Chilly because we have the screen in the storm door but I like to keep the big inner wooden door OPEN because it lets more light into the Landfill and I love natural light. Or lack thereof. It was in the 50s this morning but we are good at layering and there are lap-sized blankets all over the place so we were FINE!

We had a wee bacon-based brek and then lounged on the Green Couch doing our daily word puzzles in person. Usually we are texting back and forth. I have still not gotten to Queen Bee today. I am missing one in10 word and it is NOT one of the pangrams. Actually I may have given up on it for today. Just not seeing it. A new bee person walked quickly to Queen Bee today without even looking at the grid! So congrats! Note that we do NOT do this competitively! It is FUN and we are all word-y type people and it is a low-key way for adult daughters to interact with their mooma duck.

We eventually roused ourselves and drove out to Swan Corners to look at the cygnets (still 8), then did a mouse nest drive-by, knowing that no one was home.

The GG sent this cute little pic to indicate that he had arrived at the moomincabin and was getting it opened up for the season. I wanted to ask for a pic of whatever snow was still around but he… was… busy… Among other pesky little problems, plumbing mainly (which he is good at fixing quickly albeit it sometimes with multiple trips to the hardware store) the DSL was not working. I’d had a heads up about this when Our Northern Correspondent texted me yesterday to inform me that a dramatic lightning strike had taken out their internet as well as that of a McPiedy neighbor. We didn’t know if it was a local problem or more widespread. Well, apparently more widespread. Hopefully it’ll be fixed after Memorial Day when I plan to do some telecommuting from up there.

I suppose I’m about done for today, at least with this blather. I am cracking up though because as I started writing about the spelling bee puzzle, NPR played a song called Queen Bee by Taj Mahal, one of the GG’s faves. I couldn’t believe my ears! (Starts with 2 ads but one is 10 seconds and the other can be skipped almost immediately).

For those who care, I am doing well. I took Cygnus X-1 out to look at the *8* cygnets at Swan corners. Now I’m hanging out at the Landfill with my Lizard Breath. We’re trying to figure out how to turn on the TV. Maybe we’ve got it…

Got up a wee bit later than I wanted to but I had a different agenda than usual. I made it to Meijer just about at 7:00 AM. A case of beer (bud, but not lite) for FlaMan, a FEW cleaning supplies for the GG to take to the moomincabin this weekend.

For years (pre-COVID), I tried to buy as much stuff down here as I could and schlep it up. My reasoning was that I didn’t want to spend my time up there going to town to get grocks and supplies. Well, guess what? I always ended up shopping up there ANYWAY. Two years ago was the early scary days of COVID with no vaccines and a nutso president who was doing everything to ignore scientific data and promote his own quack remedies.

So that year I tried to bring EVERYTHING up. Man was that stressful. And curbside pickup was available but it wasn’t easy, at least not as easy as it was on the Planet Ann Arbor. At one point I was told that I couldn’t *do* curbside pickup at the Meijer 15-20 minutes away because I wasn’t in the right zip code. Um, c’mon. What do you care what zip code I’m in? I’M COMING TO PICK IT UP!!! I know people who live in the central yooperland who travel to The Soo Meijer frequently.

Last year, vaxxed but still uneasy, I masked up and braved the Soo grocery stores and laundromat, etc. And even a few restaurants, not all of them in the yooperland. Alas. Cases started to surge in the fall and people we know got breakthrough cases. And then I got my own breakthrough and yes I am STILL masking. “Other people” are not but I have given up trying to nag them 🐽🐽🐽

Anyway, I sent him up there with a few cleaning supplies (like dish soap and the only TB cleaner that WORKS in that terlet) that I know he will probably need. But this year I am not gonna go nutso about schlepping all kinds of stuff up. I’ll mask up and get what we need when we need it. I am going up for Memorial Day and probably a bit beyond. If I can’t get exotic ingredients, I won’t cook exotic stuff, not that I do much of that anyway.

