Last several booooks…

The Marriage Portrait. The author of Hamnet revisits history in a fictional way once again. This time by re-imagining the life as it might have been for a Renaissance Italian era duchess (and artist, at least in the book) forced to marry well, you know. Someone who kills her. This child was promised to her husband at 13. I have daughters and I cannot imagine me or the GG making marriage arrangements for them at that age. Or ever.

Snow Crash! I read Cryptomonicon by this author a few years ago. I loved it but I got lost in some of the details so maybe it’s a re-read. Snow Crash was crazy as all getout. I couldn’t always get straight what time period we were in. There were crazy futuristic things going on yet people were talking about their parents/grandparents fighting in WWII and Viet Nam, etc. This dissonance did not make me dislike the book but maybe I also need a re-read.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Video games anyone? I don’t actually play them. I mean NOT at all. Well except for the xword and spelling bee. Some people seemed to be annoyed at the characters in the book. I GOT THAT! But they weren’t all that bad and I know enough about coding/programming that I kind of got what was going on. Plus layering the art over the “engines” that drive video gaming. I don’t have words to articulate that but tech work in any format is both technical and artistic.

I am reading Horse now. Geraldine Brooks. I am loving this book as much as I loved March, her novel imagining the life of the father of the Little Women.

And I am off to watch my newest phone series, which is Game of Thrones!

The good news is… My phone vibrated this morning. I was in the middle of a css rabbit hole to beat all hell. I peered at the number. It was from Brimley, Michigan but it wasn’t a number I recognized. Then again, I do know people from that area who are not contacts in my phone. In the end, I declined it. If it’s important, they’ll leave a voicemail.

Guess what? They did leave a voicemail. Guess who it was? It was the telephone company. Can you guess why they were calling? They were not calling because I hadn’t paid the bill because I auto-pay it … … … Okay, I’ll tell you. They were calling to set up an appointment to waaaar (or whatever they have to do) our “house” for FIBER OPTIC WIFI! You can darn betcha I called back immediately. I explained that our “house” was a seasonal cabin and we wouldn’t be there until sometime in the… well, sometime after winter was over but of course, this is EXCITING! They have made a note that we are seasonal and I can call them when we’re ready.

I’m trying to remember what year it was (was it pre-covid? not gonna look it up) that we drove in to find funny little “flags” along the road. A notice was on our door that they were going to install fiber optics. And then… The whole project got postponed and postponed and postponed ad infinitum. It was okay. We’ve had a DSL up there for years and it never fails. Except for when lightning took it out last spring. But that was fixed QUICKLY with over-the-top service (we needed an actual phone and our old one also died by lightning so they scrounged up an old phone). Dealing with that telephone company is NOT like dealing with Comcast or Xfinity or whatever it is.

But it is exciting that this upgrade is apparently finally happening. I mean, we don’t even have fiber optic wifi here on the Planet Ann Arbor, at least it isn’t available to my house. So yay for the eastern yooperland and the telephone company is now in my phone contacts.

The pic is rock formations on the southern shore of Gitchee Gumee.

This is the bubble wrap hoard I collected during the initial intense online ordering phase of the pandemic. This has been hanging out in the Landfill Dungeon for years now, as long as the pandemic has dragged on. I still order a lot of stuff on line but not as frequently as I did back in the early covid days.

From time to time, I try to think of ways to get rid of my bubble wrap hoard. I could take it over to the drop-off station but I suspect it would end up in the landfill (I mean the city landfill, not my landfill). That would be extremely irresponsible of me to do because bubble wrap may not be recyclable but it IS CERTAINLY REUSABLE (with the possible exception of the sheet we let our sweet trio of western grand-nieces stomp on last summer – pop pop poppop poppity pop).

But what are my options for donating it somewhere that it’ll get re-used? I don’t think the Scrap Box or Kiwanis would take it (although you never know what Kiwanis might take). I have seen people post it om (om om om) on next door neighbor but I’m leery about interacting with strangers on that platform. It’s not because I think I’ll run into a serial killer, just the usual friendly introvert social anxiety.

