Hey, it’s the Indefatigable. A basic Jeep Wrangler we bought new in 1992 and sold in 2009. Yes, that’s 17 years. Basic means it was just a drive train (as the GG used to like to say). Four on the floor, no A/C or other amenities. It did have a radio. And make no mistake, I LOVED driving it. I love the vee-hickles we have now but I miss a stick shift.

Here is The Indefatigable all decked out for a snowy Halloween. Wonder how many trick-or-treaters we got that night.

.

Various skeletal parts were hung everywhere inside The Indefatigable. I remember a beach urchin’s Planet Ann Arbor friends warning a college friend of theirs about the artifacts hanging around in The Indefatigable. If you ride with Liz, you ride with bones. Readers, don’t clutch yer pearls. It was all aminal bones he found out in the woods.

I CANNOT STAND random plastic bottles rolling around in any vee-hickle I am driving. These were in the Indefatigable but all these years later, I still find them in Cygnus X-1. But usually not in the back seat.

The Indefatigable did have air-conditioning. After a fashion. There were holes in the floor too… … …

When we bought this vee-hickle, one of our children was still in nursery school. The first time I dropped that kid at nursery school in it, the teacher (who was on duty to usher children out of their parents’ cars and into the school) asked if it was a new car. I replied that it was not a car, it was a mid-life crisis!

That mid-life crisis taught uncountable under-age children to drive on the back roads of the yooperland. Including the weekend’s Big Fat Greek Wedding’s bride. It got both of our beach urchins their driver’s licenses. It drove Yaggies (AA Younger Actors Guild friends) all over town. It served as the younger beach urchin’s vee-hickle her last couple years of college. It was after she graduated college that we faced the music and sold it.

In the end it had to be hauled away on a fancy tow truck. The buyers were work friends of the GG so we sold it pretty dern cheap.

I dunno why I bothered blahgging at all yesterday. I didn’t have my laptop with me and the two people who mainly keep track of me were… staying in the hotel room next door to me.

So the “formal” wedding I had been so stressed out about has come and gone. The bride is the daughter of a MacMu cousin I was very close to. We spent time together as children and she started bringing her daughter Ana up to visit the moominbeach when Ana was a baby. They are not on the side of my fam that owns the moomin but they were always welcome and The Commander (my cousin’s aunt) LOVED when they visited. My cousin died a couple years ago, way too early, but we had become an important part of her daughter’s life and as a young adult, she continues to make an effort to visit each summer.

We love her and even though I am not a huge fan of weddings or any large social events, there was NO WAY I was gonna miss this wedding. So I sucked it up and went. Of course I didn’t know a whole lot of people there except the six of us traveling from The Planet Ann Arbor. But I hugged my cousin “Salwa”, older sister of the late mother of the bride and we were seated with my late cousin’s best childhood friend. We had never met before but she knew about her friend’s trips to the moomin and it was wonderful if a little bittersweet to meet. There were a few tears.

A couple other highlights were when the bride’s Man of Honor included an unexpected shoutout to the moomin in his speech (he has been a guest there), saying he wanted to die there 🤣🤣🤣. Then a woman I didn’t know sought me out and come to find out she has been dating the bride’s dad. I don’t know the dad very well but I know he sorely misses my cousin (he’s quite emotional). I feel good that he is able to move forward. His new girlfriend is LOVELY and we (beach urchins and I) greatly enjoyed talking to her. I approve! Not that my approval is required.

All in all, it was a wonderful Big Fat Greek Wedding. My cousin married into a large Greek family and apparently the bride and her dad have watched all of the movies umpteen bazillion times. He did a lot of the shtick in his speech (in between a few tears). I will have to revisit that movie series.

So what did I wear? It was kind of a mish-mash but it worked and it’s the bride people are supposed to be looking at anyway. After spending all fall ordering multiple skirts, etc., online, I didn’t end up wearing the black sequin skirt I thought I would (but am definitely not giving it away). Instead, I wore a plainer black lace-trimmed Chico’s skirt, which I bought as a by-product of all my shopping. I decided in the end to wear The Peacock, a loose-fitting Chico’s jacket the beach urchins goaded me into buying a couple years ago. It has an abstract pattern in peacock-ish colors. The sequin skirt was too much for that jacket, hence the plainer skirt. Black tank top and a black sparkly scarf The Commander made in the last couple years of her life. All of us FinFam gals wore talismans from The Comm and Radical Betty. We did not coordinate that.

Oh, and the peacock purse in the pic from yesterday, the only pic I took at the wedding. (A wedding photographer I am not.) I scouted this out (Etsy) after my antique beaded “evening bag” disintegrated during an August wedding and I realized I had donated my newer, sturdier ones. The peacock purse sorta matches The Peacock jacket and fits my cards, phone, Cygnus fob, and a neat little folding hairbrush I got on Amazon. The brush was probably my BEST wedding-related purchase. My hair is very unruly and needs a quick brush once in a while if I don’t have it tied back into my usual fugly ponytail but full-size brushes don’t fit in a small evening bag. A couple other people also used it (it’s okay, it was close family members). Stocking stuffer maybe?

