So I have entertained the UU (my husband’s identical twin) here at the Landfill a couple of nights over the last few weeks. Tonight the GG is being entertained by the UU’s wife The Beautiful Gay (TBG and she is a woman). By “entertain”, I mean us gals are feeding our brothers-in-law dinner and providing them a place to sleep. Alone. We are not the least bit kinky.

It’s interesting being married to an identical twin. I love the UU but not in the same way I love the GG. I don’t really get mixed up about who’s who. I absolutely don’t get mixed up when LOOKING at them. They do look exactly alike but somehow there are little differences. I imagine it was more difficult to tell them apart when they were infants but I think one of them has a some sort of birth mark maybe? When I mix them up is when I’m not looking at them. Their voices are the same and if I’m not paying attention, I sometimes think, which twin is that?

It maybe took some time for TBG and I to get to know each other. When we first met, she was in the throes of child bearing, her third child on the way. The GG and I didn’t get started on children until four years after that. Nowadays we are good friends. We certainly have differences but they are mostly trivial things (think house cleaning habits, i.e., she is waaaaay better than me). We have a connection somehow and she is one of my favorite people to hang out with.

I hope the spidey doesn’t freak anyone out. It’s a Daddy Long Legs and it is harmless to humans. I grew up thinking that. In recent years “we” are being told via the interwebs that it is very poisonous but its fangs are “too short to bite humans”. Like American politics, this is a complicated issue. My recent google search pretty much confused me except that I continue to NOT be afraid of a Daddy Long Legs bite.

I have always loved walking over to my polling place, which is the elementary school behind my house. Since covid, I have done absentee ballots for every election. I miss being the first voter (if Mr. Mxyzptlk doesn’t beat me to it). I don’t miss the various issues that occur when you are among the first voters. I love our poll workers and understand that since they don’t do this job every day, there can be confusion in the early morning before they get into the swing of things.

The last time I voted in person was for the 2020 primary. You know I did not vote for The Former Guy. At that time, covid was lurking and the powers that be were telling us to keep three feet away (yes, really) and no one was masked because no one was masked then. I was nervous but I did talk to folks in line with me. A couple weeks later, my grock worker, who still votes at Haisley, told me that she’d had a sore throat that day. Ugh. Yes, it was probably covid (very hard to get tested in those days). Fortunately, she had a mild case.

If you know me, you know I did GO BLUE for this election. I am sick and tired of old/young male/female fossils trying to tell me how to run my life. I don’t agree with everything the democrats want. Well, actually I do agree with a lot of what they want but I don’t think most of it is electable. Nevertheless I voted blue because, well, see fossil stuff above. If you disagree with me, have a little think about what freedom means.

Yay for me. I have gotten a fair amount of flinging done this weekend!

For a while anyway, closing the browser window and re-opening seemed to solve it.

Man oh man am I taaaared. I actually started to write (what?) a while ago and then dozed a bit. I’m back but will not be staying long. I forget what road I was on when these sandhills were crossing the road. I was going at a snail’s pace so no danger of hitting them and they didn’t speed up much either but they didn’t provide a great picture either. At the bottom of the pic is one of Cygnus’s readouts. I’m not exactly sure what information it’s exactly supposed to convey except the angle I’m ascending/descending at. Which is weird because it says I’m at a slight uphill grade but this was flat flat flat.

Tinked away at reorganizing/flinging things today although nothing actually left the Landfill. Soon. Reading? The Mountain in the Sea (octopodes). Watching? Little Fires Everywhere. Like the book. Not like the book. Whatever. G’night.

WordPress hell? I had a devil of a time posting a photo. It kept trying to tell me I was uploading a video or a gallery? Whaaaa? Restarted and was able to upload a plain photo with no problem. Dunno.

At any rate, this is all just a filler post. G’night!

I got a voice mail from the GG today in which there were a lot of crunching noises. I had actually just talked to him on the phone so I when I saw the notification that i had missed a voicemail, I was like WHUT?

