I was hanging out slapping MOE-skee-TOES in the Landfill back yard after work this afternoon thinking something like, “dum de dum de dum, whatami gonna blahg about today?”

So Bob next door was making noise in his back yard. Not annoying noise, sounded like he was trying to muster a prodject. After a bit he air-knock-knocked at us in our back yard and asked the GG if he was up to helping hoist a patio table up over his fence. He had recruited a couple other neighborhood guys and one of them was extra friendly.

After a few fleeting comments from us and him about the yooperland and where the FinFam beach is he said (I think) that he had grown up in Sault Ste. Marie. And then he told me who his grandparents were. Ozzie and June. My jaw dropped just about to the floor.

I GREW UP LITERALLY NEXT DOOR TO OZZIE AND JUNE! Ozzie owned a garden/feed shop downtown and drove a truck with Green Thumb MacInnes painted on the side. Every year he grew a patch of corn in his back yard. The Commander always tried to do that too but it never came to much of anything and she would kvetch about how meager her corn patch was compared to Ozzie’s.

It turns out Ozzie and June’s grandson lives around the corner from us, in a house once owned by one of my best Haisley School PTO friends but that’s a story for some other day.

His aunt Bobby (Barbara) has been in my thoughts lately. She was something like six years older than me and I so looked up to her. We liked when she baby-sat us but she wasn’t our most frequent baby-sitter. I’m not sure she liked baby-sitting all that much and I am gonna guess me and my brother were known as brats. But she is still alive and doing well and I am happy about that.

Small world, eh?

This trip was kind of a rocket trip to the yooperland. He came home a bit earlier than he had planned. Of all things, he decided he wanted to hang out with meeee rather than other relatives. I dunno why. I think his siblings et al are much more fun than I am and most of them also agree with him about pollyticks.

I also wonder if he decided to come home because I texted that the refrigerator was fixed and beef stroganoff was in the hopper.

I can always tell when he is at the end of the block because I can hear the Lyme Lounge squeaking.

Back when the beach urchins were tween and teenagers, we never expected their friends to knock on the door or ring the doorbell when they arrived. Nope. If you knew us you came in the door and either squeaked or grokked. Our doors were unlocked throughout the night for the most part. I miss those days…

Okay, I kinda fell off the world when I tried to switch (or not exactly) from Goodreads to StoryGraph last spring or whenever it was. I was successful at transferring all of my Goodreads stuff to StoryGraph. What I struggled with (and I knew I would) was keeping two book apps up to date. So I haven’t been updating what I’ve been reading in either app. My bad.

Also, I have been doing audio books since the beginning of the summer. I dunno why. I never glommed onto them before. They’re working for me now. I dunno if this situation is temporary or not.

The Glassmaker is one book that has left me with a book hangover. There is an interesting structure to this novel, which it set in Venice and begins in the 1400s and ends in the COVID era. That is all I will say.

Another that I read was Buckeye. It’s set in Ohio. A lot of the North Country Trail goes through Ohio, plus there is the Buckeye Trail, which often intersects and/or joins the North Country Trail and the GG has hiked a lot of it. I just finished this one this afternoon but I think I’m going to have a book hangover from this one too. A lot of people like to disparage Ohio. If you are snowbirding south to Crazy Old Florida on the I75 Snowbird Geezerway, it can be a drag but Ohio has a rich history and a varied terrain. And Lake Erie is its northern border. Buckeye was a good book although I was appalled at some of the choices the characters made along the way. No one hiked the North Country or Buckeye trails.

That’s the Lyme Lounge and Mooon Yooonit parked at the Tahquamenon Falls lower falls campround.

What are you doing/looking for? I must’ve asked this question umpteen bazillion times this week. The GG was getting ready to rumble and, as usual, where is it? 10% of his stuff is always missing and it’s always a different 10%. That’s a quote from his dad but it applies to the GG too.

This refrigerated bag was missing. He was wondering where the heck it was. I couldn’t remember *what* he was talking about. Oh yeah, I ordered candy from BonBonBon for him last Valentine’s Day. I never heard how he liked the candy. I didn’t expect the bag and I wondered if it was a wee bit “girly” for him but nope. (He uses one of my mom’s old purses too.) He couldn’t find the bag yesterday and was gyrating all over the house looking for it. Obviously he eventually found it.

