Looking for something else, I found this. I dunno what I was even looking now. It’s Radical Betty and the GG two years before she died. We were having brunch at the Hotel Ojibway and The Commander and Cam are also with us (and not sure who else).

On NPR (LOL) this afternoon I heard a familiar voice. It was Big Abe. He has been dead for a long time but he was a Native American fisherman (and bar owner, probably more well known for that) in the area of the moominbeach and there was a big kerfuffle about various kinds of fishing, “gill net” being an operative word. This is all too complicated for my “pretty” little head and my family does not fish at all but that would be a story for another day. Or not.

At one point, Big Abe got taaaared of law officials trying to track him down, so he called them up and said, “I am gonna be fishing HERE today, come and get me.” A lot of stuff ensued that I don’t really understand, so I’ll have to listen to the podcast.

Okay. I had a Japanese Uncle. Tatsuo Takei (yeah, he was from samurai). He married my eccentric Aunt Roberta when she was 70 and he was 60. He fancied himself as an entrepreneur and wanted to do some kind of deal with the eastern yooperland Native Americans. So he scheduled a meeting with the tribe and he and Roberta stayed with my parents, who accompanied rhwm to his meeting out on the reservation. Now. My dad was a long-time *savvy* local banker and I’m sure he knew a lot of these people and what they were all about. Native American or not, my dad had a better handle on what eastern yooperland people were all about than Tatsuo did.

So the whole meeting from what I remember being told about it was a little crazy in terms of cultural differences. Japanese? Many rules and protocols, like kids (for example) were probably not even around in Japanese negotiations. Native Americans? Kids were running in and out of the building all the time, acting like “wild Indians”, kinda like my cousins and I did when we were kids on the moominbeach.

Tatsuo dubbed Big Abe as Big Chief. Big Abe was not the chief. He called another guy “Big Mouth”. I don’t think he was the chief either. I don’t know who the chief was. My parents were laughing about all this but I suspect Tatsuo also understood some of this stuff. I’m pretty sure no entrepreneurial deals came out of this shindig.

My main mantras for dealing with successful adult children are “go with the flow” and “stay outta the fray”.

Today I came up with a new one. It’s a holiday mantra but I’m not sure I totally have the right words yet. Something like, “plan for more than enough for whoever might show up and welcome everyone but don’t ever try to guilt trip people into joining you” but that’s a pretty long mantra. I mean, it’s not like I’ve never done things that way anyway. Turkey day is easy to do and I do welcome everyone. Well, not serial killer type people of course but they are not likely to hang out with the people in my family.

So it was a great turkey day. Some of the fam went downtown to do the turkey trot. The GG went downtown early early to meet up with them (although he did not do the trot). He did eventually find the trotters but not for a while because he didn’t exactly get the time right. Whatever. We had eggs benny and then the trotters came over and made their own breakfasts on Gertrude after the turkey trot. My mouse cleaned Gertrude’s stovetop within an inch of its life and I am forever grateful for that.

Then I cooked a pretty traditional tday dinner with enough for everyone in the local fam plus. npJane visited for a while but had other plans for dinner with The Friends and we had a couple other guests. And a terrifically hard jigsaw puzzle, which the GG is working on in the pic. I am not really a jigsaw aficionado (except for the one the Uncly Uncle had made for me out of a photo I took) but jigsaw puzzles give people something to do on holidays when it’s too crappy to go outside and the football game is over.

My main point is, anyone who wants to join us for turkey day (or any other holiday) is welcome. Even if you want to spend the afternoon napping on the couch, which a couple of trotters did today. I love when people are napping in my house. That means they are comfortable here.

Oh, don’t worry. I have NOT moved over to the fugly orange side of things. And neither has Gertrude, my stove. Just file the pic under Weird Stuff Found in the Landfill. And I found it just before the GG was scheduled to arrive at home this afternoon so of course I put it on for his entertainment. That’s the kind of thing you sometimes do when you are in a Mixed Marriage. In our case, that would be Trump supporter (the GG) and F*ck Trump (meeeee). Turns out Doug (our brother-in-law) bought these hats and handed them out. I love Doug ANYWAY.

