It is a Wednesday. It is a dark gray fugly Wednesday. It’s okay, it’s January. We’re used to that. But. Today. The GG hiked to Dexter (10 miles) and I picked him up and he said, “Dooya wanna get lunch?” Well, yes. I have time for lunch. Oh, not that I couldn’t go out to lunch while I was working. It was totally okay and sometimes I did. Heck, years ago, the LSCHP went out to lunch just about every day. But mostly I did not and usually when I did, it was a work function.

And then. After lunch, I asked if the GG wanted to drive the back roads a bit. Well, sure. He was finicky about which roads, turning around on some roads that looked particularly muddy. But then again, he drove down other roads that were equally muddy. I couldn’t tell the difference. At one point I asked if he wanted to run Cygnus through the car wash. He didn’t and anyway that would have required us to deal with Wagner/Jackson Road traffic and Michigan left turns, etc. Not today. Cygnus is dirty but she’s happy.

We went east of the freeway (on a dirt road) for a few minutes until we encountered this train. Or trains. We couldn’t tell exactly what was going on but it seemed like they were connecting/disconnecting two (more more?) trains. So these train cars were not really moving at all until you heard a big BANG as a couple of trains knocked into each other somewhere down the tracks that you couldn’t see. So we turned around and wound our way home. (I dunno what “Guzzy Boys” are.)

Anyway, the point of this boring bunch of blather is that I did some things today! Nothing constructive, at least not more than the usual boring mini-chores. Changing the sheets, washing dishes, dealing with some odd online banking stuff (note to my main bank, don’t change things without providing a CLEAR explanation – you need MEEEE but don’t even think about trying to hire me). Anyway, it was a weekday and I got out and even initiated something (an after-lunch ride). One step at a time. But probably not without a lot of back-sliding.

Love y’all, KW.

This afternoon a beach urchin texted to alert us that the sidewalks were slippery, at least intermittently. Freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw.

I gave her a thumbs up for the alert but I knew that although the GG was talking about a “hike” earlier, he was now engaged in a big fugly prodject (as you can see) and wouldn’t likely be going out any time soon. And he didn’t.

He pulled a whole bunch of bags and boxes out of Moooon Yoooonit and the “coat closet”. You know the one. It’s where you store all your coats and jackets, even the ones you haven’t worn in years. And usually a vacuum cleaner or five, although this one doesn’t have any vacs. They are scattered around the Landfill. What it DOES have are TOOLS. Of every description. Multiples of most. Except chisels. There are multiple chisels but he couldn’t find any of them. Maybe they are in the Lyme Lounge? Which is in storage in the Uncly Uncle’s garage. In Gaylord. A three-four hour drive away. Oh well, he can get reunited with his chisels later.

All of this stuff was pretty disorganized. Like his dad The Gumper used to say, “I’m missing 10% of my stuff all the time. It’s just always a different 10%.”

So the GG pulled everything outta the bags and boxes, sorted it and reorganized it. This was pretty painful to watch but I think it needed to be done so I pulled out the “mantras” I use when dealing with adult children: “Go with the flow” and “stay outta the fray.”

Other than a zoom call with my only remaining MMCB this morning, it was a pretty slodgy day for me. I’ll get over it. I’ve been this way after xmas before, even during regular post-xmas periods with no “drama”. MMCB surprised me a bit (pleasantly) by asking if the GG and I would like to occasionally go out to dinner with her and her husband. She had never asked before because our other coffee buddy and her husband NEVER went out to eat. They were focused on cooking for their family and various guests. So I guess it just seemed a little awkward, which I understand. We don’t go out to eat a whole lot either and usually favor lunching but maybe this will be in my future! Maybe they’ll introduce us to Pacific Rim, which is one of their faves.

P.S. The GG says he actually uses most of these tools… I was like, if you can find them…

I am in the stage of “retirement” that I do not know what day of the week it is. The holidays have not helped with that. The GG came home from hiking trips today and took down xmas or at least most of it. The tree is out. There still seems to be a lot of clutter around but I don’t think it is exactly xmas clutter. The radio (NPR) and TV help with this situation a bit. We watch Andy Griffith on weeknights. He is not there on Saturday or Sunday.