Brunch near the hotel this morning, then home on a warm, bright November Sunday. Oh, and carpooling was a fantastic idea. For one (major) reason, it kept yer fav-o-rite blahgger calm to have an adult daughter and friend in Cygnus with us.

More tomorrow 🤖

That’s what it felt like anyway. I was up and out early enough to make it to the Saline Rd. Meijer by seven AM to get stuff I buy there that I don’t (usually) buy at Plum. Lima beans for one 🐽 (Plum doesn’t seem to carry them). I had a minor kerfuffle with the Meijer uscan because I put my credit card in backwards 💩 and got the dreaded “card not recognized” message and then couldn’t cancel out of it. The cashier (who is wonderful) was helping another person with what seemed like a more complicated problem. And then. I noticed a “go back” button and that worked like a charm. Go me.

Home long enough to move a load of laundry from the warshing musheen to the dryer, then off to the Plum to get the rest of the stuff on my list and check in with my fave workers there. The Plum uscan got confused about some sweet potatoes and kept telling me to move them here and there but eventually I bludgeoned my way through. This uscan accepts cards when you hover them by the pay-pad screen so no issues there.

I was pretty stressed out in general. That began at four AM or so because of all things I was stressed out about getting up in time to get to Meijer by seven.

Mr. Golden Sun is rising around 7:20 these days so it was dark when I left, or so I thought. I was hanging out by the front window which faces west. When I got out to Cygnus and turned around? Wow, the eastern sky was pretty light and there was the waning crescent moon hanging there. A sweet, calming moment of grace.

Even though I am anything but a sports fan, when the home team plays OSU, I do NOT root for Ohio.

But I was rooting for Ohio this week. You know why, right? I know not everyone is as avid about pro-choice as I am and plenty disagree with me. But it is clear that a majority of Americans disagree with the draconian abortion restrictions being forced on women and their families in the name of “god” or whatever.

To put straight a few things that I think and don’t think. I do NOT think women should be able to nonchalantly abort a healthy fetus in a late stage of pregnancy. I DO think that the vast majority of women in later stages of pregnancy WANT their babies very much, even if they were earlier conflicted.

When the Orange Baboon speechifies about women killing their babies after birth — and he has and you can probably find a clip on the intertubes — he is unhinged. What was it he said about how they wrap their babies up in nice cozy blankets and wait for them to die? Well. That DOES happen. But when it does, it is because the baby has a lethal issue that is incompatible with life, not because the woman doesn’t want the baby. She has chosen to carry a non-viable fetus to term knowing it is going to die within hours and is providing comfort to the baby she loves and wishes could live.

Oh yeah, there are probably a few lunatics out there who kill their full-term babies. That is a different thing and those women are criminals. But then there are terrified young teenagers who I don’t believe are criminals. “Am I really pregnant? My dad will kill me. Maybe it’ll just go away.” No teenage *child* should have to go through that and we (all of us) must treat people more humanely in those situations than we currently do.

I wish we had more compassion for women who make these excruciatingly difficult choices. Not everyone has the support it can require to birth and raise a baby and adoption is wonderful but it isn’t for everyone.

Apparently a whole lot of people agree with me.

Fun “fact” to end on. Waaaaay back in the day (pre-kids), the GG and I were traveling south through O-hiiii-o in one of our Ford Fiestas. A big I dunno Lincoln or Caddy-lac passed us. The two “old” guys in it were obviously having a great time and honked and waved at us. Bo Schembechler and Woody Hayes? We thought so. 15 seconds of fame? Assuming we had correctly identified them 🤣

I’ve been whining and moaning the past few days about bike/ped/auto infrastructure. Today. I got this pic from one of the beach urchins. It is from the back seat of a SELF-DRIVING car!

I’m not sure how I feel about self-driving cars. Oh, I don’t mean I don’t think my daugher should be riding in one. That’s up to her. Each generation moves on into the future when it comes to technology. My grandparents had to adjust to the switch from traveling on trains and steamships to buying their own automotive vee-hickles and they never really adjusted to flying as a means of travel although they would fly happily enough with their WWII pilot son (my dad) in the little Cessnas he rented by the hour from his friend at the Sault Ste. Siberia municipal airport.

