We took Cygnus X-1 in for scheduled maintenance this morning at 0-skunk-30. It fell to me to follow her and the GG in Mooon Yooonit. I haven’t driven Mooon Yooonit in a while and I couldn’t really remember how to work her radio. So, all right, I will listen to right wing crazy crapola for the 5-10 minutes it takes to get to the Subie dealer. I might learn something?

Immigration was on the agenda this morning and people were ranting and raving about “open borders”. Folks, we don’t HAVE open borders. I don’t really understand that term. We do have rules and regs for immigration. Ask me about the times *I*, a WASPy type person who grew up on the Canadian border have been GRILLED about why I’m crossing the damn border. Because I own property on the American side and wanted to go shopping on the Canadian side? Jeebus.

They aren’t really talking about the Canadian border though. They are talking about the “southern” border. On that border, we have physical walls to keep people out. I’m sorry but Mexico did NOT pay for them. They pre-existed the Orange Baboon and I don’t THINK he did much to enhance them. But yes, people who are trying to escape desperate situations are going to try to cross borders. Which are not really open but people will try to cross them anyway and sometimes they are successful.

I dunno if I can write coherently about this tonight. I regard immigration as an EXTREMELY complex issue and I doubt that many of our elected officials have the answers or even understand the issues. I sure don’t. My ancestors were immigrants, WASPy folks from the British Isles mainly. The branch of the fam I know the most about (dad’s paternal line) were barrel makers from northern Scotland and moved to Canananada in the mid/late 1800s. They didn’t have to scale a wall to get here, just traverse the Atlantic Ocean in whatever boat they were on. Luckily they made it here safely. If they hadn’t I guess I wouldn’t be a tax paying citizen of the United States of America.

A lot of the folks who are trying to enter our country are trying to escape very difficult situations, violence or extreme poverty or whatever. I don’t think my WASPy ancestors were escaping any of those things. They were just trying to make a better life for themselves. Which they did! Why can’t those of us who have benefited so much from our own immigrant ancestors help those who are trying to do the same kind of thing? Is it just a skin color issue? For some people I think it is. Such a superficial trait to use to divide people. Ugh.

In bird feeder news, I had a few birds today. I also had a squoil try to get to my bird feeder from the roof. The GG missed all of that excitement because he was yapping with various brothers on his phone. He did see a downy woodpecker go after the backyard suet feeder. I’ve seen downy woodpeckers before out my front window. Maybe I also need a suet feeder. Apparently some of our birds are also feeding off the xmas duck carcass, which is still haaaaanging around.

Oh yeah, the pic. Those are peanut butter jars I cleaned up for the GG to put North Country Trail blue paint into for blazing trees.

I dropped my Great Lake State presidential primary ballot off in the bin at Vet’s Park at 0-skunk-30 Monday morning. This morning (Wednesday) I received an email verifying that my ballot was received, my signature was verified, and it will be processed by a team of BIPARTISAN Michigan voters who are carefully trained to process ballots. I personally know a few poll-workers here and in other states and know how seriously they take their jobs.

I was very focused on voting for Biden. Is he the best candidate? Probably there is someone out there better but I am clinging to the thought that he is our best bet for defeating the Orange Baboon. I keep hearing (on the news or whatever) that various groups are disgruntled with Biden because he hasn’t done “enough” for “them”. I have very complicated thoughts about the folks who are struggling in our country (that’s real) and whether the president alone can help them. But I think a second OB presidency could potentially be disastrous and Biden’s job is to stave that off. I don’t think the bad orange man is based in any kind of reality except maybe the reality that serves himself. My opinion has not changed since long before he sought the presidency. Dictator for a day? Is that just typical “Trump Bullshit” (as he has been known to say, ask his biographer) or would he try? I think he would. And maybe try to extend it… … … Not what my WWII warrior ancestors (dad, uncles, father-in-law) would want. Not at all.

The thing is I was so focused on filling in the little box for Biden (with my black pen) that I didn’t really pay attention to who else was on the Democratic primary ballot. I did see Marianne Williamson. I would never vote for her but I, uh, kinda like her. And two other options. Where was RFK junior? Was he on there? I couldn’t remember so I looked up the ballot and no he was not on it. I googled and he is apparently running as an independent. I would never vote for him. My parents were not Kennedy fans so there’s that lingering childhood legacy but this guy seems just as nutty as the OB albeit maybe a bit less dangerous.

Himself seemed a little put out that HEEEEE did not get mail from the city to ask if he wanted to automatically receive ballot applications. Well. MAAAAYBEE it’s because in the 2020 election, he pooh-poohed voting absentee as being subject to fraud so he didn’t apply for a ballot that year and they didn’t SEND HIM this mailing. Even though he HAS voted absentee before because we are often outta town if there is an August election. Voter fraud does happen but it rarely results in the numbers required to change an election. I love him ANYWAY!