A few years ago we were at the moomincabin and the GG was on his computer and there was this really weird noise and I finally asked what WTF? It was a video of a fox eating a camera.

The UU came to have dinner tonight. He was craving salmon and kinda wanted to go to Knights. I processed that for a while… … … I am still not comfortable with indoor dining plus this is Friday and Planet Ann Arbor restaurants are slammed plus traffic is NUTSO. I cannot even make a left turn outta my neighborhood onto N. Maple. In the end, I cooked salmon piccata here at the Landfill and that seemed fine. Maybe next week when the GG is home, we’ll grill some salmon.

Hopefully this’ll get shaved by the time he gets home, whichever day that is. I really do not like facial hair all that well. But whatever.

And I really don’t know what day Himself will return. I was thinking how much I would miss him when we said goodbye almost two weeks ago at the moominbeach. I was heading south and he was heading west (a lot) and a north (a bit). NNW? Yeah.

But once I got settled in at The Landfill, I felt great. I haven’t gotten as much done as I wanted to but I have made some progress. And I have either another full weekend or most of one to focus on things.

I haven’t been lonely. The beach urchins et al have been over a couple times and the UU spent the night last Sunday. And there’s always work folk in the United Snakes and India and wherever.

A friend posted quilt-type stuff on Instagram today. I don’t remember her ever doing quilt stuff when she was living on The Planet. But she was working full time then. I think it’s really cool that’s she’s doing that now. And here I am working at this baggy old age (and LOVING it). When I do pull the R string, I will want to do quilt stuff again. Why am I so outta whack from the norm in terms of career trajectory? I do not know.

The GG took this pic of Canananada while hiking the Minnesota/Ontario border part of the North Country Trail. I want to make the yellow trees be tamarack/larch but I think they are more likely maple, etc., given the season. Trees are not really changing yet here on the Planet Ann Arbor and it is 70-something today so I am hanging out in the back yard between my work day and my leftover dinner.

I seem to remember O Canada from when I was a kid but (again) I’m not sure I have an accurate history of Canadian independence from the British crown and Canadian national anthems. I suppose I could look it up but not right now because after yet another day of archaeological digging through crappy old-skool javascript and antique functional specifications, my analytical brain is FRIED. And I am a terrible historian from the getgo.

I was laughing to myself talking to last night’s visiting beach urchin. In SOME ways, my kiddos have grown up just like me although they are definitely unique people with their own talents. Although neither of them have a formal techie-type education (I don’t either except for community college classes in my 50s), they manage to be able to mastermind technical “stuff”, i.e., spreadsheets and whatever other systems they need to use at their work. I can only guess that they thought I was a totally uncool nerd when they were teenagers. On the other hand, they didn’t seem to mind too much that I spent their teenage years hanging around managing the actors guild they were involved in. They learned a lot from that guild and so did I. I’m reading a book now (Firefly Lane) where there is a toxic mom/daughter relationship going on (and on and on and on and on). I did NOT have that kind of thing with either of my then-teen daughters aside from an occasional short-lived blow-up. Actually, as I remember it, my daughters were very responsible and were trusted by other kids’ parents. THANKS!

Finally, the next season 5 episode of Handmaid’s Tale dropped this morning and you know I watched it after today’s archaeological dig work this afternoon. One of the Hulu ads chilled me to the bone. It’s probably time I upgrade my iPhone but I HOPE I can turn off the “feature” that calls 911 if I hit something. Cygnus has collision alert technology and that’s fine except that if I don’t remember to turn it off (it’s opt-out, not opt-in), it freaks out and stops my car when I back up close to TALL GRASS or MULLEIN PLANTS! I do not need 911 for those types of collisions 🤪🤪🤪

I had so much fun with my daughter who did an overnight here last night. I guess she’ll be back since she left her ‘poon here, the one I washed and hid in the dish drainer this morning 😉

The original plan was for a beach urchin to come over and cook the eggplants I have in my refrigimatator. But. It was 70 degrees and sunny this afternoon and that plan changed a bit. Like moom let’s go to HOMES Brewery. And YES! I love HOMES and you can sit outside and I am COVID brave enough now to mask up long enough to go inside an establishment to put in an order. (I only saw two other masked bandits.)