Still. I dunno what I am doing although I may have some secret stuff up my sleeve. Other than that, it was a very boring day. I went to a grocery store and did word puzzles and did minor chores around here. The temperatures are rising and hopefully that means some of the ice in the doggamn driveway will melt. I soooo hate the freeze and thaw cycle.

I do not know what that thing is in the pic. My brain is just not processing it.

G’night. KW.

Try as I might I couldn’t immediately find more pictures of my childhood dog Tigger. This is a pic of Daisy (with Chloe Belle in the background), the most recent family dog to be (alas) put down. Daisy was The Beautiful Gay’s parents’ dog and TBG and the Uncly Uncle grabbed her after their deaths and cared for her until her death.

When I was a kid and had Tigger, a mutt who looked like a small golden retriever but probably had a lot of other crapola in her (no DNA testing then), I wasn’t crazy about what my family called “little yappy dogs.” I grew to know and love these little dogs, who are really not always yappy. Bichon Frises and I’m not sure what Daisy was. We were never sure what Tigger was exactly. [Delete long thoughts about my childhood with a fearless (and beautiful) mutt on the moominbeach where BEARS have been known to run.]

So Dogs I have known, in no particular order and definitely missing a lot… Fury, Tigger, Spot, Laker, Sam, Ernie, Alfred, Bandit, Chloe Belle, Daisy, Lexi, Sniffy(?), Rags (how could I fergit Rags, my grandma’s dog when I was a kid), Mia, Tippy, Buffy, Lacy, Java, Mo or Bo (can’t keep Jeep and Pan’s dogs’ names straight).

I can’t remember the name of my lifelong friend Barb’s golden retriever who knocked The Commander into the water on the beach and also grabbed Velvet the Mouse (a puppet). The Comm was fine. Velvet was a separate incident. I dived down to the beach to separate the dog’s jaws and retrieve Velvet. Barb was a beloved friend and neighbor but she couldn’t really control a big dog at that time and she pretty soon re-homed the dog.

My mouse and the racc came over to cook me dinner tonight. It was loverly. Salmon bowls with miso and rice and lots of veggies. I always have a good time talking to the racc. Hopefully I don’t talk too much. I am an introvert but I can get going. I will say that we are on the same page politically which helps with that.

I can’t say we didn’t talk politics tonight because we did but we also talked about other things including dogs. Well and horses and donkeys because his mom has owned those and she is much more of an aminal person than I am. But I did own a dog as a child. Her name was Tigger. I was terrified of dogs before we got Tigger, even my next door aunt and uncle’s dog Fury, who was not really a scary dog. I just didn’t understand dogs. Boots the cat was kinda scary but cats are cats and Boots did scratch people. Tigger was a stray puppy who landed at my dad’s banker boss’s back door one day. Pauline (boss’s wife) was a dog person and she knew we were looking for a dog and and that’s how we ended up with Tigger.

Me and a bunch of my cousins sat on the wood pile outside the Old Cabin all afternoon the day Tigger was scheduled to come home. It was a long day but eventually my dad arrived with Tigger in tow. She wasn’t named yet and I was terrified of her. She was jumping all over the place at first. Eventually she settled down and went to sleep and somehow I was able to pick her up (UKW helped with that) and I fell soooo in love with her and have never been afraid of dogs again. I wanted to name her something like Blondie (I was *five*) but my aunt Bubs suggested Tigger because she bounced. That stuck and it was a good name for my dog.

Honestly I think I have spent the last hour looking for this picture. I found it earlier tonight. Could I find it again? No I could not. Tag yer pics, KW.

I bought this loverly jacket on a family trip to downhill ski at Steamboat Springs. I rode out there in my uncle’s big something or other (license plate BGY747) with two aunts and uncles and a couple of cousins and a cousin’s wife. My dad drove out there separately with a friend and a couple other cousins met us there from Utah. It was a fun trip but I won’t go into all the details except that my cousin Grinch and I went out to the bars most nights and people really liked us and would buy us drinks and stuff. We were so much older then, we’re younger than that now. Or maybe it’s the reverse.