At the end of yesterday, after a whole week of in and out and around and about, he was fussing with TAXES! Oh, the rules have changed (like they do every year). Okay. That’s what we have an accountant for, roight? Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great to understand these things even if you hire an accountant to actually file the taxes. Just. Oh. My. God. The kind of frenetic energy involved in tax stuff drives me nuts.

On another kind of topic, of course I can retire any old time I want to. I am feeling better about the whole idea knowing that when I do decide to, I will be leaving a big part of my bailiwick to someone who seems to be able to learn the part of my job that involves html, css, and some fugly, gnarly old javascript. “I’ve always wanted to learn to code,” he said today. The opportunity had never arisen. Man, this “kid” is a fast learner. He isn’t even intimidated by the javascript. I have to keep hanging back from hand-holding. That is a good thing.

I stepped in it a bit this morning during the daily standup. A colleague based in Florida is an expert kayak fisherman who reported that sometimes the bigger fish down there can pull a fisherman in a small bote along a bit. That reminded me of Nantucket Sleighride. It is a song by Mountain from 1971 when I was still in high school. It’s kinda long and I won’t be insulted if you bag out.

I always loved the song (and Mountain) but it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I actually looked up what a Nantucket sleigh ride was. Which is when you are on an old-fashioned whaler and you snag a whale and it takes you for a ride.

I work with a whole bunch of people from all over the USA and world. I don’t know where all of them live and they don’t always know where I live. When my fisherman friend told about being towed for a bit in his kayak, I un-muted and interjected “Nantucket sleigh ride, when you are being towed by a whale.”

A new person (to our team but not to the company) immediately said, “Oh you are from the east coast?” Nope. I am from Lake Superior. No whales in Gitchee Gumee. I said that the reference was from an old Mountain song. I’m not sure anyone actually got the Mountain reference but this person lives in Massachusetts albeit not near the shore. I was dating myself but I didn’t care. At this point we moved on into the actual meeting.

Way back in the day one of my nieces was giggling about my mom leaving her purse in the Mission Hill cemetery during a family excursion there. An excursion that my nuclear family was not part of. Oh, not that we weren’t welcome to join it, just that we weren’t in the yooperland at that time.

The photo is of the Spectacle Lake overlook. I have been there many times since I was a child. The graveyard is behind me. Native Americans are buried there as well as immigrants like most of us USA citizens are. (Take a note, Trump.)

Once when we were all young and childless, me and the GG and my brother and his wife took an evening drive up onto the Spectacle Lake overlook. We were joined by several young Native American men. One of those guys kinda glommed on to my brother in an ominous way. I was nervous about that. The rest of them were more interested in the WWII telescope kinda thing the GG had set up and were having fun talking to him. We made it out of there with no altercation. The place is usually flooded with tourists and I think that is the only time I’ve ever been nervous about being there.

Grandma (before she was Grandma) and I once ended up on the Spectacle Lake overlook on a garbage run. The dump was (and still is) on Plantation Road but mom and I were talking a blue streak (I was about 22) and she missed the turn. I knew she had missed it but I didn’t say anything and the next thing I knew, there we were up on the overlook. Of course we didn’t dump our garbage there.

Grandma’s purse was found right away but that began a mini-career of me sweeping behind people and watching for their purses. Henry Ford Hoosegow (downtown Detroit) bathroom anyone? My mom’s purse. I keep everything important zipped into my right-hand polar fleece vest pocket. That’s my purse.

At least not today*. You get a random mishmash instead.

Um, how ’bout the Greek omelet the GG brought home for me from the Coney Island near the Toyota dealer where he had Mooon Yooonit in for scheduled maintenance early this morning. As is usual I ate half of it (came with hash browns – yay!) and saved the rest for tomorrow.

Our unseasonably warm weather finally took a dive today although it was still very warm this morning. Rain moved in and now at the end of the day, it is something like 54, a more seasonable temperature for our area.

Among the many tasks my own personal “task rabbit” undertook today was replacing the screen in the outer front door with the glass door. As much as I hate this, if he hadn’t done it on his own, I would’ve asked. It’s gonna get warm again but the temperatures are on a general downward trend and I don’t like the big wooden front door shut during the day because I love whatever outdoor light I can get.

