I don’t mean the swear word. I mean the SNOW word. Are we gonna get snow tomorrow or not? I’m not sure we’re gonna get much around here but a facebook person from Soo Ontario is now in Duluth and wondering how to get back to her home and elderly parents in the Canadian Soo. Her options are to drive across the south shore of Lake Superior via M28. Bad idea with lake effect snow predicted. Marquette and Munising could well get hit hard. Other options are to drive down to US2 and take that over to I75 and then north. Or… Go north through Cananada, up to Thunder Bay and over to Wawa and down to Soo Ontario. A long trip but snow is not predicted for the north shore of Gitchee Gumee.

The GG has been north for the last five or so days. He is now at the Hoton Lake Group Home. Snow has been predicted for the northern lower and even The Planet Ann Arbor for tomorrow and maybe Monday. So I am hoping he doesn’t have to drive through any of that shit. Many times we drove through blizzard conditions or ice storms to get to Hoton Lake or to see the grandparents in the yooperland. Not to mention the times I drove solo from college in my crappy old Pinto wagon.

Driving north once for SPRING BREAK, I was in an ice storm. EVERYONE fishtailed and then slowed down to about 10 mph. A bit after that my driver’s side windshield wiper disintegrated. I could not see a goddamn thing. I stopped in Gaylord where there used to be an uber cool Amoco gas station. I got gas and a wonderful young man replaced my wiper in a wink and only charged me for the new wiper.

I called my parents from there (from a pay phone!) and they said, “Get a hotel room.” I could have done that but I kept going. It was dark by then and the freezing rain turned into snow. I can’t describe the rest of that trip except that I slowed down and moved over whenever semi trucks came up behind me.

When I got to my parents’ house they were very relieved to see me. A couple hours later, my brother arrived from his snow drive across the northern yooperland from Houghton (Michigan Tech U) to Sault Ste. Siberia.

I ordered two holiday things today. Oh, not Froggy and Frogette or any of the detritus behind them.

1) Sesame sticks and mixed nuts from nuts.com. I make Chex mix twice a year (tday and xmas), and sometimes a third because the ingredients support (almost) three batches. Last year I didn’t ever make the third batch because the xmas bout of norovirus more or less took the holiday food wind out my sails. Composted what was left of the Chex cereal because we don’t eat dry cereal very often. I discovered nuts.com during the heyday of covid when I wasn’t shopping in person and Plum didn’t seem to have any sesame sticks on their website. I’m sure they have them now but nuts.com is a cool website and I like to throw some business their way. Note that this information serves as notice that no one will be served Chex mix with year-old sesame sticks like I did a few years ago. Can you say bitter? Also, why sesame sticks, you might wonder? I discovered I liked them better than pretzels, at least in Chex mix.

2) Fudge from Murdick’s (an ancient Mackinac Island business if you don’t wanna click). Disclaimer: I like fudge but I like it in very small quantities so I don’t buy it very often. But Facebook served up some fancy holiday-themed Murdick’s fudge flavors including cranberry so I ordered a custom pack of five. I think there was something with bourbon too. I did NOT click the link on the facebook post. I opened a new tab and navigated directly to Murdick’s.

3) Well, this one didn’t happen. I was gonna scout for turkey parts to make gravy with (and freeze it). It was raining cats and dogs at the time I had planned to venture out and I bagged it and then I had to log on to work, yada yada. I’ll go tomorrow morning. I usually have to get turkey parts at Meijer. Plum has them but kind of randomly. It’s an upscale grokkery store. Meijer serves the masses (but is also a very good grokkery store).

The turkey platter is the last xmas gift I received from The Commander. The GG and I were scouting out a rocking chair for her at an antique/re-sale/whatever shop and I was entranced with this platter. My mom did NOT need to give me ANYTHING for xmas. She gave birth to me and provided a wonderful life for me and that’s all that counts. But the GG conspired with her and when we all met (us and our daughters) at her Freighter View apartment to exchange gifts that xmas morning, I received this beautiful platter. It was certainly not something I needed but I will always cherish it.

The Lyme Lounge is safely winterized and stored in its winter berth in Gaylord. I am gonna miss it. We slept in the Lyme Lounge in the Landfill Driveway for many nights this fall.