In the end a family member adopted it. A beach urchin is moving, back to the Planet Ann Arbor as luck would have it! So this morning she stuffed my entire bubble wrap hoard into a couple garbage bags so she can wrap up her dishes and other breakables. The boxes? The other beach urchin (who moved last spring) dropped those off yesterday. There were THREE boxes of boxes but one had already gone out to the car. I can’t say I won’t ever get all that bubble wrap back and if I do, I will figure out what to do with it by hook or by crook. But for the moment it’s a relief to get it outta the Landfill (my landfill but also the city’s).

P.S. Froooogie and Frogette seem to be peeking out from behind the beach urchin. Don’t look at the froogs. You’ll only encourage them.

BTW: THANK YOU GEORGIA! 💙💙💙

Merry xmas to me. I am now a Spotify user. A beach urchin is over for dinner and an overnight and she couldn’t ninja her phone to hook up with our homepod or whatever it is. So she downloaded Spotify to my laptop and gifted it to me and we got connected to the homepod.

I have friends who have long raved about Spotify but I have been reluctant for reasons I can’t articulate. This is so much fun. She loaded up a couple of Celtic playlists that she often puts on when she comes to visit. Then she found some old 60s stuff she knew I would probably like. The Byrds and whatnot. And Weezer, who probably weren’t BORN in the 60s but I love them ANYWAY. And then. I said, “What about Pink Floyd?” Clickety click and I had Dark Side of the Moon. And a couple other things and then… I asked could we search for a category like “Vietnam helicopter music”? Ask and you shall receive.

The pic is Gitchee Gumee on Saturday when the weather was at its worst in the yooperland and elsewhere. The GG and his hiking partner woke up and made the executive decision to NOT hike that day. Screaming winds among other fugly weather conditions. Instead they explored the little dirt roads they would need to drive to get to the portions of the trail they wanted to hike. When they got down to Lake Superior on one of these roads, this is what they encountered. They got out of the car long enough to take this pic and confirm that their decision not to hike that day was a good one.

The cacophony is in my head. Today I focused on a lot of writing (work) although I did not write the “comment” I have to write to finish my year-end performance evaluation. I have such a “floaty” job it’s really hard to write about what I do and have accomplished. It’s the same old same old and yet it’s always different, which is what makes it interesting. I am procrastinating and I know it. What do I write? I am also reporting to a different boss than when I last did this. Fine person but doesn’t really know me all that well.

So the GG sent some pics today of Himself in a BRIGHT BLUE jacket. We (his cousins and his sisters and his aunts or actually his wife and daughters) were wondering like when and where the heck did he acquire that? He tends more towards earth tones. Long ago this bothered me like why do you always wear brown or beige. Those are not fave colors of mine. I have gotten used to it though. If he picks out his own clothing and pays for it (and he certainly can), I guess I don’t care what colors he wears.

So the BLUE was a bit of a surprise. I didn’t think about it much until one of the beach urchins asked about the “new” jacket. Well. It came from Sally Ann (Salvation Army). A trail angel helping to support our friend’s hike bought it at Sally Ann after the GG fell in the drink last week. Remember the log “bridge”? So, of COURSE! Even though he may not have chosen that color (*I* like the color just fine, I’m all about blue), I know he is grateful for such a kind gesture.

So here he is on the shores of Gitchee Gumee in December in a “new” blue jacket.

I was rambling away about poopads yesterday. I never did get the po6 spelling bee word that I was missing. This morning I looked at the bee forum comments. It was POPPED! How did I not get that? Every time I had looked at the words I had, I glossed over pooped, poppet, and potted and somehow thought I already HAD popped😵‍💫

I spent this gorgeous day cleaning things that don’t often get cleaned, mainly because they don’t often get used. And since Mr. Golden Sun was out in full force and there are no leaves to impede his vision, he illuminated every single spider web and speck of dust he could find. And I was thinking… Thinking about how I want to rearrange my house and furniture.

First, we need to replace the Green Couch. This is proving to create the usual furniture buying stress. Like I do not WANT something overstuffed. “Do you know what I mean when I say ‘overstuffed’?” I ask my mismatched furniture buying pardner. Not in that space anyway. It’s kinda okay in the back room.