*Zip-tying ANYONE is an atrocity. Children? Jesus, save the children at least. One of the other atrocities is the hint that furloughed federal employees won’t get back pay and the gleeful (via my lens on this issue) way it is being presented.The GG and I have been there done that. Thankfully, the GG did get back pay and so should the folks who are furloughed by the Trumpian Idiocracy. I’ll go there again someday when I am calmer.

A quote from an Indian woman (“East Indian”, not “wild Indian”*). I picked up the GG, this woman, and another EPA person from Metro one night. Had they been in DC? Probably.

It was long enough ago that the beach urchins and I went inside the airport to the arrival area. On the way to the airport, I saw through the rear view mirror that Mouse had totally fallen asleep in the middle seat of the Exxon Tanker Valdez (1987 minivan) and was sorta flat out with her head hanging off the seat into midair. No shoulder belts in that seat in those days and child seats weren’t required for kids her age. Three, I think.

I took a deep breath. I said, as calmly as I could, “Lizard Breath? Could you take your seat belt off for just a moment, pull your sister up into an upright position, and put the armrest up so she can rest on it?” Little Cat Z, all of 4-5 years old, was ON IT.

The other issue we encountered on that trip to Metro was that going through security, Speedy Water Janet Pop Mousey Mushroom Ears had to go through the scanner. I fabricated an explanation that calmed my mouse down about that.

The passengers were successfully picked up and we made it safely back to Ann Arbor and it was when we dropped the Indian woman off that somebody asked what was going on in the ditch outside her house. I laughed (silently) when she said the quote in the blahg title. Because I live with a guy like that too. (I bet the GG doesn’t even remember this.)

*”East Indian, not wild Indian” was how a once 5-year-old neighbor described her family. The mom is American (but not Native) and the dad is from the Indian subcontinent. They had six kids, the then 5-year-old was the youngest, in kindergarten with Lizard Breath. Dad was a truck stop preacher but I believe they now own and run a church across N. Maple from us. It used to be a Black church…

They are a good family and friendly. The mom once accompanied her daughter on one of our girl scout trips. We (30s and a few 40s moms) were a little freaked out. Like, will she care about the wine? It’s kinda verboten but I’m sure the girl scout organization knows it gets smuggled in. As we were packing up, she reminded us with a giggle that someone had left a bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge. Oh, ya don’t say?

Do y’all think the bag and raincoat clash? I do not because they are worn exuberantly like, “I like these colors/patterns together and I don’t care what anyone thinks.” The raincoat is handmade by the wearer (this was in 2016), the bag was purchased, probably at the Plum Market. On another note, “colorific” is being flagged as a non-word but I’m pretty sure the Spelling Bee accepts it.

I felt like making chicken pot pie today. I use a recipe that I think came out of Parade Magazine, which came to us for years with the Sunday paper. Apparently it was still published in paper form until 2022 but I had long stopped reading a *paper* newspaper by then.

This recipe, which I tweaked (as I often do) became a family favorite. It has a biscuit crust instead of a traditional pie crust. I think the recipe said to use Jiffy Mix but I tweaked it to use Joy of Cooking drop biscuits. I am a sub-standard biscuit maker but it works well enough. The “filling”, what lies underneath the biscuit topping, is chicken, carrots, celery, and potatoes, with a chicken broth/onion sauce.

It isn’t hard to make but there are a lot of steps and I worked on it off and on throughout the day, keeping up with washing the bazillion bowls and cooking pots along the way. And then it was in the oven. I looked at facebook and someone had “shared” a demonstration of cooking a chicken “dish” that was similar. But. Not. They dumped some frozen pre-cooked chicken out of a bag into a baking dish, topped it with frozen carrots and peas out of a bag, then topped it all with a box of Red Lobster biscuit mix. Easy peasy, five minutes tops to put together.

Okay, this would never do for my fam. I KNOW that chicken pot pies often contain peas. My fam likes peas and would probably not complain at this stage of the game, but they might raise their eyebrows. Peas? In OUR chicken pot pie?

Disclaimer on cutting corners when cooking. My recipe calls for carrots and celery. I always buy diced carrots and celery in little grab-and-go plastic containers. I am beyond done with dicing carrots and celery, not to mention that the GG and I could never eat a whole celery bunch/stalk (it’s complicated) before it rots.

We’ll talk some other day (or not) about how I think people receiving SNAP or other welfare benefits should be able to use those benefits to enable less stressful ways to feed their families without being scorned by grocery clerks or patrons.