So this afternoon MMCB₁ DM’d me because apparently a significant TORNADO went through Gaylord. She knew the GG was heading north today. Did I know where my husband was? Not exactly. I didn’t think he was in a ditch under Mooon Yooonit but I called him anyway. Nope. He was at Hoton Lake with his sister Gr8gerty. He was heading to Gaylord but that would be long after the tornado passed through. The UU (his identical twin) got footage of the funnel cloud.

I stole this pic of Spring Beauty ephemeral spring wildflowers from my mouse who texted it to me a while back. These are at the new mouse nest, one of the perks of the new place. The previous place was exotic in a lot of ways. This place is exotic in others.

Like ROOSTERS!!! For a short time a few years ago, we had a rooster in our neighborhood. I LOVED hearing it crow. Alas, people can keep hens in our city but not roosters. I’m sure there are some good reasons for this (?), I mean besides waking people up in the morning. Heck, in my neighborhood, at this time of year, there are birds galore and they make noise well before sun-up. Outside MY window, not three houses away. I love hearing bird and aminal noise of any sort and I have missed the rooster ever since another neighbor ratted on its owner.

Today I was kind of a slow-moving train wreck. The GG is heading north tomorrow and will open the moomincabin among other things. I can’t put into words my own civil war type struggle between the north (moominbeach) and south (Planet Ann Arbor). The problem is I love them BOTH. Now that I CAN telecommute from the moomincabin I have to figure out how long I want to stay there. I don’t want to miss shelling pea season at the farmers market for instance. Last summer I kept thinking I would go up there for various periods of time. Long weekends with a week or two weeks whenever. It turned out that I did some of that but I ended up staying there for SIX WEEKS at the end of the summer. That was not planned…

These are my Snag Tights Ukraine themed duo color tights. I ordered them a couple months ago knowing that they would not arrive soon. Snag Tights has been making duo color tights for a while (legs have different colors) but I didn’t really notice until they emailed me about the horse queen duo color tights. So I ordered some.

These tights were designed to support Ukraine and if I get it right, all profits will be donated to Ukraine’s effort to deflect Russia from invading their previously peaceful country. And that’s what Russia is doing. Killing innocent Ukrainian citizens for whatever reason. There are better ways to solve these kinds of problems besides trying to bomb the crap out of other countries.

Some people are making quilts or flags in the colors of the Ukrainian flag. I guess I am buying tights. I wear tights ALL THE TIME at least when it isn’t hotter than Hades. I was dithering and dathering when getting dressed at 0-skunk-30 today. Am I gonna wear these kinda crazy tights to the Plum? Am I gonna go to the Plum? I sucked it up and put on my Horse Queen blue and yellow tights. No one seemed to notice them on my walk (uh, I didn’t SEE anyone on my walk). I did decide to go to the Plum and no one seemed to notice them there. Later on, a guy walked by teleCublandia with a Ukrainian colored umbrella. Yes!

I do not in any way shape or form understand why Putin’s agenda requires killing innocent Ukrainian citizens. I suppose there are people in Ukraine who might want a different regime. There are outliers in every society. Like some of our MAGA folks. I think most Ukrainians want schools and coffee shops, etc., and free access to them. That’s what I would want. Peace please.

From one beautiful nest to another and of course, this was one of the first things unpacked and set up. So a pair of “o stalls” can be made 🐽🐽🐽 I won’t say any more about this as it isn’t really any of my business except that I am very proud of how my children navigate adulthood with such aplomb. I can’t take credit for it. I’ll let y’all guess what got auto-corrected to “o stalls”. If you want.

This particular urchin is very talented with her hands, especially but not limited to needlework. I can remember when she was five and we went over to the Henry Ford Museum one weekend. There were little workshops for children and one of them had to do with a small hand-sewing prodject. I’ll never forget her sitting there neatly and carefully stitching. The teacher was really impressed with her and so was I. And a bit amazed. She took up knitting at some point and became expert at that, making her own lace patterns and whatever.