I cannot describe how comfortable it is to sleep in a teeny little camping trailer. Because neither of us are all that tall, we can put the “big” table down and put our sleeping bags on the “bed” that makes. If it’s a wee bit chilly, we have a comforter available. The Lyme Lounge has a water supply so I can keep my plastic water glass in the sink, right next to my bed and have water in the night when I needed it. And there is lucky-shucky although my phone is new enough that it doesn’t usually need to be charged overnight.

P? Yeah. Since the Lyme Lounge was parked in our driveway, I could’ve gone into the Landfill to P in the middle of the night but instead I just went outside. The beach urchins were a bit flabbergasted about this but they didn’t really grow up using an outhouse, etc. I am positive the neighbors did not see or hear me P.

When I woke up in the morning, I would schlep myself into the Landfill to shower and start my day.

Congratulations to all of the folks who ran as democrats yesterday and WON! It’s about time somebody started hitting back at the Orange Baboon and his stoopid sycophants. I mean, where do y’all think you’re gonna end up if you continue to suck up to him? Dead maybe? I mean, he ain’t gonna live forever and if he does, he still won’t care about you. Because, broken record here, he doesn’t care about anyone except himself. I am not religious but I know about heaven and hell from Sunday School and I think I know where he’s gonna go if there is some kind of afterlife at all. Do y’all wanna go there with him? I don’t think you do.

So all the elections I was loosely keeping track of turned out how I wanted them to. Two democratic governors (New Jersey and Virginia). And they are women, which I am calling out secondarily because a person’s sex/gender does NOT have anything to do with their competence to govern a state (or do anything except maybe put your p*nis somewhere). I know that men can also competently and gracefully hold political office and I know that women can be horrible at it. So we’ll see how this plays out.

Mamdani New York City mayor. New York City is a long way from most of the country. I have been to Niagara Falls but not to the city. I know Mamdani is controversial for a lot of people, including some of my friends. But I feel the excitement of our younger generations. I agree with them that we need to nudge the “old guard” out. So we’ll see how this plays out.

The California ballot measure to implement a new congressional district map? Mixed mixed mixed feelings, mostly ugh. As a non-MAGA voter, I wish for more democratic representation, at least for now as we seem to be threatened with whatever weird stuff the Orange Baboon does. As a citizen of the United States, I think gerrymandering should be totally outlawed everywhere including with time zones (stoopid inside Landfill joke).

So… I’m with her. I did vote for Hillary in 2016. I was not crazy about her as a presidential candidate but it had nothing to do with her competency. It had more to do with we’ve had two Clinton terms and that’s enough. But when The Orange Baboon actually became a viable candidate, I was all in for Hillary. I definitely voted for Kamala but I don’t have a magnet on the fridge for her. I also have a “Women for Trump” magnet on my fridge. That was a prank but I keep it there as a reminder of my life as a pragmatic feminist living with MAGA in the Trumpian Autocracy era. I am NOT for Trump.

Some of us were strategizing a dinner together this evening. Little Cat Z had an art class but mouse and the racc were up for it. The original plan was probably dinner here at the landfill but after much indecision on my part, we landed on meeting at Sessions. One of the potential issues was that mouse worked today and had to fit in voting and then go home for a bit before dinner.

Trying to make her life a little easier (traffic is awful at the hours she’d be driving around), I momentarily offered to make stew here at home. I didn’t really have the necessary ingredients (I am low on food in general, on purpose,) but it’d be a quick trip to the Plum to pick them up and a meal I can make in my sleep. Then I looked at how many meetings were on my calendar for today, one of which I had to be in the “hot seat”, i.e., present and get critiqued. All right, let’s go to Sessions. As many years as I have worked for teleCubelandia, my stoopid social anxiety always makes me nervous about presenting at functional specification reviews. It was all fine today.

Okay. I was worrying about mouse having to wait in a long line to vote. Then I remembered that this election has ONE thing on it. A ballot proposal. I voted for it. The GG probably canceled my vote, which is all I will say about that or the proposal.

Because that was all that was on the docket, I realized that her voting experience would be quick and easy. I have not set foot in an actual polling place since March 2020, two days before my Cubelandia colleagues and I were sent home to work at teleCubelandia. Forever, as it turned out. I mean, I’m still at teleCubelandia, for a bit longer anyway. I thought I would go back to in-person voting and I may still do that from time to time. But mail-in/drop-box ballot is soooo easy. If I have to mail, it is from a SAFE mini post office in the lovely mini village of Brimley in the yooperland on the Shores of Gitchee Gumee. If I am dropping off, it is a half mile away in the box at Vet’s Park. Either way, the clerk’s office emails me when they have received my ballot.