Then. I want to get rid of the cFam dresser in the front room (where the Green Couch is) and replace it with some kind of shelf unit. It needs to have both display spaces and cabinets with doors. I want to put my extra glassware (that I was washing today) on display and store some other stuff. Radical Betty (my late aunt) had a lovely teak (I think) unit in her chalet on the moominbeach and I am thinking something along those lines. And no I do NOT want hers! For one thing, it belongs to my cousins. Also there would be the whole problem of getting it OUT of there (not to mention a few other unmentionable problems it may have by this time in its history). Also, I have some different ideas about what I need. Anyway, that shelf unit is my inspiration. I’d be willing to go with something from Ikea but others have attitudes…

Finally, I wanted a free-standing “coffee station” in the chitchen. I LOVE LOVE LOVE my kitchen overall but one of the things that got forgotten when we gutted/renovated it was an OUTLET where I wanted the coffee station. So the coffee-maker and grinder are crowding my counter, which drives me nuts. I’m not sure how much fiddling around it would take to install an outlet there. But I would like to have one there and then I could replace the kinda clunky free-standing shelf unit there with something a little more low profile. And move the glassware to the future shelf unit in the front room.

None of this makes any sense without pictures. At least not to anyone unfamiliar with The Landfill. I know that. But it might not even make any sense with pictures. It’s mostly meeeee thinking out loud. So you get a pic of our beeyootyful waxing gibbous moooooon instead. Which was bright enough to produce a wee lens flare. Gratuitous telephone pole at the bottom of the photo. Wait! Do we even need telephone poles any more? I suppose there are still a number of folks who have land lines… Actually it may be an electrical pole. I dunno?

Cheers. Or poopity poppety or whatever.

Oh boy, did I wake up on the wrong side of the bed today. For one thing it was RAINING. That was actually GOOD. What was NOT GOOD was the WIND that accompanied it. FUGLY!

I was gonna go meet my cousins downtown to drop off the Ann Arbor Pioneer 1972 tshirt that I was gonna wear to my high school reunion in August (NOT Ann Arbor) but wimped out on the event. I was travel weary but it turned out the the reunion was a covid spreader so…

Anyway. This morning I bagged my walk and then I watched a whole bunch of branches fall out of the trees. Nothing big but still. And then I bagged meeting with my cousins. I was not going to EAT breakfast with my cousins anyway (they knew that). I am still not doing indoor restaurants. It’s partly covid cowardice but it is also that the few restaurant experiences I’ve had since covid have been exhausting. I WILL get over this but this morning things were falling on my house and I just wasn’t into monkeying around with downtown (and man do I miss the old library lot but we’ll talk about that some other day). So I drank my oj and ate my overnight oats (cranberry-orange) and then got cracking at various chores. Sorry not to see my cousins today but…

Mopping floors (roooooomba is tomorrow), cleaning out the freezer (again), cleaning the bathroom, and various computer-type chores. Like ordering xmas gifts. I dunno, I took Cygnus out for a wee spin this afternoon. I was headed for the back roads (yes, she is dirty) but had to pass various shopping centers to get there. Can I just say every parking lot was SLAMMED.

At this time last year I encountered this phenomenon as omicron was going crazy and it totally freaked me out. I am not freaked out now but still, I am glad that people sent me links to stuff they actually WANT because I sat on the Green Couch and within about 15 minutes of clicking, I was DONE! Note that I would go inside a store (masked) if I needed to and may even do some in-store shopping (masked) before all is done.

I am the main problem here. They are all bugging me for a list. I have made one but it’s very short. I am sitting here looking at clutter and trying to strategize a pre-xmas Kiwanis Thrift donation run. I will blahg about that some other day. If I get around to it.

BTW: On the spelling bee, I am one po6 word below queen bee and poopad does NOT work. I dunno why. It’s what FlaMan used for his late, alas, dog. Jax was a sweet dog but I did not like his poopad 💩😵‍💫

There are selfies that people take at the edge of something precipitous and then fall off and die. There are selfies that people take on what LOOK to be the edge of something precipitous and don’t fall off and we find out later that they were really not in any danger because the photooo doesn’t show that they are actually very close to solid ground.