Gawd, it was fugly this morning. The only thing that wasn’t happening was snow. Not yet. That started later but Old Man Winter was just spitting it at us. Last I looked there was NO accumulation. Not so in the yooperland, northern lower, and west coast (Michigan west coast that is). Lake effect.

It was windy as all getout this morning when I made a Plum dash right about when it opened at 8:00 AM. That was my penultimate shopping spree before turkey day although (of course) I was texting mouse with forgotten items later. If I need anything tomorrow, I’ll make another wee run or the GG can do it if it’s something he can manage to select properly. I am a u-scan ninja but my fave cashier Joyce was there today and I chose to be lazy and let her and her lovely young bagger scoot me out the door. I picked away at prepping turkey day stuff the rest of the day and the GG came home with some surprise pork chops from Sparrow, just the right size for a small turkey day eve dinner.

Babblety babblety g’night. The GG has been playing a turkey gobbling audio clip off and on ALL DAY. Yeah, just like the REAL turkeys that were waking me up at 0-skunk-30 in the morning at the moomincabin last summer.

We met up at Sessions for dinner tonight. I keep a lot of family stories in my head and I told some tonight.

The one I will tell right now is about a time I drove the beach urchins up to the moomincabin from the Planet Ann Arbor. Little Cat Z was maybe a second grader. I worked a half day and when I got home, LCZ had made peanut butter sandwiches for us to eat in the POC (crappy old Island Teal Chrysler minivan).

We stopped at Hoton Lake halfway up to visit with the beach urchins’ Grandpa Garth and Grandma Sally, where we exchanged an old rusty rake and some shoeboxes and empty film canisters and I fergit what else for a rotten cucumber and green pepper. Something like that.

While we were there, I somehow got the grandparents rolling on retirement accounts. Jeebus. LCZ, who had heard this spiel umpteen bazillion times before and knew how much I hated it, got up close to my ear and stage whispered, “Mom! Change the talk.” And so I did, which is how we ended up with the rotten veggies. I took those oid veggies up to the moominbeach and dumped them in my uncle Don’s compost. Don’t get me wrong, my in-laws were wonderful and I loved them.

We’ll talk about the time my dad was running from the moominbeach into town on the old railroad grade and ran INTO a person running the other way some other day (or not). It was pitch black when that happened.

Then there’s just plain weird stuff. I was hanging around the Landfill this morning making gravy and of all the things that popped into my head, I realized that I was probably more upset when I was 16 and Bad Boyfriend dumped me than when I got laid off last week. I think I cried for days and had no appetite.

Jeebus. I was a pretty (I was told) but VERY awkward high school freshman when Bad Boyfriend noticed me and brokered a meeting with me through a mutual friend. Joan was her name. I did not have male friends at that time. I had no clue how to talk to boys. The mean old Grunchy old Grinchy didn’t count ’cause he was my cousin and my brother’s friends were just little kids.

Why did this *gorgeous* older (sophomore) guy want meeee for a girlfriend? We didn’t meet up all that often at first because we couldn’t drive and he lived out in Algonquin, a long way from my house. The first time he met my parents was when he walked me home from the Memorial Day parade. Thinking back on that, I can’t believe he would want to be seen with me, wearing my fugly band uniform. Or maybe I’m slightly misremembering. Anyway, The Commander, a teacher at my high school, asked, “Where did you find him?”

The Commander liked him all right but she was worried that I would turn into a fairly typical yooperland statistic, pregnant and married well before I was ready. That did not happen, partly why I was dumped. I knew I was college bound and he wasn’t, at least not yet. I learned through the grapevine that he was later regretful about dumping me but by that time we had both moved on to different relationships. His led him to an early marriage and children, mine into a more mature relationship with a college guy. That was “okay” back then, it is viewed as a bit sketchy now. But it isn’t always. That boyfriend was a gentleman and treated me very well. But I dumped him and a few years later, I ended up with the GG who gave me my beautiful beach urchins.

I’ve also figured out through the grapevine (and facebook) that Bad Boyfriend turned out pretty okay too. He did eventually go to college and earned an engineering degree! I am happy for him but I feel lucky that he dumped me and I ended up with the GG.

The point here is that life can be bumpy but it does go on.