Anyway, we had a wonderful dinner with mouse and the racc. We had a round of ‘hattans and Sessions makes a decent one, which I didn’t know before tonight. I got a turkey naan and boxed half of it up for lunch tomorrow.

Love y’all, KW

The GG and I had a really bizarre argument last night about Daylight Savings Time. I don’t think I could begin to repeat it if I tried. Basically I am for keeping the time change. I’m not exactly sure what the GG is for. Something like making every time zone in the world the same? I could not understand it.

For a start, I did not have ANY trouble switching over to Eastern Standard Time this year. In a mechanical sense, two of the three clocks I depend on (my phone and Cygnus X-1’s) change automatically. I have to change Gertrude’s (stove) clock manually but it’s a quick clickety-click process. My alarm clock seems to be manual because it hasn’t changed yet but I don’t need an alarm clock. I don’t set an alarm and wake up well before any alarm would be needed. Other digital clocks in the house have been flashing 00:00 for years.

My circadian rhythms don’t seem to be all that affected either. I go to sleep and I wake up. I mostly sleep pretty well. I did wake up earlier the morning after the change but that was a good thing. I get that some people struggle with circadian rhythms and I empathize but I don’t experience it. I do remember that it took the beach urchins about a week to settle in when they were small children and I can guess pets struggle with it too.

A lot of people say they want to have Daylight Savings Time year round. I’m sorry. That’s one thing I am against. Here in the Great Lake State we are far enough north that having Daylight Savings in the winter months means the sun doesn’t come up until after 9:00 AM. I know about this because when I was a kid, the Michigan state legislature, in their infinite wisdom (not), decided that the entire Upper Peninsula (UP) should join the Central Time zone, which is equivalent to Daylight Savings Time. That made sense for people in the western end of the UP. They were already (and still are) in the Central Time Zone. Those of us in the eastern UP are more northerly aligned with Detroit than Wisconsin and us school children were walking to school in the dark here on the western edge of the time zone.

I dunno what the answer is to time zones. It’s pretty messy in general. I have no confidence in legislators at any level to deal with this. It brings to mind when some Indiana state legislators tried to change the value of pi. Fortunately, an actual mathematician was present in the state legislature that day. I mean, a bunch of “farmers” can’t just spuriously change the value of pi. Time zones are not equivalent to the basic mathematical/physics rules of our universe (or whatever we live in) but still it takes some serious thought.

Big P.S. to yesterday’s rant. As my blahggy friends Margaret and Tonya have reminded me in the comments, there are plenty of people who ARE EMPLOYED and still need SNAP, etc. to make ends meet.

In my first post-college job, I was terribly underpaid. It was a tech job and I had NO EXPERIENCE with computers. I had been a flute major. One of my main tasks at that job was to pull people’s printouts off a Data 100 printer, separate them, and put them into cubbies to pass out to people through the “Operations window”. I went to college for this? It’s okay. I took to computer work and parlayed that inauspicious start into a pretty good career overall. But not everyone has that kind of opportunity.

I get that entry level salaries should be less than what more experienced employees get paid. But why can’t we pay all employed people a LIVING WAGE? Mine was not exactly a living wage. And no, that’s not socialism. It’s Corporate America (and billionaires) valuing their employees enough to pay them enough to afford decent housing and food so they don’t have to apply for goverment aid. I could barely manage on the ridiculous salary I was being paid ($8,000). I probably didn’t qualify for food stamps (and was too proud to apply for them). But I had some bootstraps in the form of parents who could and would have helped me if I’d needed help.

But what educated adult wants to ask their parents for financial help? And I didn’t ask although there were little ways they did help. It was a common practice in my nuclear family that the older (richer) generation paid for restaurant meals. When we were up at the moominbeach, The Commander paid for groceries if we were shopping together. I paid them for them if I was alone with the beach urchins in tow. We kept that up until the last few years of The Comm’s life and at that point, everything flipped and I paid for restaurants and groceries. Not because she couldn’t afford to. Just because it was time for me to step in. I carry those financial traditions on with my own adult children.