’nuffa that. Follow-ups: 1) To Pam re little brown birds: we are definitely getting finches at our bird feeder. I can’t identify them (yet) but The Pensioner thinks he saw a weaver finch and a purple finch. And I thought I heard him say goldfinches at the back feeders. 2) To Margaret, I got duck breast at the Earle last night. I don’t think duck is Margaret’s fave but I like it and we grill it at home a lot but not very recently.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t been to The Earle since before COVID. It has always been a beloved restaurant but as a “kid” (young adult) it wasn’t really in the budget. And then “kids” have kids and although I’m gonna guess the Earle is friendly to young children, it isn’t really the best place to take them at least not if you want to have a bit of “adult” space. If that makes any sense.

We did take Lizard Breath out to “nice” restaurants when she was very small. Once we took her with us to [the long gone] Mountain Jack’s. It was my birthday, she was three months old and she slept quietly on the booth seat next to me. As we were getting ready to leave, she started waking up and was mesmerized by all of the older folks cooing at her as they realized we had a BABY with us. “I didn’t know there was a baby there.” “She’s beautiful.” “She’s so small, was she premature?” Nope, a week early is not a preemie and she WAS small but at six pounds 3 and 3/4 ounces (birth weight), not TOO small. Very healthy, alert, easy-going baby.

I braved covid tonight to celebrate a birthday of porterization. Our friends of porterization and I share January birthdays. They like to go out to restaurants to celebrate. I prefer to celebrate at home with my kids et al but I support our friends’ restaurant adventures. Alas, this January most birthday celebrations were hosed for one reason or other. Our friends had unexpected family issues to deal with and my own small celebration was LOVELY but missing a couple of people because of f*cking covid. Make it go away already!

There was one January birthday of Porterization left to celebrate. It was today, so we hit up the Earle tonight and it was wonderful as always. And that’s about all I have tonight. You don’t really wanna know about file parsing. It’s just what’s next on my plate for work…

And it is a shame because the Liii-yuns have been the underdogs for so many years. I’m sorry they lost but I am not gonna armchair quarterback it, as if I *could* armchair quarterback a football game, knowing as little as I do about the game.

I do have to say I was a whole helluva lot more upset when the Orange Baboon won the 2016 election. Even though I got up and went to work that morning, I am STILL upset about that contest’s outcome. I don’t have to live with a less than happy outcome of a football game day after day after day. But the OB is STILL in my face, even after LOSING in 2020 (and YES, he DID lose), ranting and raving incoherently in ALL CAPS! Groundhog Day anyone?

Let’s move on to household hints. How many times have you wondered from 30,000 feet (or even from the grocery store), “Did I turn off the stove?” I rarely do it from 30,000 feet because I am not crazy about flying but I definitely do it from the grocery store. One of the beach urchins has devised this method, which, amazingly, I have never thought of. YOU TAKE A PHOTO OF THE STOVE (TURNED OFF) WITH YOUR IPHONE. This wasn’t possible until digital cameras. If you tried to do this with a film cam, you would have to wait until you finished the roll and got it developed to find out if you had left the stove on. At which time it would be too late. Still, I’ve had a digital cam since the Sony Mavica and I’m kinda surprised I haven’t thought of this before.

I didn’t really do very well with film cameras in general. The nadir was when I was a young mother and obtained a sleek little camera that would advance the film automatically. I was on the moominbeach once and I took a picture and my dad and brother both panicked that I might run down the battery if I didn’t shut the camera off. Well. Reacting to their freakout, I shut the camera off immediately. BEFORE IT HAD ADVANCED TO THE NEXT PICTURE. Jeebus… What were they so freaked out about? If I had let the cam advance like it was supposed to do and THEN forgot to shut it down, how bad could it be? My battery would’ve died and I’d’ve learned a hard lesson. But not one that would’ve broken the bank. Reacting to their panic may have broken the bank because it also broke the camera. I didn’t ever get that one fixed.

Photo credit to mouse and this is the stove at the group home at Hoton Lake. She and the Racc tried to ski/hike up there last weekend. The trails sucked. The ski ranch had to close because of conditions and hiking involved post-holing.

So here we go again. The GG *forced* (well, strongly encouraged) me to pose for a Liii-yuns fan pic to send to the cFam text group. Other people in the fam were dressed up in Liii-yuns gear. I do not own any Liii-yuns gear so I’m in my usual evening chill-out tie-dye. He did hand me an actual lion to hold from our huge menagerie. That was fine but I chose to hold Frooooggy too. Actually this is Frogette. I think Froooggy is buried somewhere on the Teal Couch aka teleCubelandia. (P.S. I did not name Frogette. A North Country Trail member’s grandchild did. Works for me.)