My dad was an expert automotive vee-hickle driver but computers pretty much flummoxed him. Not so much The Commander. I remember back in the 1990s when me and my bro would bug them about getting a computer. It was kind of a contest at first. My brother was a PC guy (in those days, he later switched) and I was (and still am) Mac Mac Mac all the way (er, except for work). We were both advocating for our own platform. Poor mom. But then… I was astounded one day when I faaaared up our big old Mac, the FAMILY computer, and there was an email from MY MOTHER, who hadn’t had email ever before. In other words, she got sick of us bugging her and went out and bought her own computer ALL BY HERSELF!

It was a PC but that was okay. I think she found a guy to help her set it all up and I was happy she took the initiative. In her later years, she had MacBook laptops and an iPhone. She used her iPhone to (among other things) TEXT me! In her last couple years, phone calls were difficult to manage but text worked well.

My dad never did get accustomed to using a computer or even owning one. Or swiping a debit card at the grocery store but that’s a whole ‘nother story (and he was a BANKER who retired AFTER debit cards). I remember him talking about my mother using the “generator”. He would stay OUTSIDE the “generator” room when she was doing that 🤣

I don’t think self-driving cars are the technology hill I will die on. Although I suspect I will be nervous riding in one and might feel like I want to take the controls. Err.. I’m not sure I would even recognize the controls in a self-driving car. But I am nervous if I’m in a car almost anyone else is driving except my kids and (mostly) the GG. I have always loved to drive and am always alert. So we’ll see.

But then again, I spent a bit of time looking at the Waymo site and how they build their database and… We’ll see… This technology might help people like The Commander get around, when she was in relatively good health but couldn’t drive her own car. In any case, Waymo isn’t available on The Planet Ann Arbor yet and probably won’t be for a while.

One remaining question I have is how self-driving cars will deal with inclement weather conditions. Like snow and ice…

Thinking about the higgledy-piggledy-ness of yesterday’s entry, I could probably write more coherently about this stuff but I didn’t really have time yesterday. The point is these are extremely complicated issues and I’m not seeing that our government (local, national, whatever) is thoroughly analyzing transit infrastructure issues. It’s not that I don’t want change. I care about pedestrians and bicyclists and agree that we need to move away from carbon emissions but cars are not going to go away anytime soon. I just want us to carefully analyze and design our changes. It isn’t easy to change existing infrastructure so we have to coexist. I can’t say I would be the best analyst/designer for these issues so I’ll shaddup for now.

I often think about the era in which my grandparents’ generation switched from traveling by train and steamboat (and probably there were horse-drawn carriages in there, at least locally) to automotive vee-hickles. What kind of upheavals did that cause and how was it handled? Too much for this “bear of little brain”, at least tonight.

I’ve been having even more REM dreams than usual lately, some of them not very pleasant. I’ll write about one of them after this weekend and I’ll explain why I waited when I write it. Oh, it’s okay. Nobody died or anything. There may have been visitations from dead relatives but I don’t really remember. They float in and out of my dreams and I allow them in but I don’t let them tell me what to do 🐽

Overnight in the wee hours, between *two* REM dreams, I got up to visit the Water Closet. Out the W.C. window I could see a beautiful waning crescent moon. For some reason this confused me a whole lot. I have a BASIC idea about how the moon phases work and I have some good apps for locating objects in the sky. I didn’t get around to using my apps until this morning when I was on my 0-skunk-30. It was cloudy by then but SkyView showed the moon to be more or less right above me.

Reality hit with an early trip to the Plum Market and then there was a flurry of text message confuddlement between me and the beach urchins about election day. Did we have anything to vote on or not? The city mouse and I live *on* the Planet Ann Arbor (the city, that is). The country mouse is in an adjacent township. A friend of mine lives in ANOTHER adjacent township but dumps her recycle in the country mouse’s township. Confused? So were we. Turned out none of us had anything on the ballot but my friend did.

Gotta get back to making “Supper [not] At Six”. Using an old recipe I lost for a while and recently searched out on the internet. I found it in an old Gourmet magazine annual that I used to own but became a victim of flinging at some time in the past. More tomorrow maybe…

Automotive vee-hickles vs. pedestrians and bicyclists. Various versions of this topic are all over next door neighbor (NDN) ALL the time. Along with the Dog Wars but we won’t go there today.

Our city is hell bent on making things safe for pedestrians (we’ll leave bicycles out of this just for now). It began a number of years ago with crosswalks across busy streets. I am ALL FOR crosswalks BUT. The rules got changed from what I learned umpteen bazillion years ago in driver’s ed such that you had to stop when pedestrians were IN the crosswalk. Our local rules now are that you have to stop if someone is APPROACHING the crosswalk. So if it’s dark or the crosswalk is adjacent to a bus stop, you either can’t SEE the pedestrian(s) or aren’t sure if they are approaching the crosswalk or the bus stop. So to be safe from hitting someone (I would NEVER recover from hitting a person), basically you might as well just stop at every crosswalk. But that’s not the rules and people don’t reliably stop…

I don’t comment on ANYTHING on NDN but people who make even the barest suggestion that a pedestrian is EVER at fault are excoriated. It’s always the automotive vee-hickle driver’s fault yada yada. As both a driver AND a pedestrian, I disagree. I am ALWAYS aware of my surroundings when I walk and if there is a car anywhere near me, I wait until I am SURE what it’s going to do. I don’t EVER wear earbuds. I learned years ago that I would rather listen to nature.