Oh, yeah, my parents did buy me a car once. A new 1979 Ford Fiesta. 4-speed manual tranny. $5,000. That humble car was a bootstrap a lot of people don’t have.

I probably can’t write about food stamps/SNAP coherently because I am not all that familiar with the program except for the snippets I hear on the radio. But I’ma gonna try. If nothing else, I gotta get this crapola outta my head.

I was horrified about a lot of the stuff that happened in Trump 1.0. There is so much more that horrifies me about Trump 2.0. Slash and burn and fix the mistakes later. Or not.

The Big Beautiful Bill and ensuing government shutdown are HURTING PEOPLE. They aren’t hurting billionaires. They aren’t even hurting people like meeee and the GG, who are certainly not ultra-wealthy but after years and years of hard work and carefully saving money, and some built-in “bootstraps”, we are pretty darn okay.

I get that the SNAP program that expired today(?) is probably going to be funded thanks to a couple of judges who called out Trump’s bullshit. (I THINK I have that right.)

Okay. I get that people don’t want government assistance programs to be misused. People should be working for a living, not taking food stamps, I agree with that. There are probably a few “welfare queens” sitting around watching TV but I think that’s a very small percentage of the people who are receiving government aid.

More often than not, I think people who are receiving aid want to work but are not able to jump through the hoops required to find and KEEP a job. What hoops? Let me count the ways. Caregiving responsibilities. Children, parents, disabled relatives. Lack of access to things like toilets and showers and presentable clothing. Transportation. Access to the internet! I could go on and on.

Trump and his sycophants have no clue about what poor peoples’ lives are about. How could a billionaire know? If I was a billionaire, I would be a philanthropist. I *am* a philanthropist, just at a small-time level.

A number of years ago, I was at the Plum Market, in line behind a young man who was trying to pay for food ($25 or so) with an out-of-state food card. It wasn’t working. I snuck in behind him and swiped my credit card. I’m not bragging about that wee bit of philanthropy. Just that we have to take care of our fellow citizens when our government goes awry and refuses to fund programs for our most vulnerable citizens.

We had THREE trick or treat customers tonight. I loved the trick or treaters we had, I just wanted to have more.

I put a whole bunch of the leftover candy info a paper Plum Market bag and put it out at the end of the driveway so anyone who wanted to could take some candy. The GG was not crazy about that strategy so the bag is still outside but it isn’t out at the end of the driveway.

Our first and most favorite trick or treaters were the across the street neighbors’ daughter, son-in-law and 9-month grandson. Wouldn’t you know they are already expecting their second child. More is better as the GG would say, being one of 10 siblings and an ID twin.

P.S. The three characters in the pic were NOT the trick-or-treaters.

When I was a child, we lived in a shabby little bungalow on Superior Street (in Sault Ste. Siberia). We lived across the street from the back of Lincoln School. I “red-queened” over to school every morning in kindergarten and first grade. After that, I didn’t really “red-queen” any more. It might’ve stopped being “cool”. Re-read Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass if you want to know what red-queening means. Or just google it.

We had a modern electric stove in our shabby little bungalow and I’m not sure I’m remembering this accurately but I think there was a light that told you a burner or the oven was still on? I’m not sure. Its label was “Units”. I mean, as a user experience designer, I think that’s a terrible label but even though I didn’t really understand what “Units” meant as a kid, I knew enough to tell The Commander when “Units” was on so she could make sure the stove was totally turned off. “Mom! Units is on!”.

In The Landfill today, among many of the things the GG did was try to figger out how to sign up for an internet service. He kept throwing out figures like $1,000 or $39 or $11.49. Okay. The business systems analyst persona that defines my career of the last 18 years was screaming, “What are the units”? Is it per year or month or day? If it’s $1,000, I hope it is not per day.”

So the GG is still fussing around with this and I dunno what the outcome will be. Hopefully he will do some research and critical thinking before signing up to pay anyone anything.

When The Commander was around 87-88, she decided she wanted an iPhone. So we helped her buy one. We made sure that her phone would NOT roam to Canananada since she lived a hop, skip, and a jump from there.

