Oh not the shrimp gazpacho I got down at Monahan’s Seafood at 0-skunk-30 this morning. That was really good. I’ve been seeing it on facebook for years now but every time I’m down there, I forget about it. My ears perked up when a woman ahead of me ordered some so I did too. I will order it again but as good as it is, I think I will also add shrimp to my own more or less Moosewood gazpacho the next time I make it.

I also bought Copper River salmon (’tis the season) and then beef tenderloin at Sparrow Meats. Asparagus, potatoes, and garlic scapes outside. Wanted shelling peas but they aren’t available yet. A little early? Not sure.

I was rather slowly cleaning out the refrigimatator when my cousin called and next thing I knew we were sitting in the back yard jawboning with her and her husband and their friends, a couple who lived below me on Seventh St. umpteen bazillion years ago. We won’t talk about the time my terlet was leaking and I didn’t know it and toidy water was dripping into their dining room or whatever. It was kind of a ram-shackle duplex (old house converted into upstairs/downstairs apartments) and I was glad when we moved out.

We moved because we were getting married and if I remember correctly, one of the reasons (besides we were getting married and could afford it) they accepted us as renters was because we were not a “zebra team”. Thank the gods times have changed. Or have they? I actually remember thinking, “What the heck is a zebra team?” At the time, I just wanted a nicer apartment. We moved again when Lizard Breath was on the way (into the Landfill where we could make our own social rules). I first felt her move on the couch in that apartment. When we were moving out, the landlady started to get a bit snarky about a teensy bit of dirt on the carpeted stairs until our buddy Master Woodring (phd in limnology) quietly alerted her to the fact that I was not walking alone in life any more. We still did our best to clean it up.

Three of our guests today went to high school here and they are attending a reunion this weekend. When they said they had been at the farmers market this morning, I almost said something like, “Oh, I didn’t see you there”, but then OOPS. I was likely HOME from the market before they were all out of bed. In fact, when the Sparrow gal told me it would take a few minutes to trim a new tenderloin, I said, “I’ll just run out and get a couple things at the booths.” When I got back like five minutes later, my tenderloin was trimmed, wrapped, and ready to, uh, pay for 🤣.

After everyone left, we kinda crashed out for a while. The GG was asleep. I never sleep in the afternoon except occasionally when I doze off on the moominbeach on the right kind of day.

P.S. Don’t even begin to try to understand yesterday’s ridiculous and incoherent post 🐽. I’ve been thinking through the ins and outs of a first-world problem and how to try to ninja my way through it.

I dunno. I am a rather extreme introvert but I am a friendly introvert. I love people, I just don’t want to entertain them frequently. I do love when folks visit me here on The Planet Ann Arbor in the back yard and I love when the Moomincabin is full up, as long as COVID is not lurking.

What do I do for a living? It’s hard for me to detail that in a day to day way. I am happiest when I can just do my job without trying to describe every stinkin’ little detail about it. Besides being a friendly introvert, I have a weird knack for remembering and organizing details. Every job I have ever had, paid or volunteer, I have been what a Young Actors Guild person called The Glue.

No one at my current job calls me The Glue and I wouldn’t ask them to but I do tend to be one of the people who can figure out what we changed when and why and (usually) find documentation for it. I wrote a lot of that documentation… I love my job but after the last couple weeks, I wonder how long I will I last there. We’ll see. I am a baggy old bag but with any luck I will ninja myself along for a while longer!

Am I smart? I am smart enough to know that there are a whole helluva lot of things I do not know.

Love y’all, KW

So, Eco-Terlet has been showing signs of being in a failure mode for the last couple days. Like you push its buttons and they go down but NOTHING happens. Fortunately both times this happened, there was nothing significant in the bowl and my personal plumber fixed it. Except why does it keep happening? I was met with a certain amount of grumptitude (and I was NOT a happy camper about that) when I reported this today. I mean, we have ONE terlet here. I am no stranger to going in the outdoors but we can’t use our suburban backyard every time, especially not if it involves good old number two. I mean Nextdoor Neighbor is FULL of people complaining about dog poop. Can you imagine if human poop was also in the mix? Hoping the second terlet fix is a keeper but still gonna put a bucket at the ready. Thanks to the Moldy Old Hoton Lake Cabin, I am no stranger to bucket flushing.