It rained ALL NIGHT here, turning to snow after 7:00 AM or so. Fortunately not a lot of snow. I hit up the Plum a wee bit later than usual, partly to drop off some mail, and the roads were fine. As I was checking out, my fave employee was leaving her lair and the uScan person heard me yell her name. He said, “I’ll go find her.” And he did. I made a special effort to thank him for his extra good service today.

I was worried about the weather because the other beach urchin was traveling to a conference (or something) today. Only an hour or so away but I am a mom and I ALWAYS worry about my children driving in potentially difficult situations even though they are good drivers and grew up in this sometimes god-forsaken state. This has intensified given my own recent near accident in snow conditions.

As it turned out, the snow QUIT (as predicted) at around noon, well before my ADULT kid had to drive. There was maybe a half inch of slushy stuff on the sidewalks and driveways. The neighbor across the street shoveled his. I did not. An hour later, our pavement was the same, which was wet but not slippery. I have since figgered out that he may have shoveled because they have company tonight (I’m gonna guess Liii-yuns game party). Even though the “company” arrived in a big honkin’ pickup truck. Don’t get me wrong. These are long-time neighbors. When we moved in, it was his MOTHER’s house. They are WONDERFUL and I love them.

The GG was down in southern Ohio for some hiking. He thought he might stay another couple days but the hiking was muddy as all getout and the Liii-yuns are playing tonight so he came home early, stopping at the Neil Armstrong Museum in Wapakoneta along the way. I’m glad he did that without me. When I was a child, my WWII pilot dad took us to enough flight museums to last me (and my children) the rest of our lives. Mainly the Smithsonian museum in DC and the one at Wright Patterson AFB in Ohio.

So for now the Liii-yuns are ahead but it’s early in the game. I will not really watch but I’ll have to listen to exclamations throughout. “No!” “Yay!” “Shit!” “Ohhh-oh!” “Errrrrggg…” And whatever. As the game goes up and down. We won’t talk about the ads or the “yodeling” of the National Anthem.

Here’s a view of Cygnus (and me) you won’t see very often. I almost exclusively drive Cygnus and I am almost always alone. This is a good thing because she doesn’t get too filled up with junk. Gone are the days when I would find things like petrified happy meal burgers and other detritus in my vee-hickles. The worst thing right now is that the floor mats are crusted with dirt and road salt but that’s a function of our recent weather. The Pensioner will clean them up eventually. The light on the dash is on because I intentionally turned off the function that beeps at me when I go out of lane. When I go out of lane, there is a DARN good reason.

Today the city mouse and I had a fun wee errand to run (more later) and we took Cygnus. Later on she texted this pic that I had no clue she was taking. I was confused at first because we were in a multi-thread text thing with the country mouse AND the country mouse had driven down from the group home at Hoton Lake. Oriole’s (her Crosstrek) interior is also black (exterior is orange though and she has a stick shift) and I was thinking maybe the Racc had taken this? But… The country mouse doesn’t have FROG GLUBS, does she? Nope. Wait! Those are myyyyy glubs. Ain’t they cute?

As for the rest of the outfit. Red turtleneck, black polar fleece vest (with zip pockets for my phone, fob, and a couple plastic cards – I don’t need no stinkin’ purse). Plaid cashmere scarf and that looks like pants but it is a skirt draping in a funny kind of way.

Obviously nothing exciting is happening around here. NO Little Brown Birds (or any birds) came to my feeder today, at least not that I saw. Little Brown Birds made a surprising appearance in the book I’m reading though! Song of the Lark (Willa Cather). It didn’t seem to be used facetiously like how the modern bird community uses it. I am on the very fringes of that community, meaning I lurk on a local birder email list serve.

I am enjoying Willa Cather. I think My Antonia was the first Cather book that I crossed paths with recently. It is the third in a “trilogy” although the books do not follow the same set of characters and can be read in any order. Being somewhat “anal”, I decided to start with the “first” and read through to My Antonia.

Y’all do know how hard it is to get a good pic of a bird at a birdfeeder even when it is less than two feet away from you on the other side of a window, roight? Especially with an iPhone although I find the camera to be good in general. But I didn’t really try.

What kind of bird is it? Why, it is obviously a Little Brown Bird 🤣🤣🤣 Roight? Wren? Sparrow? I do not know. I was just happy to see visitors at the feeder. After some early action, I haven’t been seeing many birds at all. I’m not sure what it takes for them to discover and become regular visitors at a feeder. I did see a chickadee (a bird I CAN recognize) once or twice today but could not get a pic.