So that was fun and I posted a pic on Instagram just to show the GG that I AM (REALLY) trying to dredge myself back up into interacting with the outside world. Well, it was fun until trivia night or whatever it was started. It got really crowded after a while and along with that came noise and chaos and I am not really ready for that yet, not to mention the long line I had to wait in to close out my tab. Why did I run a tab anyway? I should’ve known we would eat, have one drink, and vamoose back to The Landfill.

If we had only left 15 minutes earlier… But we were trying to gauge the traffic on Maple and then we got into a terribly interesting conversation about doing archaeological digs. At work I mean, not out in some field or desert or somebody’s back yard or whatever. But we might’ve missed some of the chaos and noise had we arrived at the restaurant 15 minutes earlier.

And then on the way home, both Twinz of Terror called. The UU was first so we were talking to him when the GG called. So we ignored the GG 🐽. It’s okay, I did call him when I got home. He has not had a shower in SEVEN days and it sounds like he can’t even stand his own smell. Was that TMI? He should get one tonight and hopefully he’ll find a laundromat too. And maybe we’ll need to get Mooon Yooonit detailed when he gets home?

Anyway, I love HOMES and this is the first time I’ve been there since you-know-when although I have gotten take-out a couple times. I’m glad it survived the pandemic and is thriving.

I got this via a text message from northern Minnesota. At first I couldn’t figure out what kind of aminal it was. Bear? Nope. Wrong color. I’m glad it was hard to see though because that means no one got too close to it! That would not have been a good idea.

So first I got up this morning and I was jumping around like crazy. Plum Market and then I decided to look for skirt hangers out at Meijer. This was a stretch for me because it was well after opening time for me to go there but I had some clothing to dump off too. I dropped the clothing off in the drop box in the parking lot but they didn’t have skirt hangers in the store so I walked out without buying anything but I did get some gas there. When I got home I found enough skirt hangers to hang all of the umpteen bazillion skirts I own so it was a good thing I didn’t buy any.

This little bowl has been at the moomincabin for a couple years. It did not have a cover. I could not figure what it was or where it came from. It turns out that it is MINE. It belongs to a set of nested bowls with covers. How did it get to the moomincabin? I do now know. I can only guess that it made its way into the Lyme Lounge and then up to the Moomin. Please do not take Landfill kitchen stuff anywhere… … …

It’s a little like severance. My yooperland severed self has been wondering where this little bowl came from for a couple years later now. My Planet Ann Arbor severed self has been wondering where my missing bowl was… Finally my two severed selves integrated and voila!

I am going a little crazy because the GG is not here but his identical twin is. Twin is on the phone with his kids and grandchildren are and it is hilarious listening to this conversation because I keep thinking I’m hearing my husband but I’m not. It’s his twin. Love them both!

Because you don’t want to look at photos of me FINALLY reorganizing my spice “drawer”.

This is the woman the GG is backpacking with this week. I chose this photo because you can’t really see her and I didn’t ask permission to post it. Actually I can’t ask because I don’t think they have cell service right now. This is her second thru-hiking trip on the North Country Trail albeit she is not doing it from end to end contiguously. Last winter the GG did parts of Ohio with her and is joining her again in northern Minnesota. I got Queen Bee on the spelling bee today but this woman is the REAL Queen Bee.

That said, I DID FINALLY reorganize my spice cabinet. I did it in five minute increments throughout my work day Thursday I think it was. I now have a primary place for all herbs/spices and a secondary space for duplicates (and a couple triplicates 🐽). I have already put the beach urchins on alert not to buy garam masala, nutmeg, or turmeric. I have triplicates of those. And then there’s the humongous oregano container that was a pandemic shopping error. Always check sizes and quantities when ordering!

This weekend I started slow-walking my clothing into some kind of order. Right now it is a huge mess. And that’s even though I got rid of most of my biz caz after I turned into a permanent telecommuter and have done some other dumps since then. It turns out I cannot stop myself from ordering skirts and tights online.