I’m not sure exactly where the GG is in terms of safety in this photo. He is up on Miner’s Castle. It is a rock formation on Lake Superior. Forever in my childhood memory, it was a big rock with two “towers” on top of it. Not toooo many years ago, one of those towers decided it was time to fall into the lake and so it did.

So is he near the edge or is there some sort of barrier between him and the edge? I do not know. I do know that he did not fall off the cliff or even off any substandard bridges. We got porterized tonight and he is staying at a motel with a nice hot SHOWER and wifi. He is apparently cooking and eating in the Lyme Lounge and his hiking partner is, if I get it right, getting lucky shucky for her trailer from his room, with permission from the motel.

Oops! Correction: He is not ON Miner’s Castle. You can’t get there any more. He can SEE it from where he is. I KNEW that!

So this is what we got from the GG today. He is southwest of Munising, Michigan. I don’t really like the looks of this so-called bridge much more than the “pole bridge” of a couple days ago but at least it has a flat surface as opposed to a rounded one and I didn’t hear that anyone fell in.

I can’t complain too much. I remember when our own section of the north country trail was not quite as good as it is today although I don’t remember pole bridges. A dedicated group of volunteers worked hard to improve it and we’ve partnered with the US Forest Service to replace some bridges and other things. I dunno how organized the folks who maintain these other sections are. So much of this is volunteer work.

Me? With the usual amount of trepidation, I presented some stuff at work today. I do not enjoy public speaking even when my audience is the wonderful folks I have worked with for 15 years (and it’s teams and all they can see is my work photo, which was taken a few years ago). There are always wildcards and today they were Mr. Bear and the BB. Also today I was feeling a little iffy about my designs because I don’t have fluency with the “backend” processes that we are replacing with user interface.

As luck would have it, Mr. Bear was on his best behavior today. I’m not sure if that was because the BB was there or what but WHEW! I only felt stoopid once during the whole presentation and that was my fault for totally misunderstanding something in a totally ridiculous way. Ridiculous enough that one of my dev pals laughed out loud.

P.S. NPR article right this minute says that bats can make sounds over SEVEN octaves. Does a piano have that many octaves? I think so…

I would bullet these but bullet points don’t work very well in my blahg space because floats and I don’t feel like messing with css. That’s one of the things I do for a living.

Cautionary tale: a friend (with much trepidation) and her family had multiple gatherings over the tday weekend and guess what? If you guessed covid, you win the booby prize. Everyone is vaxxed and boosted at least twice but… It is not over. Our own *one* holiday gathering was much smaller and after a week no one has symptoms.

I made an 0-skunk-30 Meijer run today. It was pitch black all the way over there and back (and WINDY) and I FORGOT to lock Cygnus while I went in the store. Yes, really. Fortunately all was well. I was in there 10 minutes tops but it only takes a second. I leave my purse in my car when I go into stores. That way I can shop unencumbered with anything that’s not in my pockets. Phone in one zip pocket, debit and fob in the other. My purse is well hidden but still. I wouldn’t take my purse at all but my drivers license is in it and I am driving.

One of the things on my grock list was REAL seasoned salt. My homemade stuff didn’t really hit the spot (Chex Mix), at least not for me. Hopefully it won’t take 20 years to use this stuff up.

I am almost done with the tday leftovers. Been making cran-turkey wraps for lunch among other things. That also used up a partial package of tortillas I had in the freezer and some of the arugula that got left here.

Yesterday the GG complained that I didn’t post a pic. Well, my friend, I didn’t really have one. It was dark when I walked and gloomy all day and I worked. So. Here’s a horse pic he sent me a few weeks ago.

Last but not least: No one fell off a log into a river today, at least not that I’ve heard about.

90s TV that is. I did not miss Clarissa Explains It All. That was on Saturday afternoons or some weird time and we watched it on the little TV in the Landfill Chitchen. I often fell asleep to Nick at Nite after play rehearsals. Taxi and other shows. But I didn’t watch prime time TV at all. And so I missed out on sitcoms like Seinfeld.