And then there is public transportation. We have an excellent bus system here (I used it pre-covid and will use it again). When I was distance-caring for my mother in her last year (when we wouldn’t let her drive any more), I realized that if she lived with me, she would not be able to walk the three blocks to the bus stop especially through snow. Her small yooperland city didn’t have a bus system. To this day, I don’t think Uber or Lyft are operational there. I thought a regular old TAXI would work for her. I remember riding in taxis with mom when I was a young child and we could only afford to own one car. But… “ANNE!!! Do you know how much a taxi costs?” No mom, what does it cost? “Five dollars!”, she roared. We are not Warren Buffet but she could afford taxi rides from here to Jupiter. Alas, her world had shrunk by then and I couldn’t convince her otherwise. I mean, she’d’ve been the darling of the taxi service. “Anywhere youz wanna go Mrs. ‘Finnelson’. My mom took your child care class in high school.”

So one of my points is that we have to make sure the elderly (mom was 90) can get where they need to go if they are no longer driving and don’t have family around to help them (or have alienated their family like some people are wont to do). And the bus is not the answer. Another point is that we have to hold pedestrians responsible for their own carelessness. When I am at a crosswalk in the dark and I see headlights coming from any direction, I WAIT until the street is clear before crossing unless I can do a distance/speed calculation in my head and determine that I can get across the street before they approach the crosswalk. If I don’t make it, it’s MYYYY fault.

We’ll talk about the Dog Wars and roundabouts some other day. Or not 😵‍💫

I got into Cygnus X-1 this morning. It was EARLY and I was making a Meijer run because I needed turkey PARTS so I could get my Thanksgiving gravy going and into the freezer. I am not a gravy-in-the-turkey-pan maker even though I have been taught how to do that by multiple super-cook relatives from all branches of all of my families. Anyway, the Plum sometimes has turkey parts. Meijer *reliably* has them. Disclaimer: Plum reliably has things that Meijer doesn’t 🤣

Mr. Golden Sun was just about to come up. But. The clock said 8:0-something. Meaning that wasn’t the right time because DST happened overnight so it shoulda been 7:0-something. I LOVE Cygnus dearly but I felt a small wave of annoyance that she was apparently not set up to change the time automatically. Would I have to use the app to reset the clock? But I have owned her for 2-1/2 years so we have switched back and forth a few times since I bought her and I don’t remember having to do that before. Five minutes later I randomly looked at the clock again and it had switched. Whew! She just needed a few minutes to sync. Also, first world problem.

Cygnus is not a Honda, she is a Subie Crosstrek. The vee-hickle in the pic is my old DOGHA (Dirty Old Green Honda Accord). A top dollah 2001 vee-hickle with a *V6* transmission. She could do vroooom, at least enough vroom for yer fav-o-rite blahgger’s rather cautious driving style.

I was ready to jettison the old Island Teal POC (Chrysler minivan) in 2001. I asked my General Motors auto engineer brother what he thought of various sedans (I was also ready to downsize to a sedan). He shocked me by suggesting we look at the Honda Accord. Bdah bdah bdah. You work for GM, right? You are suggesting we buy a (gasp) Japanese vee-hickle? Yes, yes he was. Next up was how the GG would react to that as he had always seemed to have an attitude against Japanese cars. Of all things, he actually seemed excited about the idea.

The NEXT thing was to find an Accord with THIS particular package (V6 et al). The Engineer didn’t think we’d be able to find one anywhere. Welp. Weeeee live on The Planet Ann Arbor and the GG managed to find one PDQ aaaaaand… We bought it! I emailed a couple pics of it in our driveway to The Engineer and his response was, “Where the HELL did you get THAT?” She was our first Japanese vee-hickle and we’ve never looked back.

In this pic the DOGHA is masquerading as a Halloween vee-hickle. Our older beach urchin was in Spain on study abroad at the time and asked for Halloween type pics of The Landfill et al. We took the DOGHA out to buy pumpkins and this was one of those pics.

P.S. I miss my brother, who died four years after we bought the DOGHA.

P.S.S. I won’t rant about switching to and from DST. It doesn’t really bother me although it did mess up my kids as small chidren. I will say that if we ever do choose one time to stick to, I hope it is Standard Time, not Daylight Time. I don’t mind dark mornings but sunrises AFTER 9:00 AM are too late at this latitude. I just want “us” to think through all of the issues and scenarios all of our citizens would have to deal with and not let a bunch of old fossils make those decisions for us. I experienced walking to high school when the sun didn’t rise until after 9:00 AM one year when that era’s old fossils changed the rules. Those rules got changed BACK PDQ.