In other positive nature news… One of the beach urchins always sends me a small vase of flowers for my bday. This is a welcome bit of color in the middle of January. This year’s flowers came in a package that included a wee bit of chocolate and… A live plant… Well, as some people know, I am death to plants. House, garden, everything but weeds (and we’ll talk about the definition of a weed some other time).

My face must have shown some sign of distress because the beach urchin offered to adopt my new houseplant. I said something like, “Lemme keep it around just for a bit and we’ll see how it does.” So I put it on the ledge by the window next to teleCubelandia (below where the bird feeder is). Two days ago I noticed it looked a little wilted. Sigh. I’m doing it again. But then. Hmmm… My water glass is right here… I tipped a wee bit of water into my new plant and lo and behold, a few hours later she was all perked up and happy. I will keep trying with my new little plant 🧡🧡🧡

The pic is from this morning. The slushplow came by yesterday afternoon. Alas, Cygnus was parked in the street at that time. The GG had taken Mooon Yooonit up to FlaMan’s place and Mooon Yooonit is ALWAYS at the TOP of the driveway. So KW can get Cygnus out, y’know. Mooon Yooonit is also fine to drive (as long as I don’t take her to the laundromat 🤣) but Cygnus is my gal. I do let the GG take her out for a spin from time to time.

Anyway, I couldn’t get out there in time to move her so they had to go around her, leaving a bunch of slush surrounding her. And that was okay. It certainly wasn’t anything she couldn’t navigate and (knock on wood) the temps are supposed to stay in the upper 30s or thereabouts for a while. The slushplow came by again this afternoon and this time Cygnus was not in the street so more of that stuff got cleaned up. But there’s still some there and I had the fun of dragging the garbage/recycle carts across the slush at the end of the driveway this afternoon.

It has been foggy for two or three days now with no end in sight. I LOVE the fog but I don’t love missing the full moon.

I am not organized enough tonight to do a decent boooook blaaaahg. Among other things, I am reading Willa Cather. She flew by me a while back in a random way and then an NPR post was talking about who people (commenters on something I guess) were reading said something, “Willa Cather? Really”? Apparently a lot of people are reading Willa Cather. I thought, “Did I ever read anything by Willa Cather?” I read Sister Carrie. Oh, KW, Sister Carrie was not written by Willa Cather. Duh. Anyway, don’t start reading Willa Cather just yet. I like it but I have nuanced thoughts about some of it. Not that I could necessarily articulate them coherently.

What I will say is that I have been watching “The Crown”. And having a good time with it. This surprises me because I am not an Anglophile. But I am still in the early years of Elizabeth II (before I was born mostly) and I wonder how I will do when we get to the Diana era. Or even if I will make to that era. All of that stuff annoyed me to no end. And yet I understand the issues the younger “royals” had/have to deal with.

Two pieces of mail went missing. The first piece was a Metropark vee-hickle sticker. It arrived successfully but it wasn’t addressed to me. I notified the person it WAS addressed to and they said they would pick it up “Saturday”. THAT Saturday was January 13 and by that time, that person had covid (despite continual vigilant attention to protection against giving/getting that disease).

Covid is over (this bout for this person anyway) and yesterday I was asked, “Can I pick up the Metropark sticker after work?” Well, YES. I mean, you can come over here ANYTIME (except when you have covid). But. WAIT. Where IS the Metropark sticker? It was no longer on the table where it had been sitting for the last 10 days or so. I rummaged around like crazy. I could not find it. The last place to look was in the recycle cart outside the door in the snowy/icy driveway and it was getting dark. I said I would look for it when Mr. Golden Sun came up (if not OUT) in the morning.

And so I did. I wrestled the cart onto its side. There is not a lot in it this week (a good thing) so everything was down at the bottom (a bad thing). Because I couldn’t reach anything without tipping the cart completely over and into the slushy muckity-muck on the driveway… So… I grabbed a pair of long BBQ tongs and after a lot of stretching and rummaging, VOILA! There it was! All I can think of is it must have gotten mixed up with the newspaper somehow.

The second piece of mail was my application to receive a ballot for the primary election later in the month in February. I dropped it in the Stadium Post Office slot INSIDE the building early the morning of January 12. BEFORE it started snowing/raining/sleeting/whatever. With another piece of mail that DID get to its destination. A whole week later I got an email notification from the city clerk’s office that they hadn’t received my application yet. Hmmm. I decided to wait and see if it came… It didn’t. This morning, I went out to the website and printed a new application. I was just about to fill it out and put it in an envelope to mail (again) when… DING DING DING! AN EMAIL ARRIVED SAYING “YOUR BALLOT HAS BEEN SENT!” Yaaaay! I don’t have to tell anyone who I’m gonna vote for, do I? 🤣🤣🤣

Mail has been particularly flaky since we’ve experienced our recent bouts of winter weather.

