would call it The Snot Rocket. Although I don’t actually dislike the color in and of itself, being meeeee, I would never buy a yellow vee-hickle. I bought a fancy black color.

My once boss the LSCHP did in fact buy a snot rocket colored vee-hickle. It was a VW Bug convertible and he LOVED the color. And looked quite dapper driving it with the top down. He came back from a lunch excursion and some Black guys in the restaurant parking lot admired his car by saying something like, “That’s a real nice chicken box!” Say what? I didn’t totally understand it but apparently it is a car that might attract pretty women. This cracked all of us up. In truth the LSCHP has a wonderful wife who he is totally devoted to and isn’t looking to pick up women but he took it as a compliment.

So the orange guy in the pic is not emulating the Orange Baboon. He took a long walk today including quite a bit of road walking so he is wearing orange to be visible to vehicular traffic. What is also important about this pic is, dun dun dun. Look at Mr. Golden Sun! Shining down on Groundhog Day. Which of course is exactly halfway through winter. I do not know how many window replacement folks over the years have tried to solicit our business. Nope. I LOOOOVE those windows.