That ski outfit also had some matching “overalls” and I didn’t really buy it. My dad did. He also bought me a new pair of skis because the ones I took out there broke on a downhill run. Privileged? Yes, at least sorta although we aren’t anywhere near Warren Buffet. But I do try to pay whatever privilege I have forward.

This pic is quite a few years later. I was at Hoton Lake hanging out with the GG. I am not wearing the overalls here because we were x-c skiing and overalls are just too damn hot when you are x-c skiing. Clothing is so different now. I haven’t worn jeans since Calvin Klein changed the form factor. Nowadays we have merino leggings and I have a featherweight merino jacket and base layers are the new bizcaz. And I have totally embraced being a skirt gal.

P.S. My aunt Katie aka The White Tornado was never really much of a ski enthusiast and I don’t remember if she skied at all during that trip. She did clean the hell out of the broiler pan in our rental condo. Probably hadn’t been properly cleaned in years.

Lemme see, they have skied or snow-shoed at Forbush, Beaver Creek, the ski ranch, Hartwick Pines, and the Mason Tract. It didn’t surprise me that the Mason Tract seemed to have been the trickiest/most squirrelly. It is a narrow up and down trail and it doesn’t get groomed for skiing (they were skiing today) except maybe for an occasional volunteer groomer. It follows the south branch of the Au Sable River and has an interesting history if y’all feel like googling “Mason Tract”. One of my main memories of skiing/hiking/whatever the Mason Tract is of watching a huge porcupine scale a tree. It’s a small memory but a good one. These places are all within an easy drive of the Hoton Lake Group Home, which we are always happy to share with younger family members and their friends. The pic is Hartwick Pines, I think. Snowy ski trails all kinda look the same after a while.

I feel like my uncle Austin of RAM fame may have had some involvement in the Mason Tract but I can’t remember why except that I think it is state land, and so would have been under Austin’s purview when he headed the Michigan DNR. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He was more of an owls in the refrigerator guy than a bureaucrat.

Happy New Year! I was surprised by a text message this morning from my former work friend K, a wonderful Indian-American man and development WIZARD. I returned his kindness and assured him that I was FINE! Because I am. I don’t really expect to hear from former work friends. I know that’s not really how it all works, having been on the other side of this for many years. The survivor’s guilt can be crippling in terms of talking to laid-off former co-workers. At least it always was for me. But I really appreciated that text.

Haha, and then LinkedIn sent me some spam that PNC Bank was looking for business systems analysts. This cracked me up on so many levels. A couple of them are: 1) I have a looooong history with PNC (one that pre-dates *PNC* by many years) and it’s still my main bank of quick liquidity and 2) I am not looking for a job. Um, I was gonna retaaaar? I had something else to say but the GG just asked for a refill (he’s watching the Rose Bowl even though we don’t have a dog in this race) and it totally flew outta my head. You’re welcome!

This was a couple of new year’s eves past at Little Cat Z’s house. We were planning to do it again last year but a norovirus canceled that big time. I have been forbidden to talk about that but it *is* my blahg. This year, LCZ and friends are x-c skiing/snow-shoeing at the Hoton Lake Group Home. They seem to be having a great time and I am happy for them.

We are here on the Planet Ann Arbor and there is somebody playing football on TV (OSU maybe?) and it is what it is. We grilled some mini filets and rounded that out with leftover potatoes and gravy and frozen peas and friends. Not a lavish NYE dinner but it worked.

Apparently the Racc made some lemon pigs today so I had to post this pic.

I don’t have much else to say except Happy New Year.

Our skiers traversed Beaver Creek and the ski ranch today. Beaver Creek is “across the street” from RAM, which is a state-run conference center named after The Commander’s brother, aka my uncle “Austin”, which was his middle name and what we called him. He was the director of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources when I was a child/teenager and he was the father of my beloved (alas, late) cousin Teri and grandfather of her daughter Anastasia, who he never met because he died when Teri and I were barely out of our teens. There are big freeway signs pointing out the exits for this place.