Oh well. I am totally outta steam tonight. Early trip to the farmers market for, lemme see, carrots, onions, apples, delicata squash, and some eggplants at the last minute that I could NOT turn down.

G’night!

It was a gorgeous day and at the end of the day I sat outside watching Severance on my phone. I have figgered out how to watch videos in landscape mode. That is a good thing.

Anyway I am loving the fall-type yard noises. I can still hear crickets (I think that’s what I’m hearing) but their chirping has slowed down. Of course there are always squoils and things hanging around.

For quite a while it was warm enough to hang around outside with just a few layers. Turtleneck, polartech vest, skirt over tights. When the sun headed down over the west side of the Landfill, it got a little chillier and I threw this loverly lap blanket over my legs. This was a gift from my dad many years ago. I don’t think my dad really had an affinity for gift giving but he did give blankets. High quality ones. This one was from LLBean but most often, he gave Hudson Bay blankets. His granddaddy trapped for the Hudson Bay Company in northern Saskatchewan and died there but that is too long a story for tonight.

We who live in the north country always have a lot of blankets around. Wool are best but down comforters work well too. I can remember being at the moomin when I was a young child and my foot was FREEZING! Moom! I yelled and she got out of bed and covered me with a thick wool air force blanket and boy oh boy was I warm!

It’s probably time to put my impatiens in the compost but they are still budding so I am gonna wait a bit longer.

This is not a dog, it is a dog-shaped stone and I fergit where it is but the GG texted a pic of it. I WISH TO HELL HE WOULD TEXT ME FULL-SIZED IMAGES. THIS IS NOT NOT NOT!

After work and rolling out the various carts this afternoon (garbage and recycle this time), I thought I would watch the next season five episode of the Handmaid’s Tale. It’s out today right? Not. I watched the first episode of Severance instead. I liked it although I don’t yet totally understand it. But that seems about right for the first episode of a sci-fi type thing. I think it will be up my alley.

Some of my co-workers were talking about Severance a while ago (quiiiite a while ago, I am a late adopter) and they liked it. So let’s give it a try.

Also I recently read a novel titled Severance that I liked a lot. It is totally unrelated to the TV series and it features a pandemic, of all things. Note that this novel was published in 2018, well before covid-19 hit and totally different symptoms than covid. Weird symptoms…

Hahaha. A lot of people in the flute world are freaked out that Lizzo played James Madison’s crystal flute. Me: James Madison played the flute? Also me: I LOVE LIZZO. Here is a link to Lizzo playing the crystal flute. It comes with an ad and some other crapola but I am (was) a flute player and I LOVE LIZZO. I was good but she is better. You go girl.

I can count on one hand (I think) the number of times I’ve visited Crazy Old Florida in my life. I am not a regular. I love visiting but after about a week, I am itching to head back north.

Because we had/have relatives in Bradenton, that area is what I’m most familiar with. The second-to-last time I visited Florida, instead of staying with relatives, we rented a place right on the beach on Long Boat Key (gulf coast if you’re not familiar). Which is pretty much right in Ian’s path, a bit north maybe but probably not far enough north if I’m understanding Ian’s path correctly.

We had GORGEOUS weather the week or so we were there. Sunny and not too hot. NO HURRICANES. Our rental was a retro motor hotel style place renovated with studio-style rooms, i.e., small but fully equipped kitchens. I do NOT like glamorous hotels. I am okay with “rustic” but I prefer the rustic cabin that I own. It has its flaws but they are long familiar ones and I know who cleans it. Our rental hit the sweet spot.

The next time we went to Fla (last time for me) is what I call the LSD Trip. This was a rescue trip so we didn’t stay anywhere near the beach. The Frog Hopper broke down, I got a red tide warning on a weather app as soon as we arrived, and wouldn’t you know a hurricane (Michael) caused us to leave a few days earlier than planned. We got the car fixed (miraculously) and drove back up the I75 Snowbird Geezerway with an oxygen setup (and the person using it), a dog, and a U-Haul trailer. “Don’t hit any bumps, my TVs are back there!” Gotta be able to watch Gunsmoke reruns, don’tcha know. Fun times.