I dunno what’s on prime time TV in terms of sitcoms today. Do they still air stuff like that? I’m lucky if I can figure out how to turn on the TV let alone find one of the old networks. CBS, NBC, ABC. CBC if you are Canadian or you grow up in an isolated northern border town where the only TV channel you can get is Canadian.

So I don’t EVER think about Seinfeld but the other day, an Atlantic article flew by on Twitter. The writer had (like me) never watched Seinfeld so he decided to binge it. By bingeing, I mean one episode a day, not a full-fledged pig out. This intrigued me enough that I surfed around on my phone and found reruns. I am enjoying them and sometimes actually laughing out loud. Yes, really. I am still making my way through Westworld and an episode of Seinfeld is a nice little palate cleanser between that and sleep.

I think my kids thought I was nuts when I fessed up about this🤣🤣🤣 But I’ve also been known to watch Green Acres re-runs, although I also watched the originals as a kid.

P.S. I do miss the 90s. Those were the years the beach urchins were growing up and I loved ferrying them and their friends all over town with the radio playing “dinosaurs on” (Wee Sing Dinosaurs) at the beginning of the decade and alternative rock at the end.

“Sorta” exciting day? Crossing a small river over a “pole bridge”. A SNOW-COVERED “pole bridge”. Hey buddy, that eez not a breedge! Eet eez a LOG!

Why yes! He did fall in! How deep was it? 1-3 feet. How wet did he get? Wet enough. He hiked “fast” for a couple miles until he could get to where someone could pick him up in her warm car. Thank you Sue! His phone was apparently undamaged. His feet did not get frostbitten.

I was thinking something like, “I would NEVER cross a river on a ‘bridge’ like that!” I was feeling a bit embarrassed about that until a beach urchin piped up to say she crosses those kinds of “bridges” CRAWLING. Like on her hands and knees. Good choice.

I used to cross a log bridge as a child. Before there were modern houses at the west end of the moominbeach, we would launch onto the path at the Mullin cabin, run like bats outta hell to the “pond”, stopping briefly to inspect the woodpecker tree along the way. The “pond” isn’t really a pond, it is a stream and the log was how we crossed the stream at that point. If we crossed it on the beach, we just sloshed across it. So our log bridge was shorter and thicker than the one in the pic and we were agile little monkeys, not baggy old bags. And there was no snow because in those days we closed up our cabins for the winter and went to our houses in town. Meaning we weren’t there in the winter.

I don’t remember anyone ever falling off that little bridge but my (older) cousin Mac managed to TERRIFY me anyway by telling me there were water moccasins in the stream. Well. Not. We have ONE poisonous venomous snake in the Great Lake State, the Massasauga Rattler. It is RARELY seen and non-existent in the yooperland. Garter and grass snakes in our biome. I knew all that (I was about five) but it still scared me. But not enough that I was afraid to cross the bridge!

Oh not here (the pic). A beach urchin sent this pic today from her apartment. It is The Commander’s Christmas cactus and it still thrives going on 11 years after her death. I’m not sure how long The Comm had it but probably a number of years.

It’s a good thing some of whatever “farming” DNA exists in the Fin/MacMu/cFam ancestral pool made it to somebody. I absolutely did NOT get any of it. I kill plants just by looking at them. Houseplants, garden plants, whatever. Sometimes it’s neglect but mainly I just do not understand them. We have babysat house plants over the years. We have one right now. The GG is better at nurturing them and in this case, a main guardian of the plant will be around to check on it.

Fortunately, The Comm’s houseplants found friendly homes, mainly with Lizard, after she died.

We had a struggle with one of her plants. It was a HUGE potted thing (in a huge pot). The beach urchins called it “that tree”. I wasn’t sure how we were gonna even get that thing out of her house, let alone transport it to The Planet Ann Arbor. We deliberated throughout summer of 2012, when we were emptying The Comm’s house in preparation for selling it. The “tree” was among the last things to go. The laundry musheens were still there but I was using them that summer and left them for the next owners.