My old facebook “bio” was “Vagabond masquerading as a fintech pro”. So it was time to change it.

Back in my early days of my fintech industry employment, my then boss (the LSCHP) found my twitter account, which had the same “bio” as my facebook profile. Remember when we (some of us at least) used to actually USE Twitter? I was on vacation when he tweeted me. Like really? I panicked for a split-second. What do you do when you’re sitting on the moomindeck and your boss TWEETS at you? Is he firing you? By Twitter? Nope, although we certainly know someone who does that now. He was just letting me know about an upcoming team function at a science museum in Detroit. Of course I replied to him. It was all pretty funny because when I got back, my then Cube Nayber told me our boss was ADAMANT that he TWEET the invitation to me which was hilarious to both of us. And my boss loved my Twitter “bio” and wished he had thought of it for himself.

The post title is my new “bio”, or half of it at least. I’m not quiiiiite ready to give up the cool thing I did for a living for 18 years. I’m not gonna just sit around and do little old lady things (whatever those are) although I’m not sure what I AM gonna do next. (Don’t ask. I know. I said that already.) For the moment I am gonna enjoy Turkey Day week, which will likely mean umpteen bazillion trips to the grokkery store. But I have friends (and a relative) there.

I wonder how many people actually know what “pragmatic” means. I *think* I do but I have to keep looking it up to double-check myself.

My old mensch of a boss had to lay off MANY people over the years and HATED every minute of it. I survived all of that including his own layoff. I’ll probably write more about all of that someday (or not). I will say that when he did get laid off, I was the first person he told. I mean, maybe because I was the first person he encountered when he left his office. But we were close.

Right now, I am still “processing” my own status although I still don’t seem to be upset about it. Reductions In Force are part of working for Corporate America and I knew that going in. 18 years… I will say that my old boss landed on his feet. I haven’t had to land on my feet because the GG and I have already been on our feet for years. We haven’t had a mortgage or any debt for many years and we have successful adult children. We aren’t “Warren Buffet” but we have worked hard and are fine.

How many hats can one man own? Turns out the count is 30. Last I was told.

This guy wears hats. Sometimes he even needs one. It does get cold here in the Great Lake State. Stormy Kromer hats? He probably has about eight.

Anyway, the GG puts a hat on every time he goes outside and often wears one even in the house. I don’t bother to tell him that wearing a hat inside the house (if you are a man) is sorta verboten. Or at least it used to be back in the “white glove”, “no white clothing after Labor Day” era. I was a child in that era and I did have white gloves to wear to church and such. The Commander tried to raise me “properly” but her lessons didn’t really stick. She was trying to fit into Sault Ste. Siberia as a young wife and mother and part of that was teaching us kids how to behave, etc. And then the 1960s hit and all hell broke loose everywhere. In the end, The Comm became a greatly loved and respected member of the community on her own partly because she didn’t exactly subscribe to all those old social rules and eventually kicked back a bit. My dad picked a good gal on the banks of the Red Cedar River. My words are gonna trail off here for today, because I’m talking about the GG’s hat “collection” today.

So, about three times a week, the GG will be rummaging all over the place. I ask, “What ARE you doing?” and he replies, “Looking for my hat!” Well. Which hat, just for one thing?

Apparently today was the day to rummage the Landfill collecting all of his hats and gathering them together. Maybe he could donate some of them? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have lice.

Two of my cousins originally from The Planet Ann Arbor and their husbands were in town to do an early Thanksgiving with their dad, My Dear Uncle Harry (MDUH). He’s 98. We were not invited to this event and that is fine fine fine. Small celebrations are usually better for the elderly although I have pics of Radical Betty’s last birthday and she was rabble-rousing even then. But not everybody is Radical Betty and Radical was a bit younger then than MDUH is now.

Anyway, we met at Casey’s Tavern for lunch today, minus MDUH, who is probably still recovering from the hilarious salad faux pas from yesterday’s dinner, and plus Little Cat Z (who lives and works close by). I am an extreme introvert but I am also a friendly one. Talking with all of them about my recent employment status change (and general life stuff), I am sure I talked their ears off. Sorry you guys!