We knew that Michael would not hit our area directly (he didn’t) but we were concerned about driving through potentially heavy rain in Georgia. I will never forget my relief when we crossed the Tennessee River bridge under brilliant sunshine.

Anyway, I have been thinking about Long Boat Key and the surrounding area. What will happen to our beautiful motor lodge. And what about Mr. Ed. He is our late sister Suzie’s husband and last remaining Floridian relative. He is a native. I can’t believe he’ll evacuate but then he is not ON the beach. Hoping for the best for him.

Some pics from our last FUN trip to Fla. The one before the LSD trip, which was fun in its own way, like this’ll be funny some day, roight? 🤣

Here is the Sea Club 1 and we are second from left on the first floor there.

From this courtyard (Ringling Brothers art museum), I managed to talk my mouse (who was at my house doing laundry) through how to find and email some files (that I had forgotten to upload) to my boss 🐽

Banyan tree. Trees? Too lazy to look up. Also at Ringling. Mr. Ed’s family had worked for Ringling. I mean the museum(s) not the circus. He loves the place.

Mangrove. I think. Am I remembering accurately? I love seeing the different flora and fauna even though I don’t know much about it.

One of my fave photos ever. I snuck up on these slowly with my iPhone cam in burst mode and picked the best one. I’m not usually that patient and therefore not good at wildlife photography.

This is how I feel when we cross the Great Lake State border (especially on the LSD Trip). Almost home.

P.S. My MAGA-ish facebook/high school snowbird friends, after some days of hurricane bravado, seem awfully quiet all of a sudden. Gitchee Gumee can throw up some good storms but there isn’t enough water there to conjure up anything approaching a hurricane. So I hope “youse” are all right.

That is, an adult child waiting for her moom to say something totally stoopid or whatever. What I had said that fell into the flytrap a couple weeks ago was something like, “I can’t deal with the cognitive dissonance.” The cognitive dissonance was facing the fact that I would probably have to eat leftover pizza and Chinese for dinner that night (and I did and it was fine).

I dunno what landed in the flytrap tonight but for the first time in quite a while I had my beach urchins and our raccoon over here for dinner. We had Chicken Pot Pie (CPP), not to be confused with PCPP (Purple Chicken Pot Pie). PCPP, you ask? Years ago the GG took a trip out to Bingy with Pengo Janetto and her mother to check out a college for a masters. I promised CPP for dinner when they arrived back on The Planet Ann Arbor. Problem. I bought PURPLE potatoes. WHAT was I thinking? I’m sure it would’ve tasted fine but I could not serve a dish that color to guests, not even family members. A normally whitish dish with dashes of orange (carrots) should not be purple. Cognitive dissonance? We went to Knight’s instead.

Although we are all still concerned about COVID transmission, the reason we haven’t been having dinner together is mostly because we are all as busy as all getout and going out of town for various trips. Although not to exotic faraway places mostly. Yooperland and the northern lower and one of the Carolinas but I can’t remember which.

The pic is from the GG, who is staying at a lodge in Gunflint, MN on the eve of a backpacking trip on the North Country Trail. It looks comfortable enough in the pic but I am wondering where the flushy terlet and shower are. They will not have those for the next umpteen days or so. He said something like, “I will not smell very good at the end of this.” Indeed. On the other hand, he bought laundry detergent and little bottles of shampoo and things before he left the moomincabin area, where it feels like you are deep in the wilderness but there is a Meijer 15 minutes away.

This fuzzy was taken by the GG somewhere near Ontonagon where he was hiking with the Softies. Note that it has an American flag. The Big Mac hangs an American flag on federal holidays. A couple times this year that didn’t happen either because of weather or some other sort of difficulty. Wouldn’t you know the MAGAts on Facebook had to complain. I wonder how many of the complainants would’ve been willing to go out there to help hang the flag. I wonder how many of the complainants are AFRAID to cross the bridge. A lot of people are. Just sayin’.