Subtitle: I am so dumb.

I didn’t blast outta here to get grocks at 8:00 AM, deciding to have a wee spot of coffee first. When I did get into Cygnus X-1, the first thing I noticed was that there were two bottles of water on the driver’s seat. The glove box was open and there were papers and things on the passenger seat. And more water bottles on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Probably the most annoying was I couldn’t find my car hairbrush. I guess the water bottles distracted me. I cannot abide more than one or two water bottles in my car. And these are OLD water bottles that have been refilled umpteen bazillion times so who knows how many people’s (peoples’?) germs are on them. Ugh.

Because I was distracted by the water bottles, it took me until I got to the Plum Market (a few blocks away) and was inside talking to mouse to come to the realization that somebody had come into the driveway in the middle of the night, opened the UNLOCKED (yeah, I know) car, and rifled its contents. So, still processing that, I sent the GG a “Did you ransack my car?” text.

No, OF COURSE he hadn’t ransacked Cygnus. In fact, it turned out that Moooon Yooonit had also been ransacked. One small item was taken and replaced by a pack of cigarettes with TWO cigarettes left.

The GG perused webcam photos and someone was in our driveway at, hmmm, was it 1:10 AM? We were sleeping in the Lyme Lounge and each of us have a vague memory of hearing something at some time during the night. Fortunately I didn’t go outside to drivewayP until 3:15 or so, so at least I wasn’t in caught in that act.

I am annoyed but not freaked out. Why? As long as we’ve had Next Door Neighbor (which I love to hate), almost EVERY DAY there are posts from people whose UNLOCKED cars were ransacked overnight. The perpetrators *almost* never take anything, just strew things around and make a mess. I dunno what they would do if they found a wad of cash (which I usually don’t have and wouldn’t leave in a car if I did) but they did not take the coins outta the rubber glove.

Waaay before Next Door Neighbor (40 years ago), we had a rash of these kinds of incidents in our neighborhood. Our then thief took our Tickly Toddle cassette tape out of Daddy’s Little Blue Car*. I wonder what that might’ve been worth to them.

I ALWAYS lock the cars before going to bed. Except last night I apparently didn’t. (LOCK YOUR CAR DOORS!)¹⁰⁰

The pic is one the GG took of WWII planes flying over down by the Big House, where Umich beat Wisconsin today. I didn’t see this flyover. If it had been modern fighter jets, I’d have heard them.

*Daddy’s Little Blue Car was one of a trio of Ford Fiestas. The other members of the trio were Mama’s Little Gold Car and The Orange Car (an unknown neighbor down the street).

80 degrees, that is, not the 1980s. People keep saying this is way too warm for October and they are not wrong. October can be a mixed bag in the Great Lake State. I am not a climate change denier at all but this heat is not all that unusual for this time of year. On the other hand, we can also have snow in October

We discussed the possibility of eating outside tonight but about the time dinner was ready, the MOE-skee-TOES were coming out and even though they weren’t all that bad, we headed inside to eat. MOE-skee-TOES? Yeah, they come out at dusk at this time of year. They don’t exactly target me all that much but even one bite is enough.

Obviously I don’t have a lot to say tonight. There’s our shed with the lights on and some impatiens that got potted around Mother’s Day and are hanging on pretty much forever.

Sayonara, KW. Typos be damned.

From the Never a Dull Moment department… We slept in the Lyme Lounge again last night. I got up and took a shower and then gathered a humongous pile of laundry. I schlepped it down the stairs and then as I walked into the pitch black utility room, whaddya think happened next (the light string is in the middle of the room)? If you answered “SPLOOSH!”? Ding ding ding. You win the booby prize. Which is a guy with a roto-rooter.

I sloshed through the water (it was very shallow), set the laundry basket on top of the washing musheen, and went back upstairs to text the GG, who was still out in the Lyme Lounge. A flurry of activity (and some waiting around) ensued until “we” (aka the GG) got a call that “Tommy” could be there in 20 minutes. Okay, we were on a roll. Tommy arrived and apparently the clog was 70 feet from the landfill, out under the street. But it was fixed by 11:30 or so and the GG was able to make his scheduled trip to FlaMan’s with grocks and things, only to find that one of their sisters had already visited with the same grocks the GG took up there. And I have probably mangled some of this.