He was a naturalist with a phd and The Commander often talked about how he would store OWLS and things in the family refrigerator in their grandparents’ farmhouse where they lived in Garden City when they were kids. (Last I knew there was a fast food restaurant where that house used to be.) Ralph Austin was a few years older than The Comm, Frances Carolyn (they were #2 and #3 out of five children) and I get the idea that he looked out for her, driving her around with his friends, etc., back in the day when 25 cents would fill the gas tank.

She revered him and, as luck would have it, she married a guy he (and everybody in the MacMu family) got along with (aka my dad), a flight instructor in WWII. I’m thinking Austin might have been a flight instructor too? That’s not how my parents met but I think Austin was at their bare bones wedding out in the American southwest. Mom took a train out there and that’s a good story but not tonight. My MacMu grandfather wanted to go too but it didn’t quite work out because war. F*ck war.

Austin married Helen and they had Sally and Teri and they visited the moomincabin every summer AND THEY HAD NO PROBLEM USING THE DAMN OUTHOUSE! They qualified as “cool” aunt and uncle but I had a LOT of cool aunts and uncles. I do remember that Austin witnessed my FinFam uncle Duke and a friend of his illegally fishing at the moominbeach and did NOT turn them in.

I won’t write more about the MacMullan family tonight. I’m kind of laughing because until a few days ago, I had never heard the conference center called RAM. It is his initials but RAM also matches his state government work personality when he had to deal with “difficult elected officials”. Years ago, a Detroit Free Press columnist (Bob Talbot) wondered who Ralph A. MacMullan (of freeway sign fame) was. One of the things his research turned up was that my uncle was one of the few people who could shout down (long dead) Michigan yooperland firebrand senator Joe Mack. RAM!

Photo credit to Little Cat Z.

It’s a wrap. I am out. I am fine although I can’t say it’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done. “Some people” were worried that it wouldn’t be done quickly but after working for Corporate America for 18 years and seeing their systems evolve a lot, I knew it would be quick. And it was. Done.

After I did the deed, I really wanted to go for a ride out in the county again but today was a snow day. The back roads would’ve been fine (it wasn’t really a lot of snow) but getting there with all the nutso traffic would not be fun.

The pic is one Little Cat Z sent us from the Great White North on the way to an x-c ski area. She’s been staying at the Hoton Lake Group Home and yesterday it was ICE but today was more conducive to skiing as you might be able to see via the pic. There were other pics but I won’t post them because there were people in them. There is more snow there and tons of snow in the eastern yooperland, where the moomincabin is.

I think we put LCZ on skis at about the age of three. We backpacked our baby mouse on that trip – she wasn’t walking yet. At one point, LCZ was solo for a few minutes traveling between me and the GG. I remember hearing her answer a friendly stranger’s question with, “I’m with my mommy and my daddy.” A person who no doubt was wondering why a tiny child was skiing alone. I came around a corner right around that time, which put that good Samaritan’s fears at ease.

Mouse was on skis by the age of two. Tiny red rental skies. She rocked it for a couple days and then I made the mistake of saying I would take her on the “little kid loop”. Oops. Tantrum. I picked her up, skis and all, headed up to the counter in the ski ranch and told Bob, “We’re done!” Having four children of his own, he just laughed.

A few years later, I was skiing with mouse on the Manitou Trail, a 5K loop at the ski ranch. She was a great skier by then but that was probably a bit too long for a five-year-old and before it was all over, I was carrying ALL FOUR of our ski poles in my left hand and holding her hand in my right. (Note that little kids don’t really need ski poles, they just want them because everybody else has them.) We were slodging along for a while when she said (in true mouse style), “Mom, why do I think about volcanoes so much?” How does a mother answer a question like that? I didn’t really know but to be fair I used to worry about volcanoes and things when I was that age too. In fact, non-religious me even “prayed” every night that we wouldn’t get “hit” by a tornado or volcano (and a whole list of other disasters I was worried about). Anyway it was a long slodge on the Manitou Trail that day.

I don’t think it is an atmospheric river (and no one is calling it that) but man oh man did it rain today. The GG has been bugging me to get out and go for a ride in the county and although I like doing that, I haven’t really been in the mood lately. Of course, he has also wanted to go shopping at Cabela’s and I was not a fan. We’ll talk about my lifelong relationship with shopping (or not) some other day. I spend as little time as possible in bricks and mortar stores these days. Wasn’t always that way.