I’d like to say that I am also talented with my hands. My hands are very agile (even with titanium pinky) but… 1) I focused mainly on musical instruments when I was young (NOT a bad thing) and… 2) I AM NOT PATIENT!!! I made a lot of my own clothes as a teenager, with my sewing musheen going 100 mph. As you might guess, some things turned out better than others.

I will never make my own clothing again. Even having gotten rid of TONS of bizcaz and other stuff, I have plenty. And nowadays my taste runs to easy-to-wear stuff that I order from the internet. Size medium. No tailored suits. No pants or jeans. No sweatsuits. Skirts, various tops, and tights if it’s cold enough, which it is most of the year in the Great Lake State.

My fave plum cashier knows enough about my life to know I telecommute from a saggy old couch (and that a relative works there too). Yesterday I was in there and she told me she was impressed that I always “dressed up” for work. I had to laugh. Turtleneck, polartech vest, skirt and tights. “So many telecommuters wear sweats.” Not me. But if she had looked closely at the skirt, she might’ve noticed that it’s on the verge of falling apart.

I am itching to get back into fiber arts again. I can’t explain why I don’t just dive in. All I can blame it on is procrastination. When I do tiptoe back in, it’ll be SLOW STITCHED small prodjects…

’tis the season. Way back in 2020 when the pandemic started, I had a “murder hornet” stuck inside my front window. I mean, he wasn’t really a murder hornet but he looked like he could probably sting. We coexisted for a couple days but finally I went over and opened the front door and somehow he sensed there was a way out. Goodbye murder hornet.

This weekend I was plagued by a different bug stuck inside my windows. I couldn’t tell what this bug was. It seemed to be the same shape as a stink bug and I do not want those in my house but I didn’t want to kill it either. We don’t have a lot of poisonous “bugs” here in the Great Lake State but we have plenty of stinging insects and I am not allergic to those.

I do not have a generalized “bug” phobia except for a *very* weird (but not all that uncommon) insect phobia that many people do not understand. They’re harmless! Yeah, I know but… If you know me well enough to know what it is, please DON’T reveal it. If you don’t know and want to, comment (or just email me) and I’ll reply privately.

I know what stink bugs look like but I couldn’t see this bug’s markings because every time I saw it, it was silhouetted against a brilliant Mr. Golden Sun. Today it was buzzing around again. I don’t THINK stink bugs buzz, another thing that was puzzling me. And then, I went to take a drink out of my water glass and… There was a BUG in it. It was the same shape as the bug that was trying to escape my house. It was NOT a stink bug. GG says it was a Box Elder Bug. Apparently we don’t want THOSE in our house either. Nevertheless, I’m sorry I didn’t try to stage manage it out.

Not here at the Landfill, except for the Henrys. The GG just said how tarrrred he’d be tonight. Me? Yes. Me too.

Himself came home late this afternoon and I already need to be space-i-fied. Sheebus. What is this green glass in the driveway? Okay. The green glass was the last in a series of minor catastrophes in the Key Fob Saga. I dumped the recycle cart out at 6:30 AM on Thursday morning. I knew that a couple things rolled under Mooon Yooonit. I grabbed all of them. I thought. Turned out that I missed a WINE BOTTLE. So the next morning, 24 hours later, I managed to run over it with one of Mooon Yooonit’s taaaars.

I was really pissed at myself but I’ve been driving Mooon Yooonit ever since and everything seems fine. No taaaar lights or anything. I cleaned up the glass mess right away. It was mostly crushed glass, not a bunch of big shards. I bagged it up in a paper grocery bag, taped it up with mailing tape, and wrote “broken glass” on it. Wouldn’t you know, when the GG came home today, before I had a chance to tell him about the broken glass, he FOUND a couple pieces of glass that I missed.

So I was put through the third degree about that or at least it felt that way. I am sorry. I am human. I err. Next time maybe don’t leave the fob in the Lyme Lounge? Which IS where it was finally found today. Gaaaaah.

Yes. We await the asparagus season here in the Great White North. Today there was asparagus EVERYWHERE at the farmers market. I don’t like to spend a long time at the market so I grabbed it at the first booth I came to. The vendor had it bundled into thin and thick stalks. I took one of each.