Several people were experiencing or recovering from cold symptoms after visiting grandchildren, although nobody was coughing. One person had actually taken a covid test, which was negative, thank you god or whoever although covid doesn’t freak me out since the one time I had it, I was not terribly sick.

Still. I took a risk and hugged every single blasted one of my visiting cousins today. Pooh and Mark and Jay and Carl. Love you all.

Oh don’t worry. The pic doesn’t signify anything sinister about my mental health. Just starting to process. No organized thoughts yet. That’ll take a while. Although I haven’t been fired or laid off before, I know how this kind of thing rolls. I mean I think I am STILL processing the deaths of my parents and brother years ago. One foot in front of the other and which foot goes first and what does it land on?

Daughters and I always text (a bit) in the morning. Two of us do NYT word puzzles, the other just texts stuff about whatever she is doing. We are NOT a family who is in CONSTANT CONTACT with each other. I know people who do that but that’s not how it rolls here and that’s a good thing.

Today, a question was something like, “What is moom doing today?” The answer? Going to the grokkery store! What else? I mean I am a moom and Thanksgiving is coming up and my refrigerator (and house, for that matter) is a mess and since I am not working (outside the home) any more, I need to get going. Being a moom, when I am not sure where next to put my foot, I go to the grokkery store! And so I did. I’ll be there again tomorrow and probably most of the rest of the days before Turkey Day and although I probably won’t PERSONALLY go to the grokkery store ON Turkey Day, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone else ends up there. Hopefully not anyone who WORKS there. A couple people do.

I posted this photo a while back on the 50th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I am posting it again today. Why? Because it kinda fits my life today.

I was laid off from my job today. I AM NOT UPSET! I was planning to retire anyway but was lollygagging. Due to complicated work circumstances that I won’t even try to explain (not bad things), this was not really unexpected. Except that getting the call is somehow always unexpected. You’re going along engaging with your colleagues and then… You’re not.

I more or less fell into this job 18 years ago. I wasn’t really looking for a job but I figured out PDQ that I had landed in a good place. For example, when The Commander was nearing the end of her life, there was a period of months when I was hanging out in the yooperland helping her out. I was “telecommuting” (I have always been able to telecommute but didn’t do it permanently until covid) but I wasn’t all that productive during that time. And guess what? My then boss the LSCHP allowed me time and space to deal with my mom (“family is first” was one of his mantras). He knew I would become productive again when it was all over, and I did. When I finally returned to the OFFICE, my cube was decorated with crepe paper streamers and there was a LADDER in it. Which he (rightly) knew I would find hilarious.

I will have some processing to do but I am okay. I told my boss something like, “I am an adult and I have a great life and I can carry on.” And I will.

I don’t really know what’s next (don’t ask, please). But a couple hours after I shut down my work laptop forever, I got an email from my first cousin Uber Kayak Woman. We are very very close but we don’t communicate all that often. This email came through Ancestry and noted that we matched as first cousins. Yes (LOL), she taught me and our other “triplet” cousin how to climb out of our cribs when we were toddlers. I’ve done the Ancestry spit-test but I am mostly a wee bit of a dabbler. But whether or not I get more into genealogy, the message was well-timed. There’s more out there for you to do, KW.

Love you all! And onward.

When I was a child (and a pretty picky eater), Minute Rice was one of the things The Commander could count on me eating. I ate a lot of other things but I didn’t like things like au gratin potatoes (outta the box, fer kee-reist) so if that was in the hopper, she knew to make me Minute Rice.

She served Minute Rice in these bowls. She would put the rice in the bowls, then pour boiling water over the rice. Wait five minutes (or one?) and it was set to go. And butter! Yes, butter.

I dunno who made these bowls (and tops!). They look handmade but not sure. In any case, they were integral to my childhood. Maybe The Commander even made them? I dunno. I do know that a few years after she died, I started wondering where they were. I knew I didn’t get rid of them. I knew I had carted them down to The Landfill. I finally found them in a box with some fancy little white coffee cups. I think The Comm obtained the coffee cups later in life and I don’t care much about them. The rice bowls are part of my childhood and I will keep them.

Nope. This moon is not flying. It’s a fool moon from last year. Tonight’s moon is a waning crescent and I haven’t even looked for it.