Anyway, he tried again to get me outta dodge today. This time shopping wasn’t mentioned and I was ready. For one thing, rain rides can be the best and this WAS a rain ride. Where’re we goin’? Manchester area (that’s southwest of the Planet Ann Arbor). Okay. I knew we would be taking back roads and we did. And here is one of them. It was very icy but navigable at a very slow speed.

We made our way from there to somewhere near Grass Lake, which is a village and a lake of the same name. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever been there before. Probably but can’t really remember. The GG suddenly backed up Cygnus X-1 and I was like, whut? Oh, because there were skeletons there. He took photos out the driver’s side window with both my phone and his. He thinks doe and fawn? Not sure but seems like the right sizes. Hope this pic is not too freaky. Growing up on Lake Superior, dead birds and aminals were always floating in and decaying (and sometimes dying slowly on the beach, which is worse). But I am used to looking at skeletons.

Eventually we turned back homeward and as I kind of expected, we ended up at Cleary’s Pub in Chelsea. It was raining SOOOO hard when we got there, that the GG dropped me off right outside the back door. I was NOT really under-dressed but 38 degrees and rain was a little bit more than my base layers and stuff could handle. I only had to go a few feet to get into Cleary’s but I was wet and freezing when I grabbed seats for us at the bar and ended up wearing his jacket for a while to warm up. I ordered a cabernet IMMEDIATELY, which helped me warm up, then a second to drink with my chili.

We heard an “explosion” a while ago. I was like, “What was that?” A couple years ago there was a propane explosion around this time of year that leveled a house 10 miles north of here and killed four people. I dunno what this was. People on the Ann Arbor Townies facebook group think it might have been thunder. I’m not sure. It’s a weird time of year for thunder but it happens and it’s rainy and actually pretty warm right now. That will change overnight.

Yesterday the GG helped our our mouse finish her 2025 100 miles of hiking on the North Country Trail. I think they did a lot of road walking because I have seen this boot before and I think it is on a roadside. I hate road walks but whatever it takes. They had to walk out to this boot and back.

They had lunch in Albion on the way home. Fun fact: my Uncle Don did undergrad at Albion College (and then med school at uMich). My daughters could have actually gotten some kind of discounted tuition at Albion because their great uncle went to school there in the Jurassic Age (go figger). They chose Kalamazoo College instead. It’s okay, With financial aid, we could afford it and it was a great college. So is Albion.

I had a slow day. I am having a slow bit of time. People seem to be worried about me but as a “Finnelson” I will phoenix outta this. It’s what Finnelsons do and I have done it a few times before. I’m just reorganizing myself. I need time and space. Please please please give that to me. It’s much less to do with job loss (a blip with a shit ton of severance pay) than friend loss (Sari). And it’s a goddamn dark fugly time of year.

One thing I am NOT gonna do is jump off the Mackinac Bridge. For the second time in a week or so, the bridge closed today because a suicidal person parked their car and stepped over the rail. Thank the gods, this person was encouraged to step back across the rail onto the bridge and was taken to safety. I cannot actually imagine jumping off the Big Mac but apparently it happens quite frequently and most people don’t hear about it.

But I am okay and cooked turkey “tetrahedron” while kitchen dancing to whatever was on the radio and then we watched Svengoolie, who was playing a nutso vintage movie about robots and the GG fell asleep during that and I sent a pic of that to the beach urchins but will not post it here. I wasn’t sure if he would wake up in a reasonable time for bed but then I heard P-ing noises coming from the bathroom. I was told that was TMI and maybe it is.

This year I asked for (and received) a little piece of the Mackinac Bridge grate. The bridge was completed in 1957 and in 2017 they started replacing the grate in the middle two lanes of the bridge bit by bit.