I also bought red onions and carrots. I bought them from Donahee and was surprised when I was presented with a choice of payment! Yes, I’ll use a card. Problem? My card ran through without a problem but when I tried to enter my phone number into their device (iPad I think) for a text receipt, the top row of numbers did not respond to touch. I assured the Donahee folks I did NOT need a receipt and lo and behold when I checked my bank stuff this afternoon (which I do EVERY day), the $8 dollars I spent there showed up just fine. I’m sure they get a lot of difficult customers. I am not one of them.

I had to take a pic of what it looks like heading east at the market at this time of year when the sun is up and out. It’s hard to see who’s coming the other way and I was lucky I didn’t slam into anyone. In another week, the sun will be in a different place at 7:00 AM. Or it might be raining. Who knows. We got wonderful rain 2-1/2 or three times this afternoon. It’s not all that dry around here yet but we’ve had warm/hot weather this week and I felt like we needed rain. If nothing else to water my newly potted mother’s day impatiens since there isn’t an easily accessible garden hose set up out here right now so I’ve been watering them from a Copco bowl 🐽🐽🐽

This was last night.

It is hot here but not oppressively so although in the mid/late afternoon I have to move teleCublandia away from the sunset window or quit working for the day. (Or turn on the central A/C. Ugh.)

I read To Kill a Mockingbird. I’ve read it before, I think in high school? I liked it as much this time around as I did the first time. I am now reading Go Set a Watchman. Hmmm.

There are a couple of people with the same last name as mine who I (long ago) accepted friend requests from on Facebook. These are people I don’t know from Adam and don’t think they are anything but DISTANTLY related to me if at all. I’m not talking about my third cousin Janet who DM’d me to check in and had verifiable information. We ARE related although we don’t share the last name.

I am lately flooded by folks on my “you may know” feed with TONS of fins (people with my last name). A whole bunch of these folks live in Idaho/Utah and there is some evidence that they have roots in New Zealand. That doesn’t surprise me since Scottish folk migrated all over the world and Australia/New Zealand are notable destinations. Open borders anyone, you MAGAts?

As a caveat, I don’t agree with “open borders”, lefty lulu that I have become. But migration has been happening forever and will continue to happen. I believe we need to handle it with humane rules. I think most of my Scottish ancestors brought positive contributions to our country and I believe folks from other countries are doing that too. Even those who aren’t Caucasian like my ancestors were.

I have not pursued friendships with any of these Facebook folks. I am curious about them but they are not requesting me as a friend, just floating by. And I have enough to do.

If you got an error trying to read my blahg yesterday, I’ll just blame it on Froooggy. I think he waited until I was asleep, grabbed my blahg and took her off on a drunken spree. Londry detergent with a chaser of Listerine are his go-to intoxicants. By the time I woke up, my blahg was back, if a little bleary-eyed and there was loud snoring coming from the londry basket where Frooog was sleeping it off in the dirty londry.

I found myself in the driveway at 6:30 AM dumping the contents of the recycle bin out. Why? Because I still cannot find the missing fob. There was only an infinitesimal chance it could be in the recycle cart but I had to be 100% sure. I don’t need any man-‘splainin’ to tell me that fobs are expensive. I’ll spare you the details of my system for handling recyclables and its proximity to the key basket. The fob wasn’t in the recycle cart, which is now out at the curb for tomorrow’s pickup.

I couldn’t get into the Lyme Lounge to look because it is locked and I could not find a key that opened it. Turns out the key is in a really odd location. If it’s a location I have once known about, I have long forgotten. Anyway, the key fob saga continues. It’s kinda like the time (long ago) when, for WEEKS, I could hear a smoke alarm beeping somewhere. It was faint and not one of the ones we were relying on. Eventually, we found one from our co-op nursery school buried in the front closet. You know the one. It’s where all the tools and car stuff and vacuum cleaners are stored🐽🐽🐽

A happily divorced friend is dealing with lawn services, etc., and was kvetching a bit that it might be nice to have a husband if only to deal with that kind of stuff. She is totally capable but it’s hard to manage a house single-handedly and I’m sure she gets tired of doing it all herself, including dealing with multiple contractors. I laughed like crazy and shut that talk down pretty quickly by providing a LOVERLY vision of meeeee in my driveway at 6:30 AM sifting through the contents of an upturned recycle cart. Because of something my beloved husband did, inadvertent as it was.