The pic is from last night and it was FOGGY, not snowing. The temps were just a weeeee bit above freezing (36 maybe?) but we did not get snow and it has rained all day although not hard enough to clear out some of the snow. Our street is a frickin’ MESS. Wish I had thought to get a pic of that before the plows came through. Winter in the Great Lake State.

Okay. Jeebus. The Ann Arbor Public Schools board of education has passed a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and Israel. I have tried in vain to google the exact language of the resolution and cannot easily find it. It must be out there. Try if you care.

Oh come on now folks. We elected you to run the SCHOOL DISTRICT, ROIGHT? We know you care about international politics. We (your voters) do too. As a WASPy Great Lake State yooperland-type person who isn’t much of a historian, I don’t totally understand all of what’s going on. I do ABHOR violent conflicts between people, especially when civilians (or any human beings) end up being “collateral damage”. But at this time of my life, I do not expect anything different. (We won’t talk about the orange baboon tonight.)

I am well aware that the local public school board can be a spring-board for those with political aspirations. On the other hand, there are also local citizens who are sincerely interested in trying to run the schools and have no interest in going beyond. I am a longtime friend of one of those citizens and she’s one of the gals I meet with every week on FaceTime. She is a “mensch” to use a word she once called me. After one term on the school board, she declined to run again.

The woman behind the school board resolution is Palestinian. She is the president of the school board. She probably has friends and relatives in Palestine. Again, I don’t really understand all of the issues here but I feel her pain. But her role on our LOCAL school board is to MANAGE OUR LOCAL SCHOOLS, not opine about very complicated international affairs.

I have NEVER had political aspirations but I did do a lot of treasurer positions in PTO orgs and other small school-related organizations. I love to count and sort money, use Excel to keep track of it all, and balance the books. I am also good at transparently providing budget info to whoever asks. Being a prez or vice-prez? I am NOT GOOD AT THAT. And I am not INTERESTED in it. You are happy about that.

So “they” keep enticing us with forecasts of much warmer weather. But. Apparently we have to endure more frickin’ snow and FREEZING RAIN before we get to the higher temperatures. IF we ever do…

So at the end of today, I was in the kitch and given the potential for freezing rain tonight, the GG said something like, “Maybe I shouldda gotten the generator out and going today.” Our generator is a portable. You have to schlep it up from the Landfill Dungeon and take it outside before you plug it in. The idea of me trying to deal with it when he’s out of town terrifies me. If you don’t hook these things up correctly, they can kill you.

Anyway, I said something like, “Oh that would’ve been a good idea…” To be fair, if we DO need the generator tonight, I have confidence that he will be able to trouble-shoot any issues and get it going PDQ. Ask me about the OIL furnace in the Moldy Old cFam Cabin (before the GG and his siblings razed it and replaced it with a modern house). We would get there and the furnace would not turn on and if he couldn’t get it to turn on, he would call the furnace guys and they would LAUGH. And MAYBE they would be able to find the right part… I’m pretty sure they were familiar with The Gumper (GG’s dad), like what does he want now? Beloved mechanical engineer par excellence.

Our generator can power the furnace (the most important thing) and the fridge. It can definitely charge our laptops and phones and wifi and LED twinkle lights. It’s almost like luxury camping. And our water heater is gas-powered so we don’t ever lose hot water in lucky-shuckial power outages.

For now freezing rain has not happened YET and The Landfill is fully powered. For now.

Old pic, not an ice storm, too warm. Plain old rain.

I wasn’t watching although I checked the score occasionally. I was cooking and reading and procrastinating about chores. I did run Roooomba. Book blahg soon, I think.

As I have said umpteen bazillion times, I like the ambience of having football on TV although I am rarely in the same room with it. (I was for UMich’s last game and I even kinda watched it.) Some of the things I don’t like about football on TV are:

1) Walking into the kitchen and seeing a blowgun aimed sorta toward the kitch. It was actually aimed at a target to the right (from the back room) of the kitchen pass-thru but still. If I am anywhere near a blowgun, I prefer it to be aimed DECISIVELY in the opposite direction from me. I don’t trust those things. I still remember the time it missed a target and slow-shattered the back doorwall. I mean it WAS aimed in the opposite direction from me but…

2) Repeated activation of a xmas “novelty” gift that plays an annoying song. Jingle Bells I think. At least it isn’t in the Water Closet any more🐽

3) Getting all excited because a bunch of the more neanderthal Liii-yuns fans apparently chanted “F*ck Joe Biden” for a long period of time and calling your twin brother to ask if HE had encountered the same phenomenon. No, apparently twinnie was watching a different channel. Yer fav-o-rite blahgger lobbed a half-hearted and CHILDISH “F*ck the orange baboon” from the kitchen. No one was listening🤣🤣🤣

P.S. I dunno who these guys in this crappy TV shot are, just that they are wearing “Honolulu Blue”. Maybe “Ice Blue” would be a better color for a Great Lake State team?