At first they were selling great big grate pieces like too big to fit in your house but after a while they started selling little pieces like this. The other problem was that you could only get them by going to the bridge IN PERSON and while we traverse the bridge frequently, we never seem to be there at the right time. Somehow I got it into my head to try Etsy and VOILA! Of course, enterprising people who live a bit closer to the bridge have been scooping up grate pieces when they are available and they are ALL OVER ETSY. So I bought a couple pieces for the beach urchins and put it on my own xmas list with a note to check Etsy.

This is what I was gifted with. It isn’t the best pic given our dark crappy rainy ice storm winter day but there is an atomic rabbit who arrived with the grate and some fugly landfill crapola in the background just to keep it real.

In turn, I found a cool albeit dangerous looking knife made out of retired Mackinac Bridge grate steel for the GG. It was forged by a Michigan craftsman who included a hand-written note. There was even a reference to a bible verse. Although I am not religious at all, I am always happy to support small businesses and this all just about brought me to tears. Embiggen it because it is gorgeous.

I don’t think I will make a habit of collecting retired Mackinac Bridge grate fragments or knives made out of their steel but it was important to me to own a little piece of the bridge and I knew the GG would like the knife. I have vague memories of taking ferries across the Straits of Mackinac on our trips to see our Detroit grandparents and other down-state relatives. My dad and I would walk up to the upper ferry deck and he and I would walk around in the dark with our hands in our pockets. I also remember us traveling across the bridge the first day it opened and have a little card commemorating that event. These cards were handed out blank by the toll booth personnel (they were really busy) and my mom filled ours out. Dad, Mom, me, and my 3-month-old brother. I am the only one of us left.

So another xmas is a wrap. We had six people this year. Our dining table extends enough to fit six people but the surrounding space isn’t really all that big so we hung out in the back room with football (silenced) on the TV and music in many languages on the pod. A lot of it Celtic but not all. A couple of fireplace whisperers fed the faaaaar and all was well.

This is the Solo stove the GG asked for and I provided. I’ve had my eye on these stoves for a while now. They keep flying by on facebook and they look really cool but I didn’t explore them because 1) I will not click on a facebook ad to buy ANYTHING and 2) I wasn’t really sure the GG might want one. It turns out his ID twin has one and the GG likes it. Still, I did not click on a facebook ad. I went straight to the company site in my browser and ordered it from there. I am surprised at how big it is and not sure which vee-hickle he is gonna squeeze it into. But that’s his problem, as long as the vee-hickle is not Cygnus because she is mine and I hate when she is filled up with crapola.

Oh yeah. I got a BATTERY! I am laughing about this because there is a facebook meme about how your wife never forgets the year you gifted her a MOP. Well. I have never received a MOP but the GG and I have a long history of giving each other vacuum cleaners. Happily received. Yes really. This year I asked for a Dyson cordless vac. We have two already (we have a lot of vacs) but there are battery issues with each, some of them our errors. So what did he get me? A BATTERY for a Dyson cordless. Am I happy? Yes, unless it doesn’t charge properly. If it doesn’t, a Dyson cordless will be on my bday (January) list. Unless I just get out there and order my own.

Merry merry if you celebrate xmas and cheers to a wonderful day if you don’t.

Will there be an ice storm tomorrow morning? Time will tell.

The solstice pig is at the mouse house and it’s her photo, not mine. We are a few days beyond the winter solstice. That means sunrise is still late and getting a bit later every day but sunset is also getting later. I don’t totally understand the rules. I enjoy the dark at both ends of the day but this year, I am kind of surviving. Don’t worry, I am okay. Or will be.

I am kind of phoning xmas in this year. I have gifts for people but a few of them are still not wrapped. But I’ll get there. And there might be a couple of surprise gifts. Ya nevah know.

For tomorrow, I have mashed potatoes and brussel sprouts ready to go into the hopper. And cranberries and stuffing. I was gonna make Chex Mix this afternoon but out of the bazillion bottles of condiments in the refrigimitator, Worchestershire sauce was scarce so my mouse is bringing some over tomorrow. It’s December and I am still somehow in the throes of the annual “combinding” of the moomincabin condiments with the Landfill condiments. Another topic for another day. We have a couple of chickens to grill tomorrow and I need to remind the GG that I bought some fancy little oranges that we can stuff them with. Because we don’t stuff birds with actual stuffing. That’s a separate dish.