Apparently we had dinner or some other event that night and the GG hooked up the “sparkler”, which makes the red and green sparkles or whatever you want to call them. I like it up to an extent but sometimes I get tired of it. When we hooked it up at the moomincabin couple summers ago, I asked my next door cousin if it bothered him. Nope. He had asked me if running a power washer would bother me. Nope. We are fam-i-lee.

Today I was in a meeting with Amazon Woman and My Replacement and the GG was running the goddamn tornado vacuum. It was so f*king loud I could hardly hear the meeting. I muted and tried to get the GG to stop the vac. He didn’t although he did close the door. I mean, he is an ID twin in the middle of a set of 10 siblings and he and the UU do whatever hell they want to do. At my wedding rehearsal dinner, their aunt Gale (like the wind, she would say) told me they were holy terrors. I already more or less knew that. In the end, they have been successful in life.

Well, we have football in the back room, regular Sunday night music on the chitchen radio, and eggplant parm and friends in the hopper.

That is about all. The Lions are playing somebody somewhere and we were watching them and kibitzing about the uniform colors. The Lions wear Honolulu Blue, the other team (who was it?) was wearing a dark green color of some sort. The GG thought it was totally green but I felt like there was some blue in it. Dark teal?

When I renovated the Landfill Chitchen a while back, I talked Certified Kitchen Lady into teal backsplash tiles. She was a bit reluctant at first but she got my drift and in the end, my little kitchen was put up for contests. It didn’t win but so what.

I do not know what today’s picture is exactly about.

The football game is not over yet and I guess we will watch it in the bedroom. At least the GG will. I’ll probably crash.

This morning didn’t exactly go how I wanted it to go. I was like, where is the bag of returnable cans that is usually hanging in the entryway? Oh, it’s in Cygnus, was the reply. He was taking all of the cans to Kroger this morning to return and also buy a bunch of stuff to take to FlaMan in Flint tomorrow. He warned me that the freezer was full but that didn’t stop a ziplock bag of frozen chicken from falling out of the freezer and ALMOST landing on my foot.

So I didn’t have Cygnus to make a grock dash and I didn’t really wanna take Mooon Yooonit, not that there’s anything wrong with Mooon Yooonit, just that me and Cygnus are joined at the hip. So I waited until the GG got home to take off for my Plum dash. On my way home my phone buzzed a couple times and when I finally got home and looked at it, the GG was walking to Dexter and might want a ride home. What the hell? Let’s just have lunch in Dexter at the pub and so we did.

We sat at the bar, which we like to do if there is no one annoying at the bar, like the too-friendly woman pre-covid who knocked back at least three huge beers. She wasn’t there and no one else seemed to care about talking to/at us. But down the way a bit was a guy who was (loudly) advocating for not paying off mortgages quickly.

I wasn’t sure what he was saying exactly but WHUT? We had a 30 year mortgage and we managed to pay it off in 13 years. That among other frugal practices more or less led us to be debt free pretty much forever. Like the last time we bought a car (Cygnus) we actually wrote a personal check. I hope that loud person was not really trying to influence other people like his kids or whoever. Probably preaching to the choir here but if you need to go into debt, do your best to get out of it as soon as possible. Trump and his 50-year mortgage idea? F*ck it. I bet he hasn’t had to take out a mortgage in his entire life. (Banker’s daughter here.)

This photo is not from tonight, when we porterized ourselves out at Aubrey’s in Dexter. I kinda prefer Dexter’s Pub but Aubrey’s was fine and they made decent ‘hattans which I don’t always expect anywhere.

It’s the time of the season for darkness. I actually like the darkness of the winter solstice. Early morning and early evening.

That’s about all I have to say for today.

First. My mouse took this pic of the northern lights from a hill near her house a bit north and west of The Planet Ann Arbor the other night so photo credit to her.

Back to the title. Mainly that I am NOT a programmer (we call them developers today). I taught myself BASIC and FORTRAN umpteen bazillion years ago. I understand programming logic VERY WELL and if I know a language’s syntax, I can program like the best of the best. Back in my childhood job at That Darn EPA (I was a contractor), I once wrote a snippet of FORTRAN code to get our facility online with a monstrosity of a mainframe down in DC. NCC-UNIVAC. Awful system. Jeebus. Some person (guy probably [snort]) down there looked at my code and declared it SEXY. I *think* that was a compliment?