In My Plumber aka the GG’s defense, he has spent umpteen bazillion hours in the last few days replacing the brakes on the Lyme Lounge, not to mention the battery. It is nine years old now and stuff happens. And then there were some other dealings, which all I’ll say about is DO NOT EVER give out your credit card number to ANYONE who calls you!!!! !!!! !!!! No, it wasn’t either of us who did it but the GG had to clean it up. I mean, I’ve worked in online banking for almost 15 years now and I am required to take online training sessions several times a year about various fraudulent practices. Guess what? I ALWAYS pass them with flying colors because I never did that kind of thing even before I had this job. JUST DON’T DO IT!!! In fact, if you don’t recognize the number calling you DON’T ANSWER IT AT ALL!!! !!! !!! And then BLOCK IT BLOCK IT BLOCK IT. Just a PSA.

One of the things we did NOT argue about tonight was Elon Musk 🤣🤣🤣

Not me, I did that in January, on a loverly little breakthrough COVID birthday.

Today it’s the cute little beach urchin on the left, my younger niece. The beach urchin on the right is my younger daughter. I use the comparative rather than the superlative because in the finFam, I only have two daughters and two nieces. On the cFam side (in-laws), I still have only two daughters but umpteen bazillion nieces, not to mention a bunch of nephews.

My brother and I each had two daughters, meaning my parents had four granddaughters. My older daughter is two years older than my brother’s older and my younger is two years older than his younger. They were all blonde as young children, as my husband, brother, and I were. I still call us all blonde although, like many blondes, our hair darkened into dishwater blonde later on and mine is mostly white/gray now.

This pic is a long time ago and they are all 30-something adults now and this one has a PHD and a successful career in her field! My brother would be very proud of her! He was capable of giving his kids crap from time to time but this one did NOT take any of it. Once summer when we were reading “The BFG” (Roald Dahl) aloud at the moomin, he tried to give her some crap one morning and she got right up in his face and said in her 2-year-old foghorn voice, “YOU are the Big UGLY Giant!” He was wearing what he called The New Morning Look and I think he actually cracked up.

Anyway, HB kiddo. We all had so much fun at the moomincabin back in the day. Kids, dogs, and three generations.

It was a long haul driving down from the yooperland but it couldda been worse. The GG thinks that’s because “Biden’s” gas prices are keeping people from traveling and the whole world is going to hell. *I* think it’s because it was TUESDAY and all the fricken’ pandemic road nutsos were not on the toad. Road… Gas prices are scary right now but I don’t believe they are solely Biden’s fault.

So, gas at Brimley (for Cygnus) and then a stop in Iggy to transfer I dunno what to and from the North Country Trail station there. Across the Big Mac and next stop Gaylord to snag a battery from the GG’s twin’s house. The Uncly Uncle was AWOL but least we got to see The Beautiful Gay for a few minutes. On down the I75 SUV Speedway…

I took a call because I can (just barely 🤣) doooo that now that I have a modern vee-hickle. After a bit, the GG (driving ahead of me) tried to call meeeee. I could not for the life of me figure out how to put my call on hold to take his and then he hung up. So my friend and I ended our call. We (the GG and I) were getting close to Bay City anyway and I knew I would have to totally concentrate on driving at that point.

I tried to call the GG but butt(car?)-dialed BFF first and ended quickly. When I did get hold of the GG, he pleaded with me to help him visit FlaMan at his apartment in Flint. I REALLY wanted to get home but whaddya do when you are a for better or worse person and someone needs help with his disabled brother.

So, okay and then I managed to butt(car?)-dial BFF AGAIN and eventually she called me back, wondering WTF. At that point I was on the Zilwaukee Bridge, which I don’t really like very much (it has a looooong history) so I said I would email her later and I did. And there was another gas stop somewhere around Saginaw. Mooon Yooonit needed it. Cygnus had enough but we topped her off anyway.

FlaMan’s problem was… He was mad at one of their sisters, something about food, yada yada. She is trying to HELP. While we were there a telephone solicitor called him to try to pressure him into buying an extended warranty for his automotive vee-hickle. I loved how FlaMan (who hasn’t owned an automotive vee-hickle in at least 30 years) handled this. “Exactly what vee-hickle are you talking about?” I don’t know what the other person said but FlaMan said something like, “You are a shithead.” I wouldn’t have even answered the call but FlaMan is FlaMan and he ain’t gonna change and I thought given the question, he had a good answer. I watched Gunsmoke with FlaMan while the GG did some chores and I learned who Miss Kitty was.