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At some point during the cFam xmas party last night, I realized that I didn’t know where mouse and the racc were. Oh, said Little Cat Z, they said an Irish goodbye. I’d never heard that term before (even though I have a significant amount of Irish DNA) but it means they sneaked out without saying goodbye to anyone (or at least most people).

This was a-okay with me!!!! When we and our next door cousins leave the moominbeach our usual way of saying “we’re out” is to honk a master salute as we are driving out. Long goodbyes have always driven me crazy. Some (but not all) of the cFam are prone to looooong goodbyes. The GG always says trying to leave FlaMan’s place is like talkin’ to Colombo, an old TV detective, and that’s kinda what happened yesterday when we were trying to leave his apartment.

Years and years ago when my beach urchins were very young, we were trying to leave the cFam grandparents’ condo in Crazy Old Florida to return to the Great White North. We had a breakfast plan at I fergit which fast food restaurant. We were in the in-law’s driveway trying to leave and I didn’t feel like we were ever gonna get outta there. I loved my in-laws but they segued into recommendations about various restaurants we should go to instead of our fast food choice. Nope. We wanna get outta Dodge and head north. I love Florida but when it’s time to go back north, it’s time.

The funny thing was that whatever that restaurant was, I LOVED the women at the window. I HATED the food. Oh well. It did get us outta Dodge.

P.S. The pic is scarves that our lovely nephew Flec (not his real name) uses to juggle. He is a fantastic juggler among many other things and the scarves are very handy when you are working with very young children, like the ones who were at yesterday’s party, including his daughter. We have some good people in our family(ies). I always have a good time talking to Flec.

I *think* this photoooo is pretty okay to post. It shows a few people at the annual cFam xmas party but definitely not everyone who attended and those shown are not easily identifiable although my daughters and the racc are in the middle, back in the background. But I’ve got nothin’ else for a pic today.

Getting there was a bit of an odyssey though. FlaMan was missing some items in his apartment and we had to drive NORTH from where the party was to deal with that and deliver some food. We had Little Cat Z with us for that little excursion and she was of great help. Although we spent most of the time in the living room watching Gunsmoke reruns. Gunsmoke is actually not a bad show as long as the volume is down and you aren’t streaming it from someplace that inserts five minutes of ads every fifteen minutes. When we got there, FlaMan was in a deep sleep and a sweet FlaMan whisperer was in his apartment doing some cleanup chores. She was calling both him and the GG “babe” if memory is accurate. Eventually at least some of his missing items were found and LCZ heated up a frozen dinner for him. Alas, he wasn’t really in a good place to go to the party. Which was kind of a good thing because we’d’ve had to drive him home again, adding 20-30 minutes to *our* trip home. Oh don’t worry, he was okay, just not in the mood to party. After an hour and a half at his place, I was ready for some whine.

My modus operandi for these parties has become to sit at the kitchen table with the Lady of Linden (it’s at her house) and let people come around and talk to me. So that is what I did. Like many families these days, our family is a bit politically divided but after a while some of the younger folk migrated to the table and we had a meeting of minds about our current government. They know what I’m all about. I also had some good (and polite) discussions with some of those who disagree with my views. There was even some laughter about Trump/MAGA hats at some point. Throughout all of it, the little kids romped around like wild Indians, oblivious to politics. Siblings and cousins and second cousins. I didn’t manage to count how many people were there.

Posted this pic before. It is my grandaddy serving a couple of young girls at the 1st National Bank of Sault Ste. Marie children’s teller window. My granddaddy was the bank president and I was probably a toddler around this time. Grandaddy was very kind to children but I’ve been told not so much to people not paying their loans.

My dad ended up being the bank president later on so I am the daughter and granddaughter of bankers. Their small-town bank got swallowed up by various holding companies, ending in PNC, which a lot of people might know about?