No fob but at least it wasn’t in the recycle. I wasn’t worried about the garbage cart because it was EMPTY until I put two half-full kitchen bags in it. All carts are down at the curb. G’night. KW

No, it’s not outside! I said that to the GG after my second trip outside to look for one of Cygnus’s fobs today. I also looked INSIDE and even emptied the grocery bag I collect recycling in until it’s full and I take it outside to dump it.

OMG what a morning! Himself is traveling again. Just a quick trip north this time. Long weekend. I mean every day is a weekend for The Pensioner, right? There was a Mad Scramble of last-minute packing and I could hardly hear MMCB on our weekly facetime call because of all the bag rattling and ice clinking (packing a cooler) and door opening/shutting going on.

At the penultimate moment, Himself was standing by the entry saying, “I’m sure I forgot something!” Yeah probably. My attitude about that is that if you are traveling to Hoton Lake and the yooperland (he is), you are in the Great Lake State and there are plenty of places you can buy just about anything you’ve forgotten. Or if it’s a quick trip like this one is, you can do without until you get home.

Unfortunately, he did forget something. Unfortunately, it was an important thing that he can’t buy at Walmart or somewhere. I cannot find it here even though our finder-type app shows that it is right next to Mooon Yooonit’s fobs. Which are IN THE BASKET. Where they belong. It is NOT. I’m sure it’s somewhere here. If I don’t find it this weekend, I am not looking forward to whatever rummaging activities ensue when Himself returns.

I maintain that packing not to mention cleaning would be a helluva lot easier if we weren’t always dealing with so much crapola. We have made progress but still.

I love him anyway.

I haven’t read that book but I recently read another one by the author. I liked it well enough (rated it 4 on goodreads) but it didn’t knock my socks off, probably because I wasn’t totally crazy about the characters.

He mainly writes YA books if I’m not mistaken and I get the teenage angst. I mean being a kinda high-strung person, I lived through enough of it as a teenager. The one thing that saved me from crawling into a hole somewhere (besides the moominbeach) was music. I was good enough at playing the flute that when I was in 8th grade, I challenged a senior in high school and WON. (When I was in junior high, our school was connected to the high school by a long hallway. There was no junior high band so if you were good enough, and you didn’t have to be very good, you played in the high school band.)

Was I proud of myself for beating Georgia? Yes, I sure was. What do I think about it now? I have mixed feelings. On one hand, if you are good at something, you should try to accomplish whatever achievements you can if it is fair, and this challenge was but later challenges under a different band director were not. On the other hand, I was aware she felt awful about losing her seat to a little junior high kid and I haven’t forgotten that.

I dunno what the answer is. For one thing, in a small town like Sault Ste. Siberia, the high school band was about the only place a talented musician could aspire to. I couldn’t be snuck out of public school band and placed in some fancy youth orchestra or whatever. The best I could do was the Interlochen All-State (2-week) summer camp program and I couldn’t audition for a scholarship to that until I was a junior. And scholarship was the only way kids could get in their first year. The short story is I think they didn’t want wealthy folks to buy their kids’ way in. Which is a great philosophy (and it was a great place).

So a couple days ago, the GG texted this turtle pic to us (me and our daughters) and I was like, “when the heck did you take that?” We had been driving around that morning and I had glimpsed a similar scenario on the river but we did not stop to take a pic. I surmised that he’d taken it a couple days ago. Nope. I heard him take a little bowl of chips out to the back yard and I’m sure I heard him eating them. Turned out he snuck his eBike out without me noticing and drove it down to West Park where there were turtles galore 🤣🤣🤣

I am such a blank today after a series of rabbit holes. I got inspired by something at the end of the day but by that time Mr. Golden Sun was soooo bright in teleCubelandia that I couldn’t really see my screen and I didn’t feel like relocating outdoors so I bagged it. It’ll be a lot easier to do quickly and accurately in the morning when teleCubelandia is on the shady side of the house.