We are back on The Planet Ann Arbor and there was a speshul package on the dining table courtesy of our mouse who brought the mail in. It has Lyme Lounge trailer brake parts and the pic shows the GG out there working on the Lyme Lounge brakes.

Love y’all, Kayak Woman

Or not. It’s probably somebody’s birthday today (Facebook alerted me to two) but the title refers to what I now text to people I have sent misguided text messages to. “Oops! Happy birthday!” It started when our friends of porterization sent us a loooong text wishing someone happy birthday. Um. Nope. Not us. Since then, I have sent THEM at LEAST two misguided texts, usually things about the spelling bee or wordly-type puzzles that were meant for the beach urchins.

I had been up in the air about when to drive back down to the Planet Ann Arbor. My original plan was today but ongoing work weirdness made me want to be ONLINE today and I didn’t want to drive Sunday and have to deal with the Pandemic Road Cowboys with their big f*cking trucks and 85-95 mph speeds and unwillingness to let someone driving a smaller SUV at the SPEED LIMIT (75 mph) pass slower traffic. So we are going tomorrow. It was probably a good thing to change those plans because it rained ALL DAY here (we needed it) and everywhere else in Michigan and there were and maybe still are severe storm warnings in the lower. No thank you.

Absolutely FOREVER, including today, I have cleaned the moomincabin stovetop by pulling out the burners one by one, soaking them in the sink, and reaching into the holes to clean out what’s underneath. I was ABSOLUTELY ASTOUNDED today when the GG walked over to the stove and LIFTED OFF THE WHOLE TOP! Just like that. I wonder if The Commander (my late mother) knew you could do that. I certainly didn’t. Yes, it’s a small-size stove. I’m not sure how old it is but definitely decades. It took a cFam boy to figure out how to open it up like that. As nutso as he can sometimes drive me (we’re arguing about Elon Musk tonight, don’t ask), he was a good catch. The Commander would be the first to agree.

So apparently the GG is actually asking meeee for book recommendations. That’s a little weird given that we have quite different tastes in boooooks. He likes to read old war books and things. But a while back, his identical twin was asking and some of the books I recommended seemed to be okay for him. And it turned out that the GG also read those books (Eide family trilogy and Marsh King’s Daughter). Last I knew, he was reluctant for whatever reason.

Last night, I recommended Project Hail Mary and Great Circle. Project Hail Mary is by the same author as The Martian and I think he liked that book. But this morning he was asking about Great Circle (Maggie Shipstead) so I’m guessing he may embark upon that one. It’s a good choice in my opinion. Fictional female aviator back in the day.

Those of us who do the spelling bee got a wee bit freaked out when we realized that genius happened at 347! Yikes. I did manage to get to genius and got ALL THREE(!) pangrams, the last one after I misspelled it (and its root word) something like three times. I am down only one word from Queen Bee, mi7. Will I get there? I dunno. Our official Queen Bee seemed excited about the whole thing early this morning but was too busy to get going on it so he gets a pass.

On top of everything else, the GG got into Suzy Homemaker mode and did a whole bunch of cleaning and window washing, etc. THANK YOU! And we ended the day with a bote ride!

I love Emily St. John Mandel and I LOVED Station Eleven. Station Eleven chronicles the aftermath of a pandemic and I read it during a xmas vacation quite a few years ago while I was SICK with a fugly vomiting virus. One of my beach urchins brought it home and I succumbed. After spending a lot of time with the Blue and Only Terlet, I moved to the Green Couch and sucked on ice chips for the rest of that night and a few more nights after.

Hahaha! It was a horrible virus for those of us who got sick from it. Mostly women if I remember. It wasn’t a pandemic. It took a while for me to recover well enough to want to eat much of anything again but I did get there. So I read a book (Station Eleven) about the aftermath of a pandemic while being sick as a dog. Way before covid-19. Hahaha.

I just finished Sea of Tranquility, also by Emily St. John Mandel and LOVED it. It is totally different than Station Eleven but various pandemics, past and future are a part of the story. I can’t describe this book. I’m not sure I even totally understand it yet.