She had one demand. “I want BIRD!” She meant iBird, which our lifelong friend Barb Mullin had on HER new iPhone. To clarify “lifelong”, Barb was a lifelong friend of MINE. The Commander and Barb did not meet until they were young married women in Sault Ste. Siberia and Barb and her husband bought property down the beach from us from Doc Read. Long story but they were wonderful friends and neighbors and I grew up with the Mullin kids (adopted fratenal twins, girl and boy). I ran with them and my cousins back and forth up and down the beach or along the paths in the woods.

When my cat Twinkle had her second litter of kittens and first-born Butterball/scotch arrived, I ran like hell down the woods paths to collect the Mullen kids to come and watch the rest of the kittens (five in all) be born. This event was pre-arranged and I had to run the paths because we had no phone at the moomincabin in those days.

I got off on a tangent although Barb is a good tangent. The photoooo is of The Commander and the Uncly Uncle, my husband’s ID twin using their iPhones on the moomindeck. I don’t think they were interacting with each other on their phones. The Commander and I used to text all the time. Late in her life it was often easier than talking on the phone. It wasn’t dementia, just a processing difficulty. But I missed the old days when I would occasionally talk for an hour to the Birch Point Telegraph (my brother’s sometimes name for her).

My point in posting this photo and writing this entry is to illustrate how much The Twinz of Terror cared for my mother in her later years. When she turned 90, I wasn’t easily able to get to the yooperland to celebrate her birthday with her. The Twinz of Terror were going up there anyway and they filled in for me. They took her out to a wonderful dinner at “the hotel”. Dining at “the hotel” has been spotty for a long time. Food and service can vary. The night the twinz took my mother out, everything was wonderful. She told me something like, “those boys (boys?), they throw money around like nothing”. Well really. I knew they weren’t spending anything more than they could afford without decimating their childrens’ inheritance.

In the end, the point is I married the right guy. He and sometimes his brother helped me take care of my mother.

So the plan was to tow the Lyme Lounge over to the planetory sector of porterization. We would back up the Lyme Lounge into their driveway and have a bit of a happy hour.

That was the idea, but we didn’t do it. When the GG proposed this idea to the Porters, the reply was that it would be great but one of them was suffering from a cold. Whenever I say “cold virus”, in the back of my mind is “covid.” I’m not really worried about getting covid (again) at this point but if covid has taught me anything, it that when I get an aerosolized virus (like the common cold (or covid)), I need to keep myself away from other people. Or at least mask and I have tons of N95 masks around.

I used to travel hither and yon with horrible cold symptoms. I felt good even when I was hacking up a lung. You go girl. But how many vulnerable people did I infect? I have had covid once for sure and possibly a second time in the late summer. But I didn’t test. I just stuck it out with Little Cat Z (who also had whatever it was I had).

Covid WAS extremely scary in the beginning. I think people forget that. People were dying. I have heard stories from my parents about polio. Covid was different but (like polio) it was random about who died. As with polio we didn’t know the virus’s rules and a lot of people did die. Heck, we still don’t really know Covid’s rules.

We are not really pet people. I am a one-dog woman (even on a three dog night) and that was my childhood dog Tigger. We got her when I was five mainly to get me over my fear of dogs (she definitely did) and I said goodbye to her as I was leaving for my college sophomore year.

We love animals but I know much work pets are and and I spent a lot of my adult life helping take care of my brother’s increasing number of dogs. To be fair, I loved them and I didn’t have to care for them all that often but I decided it was better not to have pets. I think know the GG agreed with me.

Well, we ended up having umpteen bazillion guppies, five anole lizards, Izzy the rat and this little Piggie. Who was originally named Dina until we figured out it was male. I think we were outta names by then so Piglet was it.

This cute little guinea pig got along with me and the female beach urchins just fine. One time when I had been up in the yooperland, I arrived back at the Landfill. Piglet waited for me to talk to the GG and the beach urchins. When I was done with that, I squeaked, “Hello Piggie!” Reep reep reep reep.

He was a bit more concerned about the GG but the GG eventually whispered him into a good relationship such that Piglet snuggled into the GG’s black sweater. He approached trick-or-treaters with Piglet and little kids were entranced by him.

A potato decision. We had FinFam Steak Dinner tonight and I wasn’t sure what kind of potatoes to serve. Should we roast the cute little mini potatoes or mash the big russets. It turned out that we mashed the big russets. All but one. I had overbought a bit so we’ll use the fifth one some other day. And the minis. Potatoes keep a long time.