Here’s another photo from my cousin Judd. It’s from last weekend and maybe the dog Bo (I think that’s his name) will help show the scale of this behemoth. I’m taller than the propane tank but not by much. Our glacier looks like it is steadily melting though. The north shall rise again.

And that is about it for today. You do NOT (some of you) want to know what I think about some of the political directions our country taking these days. Hint: I am more and more Lefty Lulu every moment. Why? The reasons are complicated but in short, MAGA equals MEAN in my opinion. Read their tweets. Listen to their speeches. Note the tones of their voices.

Blahg administrivia. For a LONG time, comments on my blahg have been landing in a spam folder. This is an EMAIL spam folder, not part of my blahg software (wordpress). So if I see I have a comment, I can usually go and fish it out of the spam folder but I can’t find a way to flag these comments as non-spam. The last couple days, I’m not getting blahg comments emailed AT ALL, not even in the spam folder. Just saying that if you comment and I don’t reply to it, I may not have seen it (although I do tend to refresh a couple times a day). Also, I don’t always reply to comments for whatever reason. Laziness or distraction or whatever. I love comments but as I have said before, I am not a comment whore. I mainly do this as a brain dump for meeeeee. Also this is a first world problem 🐸🐸🐸

Love y’all, KW

Every day is Mother’s Day. One of the beach urchins was feeling a bit bad that she was too busy to drive the 45 minutes over here for Mother’s Day. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay! I mean there were many years of Mother’s Day when she was in college and then in SanFran. I CERTAINLY didn’t EVER expect my children to travel distances to celebrate a greeting card holiday with me. (I *know* it didn’t technically originate as a greeting card holiday but I think it has turned in to one.)

Never an enthusiastic observer of MD, I got really jaded during the years I was a youth theatre guild admin. We always had a big play production in May, when the lovely Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre wasn’t typically otherwise booked and gave us a price reduction. More often than not, our move-in day and tech rehearsal happened ON Mother’s Day. Cue up the angst. My child can’t attend the rehearsal because we’re taking grandma out to dinner yada yada yada.

I actually GET it even though I didn’t ever go to the yooperland to celebrate it with MY mother UNLESS there was another reason for going there. To me there was a disconnect. A lot of these parents wanted to celebrate the “holiday” with their own families but had no regard for the *mothers* (like me and Madame Producer) who were volunteering our time to support a high-quality acting experience for their kids. But when you are dealing with parents, you get a wide range. Some of them get excited enough to jump in with both feet and HELP make the play a success, positively supporting their own child plus *other people’s children*. Other parents are probably calling up their now 30-something kids’ bosses to ask why they aren’t getting raises/promotions or provide excuses for why a presentation was late or whatever. I hate helicopter parents at any age.

Anyway, we spent a lovely MD here at the Landfill. When jazz started up on the NPR station this morning at 10, we got into Cygnus and took a slow cruise along the back roads mostly south of town. We were heading south on Haab Road, a narrow tree-lined gravel/dirt road when at some point I realized there was a CHURCH in the middle of the road. Say what? Of course it wasn’t in the middle of the road. Not exactly. Haab Road ends at Ellsworth and the church was on Ellsworth Road.

Exactly my kind of Mother’s Day. Now that we’re outta the snow season, the [adult] kiddos can come over whenever they want to. And then there’s the moomincabin, where we can gather if the snow in the driveway ever melts.

I wish I had thought to take a pic when I was down at the farmers market this morning. The sun was so bright and so low in the sky that when I was walking more or less east, I literally couldn’t see anyone walking toward me. This is from the end of my street as I was returning from the market. It’ll have to do.