So I have read a book that talks about pandemics. I am still reluctant to re-read Earth Abides. Maybe soon?

My next book? To the Bright Edge of the World. Same author as The Snow Child. I read The Snow Child a number of years ago before I was tracking books on Goodreads. I was SICK when I read The Snow Child. I think this was the time that I woke up at the moomincabin feeling like my eyes were crusted over along with other congestion type stuff. We were driving down to the moomincabin that day. We had separate cars and we stopped to say goodbye to Jeep and Pan but I declined to hug them because I didn’t want to give them whatever cold virus I had. Little did we know all those years before covid-19.

I wasn’t deathly ill but I felt like I needed to take a down day. I called in “sick” but said I would be fine to telecommute to our usual Monday meeting. I did the meeting but I took the rest of the day off and read The Snow Child. All 600 or whatever pages of it.

The GG will be home in one minute (so he says) and we will head over to get porterized over on Milligan Road. I’m providing the dry vermouth.

Yyyyuuuuccckkk! The GG pulled a plate outta the cupboard and, after inspecting it, put it into the dishpan. Oops. I musta not perfectly cleaned it.

I crow about what a good dishwasher I am but I am not perfect. In the “good old days”, when we had crowds staying here at the moomin, it often took a crew of two to wash the dishes. A washer and a dryer. More people than two do not fit in the chitchen without doing the bump. Being meeeee, I would often jump in as the washer. Alas, a frequent and supposedly friendly partner would sometimes reject dishes that didn’t meet her impeccable standards of perfection. OF COURSE dishes should be adequately cleaned but these rejections were delivered in a cold hurtful way. To keep a peaceful ambience for my parents, I learned to immediately switch jobs upon one of these criticisms. I probably didn’t do dish drying in a way that met her standards either but I never heard about it. It’s probably a good thing she didn’t witness me and my cousins washing dishes after Community Dinners at the Old Cabin when we were kids. Most likely singing at the top of our lungs.

I have to say that I know of NOBODY who has ever contracted food poisoning from eating at the moomin or my house on the Planet Ann Arbor. Except for the time Sam, my brother’s dog, was caught rummaging our compost heap and vomited on the way home. He had such a guilty look on his face when he was caught, which my brother cracked up about.

The pic is from after last evening’s bote ride. Mixed weather today. Cold-ish overnight (upper 40s), calm and moe-skee-toey this morning, then a pretty big northwest wind blew in. Struggled with scheduling a return trip to the Planet Ann Arbor due to work weirdness this week but have it figgered out. The GG, who is opposite me on many issues, supports my decision on this and my job in general. Despite today’s dish washing disaster.

Love y’all, KW

Oh. My. God. I went to the laundromat this morning. I had a big baggie of quarters at the ready when I arrived but was also expecting to have to put a twenty into the change musheen.

Hello! New warshing musheens and a sign for DexterPay. Hello? An app for paying for warshing musheens. OMG. I have been dreaming about this kind of thing for years. After some fussing around I got it to work. My warshing musheen started and I made a quick trip to Pat’s groceries. When I got back, my musheen was not quite finished so I sat outside for a bit. Another woman came out and was concerned because the young man who seems to run the place didn’t seem to be around. She had put quarters (I think) in her musheens and started them and the soap didn’t dispense. Much later, after I was back at the moomin, I thought I should’ve suggested she use pods because you have to put them INSIDE the musheen with your laundry.

The dryers still require quarters. As a usability designer, I figured out why PDQ. Most people are likely to use multiple dryers and different time settings. And put more quarters in when things are not dry yet. I’ll take the washing musheen app though.

And then I got to do garbage duty. That involves putting the garbage into Green Bags and driving it up to the res where a nice man gets it out of your trunk and dumps it. I did that and then I took a trip up to Spectacle Lake overlook and then I returned to the moomin, snagging a bunch more Green Bags at the gas station along the way.

Evening bote ride to Cedar Point and Round Island after dinner and I am about done done done now.

The GG sent this pic from the Sault Ste. Siberia border patrol facility, which he was walking by on his way to town this morning. He was pretty far away from the bear and I’m glad he wasn’t any closer.

On his trek to town, he followed two sets of bear prints for quite some time. Big and little. Little Bear turned off and then later, Big Bear also did. Was Big Bear the same bear as at the border patrol facility? We do not know.