Maintaining the Big Mac is not a job for armchair quarterbacks. Once a friend of mine had a flat tire on the bridge and quick as a wink the bridge authority folks appeared and changed it. No room for error on that bridge. Getting people safely across without causing backups is the name of the game. Hanging the flag is a luxury.

Rat-a-tat tat. Rat-a-tat tat. Lather, rinse, repeat. This pecking was going on in the back of the Landfill outside the bathroom. Rat-a-tat tat. Rat-a-tat tat. Lather, rinse, repeat. This time it was somewhere in the front of the Landfill. And this time the actual bird got close enough to the window that I could see that it was a downy woodpecker. I mean, I think it was. I actually looked it up on the internet and the downy is a common bird in the Great Lake State and the smallest woodpecker and this bird was small.

We have a metal fireplace chimney and when the beach urchins were small, a woodpecker decided it was a good place to drill. He began his drilling at sun-up (like 6:00 AM) and continued on and off throughout the day. It was LOUD and echoed throughout the house. The beach urchins were TERRIFIED until the GG managed to get a picture of it in action and show them it was just a silly old bird.

And then the grandparents came for a visit. They were sleeping on the foldout couch in the Landfill Back Room, which was right next to the fireplace. I warned them the night before that the woodpecker would wake them up. The grandparents: Oh no, that won’t wake us up. Me: Oh yes the woodpecker WILL WAKE YOU UP! 🤣🤣🤣

I went backroading for a bit today. I do NOT mean the kind of back roads with big waterholes on them. I mean gravel roads that are decent enough that fancy rich people actually live on them, which means they get graded from time to time. I was on one road that was more mud than gravel and I had to slow down a few times (and I wasn’t going very fast) because I felt like I was gonna slide off the road.

I know I’m back “down south” because I get solicitors. The only people who show up at the moomincabin are utility folks or are LOST. Yesterday. A nice young woman asking if this was the cFam house. I was caught off guard. I said yes (instead of “why do you want to know”). She wanted to “interview” me about proposal 3. Dum de dum de dum de dum. Which is proposal 3? Is it the legalize abortion proposal or the voters’ rights proposal? I support and signed petitions for BOTH of them but yes, proposal 3 is to legalize abortion in our state.

Without thinking (again!) I volunteered that I TOTALLY supported proposal 3. And immediately thought, I bet she doesn’t. And no, she didn’t. She had some “information” she wanted to leave with me about some of the “negative effects” of the proposal. I told her I was a life-long choice supporter and there wasn’t any way she or her “information” would change my mind. I wished her well but NO THANK YOU.

In retrospect, I wished I’d had the presence of mind to tell her I well remember the coat hanger days and don’t want us to go back there. And if she had her head on straight and wasn’t listening to some misogynist preacher-man (or whoever), she probably wouldn’t want to go back there either. But I just wanted her off my porch PDQ.

Again (again (again (again))), this is not a black and white issue. It is a sprawling continuum. For one thing out of sixteen billion others, almost NOBODY would ever CHOOSE to abort a late term baby. UNLESS. There is something horribly wrong. MOST people who allow their unborn babies to gestate past the early months WANT them and do NOT want to abort them. But SHIT HAPPENS. And I’ll leave Trump and his delusional speeches about beautifully wrapping up newborns in blankets before killing them out of this for now. You’re welcome.

P.S. Roooomba ran for a looooong time today.

The GG didn’t really understand when I said I had been unpacking “all day”. But I have. I will qualify that I have been unpacking on and off all day. There was a grock run and some laundry and the major unboxing of an Amazon order I received before we went north the last time. BIG unboxing, multiple boxes. And I fergit what else.

The thing is I came home with (among other things) 6-8 grocery bags of, uh, well, groceries and various other things. The last couple days I was throwing things willy-nilly into grocery bags. Non-perishable foods, toiletries, cleaning supplies, computer cables and other detritus. I have unpacked it one bag at a time, doing chores or whatever in between bags.