This morning’s grock run was a piece of cake with clear roads, NO TRAFFIC, and Mr. Golden Sun, as you can see!

As a bonus, I got to talk to my grock worker and one of her co-workers for a bit. I have always been friendly with grock workers. I mean, I am also friendly TO them. All of them, but I have a special affinity for the cashiers and other front of house folks.

I worked as a cashier when I was young. It was a job I was good at and LOVED but I got paid doodly-squat. It didn’t really matter (to me) because my parents were paying most of my bills at that point in my life. I do not know how someone who worked at my Tempo store fed, clothed, and sheltered themselves and their children on what we were paid if that was their only source of income. I think my grock store pays a bit better than that but no retail store pays what its employees are worth.

I was checking out today and I thoughtlessly lifted my re-usable bag off the scale before I put anything into it, which set off the uScan “alarm”. The lovely young person handling the guest counter came over to clear my musheen (and approve the age-limited item I was purchasing). It was VERY cold this morning and we were talking and she said sometimes they have to close “my” uscan (I use the same uScan all the time) and the one across from it because wind sometimes opens the adjacent automatic doors and it gets COLD. I so remember working as a cashier at Tempo during my xmas vacations from college and with all of the people coming in and out, how COLD it got working a cash register.

Okay, so we got an inch or so of snow overnight. It wasn’t slippery, at least not for walking. I got it into my head that I NEEDED to make salmon piccata tonight. I did not have a lemon. Or capers. Or orzo, which is my pasta of choice for salmon piccata.

The Plum Market is literally a few blocks away. I don’t like to snow-drive but I can DO it and how hard can it be? The roads were not particularly good but they were navigable for PEOPLE WHO WERE NOT SPEEDING. And I was certainly not.

I crept up to a stop sign and went to hang a louie onto a main road. I patiently waited for three vee-hickles coming from the left. No other traffic was in sight from that direction. Looking right, I saw one vee-hickle a couple blocks away. Okay. I turned. Almost immediately, honking ensued. In my rear-view mirror I saw a car going SIDEWAYS behind me! It made it over to the left of me. For a couple really scary seconds, it veered toward me. I moved over to the right and then, MIRACULOUSLY, the driver corrected and their vee-hickle went straight.

I made it to the Plum unscathed, I stopped shaking after a bit, and we’re having salmon piccata tonight.

So. What happened here? I strongly believe that this person was going faster than the 35 mph speed limit on this road. A lot of people do. But. I also think I misjudged their speed. I think if I had sat at that stop sign even two seconds longer, I’d not have made that turn.

In my driving career, I have had ONE accident that caused significant damage to a vee-hickle I was driving. I was 17 and it was my grandmother’s car (she had relinquished her keys) and it was on glare ice and an oncoming driver came left of center and smashed into me. No one was hurt, thank the gods and it was ruled to be the other driver’s fault.

The (kinda) hilarious part is it happened directly in front of one of Sault Ste. Siberia’s funeral homes. My PARENTS drove by and saw the smashed-up vee-hickles in the funeral home parking lot. Did my grandmother have an accident in that same location and is that why she gave up her keys? I can’t quiiiiite remember.

Be safe out there. I [re]learned a lesson or two today.

I’m mostly posting this pic because I like it. It is Hipstamatic apped like crazy but it’s a set of filters I like.

It is from 12 years ago when I was luxury camping at my mother’s house while she was in the horspittal dealing with c.diff. I had no clue what c.diff was before some of mom’s friends called me and said basically but politely, “Getchyer ass up here.” The last time I had talked to her she was ranting and raving COHERENTLY about Rick Santorum. Remember him?

Well. I had never heard of c.diff but I did get my ass up there. The hoosegow dealt with c.diff kind of willy-nilly as near as I could figure out. At first we had to suit up in gowns and masks and caps and booties. But then we didn’t. One nurse closed the room door. Others did not. A nurse also talked to us about spores. That kind of freaked us out but we never got c.diff, probably because we were not, well look up how c.diff is transmitted. I don’t think we were in great danger and we kind of laughed about the spores. It is largely a hospital acquired disease and that is really unacceptable…

All that said, I suited up and walked down Prospect Street every morning to spend the day with my moom in the hoosegow. I packed my backpack with two laptops (work and personal). I strapped YakTraks onto my boots. My phone was zipped into my left pocket. A couple of plastic cards and a bit of cash in my right pocket. My uncle and aunt and cousins once lived in a beautiful house on Prospect Street and I passed that house every day. It’s on the right but you can’t see it in the pic and they had long moved out of that house and my aunt and uncle were dead.