In the middle of a more chaotic work day than usual, I drove to town to pick up the GG (and dump a bunch of recycle). On the way back out, we did a five minute backtrack on Five Mile Road to chase down what he thought was a bear but turned out to be a MAILBOX 🐽

When we arrived back at the moomin after that little digression, I got back on to my work laptop only to find that I was five minutes late to a hastily arranged meeting, one I would NOT want to have missed. I wasn’t very productive today and probably won’t be for a few more. At the end of the day, I put a pair of smartwool leggings on over my tights and went down to sit in the hollow in front of the Old Cabin. This was NOT a warm day (and that was a relief) but I was okay with my leggings.

Whaddya think? Should we let bears into the United Snakes? I don’t think we can really stop them although I also don’t think this one came from Cananananada. Or Mexico.

When I arrived here last Thursday, the GG was kinda jumping around like crazy in that frenetic way he gets sometimes. I was like, I just got here, it’s my first vacay day of the year, and I just wanna unpack and chill. When we dropped our first daughter at college, he was so frenetic that she finally pulled me aside and stage-whispered, “Can you get him to settle down?” He was like shouldn’t you be doing this, that, and the other thing. She was perfectly capable of taking care of her own affairs.

I think a part of what escalated his mood in that situation was that when he went to college, his parents said something like, “You’ll have to find your own ride. We’re going to Houghton Lake.” I may be misquoting that but his high school girlfriend drove him to Moo-U. If this sounds y’know, not very parental, note that 1) he and his identical twin were 5th and 6th out of 10 children (the quintessential middle children? and holy terrors to boot) and 2) he had hitchhiked solo all over the country by that time. I don’t know exactly what was in his head the day we took lizard over there but there may have been an element of living an experience that he didn’t quiiiite get as a college freshman. (He had wonderful parents and I had wonderful in-laws.)

I digress. Last Thursday I found him SOMETHING TO DO! It was to unpack umpteen bazillion toilet paper rolls and put them away. This is fancy bamboo TP from “Who Gives a Crap” and my older beach urchin sent away for it (THANK YOU). I fergit how many rolls we have but it will last us the entire summer and maybe part of next summer, given that TP generally survives winters in our seasonal, un-insulated cabin just fine.

Back to work today and it was HOT HOT HOT! And a bit mo-skee-to-ey. I tried to hang out on the deck a bit at lunchtime and there weren’t a LOT of mo-skee-toes but there were enough that I had to be vigilant and keep my After Bite at the ready. Given that experience, I bagged sitting out on the deck for my weekly meeting with Amazon Woman. There was enough wind on the beach that it probably deflected most of the moe-skee-toes but it was HOT HOT HOT down there. The temperature is supposed to take a pretty big dive tonight.

Where the heck am I? I had not been out to the old abandoned gun range in umpteen bazillion years, long enough that I couldn’t really remember where it was. So this morning, after I took an early trip to Meijer, we faaarrred up Cygnus and headed SW more or less, into the Delirium Wilderness and beyond.

i think Cygnus qualifies as an SUV although she is a pretty small one and can only tow small loads. But if you look at her taaaars, you might guess she can do sand.

We turned off onto a very sandy road to get to the gun range. It was a one lane road and at one point, we spied a vee-hickle heading toward us. We stopped and pulled off and the other vee-hickle stopped and pulled off. We waited a minute than pulled back onto the road. When we got closer, I realized it was a Border Patrol car (Canananada is across the river from us). The GG rolled down his window and they had a friendly convo, the kind that a young Border Patrol guy would have with a baggy old white couple driving a late model car. Nothing to see here. He warned us of some deep sand ahead and the GG told him he was well familiar with the road. Which he definitely was since he has been driving these old forest roads forever and we have been at the gun range many times before.

As we were heading down there this morning, he was kinda wishing he had brought a gun. I asked if he wanted to turn around and get one. Nope. He thought I might be bored waiting for him to shoot. That wouldn’t have been a problem since I had puzzles to do and a book on my phone. I don’t really mind if he shoots a gun at an abandoned range although I do know to cover my ears. But whatever.