Then one day I got up there to The Comm’s house and the tree, pot and all, was in the Trash Trailer, which was in the driveway behind the Frog Hopper. I dunno how he got that thing outta the house and into the trailer but it has lived in The Landfill all this time. Alas, it has never regained the health it enjoyed in The Comm’s house. I know the GG pays attention to it so not sure why. Maybe it was a One Woman Plant?

I texted this pic to the beach urchins when the GG finally took off on his latest boondoggle to hike parts of the North Country Trail. Yes, it’ll probably be at least partially a snow hike.

What a day. It started yesterday when he decided (surprise) he would leave today. Then this morning, he couldn’t make up his mind whether to leave today or tomorrow. There was gumbo making (don’t ask) and LOTS of rummaging throughout this morning and to top it all off, today was the Umich / OSU football game. He watches this game pacing around the Landfill, jumping up and down in front of the TV, and generally driving me nuts. Like, just LIGHT!

The game started out with OSU seemingly in control. They seem to win it most of the time so I wasn’t expecting much. He watched some of it here after making a final decision to drive partway north today. So I’m sure he listened to it in Mooon Yooonit, then finished it off at Flaman’s place before continuing on to the Uncly Uncle’s house.

I told him to leave the TV on (it’s in the other room) but I didn’t watch the game. I don’t understand football well enough to know what’s going on. I did open up a tab on my phone browser after hearing a lot of cheering from the TV. I figured OSU had done something but no, it was Umich. They sneaked ahead and never looked back. 40-something to 20-something? Something like that.

So Hail Michigan. We are now blue not only in polly-ticks but “we” have won the OSU game!

Okay. Thanksgiving is over and the next chapter begins. This morning, after a walk and a trip to Plum, I… started some bacon. Put away all of the clean, dry dishes the beach urchins left in the bamboo drainer last night. I ate the pumpkin parfait I was too full to eat last night for breakfast (and bacon). Others ate pie (and bacon). Ran the dishwasher load I forgot to turn on last night and two loads of laundry. Lots of futzing around with the blasted laundry app that decided all of a sudden to not recognize my dryer via our wifi connection.

During a session in the dungeon where I contorted myself down and sideways in order to read the sticker on the interior of the dryer door to get the “password”, it wouldn’t connect and it wouldn’t connect and I was about to give up when it suddenly recognized me again. User interface design anyone? Whose nephew designed this? Or was it a bazillionaire? It is a DRYER! Why don’t they print the frickin’ password PROMINENTLY across the the top of the dryer? Who is gonna try to log in to my DRYER? If somebody breaks into my house, they are NOT gonna want to steal a bunch of old clothes, clean or not. And if they did want to steal old clothes, they certainly wouldn’t need the dryer password. They could just open the dryer door! Or rummage through our dressers and closets. Jeebus.

So turkey tetrahedron tonight. So good. Spaghetti, turkey, peas, mushrooms, sauce (milk, broth, whine, pepper, and nutmeg), topped with parmesan/bread crumbs and baked. There is a pretty good ton of food left but probably not more than we can deal with if we’re creative about leftovers.

The pic has nothing to do with today. It is from May 2000 when a tree fell on our house and the POC (Chrysler minivan). It doesn’t embiggen much because it was taken with our first digital cam, a Sony Mavica. That thing actually saved photos to FLOPPY DISKS!

Another turkey day is in the books and this is what it looked like as the sun was rising this morning.

I was the energizer bunny all morning, making eggs benny and cleaning up dishes as I went. The GG took a walk, hiking toward the mouse house until the mouse herself picked him up on her way over here for eggs benny. She brought a few friends including this one.

We took turns using the Landfill Chitchen throughout the afternoon as the workload shifted from the taaaaring energizer bunny to the younger generation. We have pretty darn warm weather for Thanksgiving. It was too warm to build a faaar in the faaarplace. We were all excited yesterday about having an outdoor faaar this afternoon but it never happened. It was a football afternoon for some and a crash afternoon for others and that was all okay. In the late afternoon big black clouds rolled in and it has been raining for hours. Which is okay. We have needed rain and at least it is NOT snow.

Here’s the obligatory pic of my turkey platter with clutter and today’s undumped compost to keep it real. The GG was just starting to carve the turkey, which is why there are only a couple legs on the platter.