I meant to post this pic of my Halloween attire last week but somehow it didn’t make it into the mix so here it is now. Photo credit to Lizard Breath.

She took it the day before her birthday when the beach urchins and SOs came over for an afternoon back yard faaar and / or FinFam Steak Dinner. Not everyone could do dinner. It was okay. Just try to find an evening when SIX gainfully employed adults can get together. A couple of my Parent of Adult Children mantras? 1) We celebrate birthdays because they give us a REASON to get together but if you can’t attend, we still love you. 2) Conversely, we don’t need an occasion to get together. All y’all (this snowbilly has prob’ly mangled that) live on The Planet Ann Arbor now. Dinner can happen at my house ANY TIME!

I bought the orange skull tights from Snag Tights back before COVID. They were my first Snag purchase. I love Snag Tights. I haven’t worn my PINK Barbara tights yet but I will. Anyway. the sparkly skirt is a by-product of my recent searches for formal wedding attire. It was uber cheap so I ordered it for fun. Other by-products were not so cheap but LOVERLY. Luxurious turtlenecks in BLACK and jewel-tone colors from Sundance and Coldwater Creek. I needed those but they aren’t wedding attire.

The beach urchins understand that I like a wee bit (or sometimes a lot) of glitz in my clothing. The Commander didn’t totally understand that until close to the end of her life but eventually she embraced it. I was who I was and no matter what I look like and the clothing I choose, I positively contribute to our society. I think. Plus I gave her a couple of bonus sons (the Twinz of Terror).

With these decrepit (but still good) old Keen sandals, I think I look a bit like the Wicked Witch of the East (Wizard of Oz of course). Except my legs are not peeking out from under a building and I am not wearing striped stockings although I certainly OWN some (thanks to Snag) 🤡

The title is from back in the days I worked for YAG (Ann Arbor Young Actors Guild). We included a lot of special needs children in our plays and we enjoyed this one young teenager although he could be a challenge. I was running through the bowels of the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre one evening during “tech week” and I encountered this young man and that is what he said to me. He always talked like there were marbles in his mouth. What did I say back to him? I don’t remember but I CRACKED UP!!! I wonder how/what he is doing now, something like 20 years later…

I couldn’t care less about football but the home team is playing a night game tonight and the GG is watching the game in the back room. Hail Hail Michigan the Champions of the West.

I am done done done for tonight. The GG came home from a couple days of raking leaves at the Group Home at Hoton Lake and went back behind the shed (it isn’t a woodshed) to split wood. And then we were porterized for a while and I think I am ready to crash out now. Maybe I’ll try to watch the next episode of Foundation season 2 but not sure if I’ll finish it. The next episode of Lessons in Chemistry dropped today but we aren’t watching it tonight and we won’t watch it tomorrow night because Umich has a night game. So Sunday, I guess.

In the back of my mind I’m remembering when various flute players I went to school with would talk about woodshedding as another word for practicing difficult passages. I thought I knew what they meant at the time but thinking back, I find myself nonplussed as to what they actually meant. Not that I didn’t practice, just that I *enjoyed* practicing, even the “boring” stuff like scales and arpeggios and things. Oh well, I’ll have to think about that some more.

G’night, KW.

The things I get up to when I’m, well, not exactly bored. But. Finally. Today. EIGHT days after the October 2023 Work Laptop Crash. I am fully back together. Well, 99% but we won’t talk about the 1% only because y’all wouldn’t understand it and I will BASH my way through it.

I got Visio back a few days ago. I use that for flow diagrams and things. Yesterday one of my dev wizards helped me set up Visual Studio, which I use to edit html/css/js code for the high fidelity prototype I maintain. People sometimes wonder something like, “Wouldn’t it be easier to use wireframes to mock up web pages?” Oh no it wouldn’t. Much faster for me to edit html files. SnagIt (fancy screenshot annotation app) I finally got today but not without having to tell support that I couldn’t log in to the “portal”.

These are all first-world problems but after 16 years at Big Online Banking Company, it’s still nerve wracking to set up a “new” laptop. Back in the day, we had the LSCHP to “sit on” whoever was causing a problem to make magic. These days, our laptops come loaded with standard stuff and we have a cloud but we are (mostly) on our own to muddle through anything non-standard by filing support tickets. I mean our managers can be helpful but my modus operandi is usually to try to bash through it by myself.