I have been puzzled for years about what the border patrol is looking for here in the eastern yooperland. I can’t believe anyone in Canananada would want to immigrate(emigrate?) to the United Snakes. This isn’t the first time we’ve encountered a Border Patrol vee-hickle out in an area where there is literally NO ONE ELSE around. The GG thought this guy looked familiar. Was he the guy who was asleep in his vee-hickle down at the end of the beach a couple years ago? I dunno. He was a really nice guy but what the heck are we paying these folks for? And BTW, marijuana is LEGAL in this state which I voted for even though I don’t DO marijuana so I don’t think drugs is what they’re looking for. They sure were looking for marijuana back in the 70s. Jeebus.

Not that anything’s wrong at all. Just can’t cobble words together tonight. The photooo was from last evening when we took a Motor Bote ride out to Round (aka Guano) Island and back. We did not run out of gas this time like we did a few years ago when I had to row us back. Tonight we were porterized here on the moominbeach bank. Have not been porterized in person in a while.

G’night, KW.

I won’t try to describe the twists and turns we went through to cook a chicken on the grill tonight. It was a Sparrow Market chicken that I brought up from the Planet Ann Arbor and the GG’s eyes totally lit up when I showed it to him a while after I got here on Thursday. Look what I have 👀

One of the twists was that we don’t seem to have a meat thermometer here. I feel like we’ve been through this search before and I can’t believe we don’t have something like FIVE meat thermometers but whatever. The GG rummaged the Old Cabin kitchen and found a sugar thermometer but not a meat thermometer. So he headed over to cousin Judd’s place and was more successful plus Judd came over and was so much fun to talk to as he always is. I remember when he was born and slept in a dresser drawer when he stayed up here at his grandma’s place (where he is living now). A meat thermometer is now on the GG’s hardware store list. I told him I’d put it on my list but he wants to choose his own and that’s fine with me. Whew! Something off my list.

And then we ran out of propane halfway through cooking our chicken. We put it in the oven while the GG made a quick trip to Brimley to get more propane and now it’s back on the grill.

Last I looked he was smoking a cee-gar. He is a very occasional cigar smoker. Neither of us have ever smoked cigarettes outside of minimal experimental stuff when we were very young. My parents were also not cigarette smokers but my dad often smoked a cigar after dinner when I was very young. And don’t talk to me about marijuana. I am a 1970s college student so I HAVE tried it but I did NOT get along with it.

My little brother emulated my dad by smoking ‘gars aka CRAYONS! He was like three years old. My main memory was a big yellow crayon that was his favorite ‘gar. That ‘gar rolled around all over the Old Cabin, where we spent our summers before we built the moomincabin. It got really dirty (in my opinion) but The Commander didn’t seem to be bothered by that as much as I was.

I was driving to Meijer this morning because when I got here yesterday and asked if there was any food, I was offered beanie weenies. For dinner. I don’t really have anything against beanie weenies but NOPE. I made him get takeout whitefish baskets from Pickles. He rightly figgered I didn’t want him to buy a lot of food and also that I wasn’t bringing much but still… I had planned both to get Pickles takeout last night and go to Meijer this morning anyway. (I saw exactly ONE other masked person in Meijer.)

On the way to Meijer, the beach urchins were texting me puzzle progress and we got off onto beanie weenies. And yes I was texting while driving but I was voice texting and I can do that in Cygnus, at least on the slow back roads in the eastern yooperland. Not much traffic. A handful of automotive vee-hickles, two Amish buggies, and a flock of wild turkeys who were standing in somebody’s driveway fluffing out their feathers. Like the Thanksgiving turkeys we drew when we were kids. I have no clue what was going on there and didn’t get a pic.

This place is about as grubby as it usually is after nine months or so of being closed up so I picked away at cleaning tasks. We then got into some of the usual conversations about things that need to be changed or gotten rid of. The baskets next to the front door were a temporary target. They have been here probably almost since we built the place when I was a kid. Eventually we decided they were keepers although some of the crapola in them is not. Dog grooming equipment from my long dead dog? I loved Tigger to distraction but I have no emotional attachment to any grooming stuff.

Books books books. Books were an early issue of contention after The Commander died. I’ve never figured out why since I had no plans to get rid of them any time soon. But we have too many and I am beyond tired of trying to clean around them. I devised a tentative plan to ask her grandchildren (and the GG) to identify books they WANT to stay around and eventually I’ll get rid of any that aren’t spoken for. Like, The Forest and the Fort series my grandfather owned is a keeper but I doubt anyone cares much about Tom Clancy paperbacks but who knows? We’ll see if I get around to that and if I do, how well it’ll work. Given the ongoing hostility and lack of communication from one of her grandchildren, I don’t have high hopes🐽🐽🐽 (I dunno if said grandchild ever lurks here or not. I am not hostile and I do communicate or used to try.)