Fast forward to my adult job. I mostly write! In English, I mean. I code html, css, and a bit of crappy old-skool javascript but I am not a developer. The developers I work with kinda walk on water. I don’t even know exactly what language they are using now. I hear things like ASP.NET and C+ fly by and but I don’t work with that stuff. My friends on the dev team are the guardians of our little corner of the on-line banking biz and they are keeping it working and safe.

I could have learned to do that stuff in my Adult Job but I kinda like doing what I’m doing even better. My job is mainly to write functional specifications for the development team to use to build out new or enhanced functionality. There’s a lot of writing involved but as I am writing, I am not only thinking about verbiage and vocabulary. I am also making pictures. If words are not enough, flowcharts, annotated screenshots, tables or whatever often work.

I have always been what people sometimes call a “creative type”. This job is as creative as all get-out.

I’m a day late with these pics. My late (alas) cousin Teri’s daughter Anastasia’s wedding was on Veteran’s Day two years ago. I once loved going to weddings but I am so over them now. But I would not have missed that wedding for anything.

My cousin Teri lost both of her parents by the time she was in her early twenties. Her dad was my mom’s brother and he died unexpectedly. As a side note, I was a freshman in college when he died and my moominbeach friend Barb Mullin was the person who told me about it. She was chaperoning a Sault band trip to my college and I’m sure my parents connected with the Mullins to let me know about that. It was all over the news after that because my uncle was the director of the state DNR but that would be a whole ‘nother story. Or not. But they didn’t want me to hear about it via the news although now that I think of it, I’m not sure why they didn’t just call me? My dorm room had a phone. I think…

Anyway. Teri (and a lot of the rest of us, including me) did not really know where we were going in life at that time and for a while we didn’t really have contact with her. This was NOT a family feud in any way, shape, or form. It was just young people trying to find their way in this crazy world and not necessarily wanting to ask for help from aunts (like my mom) for whatever reason.

We eventually got reconnected. Teri, after some waitress jobs, got a teaching degree and became an uber-cool middle school counselor. And I seem to fall into tech jobs and own them.

All those years, my mom kept reaching out to Teri and her older sister Sally and after Teri had her daughter, she accepted those communications more actively. Teri and Sally first brought Ana(stasia) up to visit the moomincabin when she was, uhhh, maybe two? We all loved on her and as she was growing up, she fit into our branch of the Fin/MacMu family, learning to drive The Indefatigable (jeep Wrangler) with the GG and whatever FinFam cousins were around, when she was like 10 years old.

So yes, I didn’t miss Ana’s wedding and here are my beach urchins as we were boarding a bus with Ana and her new husband just outside. And the second pic is Teri and me in the moomincabin with Teri making a goofy face. Luv you cousin. Miss you but so glad we had so many good times together.

I encountered several wizards today. Two of them are my long-time Indian-American colleagues who lead our development team.

I have been struggling to solve an issue with our hi-fidelity html product prototype (aka “the demo”) for literally YEARS. The person who created the demo was my beloved old boss, the LSCHP, but he moved on to bigger and better things a number of years ago. I had no clue how this particular corner of the demo worked. When I was the only business analyst, I could manage it by hook or by crook (as The Commander used to say). Now that My Replacement is on board, it needs to be fixed. So Amazon Woman called a “working” meeting together today.

It isn’t quiiiite fixed yet but I was relieved that these two wizards obviously knew where to look and what to look for. At one point we were looking at a file that had some javascript code in it and they spied something odd. And so did I! In pseudo-code, “if the browser is Internet Explorer, do this, if it’s any other browser, do this other thing.” Problem? We haven’t used IE since, hmmm, about the time this part of the demo stopped working? Edge! Edge! Edge! And so the object (or whatever it is) referencing IE was basically useless.