Like I apparently mangled some of yesterday’s details about gov’t shutdowns. The GG actually read my blahg and apparently he WAS an essential employee and was “holding down” the lab. I don’t really remember him being out of the house a whole lot but like I think I said yesterday, I’ve probably blocked a lot of what went on during that painful time. At least the schools were not shut down🤡

In today’s title, replace “the moon” with “Mars” and “Alice” with “The Orange Baboon and Musk”. Oh, add Hegseth to that and make it a trio. What horrible people. I have, of course, seen a few episodes of The Honeymooners but I almost definitely saw re-runs because when I looked up the show, it was on mostly before we had a television set in my childhood house. We got one when I was two and there was one channel, CBC (Canadian), and I have VERY fleeting memories of Howdy Doody and that is about it.

Finally, Little Cat Z rescued the guy in the pic from her work parking lot today. A proud moom moment for a moom who would be nervous about picking up a turtle.

I’ve come a long way since the Bill Clinton era gov’t shutdowns. If memory serves (and it may not), there were two, one very short, the other protracted. I did not do well during those. I was (by choice) not gainfully employed during that period. The GG was a federal employee. A non-essential one, as they say. And no, he did not keep airplanes from crashing into each other but those people are apparently non-essential also. go figger.

We were low on cash at that point. Not because we’d been living high on the hog, nope. I mean, we were probably spending more money than we needed to but in a poor man’s kind of way. What we were really doing was doggedly working on paying off our mortgage early. At 13 years. It was a 30-year adjustable rate mortgage and we had won that gamble just about every year we had that mortgage so I was able to make much larger payments than required.

I won’t detail that fugly period in our lives (actually, I think I have blocked the details of my then moodiness). When it finally ended, beaucoup bucks in back pay arrived and within a few months the Landfill mortgage was paid off as well as the POC, a beautiful but problematical vee-hickle. That was the last car we paid for with a traditional car loan.

By the next time a gov’t shutdown directly affected us, I mean in terms of our livelihood, I was working for Corporate America. My salary was plenty enough to keep us afloat, we had absolutely no debt, and the GG took the Lyme Lounge off somewhere. Of course I was ecstatic about our situation (compared to the last shut-down) but I always feel empathy for federal workers who are furloughed with no pay. Or in some cases WORKING with no pay. This is not how people should be treated.

This time around, he is retired and I am still employed (for now). If a social security check arrives late (and I always feel like I’m double dipping somehow although I know I am not), we’ll be fine. I’m not sure what else could affect us except maybe national parks/forests closing to the public.

I’ll rant (or not) another day (again) about how Trump runs over “little people’s” (like me) lives in his attempts to do, hmmm, what? Destabilize our country by creating chaos? Big Ugly Bill indeed. That’s why we are in this shutdown.

Disclaimers: 1) That is not my photo. A daughter sent it to me from her township fair last weekend. 2) I normally blur (or “rabbit peep”) out license plate alphanumeric characters when I post them but this is attached to an amphibious car and I bet this car is not normally on the road a whole lot. Throughout my life, I have on multiple occasions encountered amphibious cars at the mouth of the Tahquamenon River. Not sure if this one has ever been there or not.

Okay, at the end of Sunday night, I was really really cranky. There was no reason for this. I’d had a great day and was on a roll and people came for dinner and it was fun and then… I dunno… My moods can be mercurial although I have slowly and incrementally settled down throughout my adult life, watching my babies grow up into successful women and gaining success in a job I totally fell into. Alas, I still have my moments.

The GG and I were heading off to bed and I was still grumpy and then… Out of the blue he asked, “Have you slept in the Lyme Lounge at all this summer?” Well, no. I often sleep in the Lyme Lounge when we have an overflow of people bunking in the moomincabin. I would never put up a guest in a camping trailer unless they were really hot to sleep there. Also, a lot of people are way too tall to be comfortable sleeping in the Lyme Lounge. The GG and I are about at the upper end of comfort there.

But also, this summer, although we had lots of people around most of the time, they were not bunking at the moomin although we almost always ate dinner there together. Anyway. I was ensconced in the Little Bedroom next to the bathroom. It is my childhood bedroom although back then there was a bunk bed for me and my brother. And a dresser (or two?) plastered with monster stickers from the grocery store checkout aisle.