I was hoping for asparagus at the market today but we aren’t quiiiite there yet. I got red onions, scallions, potatoes, lettuce, lamb stew meat, and a whole chicken. Then I went to the plum, where I also had a list of stuff. The asparagus there looked pretty good. I doubt it’s local but maybe it’s not from too far away. My fave cashier checked me out and my mouse snuck up to bag my grocks.

I do miss Farmer John’s lunchroom market over at Cubelandia but I’ll live. Anyway, today was the first Saturday the market opens at 7AM and that’s before you have to pay for parking. Not that I mind paying for parking, just that it’s easier not to have to PLUS if you get there when it opens, there’s plenty of parking.

We are VOTing aka porterzoomation after the derby. Which is already done BTW. I am not really into the derby this year but my horses were Happy Jack and Cyberknife. We did not place bets this year. And then the long shot won and the GG is having a terrible time settling down from the excitement of it all. And yes, Happy Jack misbehaved. A bit like my dad (Jack) who I’m pretty sure misbehaved a bit from time to time, at least when he was a child.

COVID is a part of why we are VOTing the derby tonight. It isn’t the only reason but we were talking to our neighbor for a while this afternoon and he mentioned that COVID numbers are VERY HIGH at his daughter’s in-person elementary school, where she’s a first grader. 200 cases? Jeeesh. We may be over COVID but it isn’t done with us. Watching the derby on TV with that big crowd of unmasked people, all I could think was how many COVID cases will come out of this? Sigh. Again. It’s still out there.

P.S. VOT translates to Virtual Oscar Tango. For YEARS, we got porterized at the Old Town restaurant downtown, known by many locals as the Oscar Tango. And Virtual is because COVID. I’m convinced we’ll be meeting there again but not just yet.

An action pic! He went into Whirling Dervish mode again yesterday and cleaned and fixed a whole bunch of windows including one I haven’t been able to OPEN for several years now. At this moment, he is on the other side of the window from teleCubelandia and this is the window the window replacement scammers are always bugging me about. Nope. I love this big multi-paned *almost* floor-to-ceiling window. I can see what’s going on in the street as well as what’s going on in, around, and under the bushes. Oh don’t get all excited. Mostly it’s just Henry/Henrietta (rabbits) and chipmunks under there. I dunno where they do their business but it isn’t under the bushes. I mean their reproductive business. I’m sure they poop wherever they want.

Taaarrred after an intense but fruitful meeting with Amazon Woman today. I don’t mean intense in interpersonal terms. We are trying to sort out a new prodject, one we don’t really have the vocabulary for yet. Having a common vocabulary or at least understanding someone else’s vocabulary is crucial to getting anything done in any endeavor. We’re not there yet but we work well together when we are figuring these things out. Although we are typically on the same page in our work, we approach things just differently enough that after we’ve beat our brains together for a while, we often come away with a better understanding of what we’re trying to do. Best boss I’ve ever had and really all of my bosses have been darn good ones.

A few of them:

Mr. Drysdale at the Sault Ste. Siberia Tempo store who chose me (summer employee) to drive with him to Traverse City to work for a day as cashier at a new store grand opening. No there was no funny business with him. He was on the up-and-up and even if he hadn’t been he was friendly with my dad and therefore would know better than to mess with me. (People didn’t really mess with my dad.) The gals at the Traverse City Tempo were initially a bit skeptical of me but I was GOOD at running those old cash registers, happy to help them with bagging, and FRIENDLY and I think we all went out to lunch together.

Byron, my first boss at my childhood career at That Darn EPA. He was skeptical of me at first (and probably should’ve been) but after I taught myself FORTRAN and proved that I could solve just about any data processing problem that came along and deal with the people who brought the problems (usually, I had some ugly moments), he left me “in charge” a lot of the time while he disappeared into the parking lot or wherever.

Manuel, who took Byron’s place for a while for reasons we won’t talk about. I returned from a vacation in the yooperland the first day we faced each other as boss and employee instead of co-workers. I jestingly asked if he really wanted this job and that lowered any tension there may have been. We went on to work very well together and cleaned a lot of things up.