I suppose I have to include a third person in the wizard category. It is the GG and I am reluctant to give him tooooo much status in the wizard department lest it go to his head. But…

After I fergit how many weeks, the Hoton Lake Group Home webcam (which we host) was down, it sneaked back up this morning. This is after umpteen bazillion hours of work of the GG trying to sort out the problem and chatting with tech support folks to no avail. He FINALLY got connected by phone with a woman who at least LISTENED to him and seemed to understand enough to file an escalated ticket. Those folks said, “Yeah, this is a known issue.” I wondered, “then why didn’t anyone else at the host service know about it?”

The ticket was closed before the issue was fixed (as tickets often are, even at my work, bad user experience) but they apparently did the job and here are the webcams. (It’s dark there now).

That little figure in the midst of all those big red pines is meeee looking straight out to where the Edmund Fitzgerald sank 50 years ago today. Something like 40-45 miles north (more or less) of where I am standing on the bank above the beach on my family’s Lake Superior property, in front of the moomincabin.

I like this pic a lot but it doesn’t show the major landmarks you can see from our beach: Round Island is in the middle, Gros Cap is on the right (in Canananada) and Iroquois Point is on the left (America). You’ll have to imagine those landmarks. I have always highly valued this property, which my grandparents bought 100 years ago. Somehow this summer, I was hit by a lightning bolt at how truly gorgeous our land is. I can’t put it into words exactly. And why did it take so many years for that lightning bolt to hit? Because when I was a kid, I was running around with my beach urchin cousins like “wild Indians” and later on busily taking care of my contribution to generation 4’s beach urchins.

I’ll try to put all that into words some other day (or not). The night the Fitz sank, my brother was in high school. He was in his bedroom at our parents’ house in Sault Ste. Siberia. As a HUGE Boat Nerd (google it), he had a fancy radio in his room that picked up freighter communications. He listened all night to the Arthur Anderson (another freighter following the Fitz across Lake Superior that night) call the Fitz. No answer.

Lake Superior’s “seabed” is littered with shipwrecks (here’s the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point). My Boat Nerd brother loved the Fitz but later in his life when he was a full-fledged automotive engineer (and husband, father, and talented jazz trombonist), he wrote a letter to the editor of Lake Superior Magazine supporting more coverage of other, particularly older, shipwrecks.

We don’t have as many shipwrecks these days. Why? Because weather forecasting has become so much more accurate. When major storms are threatening, there are sheltered places where lake freighters hang out until a storm runs its course. One of those places is Whitefish Bay, straight out from where I am standing.

So, even though this pic is hazy and the landmarks I grew up with are not visible, I like it. I’m thinking it aligns with what the Edmund Fitzgerald might have been facing that long ago night.

P.S. I know people love to hate Gordon Lightfoot’s song. I tried that on a bit but it didn’t fit. I’ve listened to that song a bazillion times in my life and I still like it. For folks who were close to where the ship went down, we needed it.

The question was asked the other night if I had ever been at the controls of an airplane. Well, yes. When I was a child, my dad rented planes from his friend Sandy Sanderson to log flying hours in order to get his private pilot’s license. He was already an accomplished pilot, having spent his WWII service as a pilot trainer but rules are rules. The first pic is from inside a Cessna (or whatever) on a flight from Sault Ste. Siberia down to the Straits of Mackinac. The Mackinac bridge was being built at the time. Before it was built, we had to traverse the straits via a ferry. I have vague memories of the ferry and I was not on this particular flight. I think I was too young.

Who was NOT too young to be on this flight was my granddaddy. I’m not sure he ever flew anywhere in any airplane that his son (my dad) was not piloting. He was born before automobiles although he did own automobiles. Of course by the time I was born, I had no idea what life without automobiles could be like. I can’t imagine what my granddaddy thought about the transition to cars and then airplanes. This kind of stuff is mind-boggling to me.

So have I ever flown an airplane? Yes and no. When I was a kid, after my dad achieved his private pilot’s license, we would go for Sunday flights. Sometimes I would get to sit in the passenger seat and dad would instruct me about how to use the controls to make the plane go up and down or turn.

My first flight was to Ann Arbor/Detroit in a passenger plane with my mom, so she could help her brother’s wife after the birth of one of my cousins. My doppelganger cousin, as I figured out as a mature adult. What I remember about those flights were the shapes of the windows. I was two.

The first flight I actually remember was with my dad and granddaddy in a little Cessna. We just did a quick tour around Sault Ste. Siberia.