Also on the menu were rib-eye steaks that were purchased from Best Choice last spring and have been frozen ever since. The problem was that four were purchased and packaged together and we haven’t had an occasion since where that amount of meat fit the number of guests. Also caramelized onions and mushrooms, garlic bread, and salad. Smoked salmon and appetizer friends and lovely Russian candy rounded it all out.

All in all, it was a beautiful day and only a bit chilly so we sat around a faaaar in the backyard until it was time to actually eat. And that is about all. I mean, I’m sure y’all don’t want to know about doing the damn TAXES. In October, roight?

Another photoooo from my mouse at her Pigeon River camping site. (Last night. She’s home now and works tomorrow.)

As I write this, the Michigan/Michigan State football game just kicked off and it is on TV. College football games have been on TV since the early afternoon. I am okay with that. As I have said many times, I don’t give a crap about football or other team games but I love the ambience of football in the fall.

I think the first football game I went to was with my dad and granddaddy. I was in sixth grade and my cousin Mac was a ninth grader and on the team so we went to watch him play. It was really exciting sitting up in the bleachers and I’m sure they bought me pop and popcorn or whatever. I don’t remember that and I don’t remember anything about the game but except my dad yelling out, “Come on Soo! Buckle down!” I was amazed. Just to say, my dad did NOT play football in high school (or any time). He was a cross-country runner. His older brother (Mac’s dad) played football.

The next year I was in junior high and began my marching career in the high school band (long boring story about why I was in the high school band). Fast forward a bit more. I was a high school senior and my brother was a freshman. My parents took a two-week bank trip to Hawaii and my brother and I stayed with Don and Katie (our aunt and uncle).

I had one of my parents’ cars and was responsible for driving my brother (and me) to school every day. It was fall so most mornings that meant marching band practice at the football field. One morning we got there and the bleachers et al had been vandalized with all kinds of paper crapola hanging everywhere. Alas, I knew who had done it. It was my boyfriend and his buddy “Foot”. Foot had organized it. My little brother was absolutely gobsmacked. I can still remember him laughing his head off and yelling, “Foot was here! Foot was here!” I don’t think Foot and my boyfriend got in any kind of trouble. My boyfriend was well known for being very responsible. He was a college accounting student at the time and had a good job. Foot went on to join the army and rose to a high rank, I know not what. Of course, it’s also possible that they didn’t get CAUGHT!

I loved staying with Don and Katie for those two weeks. Their four children were all born before I was and they gave me a lot more leeway than my parents did. My parents were wonderful but I was their first (after *11* years of trying) and were, I dunno, somewhat stricter than Don and Katie who seemed to trust me to drive around town and go out with my boyfriend until all hours of the night. And they were right to do that because I was definitely pretty responsible.

Yep. Forgot to hit Publish last night.

Not much to say today. Very quiet in general. Nothing going on at work, at least not that I had anything to do with. All dev stuff. My Replacement didn’t need anything or at least didn’t ping me about anything so maybe they were beating through it on their own. I love that My Replacement likes to do that. Also that they ask if they don’t understand some bit of idiomatic jargon. I have been there 18 years and I still do not understand all of the idiomatic jargon.

It is a strange autumn with not a whole lot of brilliant color, at least not on The Planet Ann Arbor. Mouse and the racc are up north. They stayed at the Hoton Lake Group Home for a couple nights, where they eventually found the teakettle. In a jointly owned cabin things get moved around. Not so much at the moomincabin because the owners are few and not there frequently and we close it for the winter. Well, except *I* was there for two months last summer but I keep things *mostly* in the same places The Commander did. Not that we don’t ever “lose” things but it’s a small place and we eventually find them. The Hoton Lake cabin/cottage is a modern house with modern utilities and stays open year round. A lot of people visit frequently throughout the year and stuff gets moved around.

Anyway, mouse and the racc hiked locally (Mason Tract) while they were staying at Hoton Lake and are now camping. Quite a bit more color at their camping site.

And that’s about the end of my boring bunch of blather for today. We porterized ourselves at Dexter’s Pub tonight and I won’t talk too much about the political stuff I didn’t really want to talk about but did. I could talk about many things but all I will say is that demolishing a whole wing of the White House does not in any way shape or form compare to converting a tennis court to a basketball court. Nope. I don’t think big demolition equipment was needed for that. Somebody stop him!