Those of us overnighting at the Landfill ended our evening by watching (randomly) a bunch of the first Godfather movie (and more football🐽). I read the Godfather as a teenager (yes even that part) and watched the movie ONCE in its entirety and a few other times in bits and pieces on TV. I am thinking it may be time to revisit the book and maybe even read its sequels. We’ll see. Great literature it is not but there’s nothing wrong with reading a crappy book from time to time. The trick is to keep reading.

Oh yeah, our mouse revived a tradition of having an afternoon holiday snack involving samosas and mimosas. We squeezed fresh oranges and clementines for the juice. Good times, good tradition. Not that we exactly *have* holiday traditions. Thanksgiving has been a mixed bag throughout the years.

This year our low-key turkey day celebration returns to the Landfill after a bit of a covid-type hiatus. That’s not totally correct. Two years ago, pre-vax, we did do tday here but me and the GG were alone with a huge turkey (pandemic ordering snafu and it was okay, I am good at using up leftover turkey). Last year we were all vaxxed but people were having breakthrough infections, some of them pretty severe, so we cautiously met at the mouse house with the younger generation testing beforehand. It was great and I did almost NOTHING but I couldn’t get the GG to leave at what I thought was a decent hour so this year I volunteered the Landfill again.

I designated today as my day to prep almost everything. And I got most of it done. Mashed potatoes are done. Brussel(s?) sprouts and delicata squash trimmed in prepration for roasting with I dunno what yet, dried cranberries and cherries, a bit of red onion (to use a partial one up), herbs, and maybe a dash of pomegranate molasses? Cranberry sauce is in a pan waiting for later tonight or morning. And it’s so full of sugar it can sit there all night. Dressing? Bread is cubed. Using pre-cut celery and will chop an onion in the morning. And I’ll put some other stuff in it including some chicken broth that got my late afternoon grock/beer runners a lecture on the difference between stock and broth. I don’t know the difference so I was okay with what they bought which is what I wouldda bought. Gravy? I usually make that waaaay ahead and freeze it. This year Sparrow Meats posted that they had some homemade frozen turkey broth so it’s thawing and I’ll use it for my gravy base tomorrow.

Chex mix? Chex mix? I was all set to throw that together but… Where is my Lawry’s seasoned salt? Oh yeah. It was umpteen bazillion years old and I threw it out last year. By this time it was heading toward late afternoon. There was NO WAY I was going out to a grocery store in Cygnus late afternoon on tday eve and Plum is an easy walk but did not have Lawry’s (that I could tell from an exploration of curbside ordering). So… Whaddo I do? Hmmm… I could run out to Kroger at 0-skunk-30 tomorrow morning and hope they have some (they have struggled to stock things during the pandemic). And then… A light bulb came on. What are the ingredients in seasoned salt? Googly googly and I’m sure I don’t have everything in Lawry’s recipe but what the heck, I made my own seasoned salt and I think it’s gonna be decent! Where there is a will, there is a way.

Oh plus, eggplant parm is in the oven for dinner tonight! It wasn’t the most productive work day but oh well.

P.S. I have the delicata squash because the GG was walking around downtown and called me from the farmers market to ask if I wanted anything! Yes! Facetime with veggies ensued.

[That’s why it’s such a piece of crap.] Jeebus. This morning. I can now remote start Cygnus (YAY) so I’ll do it. Problem. I needed a PIN number. I did not KNOW the PIN number but I was able to change it. So I did. But then. I got hung up on two-factor identification. MySubie was gonna send a text to the GG’s phone. The GG was still deep in slumber but I was not gonna give up on this.

So. I woke him up. Is your phone around somewhere? Mmmph. Can you check your text messages? Mmmph. He then surfaced and after a few minutes told me the code. And I managed to get it to start. It would be easier to just use the blasted fob like we have done with every vee-hickle we’ve bought since 2011. In this case, we’d’ve had to buy a SECOND fob for that functionality. We are tech-friendly so the phone option seemed okay at the time. It was MAY so there was no need to remote start for MONTHS. So I guess we were like okay, we’ll figger it out when we need to.