This particular morning, I could see the sunrise sorta. I posted this pic on facebook (12 years ago) and someone asked why the sun was rising in the northeast. Well. It wasn’t rising in the northeast. I was walking down the ESCARPMENT and the sunrise colors were peeking out under the cloud cover. If you walk along the top of the escarpment in Sault Ste. Siberia that is where you can see the sunrise if it is visible at all.

Sometimes this person does co-work with me in my house, usually when HER house AND work lose power. We had a lot of that last year. This year KNOCK ON WOOD BIGTIME, not as much. We actually had a bit of a flicker this morning but we have some funky LED light strips in the Landfill Chitchen and they blink a lot so I thought they were just doing their thing. Of more worry (to me), a frickin’ smoke alarm went off a couple times. NO FAAAAR HERE… … …

The reason this person was working over here is because she had ordered some bday flowers for meeee and she knew we were going out to lunch and it was cold. The flower delivery folks usually try to drop the flowers off with neighbors but our neighbors are not ALWAYS there on weekdays, so she brought her work laptop over here to watch for the delivery. As it turns out, the flowers were delivered just as the GG and I were leaving for lunch. Our beach urchin would have been very welcome to have lunch with us but she had work meetings.

Yesterday, this co-worker usurped my fancy Couch Table. She wanted to experience the Kayak Woman teleCublandia thing. She’s got her laptop ON the table and is using my Couch Table in a way that I don’t do. I love the table and I use it every day but differently. I put things on the table and use my laptop in my, uh, lap.

At any rate, I missed having a co-worker around today.

We do not have any birds at the teleCublandia bird feeder yet but I did see a squoil eyeballing it this afternoon.

So covid mucked with our NPD plans once again. We do not have it (and weren’t exposed) but other beloveds do. Symptoms are mild but still. Instead of a FinFam steak dinner, we got take-away from TMaz a couple blocks away (Mexican and good and I was actually relieved not to have to cook even though I like to). We had the city mouse and her partner over plus the Uncly Uncle who is visiting from Gaylord. What a fun evening!

Old Man Winter had his own role to play in discombobulating our plans. The original plan was to drive to Albion for lunch at Cascarelli’s. Emich public radio was reporting numerous black ice accidents all over everywhere. The GG didn’t think this would entail a white-knuckle drive but yer fav-o-rite blahgger was not convinced. She suggested our local Grizzly Peak instead and the GG was happy with that plan, which turned out to be a good one. The place was pretty much deserted. We’ll get to Cascarelli’s another day. It’s not that far away.

I celebrated No Politics Day in my own way by 1) giving our Griz server a big tip. But then again, I am always a big tipper. And. 2) I made a decent donation to a beloved land conservancy organization. It owns a preserve adjacent to our beachfront property and I am long overdue in becoming a contributing member although the GG has been doing trail maintenance there for a while. Our names were recognized by the person who processed the transaction and a sweet exchange of email messages ensued.

Because I do not need anything, I chose to celebrate my own personal NPD holiday by “paying it forward”.

This photo may be a bit hard to process. There’s Mr. Golden Sun, who has made NOTICEABLE progress on his northern journey. Then there are some little glass vases and things. The one on the left contains a “preserved” insect who became entrapped in there umpteen years ago. Not visible in the pic.

The thing on the right, OUTSIDE the window, is my new birdfeeder. I guess I’m a pretty hard person to buy gifts for. It’s because I don’t neeeeeed anything. But I was looking out the window from teleCubelandia this morning and after receiving umpteen bazillion bird feeder reports from the country mouse all weekend, lightning struck! Why don’t I have a BIRD FEEDER out MY window? We have one in the back that’s very popular (it gets a lot of squoils too) so I didn’t want to move that one. The GG was ecstatic about this request. He is a relatively serious amateur birder and this also gave him a chance to visit Downtown Home & Garden and later his fave hardware store after he discovered he had bought the wrong bird seed. It’s okay, the sunflower seeds will get used in the back bird feeder. My country mouse knows a lot more about bird species than I do but it’s never too late to learn new things. Or just watch birds.

I haven’t seen a bird yet but birds do hang around in the bushes outside “my” window so I am hopeful.