For whatever reason, the thought of sleeping in the Lyme Lounge IMMEDIATELY pulled me out of my stoopid funk. YES! We slept in the monster bedroom that night but yesterday morning I washed my sleeping bag and we had the best sleep out in the Lyme Lounge last night surrounded by crickets singing their song. I don’t normally have trouble sleeping in any case but this was extra good. Since the weather continues to be warm, I think we will continue to sleep out there until it, uh, isn’t warm.

It was a quiet day at the Landfill on The Planet Ann Arbor unless you count the GG gyrating in and out and around and about. Out one door and in the other, jumping between various work stations. I had a bazillion work meetings scheduled for today but a key person caught the latest bug (I didn’t ask which variety, just wished them well) and almost everything got canceled.

I had the radio on but I kept the volume down because, well, I dunno. I didn’t really want to listen to the news today and I knew the GG probably didn’t want to listen to National Petroleum Radio. I think that nickname may have run its course. If NPR is so “woke” (not my opinion), how does that square with the petroleum industry? Doesn’t that industry evoke more of a right-wing “flavor” or whatever? (Disclaimer: I drive a gasoline powered vee-hickle and won’t change over until the EV infrastructure fully supports me and my long drives to and from the yooperland. I don’t think we’re there yet.)

Anyway at around 3-something, I detected a certain droning voice coming from the radio. On and on and on and on ad nauseam. What I did was probably counterintuitive but the GG was outside with noise canceling equipment on his ears so I turned the radio up. What the hell was Trump talking about? Oh, the grandest peace plan the earth has ever seen. In the middle east no less. Grandiosity was king, Bibi was fawning, and details were scanty. From what I could tell. Look elsewhere for more comprehensive, intelligent commentary. I kept asking myself something like, “Where is the part where they turn Gaza into a tropical paradise for all the billionaires and ship its current residents somewhere they aren’t wanted and don’t want to go?” That wasn’t discussed as near as I could figure.

If this Trump administration wasn’t so frickin’ disgusting, I would be snoring. Or maybe laughing. But instead, it is scary, and I can’t look away.

I dunno, that was one of a long string of things the GG was talking to the UU about this afternoon out in the backyard as we were cooking kebabs on the grill. There has been a problem with the lucky-shucky in the Lyme Lounge all summer. I know it’s technically autumn now but it doesn’t really feel like autumn, not that I am complaining. Nevertheless, the Lyme Lounge followed the Twinz of Terror all the way to North Dakota and back and returned yesterday from yet another trip, this time mostly to the yooperland.

The yooperland trip began with closing the moomincabin but as it turns out, that job did not get totally completed. The GG was photo-documenting the procedure, including how to put antifreeze down the terlet, etc. Problem? He was so busy photo-documenting the terlet that he thinks he forgot to put antifreeze into the other drains. That would be the shower, bathroom sink, and kitchen sink, if I have it right. It is an EXTREMELY simple plumbing system albeit a bit more complicated than the one my dad grew up with, which was, “grab a bucket, run down to the lake, fill the bucket, and run back up.” With an outhouse for sewage disposal.

A cousin of mine (on the non-Fin side of the fam) is a lawyer whose specialty is insurance and I can tell he thinks our cabin is a total liability, although he understands why we love it there. But. For one thing, although it’s true that it’s closed nine months out of the year, it isn’t like it’s totally abandoned. Three of the dwellings on the beach are occupied year-round by cousins of mine and another by good friends. Cousins are driving by every day and some of them watch who drives down our road. Like I do when I am up there. Sure, a thief or vandal could sneak in and do damage but something like a fire would be noticed immediately.

And then there is the plumbing. The one time we had a burst pipe, it was our fault for not turning the right valve on or off or whatever. The moomincabin is built a few feet off the ground up on cement blocks. Because the burst pipe, like most of the pipes, was under the cabin, the water drained out into the sand below, meaning there was no water damage. The GG went to town and got some plumbing supplies and the whole issue was fixed in a matter of a couple hours. The biggest problem with that little repair job was that it was cold out that day (40s?) and a northwest wind was SCREAMING in off Gitchee Gumee and right through the crawl space under the cabin, where he was working. Needless to say, he has since blocked off the front of the crawl space, where the cabin faces Gitchee Gumee and her wicked winds.

That moooooon is a waxing crescent, not quite the “has-moon”, that’s tomorrow. That’s what my daughter called the “half moon” when she was an emerging talker.