So it was, as they say, colder near the great lakes today. I took a beach walk this afternoon and then did a complicated couple of dances of jacket vs. vest and sitting on Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench vs. the little hollow in front of the Old Cabin. This view is from the hollow. The bench is not protected from the northwest wind but it got downright HOT in the hollow.

Sayonara, KW

It was with some trepidation that Cygnus and I launched off the Planet Ann Arbor this morning on my first trip to the yooperland since I returned last year in mid-September. Part of my uneasiness was fueled by ongoing generalized pandemic anxiety. Part of it was that the weather forecast for all of Michigan was rain, rain, and more rain. In the end I slowly packed and did word puzzles until after 9:00 AM, which I figured was after rush hour, then I JAMMED my anxiety into the dungeon it belongs in and got on the road.

The drive was pretty much fine. The truck and Redneck Macho Man traffic pretty much fell off after Bay City. I got hit by some light drizzle off and on from West Branch to I dunno north of Gaylord maybe? Dry pavement pretty much prevailed.

Until I got a few miles south of the Big Mac. BIG FOG BANK AHEAD! TURN ON YOUR FOG HORN KW! I drove across the Mackinac Bridge in pea soup fog. I could see where I was going but when I got to the north side, I was like WHERE ARE THE TOLL BOOTHS? It’s okay, I found them just fine. When I stopped at the rest area just above the bridge, I found text messages including one from the GG warning me to turn on my fog horn. BTW, I was the ONLY masked person inside the rest stop.

The fog marginally improved as I got inland but as I approached my Rudyard exit, the rain had increased and it sounded kind of icy? Hmmmm. What is the temperature? 54 degrees. I wasn’t worried about the road surface being slippery but I was glad to exit at that time because my remaining travel was on low traffic roads. Not that there are a lot of vee-hickles on the I75 SUV Speedway in the yooperland.

The first pic is at the entrance to the cabin road. As we were unloading Cygnus, we were both eye-balling the precipitation and discussing whether it was actually SLEET, given its whitish color. I posted this on facebook and npJane commented that we had better FIX THE SLEET SITUATION by TOMORROW, which is when she is coming up.

It still isn’t very warm but the sleet has stopped and a little while after I posted that Mr. Golden Sun made a brief appearance so I posted THAT. Is this better?

Tempo is your store with more at lowest possible prices. Doo doo doo.

In light of the latest HORRIFIC school shooting, I have been remembering my own encounter with potential gun violence. I was a college student working in the office of “your Tempo store” (I did cashier too) in Sault Ste. Siberia.

I dealt with all kinds of things there. People paying their utility bills (yes really). People returning things (we’ll talk about the town pimp some other day). People returning things (we’ll talk about the people who were trying to return things they had stolen some other day).

Tempo was a discount department store kinda like KMart. It sold a lot of stuff. Including sporting goods. Which included firearms, mostly hunting rifles if I remember accurately but I knew nothing about guns.

So one day I was working in the office and a guy came up to the counter and laid a RIFLE across it like pointing it at me. Yikes! I was like 20 and my dad owned rifles but I never saw him shoot one of those or any other gun. So. All of us in the office kind of freaked out. Until I asked him why he wanted to return it. The guy humbly told us that he had lied on his application to buy a rifle. What did he lie about? He had checked “NO” next to the box asking if he had ever been diagnosed with a mental illness.

We didn’t freak out at that. This was in the early 1970s and people were not regularly blowing up schools and churches and stores and things. The guy’s MOTHER was with him (I think she made him come in to the store with her). Mr. Drysdale got involved and I believe he decided to let the mother own the gun. Something like that. No schools were blown up after that and we went on with life at Tempo.

This is just a story from my life. It was scary until it wasn’t but I think nowadays he might have been shot on the spot.

I needed to get out of the neighborhood for a while this afternoon so I took a River Ride. I wasn’t totally paying attention to the radio at first but NPR was talking about something at an elementary (?) school in Texas. As I was tuning my brain into it, I eventually processed that a shooting had left two students dead with 14 at a hospital. By the time I got home that had been revised to *14* dead students and a teacher and I have no clue if it has changed again since then.