I don’t blame the sales folks at the dealer. They were wonderful. But who the heck made the design decisions on this thing?

I read somewhere that Tesla cars require the driver to use the touch screen to TURN ON ZEE VEEENDSHIELD VIPERS? Really? I dunno if that’s true or if it’s just Musk bashing. But really? I can manage my veendshield vipers just fine with the levers attached to the steering wheel and what’s good is that I can do it without taking my eyes off the road and traffic.

Not everything in an automotive vee-hickle should be handled via a touch screen or iPhone app. And I am not impressed with whoever some of these companies are hiring as designers. My remote start issue is a minor thing but touchscreen control for basic automotive functions while driving is not.

I wonder what my brother (GM automotive engineer and talented amateur jazz trombonist) would have thought about all of this. He died in 2005, before facebook and twitter and touch screens in cars.

I don’t really have much today because my brain is flying wildly all over the place. ADA compliance stuff at work. I am an expert now? Nope. But after a five/six year journey through this transition, my name keeps coming up. And okay. I’ll take it. It was a HUGE learning curve for our whole team and we have come a long way but we don’t know it all. But I know enough to be able to provide a few of those proverbial (and often elusive) bootstraps to others who are staring the beginning of that journey in the face.

Oh when my name comes up, I mean only on my small team. The company at large has no clue who I am or what I do. I am just a cog, albeit a happy one. And I am NOT an ADA guru in any way, shape, or form.

So I was thinking all day about how to respond to an email. And thinking about turkey day, which I am not really prepared for but it’ll all work out and if we need anything at the last minute, the Plum will be open and we’ll send someone over there who doesn’t WORK there. Like the GG. And then there are xmas gifts, which I do not really want and don’t think others want a lot of either. Not to mention a few clutter piles around the Landfill (one reason I don’t want gifts), which are GOING TO RETURN TO WHERE THEY LIVE or else!

And then there’s my beloved Cygnus. She’s fine! But I was able to access her via the MySubaru iPhone app for the FIRST TIME since I bought her, which was May 2021 so I spent a whole winter without being able to remote start her. I love her but apparently only one person can have a MySubaru account. Which SUCKS since TWO people are on the title and she’s nominally “my car”. So what the f*ck? Logging in via the GG’s account allowed me to FINALLY remote start her without whining, “Dear will you remote start my car?” Or suiting up to go outside and start her manually. I had to do that with the Ninja but she was a 2008 6-speed manual. (I still miss my little Ninja but I love Cygnus.)

The pic is the GG putting some ancient sparklers into the faaaarplace. We have so much fun.

Actually they are calling them “sofas” now. At least that seems to be the best way to get search results on the internet. When I was a kid we called them “davenports”. At least The Commander did.

If I want to buy a couch sofa, I have to go SHOPPING. For furniture. Did I want to go furniture shopping today? No I did not. Do not get me wrong. I am not afraid I’m going to get COVID (again) by going (masked) into a few furniture stores. That train has left the station.

I just plain hate shopping, especially at this time of year. But more to the point I really hate shopping for furniture. What I would really like is for someone to get an idea of what I’m interested in and locate a few options that I can pick from. I know Certified Kitchen Lady would be a great help but they do *renovations*, not just single pieces of furniture. I don’t think I can get the GG to agree to renovating our two main living spaces as much as I’d like to.

I get so overwhelmed in furniture stores. There’s tooooo much. I can’t envision ANY of it in MY house. I don’t really like the colors. I want teal, they have taupe, etc. Taupe is not a color. I can’t STAND the intrusive sales personnel. I want somebody there if I have questions or I’m ready to buy. Trying to push stuff on me is likely gonna send me out the door in a panic. I couldn’t do that kind of job if you paid me a billion dollars.

So today we tried facetime shopping where the GG did the walking and I looked at (and rejected) about a bazillion couches sofas. At some point, I know I will have to go out and look myself. And I cannot buy a couch sofa on the internet although I can certainly surf to look at styles (but that’s overwhelming too). A couch sofa is a big enough item I need to meet it in person and maybe even sit on it.

Bah humbug😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

P.S. This is a first world problem and one I am no doubt overthinking!