The GG estimated his arrival time at about 5:15 PM today. I got dinner into the hopper and then I sat out in the back yard. I eventually heard the telltale squeak of the Lyme Lounge backing into the Landfill Driveway.

We arrived back here at the Landfill a few weeks ago and it wasn’t until today that I got things somewhat organized again. Thursday I woke up and felt like I was in the biggest mess ever. What the heck? Today I got going. I got Roooomba going again and I ran her TWICE. And I cleaned the kitchen counters. I can’t say that I voomed them but it is better than it was.

That’s kind of it for today, I’m gonna watch Svengoolie with the GG.

This is one of the more interesting butt texts the GG has sent. I do not know what it says and neither does he. When he is doing trail/chainsawing work on the North Country Trail and it is hot out, which it *sometimes* is, and his phone is in his pocket, it sometimes calls or texts people or 911 (once) 👀 

When The Commander learned to text (on the iPhone we helped her obtain at the age of 88), we were going to a destination wedding in Asheville, NC. The Comm send a weird text, something like “plow Illinois, boyyyyy”. Traveling to North Carolina from The Planet Ann Arbor doesn’t usually involve Illinois. Ohaaao, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

As an aside, I remember being annoyed about having to travel to a “destination wedding”. I had to take time off work yada yada. Friends, I had the best time. I loved Asheville and our beautiful rental place there (with relatives) and was so happy to attend my beautiful niece’s wedding. Lizard Breath flew in from San Francisco where she was living at the time and the bride (her cousin) was like, “You came to my wedding from San Francisco?” Yes. That’s what family is about.

The scariest butt texting I [n]ever did was one morning when I was a new employee at Corporate America (18 years ago). I was walking in the early morning dark and I realized my phone was about to dial my boss. Jeebus kee-reist. In truth, that boss, the LSCHP, probably would have laughed the whole thing off. What a mensch.

So there’s the butt texting and then there’s the whole big dead frog in the grille thing…

What is GNO, you are asking? It is Girls Night Out. My daughters and I went to The Session Room for dinner. The Racc was definitely invited and would have been very welcome even though he is not a girl but he is recovering from a crappy old cold virus and didn’t feel like joining us and that is A-okay,

After Sessions, we decamped to The Landfill for a wee nightcap and here I am trying to figger out what to blahg about for about the umpteen bazillionth time.

How many times can I say that I love having both my daughters living on and very near The Planet Ann Arbor, one of their childhood homes, the other being the moomincabin.

I spent an hour or so at a work meeting listening to a tower of babel type discussion where people were using different words to describe the same things. And then I checked facebook for the first time today and immediately got sucked in to the same kind of thing via a few relatives and their friends. I did not engage (I know better) except to “love” one nephew’s very thoughtful comment.

Critical thinking skills anyone? I’m not sure, even from some of those folks who are very well educated. I am disheartened by what’s going on in our country and why so many sheeple are blindly following idiots like Trump and RFKjr and I just dunno.

Oh yeah, What is Antifa short for? Anti-fascist. Are you Antifa? I am. And so was my dad (WWII pilot), uncle Don (WWII destroyer medic), uncle Duke (WWII pilot) and so many others. We are NOT radical leftists no matter what wikipee says.

G’night, KW

I didn’t test so I don’t know if it was covid. It’s been a couple weeks and I am long over the worst of the symptoms, like I don’t wake up at night coughing. I do still have a couple coughing fits most days. That is annoying but it’s okay. What I was worried about today was that I had to run a 1.5 hour training session for our next release. I “preach” to a very friendly crowd but I still prefaced my presentation with something like, “Just so you know, if I start coughing, I am not sick. I had a cold/covid virus a few weeks ago. I still have a coughing fit once or twice a day. *Talking* often exacerbates that. And I have to talk to do this training presentation. Just know that if I start coughing, I am okay.”

Wouldn’t you know, I did not cough once throughout the 1.5 hour presentation and my voice was totally clear of hoarseness the whole damn time.

And the pic shows that the moomincabin is closed for the season. No running water. Water heater drained. Antifreeze in pipes. Limited lucky-shucky. Those are the main utilities at the place. Heat is provided via a propane heater when we need it. No insulation. So. Closed down. Sad but necessary for a seasonal cabin.

In the pic, Moooon Yooonit and the Lyme Lounge are primed for their next adventure, which involves chainsawing.