Anyway, after today, I was reading some trump-tastic bullshit somewhere on the internet and I remembered a different kind of Lyme Lounge haunting from fall 2016. The GG had returned from somewhere and I got into the Ninja to schlep over to work. The Lyme Lounge was parked ahead of me in the drive AND THERE WAS A BIG TRUMP MAGNET ON IT! I kinda freaked out about that. By the time I got to work, I realized that he had been at his TWIN BROTHER’S house and had probably been pranked. And indeed, he removed the magnet. His politics don’t match mine but he doesn’t like to have anything but North Country Trail stickers and things on his vee-hickles.

I got into a crazy frame of mind and was thinking about ordering a Dark Brandon t-shirt. What the heck, he wears a Let’s Go Brandon t-shirt sometimes. He’s lucky that when I was alone with that shirt at the Up North Laundry this summer, I considered leaving it there but did not. But we’ll see what I do… xmas list maybe? I know the GG wouldn’t buy me one. Or maybe I could get a t-shirt made out of the pic where the GG has radioactive Dark Brandon eyes 😵‍💫

When I got up Halloween morning, the house across the street had acquired a blanket of yellow. Overnight. Actually I did not see this when I got up. That’s because I got up a couple hours before Mr. Golden Sun got up and I couldn’t see it until almost 8:00 AM — that entity didn’t roll outta bed until around 8:07 or so.

I don’t remember EVER seeing this phenomenon before. At least not at the house across the street. It’s just a junk point-and-shoot photo but I kind of like it. The colors work well and I especially like the contrast the little red tree provides.

Since I don’t have anything much to say and you do NOT want to know about the git repos😵‍💫 I will report that I woke up to our first snow of the year this morning. I didn’t take a pic because there wasn’t much to see. Mooon Yooonit’s veeeendsheeeld was snow-covered (Cygnus was on an 0-skunk-30 airport run) and there was a dusting on our downed leaves. Sidewalk (thankfully) was bone dry.

Other places in the state, particularly on the “west coast” (aka Lake Michigan), got significant amounts and accidents ensued all over the place. People, put your cell phone away and slow down. It’s now illegal in our state to use your phone while driving anyway.

There was snow in the yooperland too but I don’t think the moominbeach got a significant amount. It cracks me up that folks on my work team are suddenly asking if I am in the yoop or here. I have to keep re-explaining (and I actually LOVE the re-explaining) that it’s a seasonal cabin with no insulation or central heating and exposed plumbing. So we close it every winter. This year we closed it in mid-September. Most years it would be okay for it to stay open 3-4 more weeks later but this year the Master of the Moomincabin aka the GG had some traveling to do and it seemed prudent to close it when we did.

…I will turn around twice and it’ll be Thanksgiving and then xmas. Oh and there’s a wedding in between Halloween and Thanksgiving… It’ll be okay. Breathe, KW.

We did a lightweight version of Halloween decor this year although the GG did stuff Vandegriff with I’m not sure what and posed next to him in his gillie suit.

We didn’t have tons and tons of trick-or-treaters but those we had were enthusiastic and exceedingly polite. Parents accompanied them up our driveway and made sure they said thank you which we appreciated but didn’t really require. We thanked our trick-or-treaters and their parents for stopping by!

Our earliest bunch were the next door neighbors and a bunch of friends and that was really fun. The GG didn’t have gillie on yet but neighbor dad was dressed up in women’s clothing so the GG went and got gillie on and met up with that bunch of trick-or-treaters for a few minutes. Neighbor dad said his wife wouldn’t let him wear hunting-type camo.

He was laughingly complaining that his dress didn’t have a pocket to put his phone in and tried to commiserate with meeee for not having pockets. Wrong. I always wear skirts and they don’t usually have pockets, at least not viable ones, but I pulled my phone outta my Patagonia vest zipper pocket. Don’t get me wrong, our neighbor is a great guy.

So, happy Halloween and onward into the winter holiday season and the darkness that accompanies it.

This is a boring brain dump and I won’t be offended if you skip it.

Every time I have a fatal work laptop crash (I’ve been around a long time), I lose a few important but non-standard apps that I have to recover. This time, I have recovered one, need to work with the dev team on a second. And the third? It wants the last PO (purchase order?) number.

Welp. The last time I had a catastrophic crash was before the delta wave of COVID and I was at the moomincabin. it’s a long story of laptops being shipped here and there and a loverly Fedex driver gal cheerfully navigating our one-lane cabin road and dealing with the moomin/Old Cabin “parking lot”. I was the only person there so it was easy. Actually by that time, she had already delivered covid tests so she knew the landscape.

Eventually my dead laptop ended up with a support person in Massachusetts. He was GREAT. He was also chatty and VERY interested in my yooperland property. Oh, he didn’t want to buy it (or any other UP land). He was just interested. So we were talking (as we did) and I made an offhand reference about a screenshot app that I use EVERY GOD DAMN DAY. It happens to be one I knew I’d have to re-order and I’d had a painful experience with that a few years before. So when he said, “I’ll install that for you.” I was happy. But of course now I don’t have a PO number.