The main Planet Ann Arbor PNC branch closed recently, which meant that a whole bunch of people had to close out their safe deposit boxes. I’d had to do this a couple of times already, when our neighborhood Maple Village branch closed and when the Sault Ste. Siberia bank branch closed. That was the bank that I grew up in and my late parents had a huge safe deposit box with all kinds of crazy stuff in it. When we went up there, the bank folks couldn’t even open it for a while but they finally managed that and at the end of it all, the current bank branch manager (who happened to live next door to my mother’s house) said, “There are pictures of your dad and granddaddy in the basement. Do you want them?” Of course.

So. Banker’s daughter/granddaughter. Did I grow up rich? We weren’t rich or poor. I was often told (by my mother) that we were poor but we weren’t really. Just that a banking job does not always automatically mean a huge salary. We could afford what we needed but we were also very frugal. We were in a prominent family for whatever that’s worth. I had and still have mixed feelings about that although make no mistake I LOVE my family. They are good people.

As an adult, it kinda cracks me up that… 1) I always loved to do non-profit treasury jobs. Counting and organizing big piles of cash, coins, and checks and taking it all to the bank to deposit was fun fun fun for me. 2) It cracks me up that the adult career that I FELL into (after age 50) was fintech (online banking) systems analyst. I often wonder what my dad and granddaddy would have thought about that. Granddaddy died before computer technology and dad struggled when the bank started adopting it back in the Jurassic Age. So I’ll never know.

This photo kinda reminds me of the Hundreds of Beavers movie that the GG and I watched last March or whenever. It’s kind of a cult fave. We were porterized last night at their house. I kept looking at the GG across the room in this hat with its topknot. Nobody else was wearing a hat like this. To be fair, I BOUGHT him this hat. From Eddie Bauer or someplace.

We were trying to watch Svengoolie tonight but they’ve changed Svengoolie’s format and I have not been a fan of the more recent movies. They are too long and boring. It was a vampire thing tonight and that’s okay except that it took a helluva long time to get to the crux of the matter. I mean, when I was a young teenager and we had a f*cking outhouse (without a light) at the moomincabin, I dealt with vampires out there all the time. And werewolves and something can’t remember the name of that I made up. I was NOT in a fancy house in a fancy nightgown with big curving staircases and whatever else. I started to nod off so here I am trying write a coherent blahg entry.

It was a long sorta fugly day and the The GG kept wanting to go for a ride and I was like nooo, but then then we got most of the xmas gifts sorted out and I finally said, okay let’s go and so we did and here we are. He is in the bedroom watching football and I am headed there shortly.

I kinda hate the song Have Yourself a Merry Little xmas but that’s kinda what’s in my head now. And since I can carry a tune and have a decent voice (soprano or mezzo soprano), it isn’t really all that bad.

G’night, KW.

The Grinch seems to be everywhere this year. This is my cousin’s drink last night. Her husband over at Regenaxe has a better pic and lists the ingredients. I didn’t blahg yesterday because we met up with them and npJane a bit on the late side (for us) over on the other side of town. It was really fun but I was kind of done at the end of it all.

The Grinch seems to be everywhere this year. A children’s event at the Cozy Corners in Barbeau and a friend’s doggie daycare and the JKL Bahweting School and I dunno where else. I gather that the dogs were pretty nervous about the Grinch until they realized he was one of their beloved (female) caretakers dressed up in green. Dogs have a keen sense of who people are and what they smell like. I know because my brother’s dogs definitely trusted me. I was “Anne-Mom” and The Commander was “GrrMom”.

We have been calling one of my cousins the Grinch since we were all in high school or thereabouts. We were not all in high school at the same time as there is a 20 year cousin-y age spread but the Grinch and I are three years apart and have always been close. I’m not entirely sure how that nickname got started although there a few theories. But it stuck, at least within the fam. Most people he deals with know him by his first name, which is NOT Mike, which is what I grew up calling him. Go figger.

His mom was my aunt Radical Betty and as an Air Force family they lived all over the place. When Radical Betty and Duke retired to the yooperland, down the beach from us on family land, the Grinch ended up there too. He is a bit eccentric (aren’t we all?) but he turned into a construction worker who has a successful drywall business and employs a lot of folks in the area. I won’t talk about them (these days I don’t know most of them) but if y’all ever need a drywall bucket, I can probably get you one for free. With luck, an empty one.