I don’t like to leave anything edible in the moomin over the winter, perishable or not. We have never had rodent invaders (except for a few isolated weird incidents that didn’t involve food foraging) and I don’t want to start now. I imagine this annual trip was difficult for The Commander but she only had to organize and schlep things 15 miles. If she forgot something, she could easily schlep back out to retrieve whatever. I cannot do that. The GG is rattling around up north for a couple weeks and he will return for the stuff I DID leave (at the last minute) on the middle shelf of the refrigerator door. And to snag the Lyme Lounge so he is not just going there for food.

I am not as disorganized as I was the last two years [delete long rant about pandemic food hoarding] but I am also ANNOYED at how disorganized I seem to be. Why do I have three cylinders of bread crumbs? Why do I AGAIN have an extra five pounds of both flour and sugar? And two molasses(es) and some other baking supplies that I hardly ever use… The huge container of oregano (pandemic ordering failure) went to the moomin and back. I may have used it ONCE up there. I NEEDED oregano down here at one point but didn’t have it because guess what? It was at the moomin.

And I haven’t even unpacked my clothing yet but we’ll talk about that some other day.

But don’t let the pic fool you. It’s from a couple evenings ago. Today’s drive featured brilliant sunlight and blue skies all the way down. And light traffic.

Unpack? What? I got most of everything inside the Landfill, did a couple loads of laundry, and put the perishable food away. Everything else? It’s in a higgledy-piggledy mess and I’m gonna take my time with it.

Sayonara, KW

50 degrees and a nor’wester today. I slowly packed stuff up to schlep down to The Planet Ann Arbor tomorrow. I don’t wanna leave but it’s time.

Our propane stove did not keep me warm this morning. I was actually shivering. The GG did an early laundry run. He did NOT download the warshing musheen app, opting to dump quarters into the musheen instead. I cannot figger why but at least I did not have to do the laundry. This time. He had asked if I wanted to accompany him but I am a solo washerwoman so nope.

Later in the morning he jumped at the chance to do a garbage run up to the Green Bag dumping facility on the res. By the time we got to Brimley, I was warm enough to turn off my bush heater and not shivering any more.

After the dump, we traversed a HORRIBLE forest road over to the Spectacle Lake overlook in order to drive Tower Road down to Dollar Settlement. Man oh man, I wish I had taken a photo of one of the MANY frickin’ WATERHOLES on the forest road. Crapola. We were in Cygnus, which is a Subie Crosstrek and therefore a GREAT backroad vee-hickle with high clearance and wonderful stability. But it is not an off road vee-hickle and there were a couple of big waterholes that I wondered if we would get stuck in and I am always nervous about tippy stuff. Cygnus did a great job but later when we were on Tower Road (a very nice gravel road WITHOUT waterholes), I caught that he was eyeing another forest road. I said, “Don’t even think about it!”

As you might be able to see, this was NOT a beach day! Not with 50 degree temperatures.

Yeah, okay, so the GG returned today and futzed around with all of his crapola. At one point he said something about needing to streamline some stuff. Yes.

After a trip to Brimley to pick up some mini shampoos and stuff (Family Dollar), the GG decamped to the garage. He warned me that he would be doing some shooting at some point. Thank you for the warning.

So yes, he did some shooting and that was fine. I am not anti gun and we are in MAGA-land to some extent which only means that people are not likely to freak out when they hear gunshots. And he is only shooting at “old logs” or whatever is in the swamp across the road.

But. The GG had just begun another shooting round when I noticed that our cousin Judd was driving out from next door. Okay. That meant he had to drive past the garage. The one the GG was shooting from. I ran out there pretty darn quick to warn the GG that Judd was going to be driving by. When I got out there, Judd’s car was stopped and the GG was standing outside it talking to him. Everyone was talking and laughing and Bo the dog was having a great time. The GG claimed that he was shooting from a standpoint that he could see cars coming down our one lane road and Judd was saying he was aware that the GG was there.

So this is the kind of stuff that goes on behind the garage.