The painful experience was that once when I tried to order an update, a person responded with “Why can’t you just use the Microsoft Snipper tool for screenshots?” I clenched my teeth and responded POLITELY that Snipper does not have the tools that allow me to annotate screenshots to illustrate complicated functionality. One example is if you use the text tool and misspell something, you cannot go back and select the text to edit it. You have to use the ERASER tool and then re-write the text. And hope you don’t make another typo or decide to change your words, like I frequently do. I mean, c’mon…

After that, I talked to my then manager about this kinda “snippy” Snipper response and she did some kind of magic and it all worked out except that it took a couple weeks and a prod from my manager to actually get it onto my laptop. That manager USED this app and knew that I needed it. So, waiting to figger out how to get this app back. Again.

What did I wanna do today? The GG asked me that this morning. I had already been oot and aboot and prepped dinner (lamb stew) and I dunno, it was a kinda nice rainy-ish morning and I didn’t really wanna go anywhere.

A little later, he confronted me with this jack-o’-lantern on the other side of the front window from teleCublandia. So, okay, you have drilled another cFam-looking jack-o’-lantern. What does that have to do with meeeee?

He wanted me to accompany him to jack-bomb our younger daughter’s house. Well, okay then. If you are one of my five readers, he jack-bombed our older daughter last Monday (which was her birthday). Today was a perfect day to jack-bomb our younger daughter’s porch because both our daughters and their SOs spent the weekend at the Hoton Lake Group Home and they weren’t home yet. Guess what they did while they were there? They raked a shit-ton of leaves. The GG will get the rest of them later in the week. And yes we are learning it’s better for the environment if we don’t totally “vacuum” our yards clean of every leaf. We’re still learning how to put that into Best Practices for lawn care. We are old dogs but we can learn new tricks.

Anyway we dropped off this Jack and I dunno what the GG really wanted to do next but I suggested a back road trip. My original idea was to drive Bethel Church Road from end to end but as we were driving that road, I could sense the GG was tiring so when we got to the crossroad next to the actual church (because there is an actual church), we turned north and headed home.

I had a bit of a sinking spell after that, meaning it was probably a good day to slodge a bit.

I am behind on my goodreads goal so I am seeking out shorter books. I’m hoping this will balance out my choices to read David Copperfield and all five existing Game of Thrones books back in the beginning of the year. (But, shhh, also word puzzles…)

i’m feeling a bit OCD about this and thinking I should just kick this bit of OCD over to the corner of the room but I can’t quiiiiite make myself do that. Also books (novels) that are toooo short kinda bother me.

I read Stone Maidens today. It’s 300 pages or so on my iPhone Kindle app. I dunno what that really means. I heard about this book listening to NPR on a return trip from Meijer or wherever a while ago. It’s a detective/thriller/murder mystery kind of book which isn’t one of my usual genres but I liked the author’s personal story. He wrote the book and it didn’t get published until… Quite a few years later his daughter posted about it on TikTok and it went viral and then it became a best seller.

I finally got around to giving it a try. It was a page turner. Was it great literature? Probably not although he isn’t a bad writer. Probably much better than yer fav-o-rite blahgger would be if she ever attempted a novel, which she most definitely won’t.

The protagonist is a forensic anthropologist. A young relative of mine is a forensic anthropologist. As I was reading this I was thinking about what she might think of it. Eye rolls? Nose holding? Cackles of laughter maybe? Like, the FBI would never do that! Nevertheless, there is a sequel and I might read it.

We spent the late afternoon in the back yard. The little church over on Maple was hosting an event of some sort. I guess to entice people to join. I enjoyed the music but have no interest in joining any church. I try to live by the golden rule. I don’t think you need to kowtow to a deity to treat others like you want them to treat you. That’s just basic kindness.

This used to be a Black church but recently on next door neighbor, I saw a post from (probably) an in-law of a family around the corner. I won’t go in to detail but *their* next-door neighbor once referred (kindly) to the dad as a truck-stop preacher. So I dunno if that family has taken over the Black church or if they are sharing the building but I did enjoy the music. It was much more pleasant than the constant dog barking and persistent car alarm I heard when walking through the schoolyard at 0-skunk-30 this morning.

After our loverly faaar, we ate leftovers in front of episode 4 of Lessons in Chemistry, which the GG seems to actually like against all odds 🐽

That’s what I said to the Fedex guy when he handed me my new laptop this morning.

Before that I made two grock runs. The first to Meijer for Halloween candy, which I knew if I didn’t buy it TODAY, nobody would have it. Why did I procrastinate about that? I do not know. It was still pitch black when I got back from the first grock run and the sun was just coming up when I made my second run, to Plum because Meijer didn’t have the exact form factor of chicken thighs I needed. Meijer also didn’t have the toilet bowl cleaner I use so I ordered that from Amazon.