I was off for MLK Day and am taking tomorrow off for meeee day. What did I do today? Picked up a few grocks, finished my current book (Babel), tinked around with small chores, and made Chex Mix. Yes. We don’t really eat dry cereal these days and I didn’t want to have three boxes of cereal around all year getting stale just so I could compost it all in the fall before I bought new cereal for next year’s Chex Mix. I also didn’t want to repeat the Chex Mix Debacle of 2022 in which I made TWO (count ’em) batches of Chex Mix with sesame sticks that were past their prime. I don’t think I sickened anyone but they tasted AWFUL and it took me and my normally acute sense of taste TWO batches to figure out the problem (I did NOT have covid). The proportions in this batch are not perfect but the GG is noshing on it without complaint. (Sesame sticks and mixed nuts are my two ingredients besides the cereal.)

Other than the bird feeder prodject, the GG kind of slugged around but that’s okay. HE DESERVED A DAY OF SLUG after a weekend of snow driving, hiking with a group in snow conditions, schlepping Quiet Water Symposium crapola from Iggy to The Planet, and arriving home only to have to mitigate Ice Road Asteroid conditions in our driveway, etc. If you embiggen the pic you MAY be able to see our largely dry sidewalk. So three cheers for the GG!

This weekend’s snowfall was not big in terms of inches but it was a challenge.

I wasn’t going anywhere today but when I suited up and went out take a look around, I looked at Cygnus and her veeeendshieeld was covered with what I thought was several inches of snow. Stuck into the “snow” were little branches and twigs. They reminded me of antlers. I reached over to pull one out and… Nothing doing. It was totally frozen in cement-like ice.

So, I CAREFULLY backed Cygnus up to where Mr. Golden Sun would hit her with his full January low single-digit temperature force. At least he was OUT today. He has made only a few feeble appearances in the last few weeks. Anyway, backing Cygnus up was a challenge because I couldn’t see jack doodly, even through the backup cam, which was probably iced over or whatever.

I finally got her positioned in optimum sunlight and left her to idle at 85 degrees with the defroggers on. I left her there for a HALF HOUR. Yes, I know that is a long time and fortunately no one from the Planet Ann Arbor Eco-Police noticed. But guess what? When a half hour was up, I went back out there and zee veeeendshieeeld vipers were STILL STUCK and so were the antlers. Fortunately we have about a bazillion veeeendshieeeeld ice scrapers and one of them was in Cygnus. After hammering away at the ice cement for a while, I was able to dislodge a little. And then some more. And FINALLY a couple big thick slabs and then, VOILA, zee veeeendshieeeld vipers began to vipe zee veeendshieeeeld again!

So all weekend I’ve been thinking, the GG is coming home on Sunday and he’ll get his big yooper musheen out and blow all of this crapola away in like 15 minutes. Alas, this cement-ice stuff isn’t blow-able. He used a DIRT-DIGGING shovel to deal with it.

Not all that much in terms of depth. I was out in a pair of Keen sandals with YakTrax. Tights and Smartwool socks kept my feet warm. A long wool skirt. Balaclava. Balaclava keeps me from having to wear a scarf because it covers my neck. But it also makes me look like a bank robber, although the long wool skirt MIGHT mitigate that somewhat. But if I’m going “shopping”, I usually wear a ski band and scarf. Glubs of course. I find that until the temps hit the single digits, a single pair of those little “50-cent” “KMart” glubs work just fine. Two pairs doubled for single digits and below.

This snow was frickin’ HEAVY. I do not have a Power Tool Type Guy here this weekend so I shoveled the sidewalk with my fave shovel. One I haven’t seen around for a couple years so I hope no one gets rid of it because it’s just my size. I didn’t bother with the driveway. Because I planned ahead (just a bit, I did NOT and DO NOT panic-shop for snowstorms), I didn’t need to go anywhere and if I did, Cygnus can easily handle this snow. The street is not plowed yet and is a MESS so when they do plow, we’ll end up with a big fugly snow pile across the end of the driveway. The Pensioner will make short work of that with the yooperland style blower when he gets back.

A beach urchin was kinda chompin’ at the bit to come over and shovel my driveway but I wasn’t sure her vee-hickle was capable of my street and definitely not my driveway (slight incline). It was quite entertaining to watch the guy across the street try multiple times to get into his driveway (also a slight incline). Taaars were spinning like my beloved Ninja’s taaaars used to do on slight inclines in snow. This across-the-street neighbor is NOT L-of-PNet, who has a big pickup truck. I appreciated my kiddo’s offer nevertheless.

Knock on wood, I still have power despite periods of wind gusts throughout the day. These were nothing like the sustained 20-plus winds we sometimes experience on the shores of gitchee gumee. Somehow we don’t usually lose power up there. Go Cloverland Electric.