How many mass shootings have happened in the last week? It feels like they are happening every other day now. I could look up the facts and statistics about this but I know that others will do it for me. Will the US president’s main job become traveling to mass shooting sites to offer condolences since they are happening so frequently?

Thoughts and prayers? I’ll guess that there are some victims’ family members who appreciate prayers. I am NOT religious and therefore would not be among them. If a family member of mine ever succumbed to a mass shooting, I would be CURSING whatever god people worship. Thoughts? I’m not sure what that even means. Are the “thoughts people” setting aside a time each day to sit around and think about mass shooting victims? There’s a long list at this point.

Again. I am a gun owner albeit by inheritance. I have never shot or handled a gun except to gingerly pack some rifles into the POC once. I’d like to get rid of most of my guns but this isn’t really about taking away anybody’s guns. I wish we could keep guns out of the hands of nutso people. But we can’t with internet shopping and parents who think going to shooting ranges with their disturbed teenage child is “bonding” and elected officials who post pictures of their whole families holding guns around the xmas tree. And how can we identify people of any age who are at risk of going “postal” in such a horrifying way.

Although pro-choice is my hot-button issue at the moment (and always will be), I will NOT EVER vote for political candidates who aren’t interested in coming up with reasonable laws for selling and purchasing guns. I know that we can’t ensure that a deranged person won’t get hold of a gun (one that can kill 14 children in a manner of minutes) but we have to try. I do not care how many thoughts and prayers they send to victims’ families. Those are worthless.

P. S. 18 children dead and the shooter also killed his grandmother(?)

The Gaylord Tornado kind of took over Friday’s topic, which would probably have been the TICK (YICK!) the GG found on his leg in the shower that morning. Where did it come from? How long had it been hanging around? We do not know.

I immediately said I was gonna wash the sheets. He pooh-poohed that idea. But. He left for the Great Spirally North that morning so I washed the sheets ANYWAY. And the mattress pad. Which needed it. It’s been a while. TMI? I have not seen any more ticks. I can handle taking showers with spiders and frogs. I do not want to sleep with ticks.

Our moomincabin internet appliances have been fixed following the Lightning Strike. And the DSL has been replaced with a modern one. It has always been a workhorse but at 11 years old it was time. The landline phone too even though no one EVER uses it. The Jamadots guy dredged up an old used one for us. We’ve had good and bad experiences with Comcast (once they sent out a “serial killer” but another time a cheerful superman climbed a pole in below zero weather). Jamadots is 100 times better. Apparently they weren’t easy to get hold of over the weekend but they were out by late morning today and had everything fixed slam bang.

During this, my cuzz The Beautiful Jan and I were going back and forth online a bit. She reported that there were PELICANS out by the island. Pelicans do not hang around in the moominbeach area but they often make a stop during migration. I may be mangling that 🤣. I am a casual bird-watcher at best.

The new mouse nest acquired both a lawn mower and a trash cart today and both inhabitants are waaaaay excited. Apparently a celebratory beer is involved. And “inhabitant” is the one spelling bee word I didn’t get yesterday. I got “inhabiting”, “inhibiting”, “inhabit”, “inhibit”, “habit”, and “habitat”. It’s fascinating how the brain works. Or doesn’t. Hibbity-habbity.

It is “No Mow May” here to “save the bees”. This is working out for some people better than others because apparently this isn’t a good month to institute such a policy in this area. It isn’t mandatory and I had to laugh when a neighbor whose spouse is involved in a lot of this kind of stuff told us he was gonna mow ANYWAY. The GG also mowed. To me, not mowing is counterintuitive to the idea of tick prevention. This is complicated stuff though and I don’t claim to be an expert in any way, shape, or form.

The pic is from Friday evening. I heard a lot of voices in the school yard, then as dusk fell, what sounded like a MOVIE! I looked it up and it was Haisley Movie Night. It was a beautiful mild night for an outdoor movie and I headed over to take a pic. I didn’t get too close. I figured I’d probably have to buy a ticket and also, I don’t really fit into that crowd any more. Back in the day, I’d’ve been running around with cash boxes and big ziploc bags of cash. Small bills, of course. I wonder who’s running the PTO treasury over there nowadays…