It may be exciting to many to get a new laptop but I always brace myself. First, I followed my support gal’s instructions and everything looked fine but then… I got a message that “they” were setting things up for me. “This might take a few minutes. Don’t turn off your computer.” A few minutes to me is 3-5 or thereabouts. How about TWO HOURS? Two hours of nothing but Black Screen. I tried not to panic and eventually, something pinged. I received a text message at the same time as the ping and even though I almost NEVER have my phone sound on, it took me a minute to realize that it came from my LAPTOP. Okay then, something is happening even though I can’t see what it is.

After about a half hour of intermittent pings, I reached over and hit the return key. Hey, it said don’t turn off your computer. It didn’t say anything about the return key. Voila! Up came the enter password screen. It took my password and I was in. Whew!

But I’m not done yet. Two software applications that I use constantly (Visio and Snagit) are non-standard and have to be individually ordered and I couldn’t figure out how to do that, which means the process must have changed since the last time I had to do it. I didn’t have access to some links that I used to have access to and we won’t even talk about downloading from the cloud although I did make some progress.

So after three whole days of dealing with computer issues, the Virtual Oscar Tango folks are now trouble-shooting some kind of computer issue. I am not participating. I have had enough 😵‍💫

So my immediate problem will be solved tomorrow if all goes as planned. Getting through the byzantine support system to file a ticket can be challenging especially if you can’t use your laptop. Once I got connected with a person? Smooth sailing. That is all I will say. Well, except that we had arranged to communicate some important information through my personal email. I had totally forgotten that when I send email from my phone, it comes from “kayak woman”. My support person was initially thinking it might be spam! Embarrassed? Me? Yesiree 😵‍💫 We both had a good laugh.

The GG? He was busy busy busy ALL DAY. Raking, blowing, and mulching leaves with the mower mostly. At the end of the day he was digging around in the buckthorn area and making a lot of noise doing it. With hand tools. Metallic pounding noises mostly. The result of that was the long metal pole in the pic, which he dug out of the ground. A little bit of it was apparently sticking out and the lawnmower found it.

Apparently it has something to do with the RAILROAD TIES that surrounded the “garden” when we bought the Landfill, more years ago than I am strong enough to count. The problem? I do NOT remember any railroad ties… Anyway, there may be more of these poles. I suggested a metal detector might be a safer method for finding them than a lawnmower.

Actually, the mower is fine. The GG is a champion at fixing things like that. Once upon a time, a single mother down the street borrowed our mower. When she returned it, she was embarrassed because she thought she had broken it. The GG’s response was something like, “You probably sheared a pin. I do that all the time.” I don’t really know what “shearing a pin” means or if that was the actual problem. Whatever it was, he fixed it.

My rant about return-to-work orders fell a little short. Of course there are plenty of people who can’t do their jobs remotely. There are also folks who prefer to work in an office with other people around. I support both and appreciated your constructive comments 🧡

There are huge, extremely complex issues surrounding who works where and I don’t know it all. My current rather narrow concern is those companies that warmly embraced telecommuting during the early scary covid days and are now trying to force people back into offices, at least a few days a week. I believe that if people are productive and work is getting done, it should be a *choice* to return to the office.

Speaking of productivity? I have not been productive at all today although by the noon hour I was totally exhausted. Why? Because this morning, I booted up my laptop, checked my email, opened up a couple of documents I planned to work on. And. The GG came into the front room and we were talking about feral cats (one of the perennial hot-button issues on Next Door Neighbor) and watching a guy drive a riding lawnmower down the sidewalk. And… My laptop went black. Thinking I had been gabbing long enough for it to go to sleep, I hit return to wake it up. NOTHING. Doing a hard reboot was not helpful.

The GG can’t resist a mechanical/electronic problem to solve so he swung into action with a voltage meter and I dunno what other tools. In the end, he decided that there was a POSSIBILITY that it was the power supply. I phoned into the daily stand-up and a co-worker found a spare power supply at her home in a nearby satellite city. So I drove down there to pick it up. It was good to see her and we gnoffed at our work-from-home clothing. Alas, no love from the power supply.

Next step? File a support ticket. If you can. What did I try? Calling. Long wait times. iPhone app (new, not installed on my phone). Got the dern thing installed but not completely set up because of numerous continuous loops and other user interface weirdness I couldn’t get past. We won’t talk about how many times I had to log in or how many times I fat-fingered my pw and security code. Finally I wondered if I could get to the app on my MacBook Pro, which used to not be able to talk to my company at all. And… Voila! I have a support ticket. Nevertheless, SHE PERSISTED!

And so I wait. And didn’t I say just the other day (about a small work-related success), “Pride goeth before a fall?” 🐽