The LSCHP, who hired me at an age when I didn’t think I’d ever have a job again, let alone a professional career.

i haven’t had a lot of jobs in my life because I usually tend to stick to the ones I have for long periods of time.

I was one of those “creative types” who don’t know what they want to do when they grow up until they are well, GROWN UP. With grown-up children in my case! If you are a young creative type, don’t give up!

Okay, it’s time. We’ve been watching robins in the yard for a while, wondering when and where they would nest. We have three nesting sites in our yard. This nest is on a platform above the air conditioning unit. Rest assured the GG takes pics carefully by using a selfie stick when the parents are NOT near the nest. I’m sure they are still bothered by him but they do return to lay more eggs and hopefully hatch them. Nature can be cruel.

And that’s all for today. You’re welcome! 🐽🐽🐽

Okay, this won’t be a screed. I hope. I’m a little tired of advocating my STRONG pro-choice stance especially since so many people are much more eloquently articulating the issues than I ever could. So I will instead provide some memories of pregnant women/girls I knew who had to wend their way through the decision process surrounding unwanted pregnancies and the associated laws.

I don’t have a lot of these stories to tell. Most of my female friends as a teenager and a bit beyond didn’t get in “trouble”. But here is one pre-Roe story.

As a young teenager I joined a Masonic-related organization called Job’s Daughters. I didn’t really have a strong interest in this org except that a majority of the girls in my junior high and high school joined it, including my much admired older cousins. Everybody did it so I did too.

There were a number of “offices” girls could hold including a succession of “royal” (exaggerating a bit) offices leading to junior and senior princess and eventually Honored Queen. Although I envied the royalty, I never expected I would be chosen for this succession and I wasn’t. I am waaaay too nerdy and introverted for that kind of office and as an adult, I have long made my peace with that.

There were also positions that didn’t lead to Honored Queen and one of them was Librarian. Her job was to recite a poem at each meeting. When I was a high school freshman, the girl chosen for Librarian had the same first name as me (without the e) and long blonde hair, like mine. At one of our meetings, I was rushed aside by a couple of adult mentors and asked if I would please become the librarian. I was thrilled on the one hand to be asked to be an OFFICER and agreed to do it. On the other hand the Ann-without-an-e (a junior) had disappeared from school. She was gone for the entire school year.

They were recruiting me because I had the same name and we looked SOMEWHAT alike except she was pregnant. They thought maybe no one would notice?

I am not sure whether these women thought I was stupid or naive or what. They knew my whole extended family (Granddaddy was a mason and Grandma was in Eastern Star) at least by reputation. They knew that I was not stupid (by reputation) but maybe they thought I was young enough to be naive about this kind of subject. I wasn’t (I had Bad Boyfriend hanging around) and I did put two and two together to figure out what was going on. I think she was spirited away to an “aunt’s” house or wherever to have a baby and give it up for adoption, whether she wanted to or not. Don’t get me wrong. I think adoption is wonderful but I’m not sure this young girl had a real choice. I know I wouldn’t have had a choice because my parents (love them as I did) would’ve made it for me. Because having a baby as a teenager would have shamed the family. And abortion was not legal in the Great Lake State at that time. If you were rich, you could go to New York or wherever. If not…

I kept it hushed up ANYWAY but mostly because I didn’t have a clue what to do with my conclusions and it wasn’t something I wanted to discuss with my mom, let alone my dad, WWII pilot and bank president. Yikes! 👀

I can’t really remember how I managed the office of Librarian. Where did I get poems to read? The only poem I remember from when I was a kid was Eletelephony. Not quiiiite appropriate for Job’s Daughter’s meetings🤣.

P.S. My parents voted for Republicans when I was a kid but they were ALWAYS pro-choice. Republicans were different in those days. We weren’t rich, bank prez or not, but if I had gotten knocked up, I think my parents would’ve figured how to get me to New York or wherever and I would have agreed with that.

Someday?

The late super-great Lesley Gore with You don’t own me! [Youtube link that probably comes with a blasted ad.]