P.S. Trying out “My Replacement” instead of “new co-worker”. I hope he will *be* my replacement when I ride off into the sunset in the not too distant future. I have not pulled the plug yet so best wishes are not yet in order. I still have some work to do.

In the middle of a virtual maelstrom of messages this morning, work and family, email, facebook messages, work I/M, and text, I managed to text my work “team” that I would be AWOL in the middle of the day. Why? We took Little Cat Z (our daughter) out to lunch. Where? Casey’s Tavern. Why? It is her birthday. The message maelstrom was FUN! I am not complaining.

We’re at the point in our lives (all our lives) that we don’t do big birthday bashes with cake and candles and Japanese lanterns and a bazillion packages to open. We’re gonna do the usual FinFam steak dinner faaaar in the backyard kind of party on the weekend when mouse and the racc are home from camping. I asked the bday gal if she wanted to do dinner with us today. She is adjusting to EDT (and life) after a week in San Francisco and really wanted to have a quiet evening. Which was A-okay with me! But then. She rallied a bit and said, “How ’bout lunch?” Yes yes yes.

I like to post this pic on her birthday (and sometimes other days). We are walking out into Lake Superior. Little Cat Z is holding tight to ONE of the bikini clad woman’s fingers aka her mother aka MEEEEE. She seems to think that one finger keeps her safe and actually she is right for reasons I can’t articulate. The two women ahead of us are Radical Betty and The Commander, good friends since they met in college and how my mom and dad met but that’d be a story for another day. The bikini woman hasn’t worn a bikini or tanned herself into that dark color for many years.

But happy birthday to Little Cat Z. How the heck did we raise her into the beautiful, capable woman she is? To quote my dad responding to compliments (not necessarily deserved) from co-workers at my childhood EPA job, “We didn’t raise her. She raised herself.” Indeed.

What a stupid mistake. I corrected yesterday’s entry but I neeeeed to call attention to it. We owned that jeep for *17* years, not 7. There is only one vee-hickle that we ever got rid of at seven years and that was our 1985 VW Jetta. It was a really nice car for a while but in the end it began $50 and $100 dollaring us to death, as my auto engineer brother once said about HIS VW Scirocco.

Of course he replaced vee-hickles left and right. He was on the General Motors (GM) discount. I guess apparently *I* could actually use his GM discount but I went sour on American-made cars a pretty long time ago Long complicated story but when I switched to Japanese cars it was on my GM engineer brother’s advice. It was a good switch.

My brother was always trading cars in for new ones. One time I was at the moomincabin and I was checking email. It was back in the days of dial-up internet and my messages were taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r to load. When they did, a message with the subject “Twuk” popped up from my brother, with a picture of a white pickup truck that he had just bought. I showed it to The Commander and she kind of gasped! He bought that? Yes, moom. This wasn’t a replacement vee-hickle, he had added it to the fleet. He bought it because it was languishing on some dealer’s lot and he felt sorry for it.

Alas, he didn’t get to enjoy Twuk for very long because he died less than a year later. As my sister-in-law and I were walking to our cars after that event, she turned to me and asked, “Wanna buy a Twuk?” Well, sorry, but no thanks. That was in the years when we had three or four cars if you counted the kids’ cars, NO GARAGE, and not a terribly long driveway. And I didn’t really want a pickup truck, not even a relatively small one, if I remember Twuk accurately. To tell the truth, I felt a bit sorry for Twuk too but our fleet just couldn’t absorb him.

We usually drive our cars for over 10 years. I would be happy to drive them until they fell apart (like the jeep more or less did at 17 years) but I don’t like the idea of them falling apart when I am traveling solo on a long freeway trip. We sold my beloved Ninja when she was 13. She was still beautiful (we’d had her re-painted a few years earlier) and ran like a top but I figured that sooner or later her time of reliability would be over. We sold her in ONE HOUR! The GG listed her on Craigs list and within seconds after she was posted, somebody called. He came over with his son (the intended driver). They test drove her and off she went. We picked up Cygnus the next day.

That’s yer fav-o-rite witch blahgger in the pic. Her broom is on the left and there is a hedgehog on the right. Which isn’t really a Halloween aminal but yesterday morning I turned on the porch light and there was a ‘possum on the porch! I could not get a pic but this kinda looks like the possum.

We bought this loverly vee-hickle in 2002 1992? I think? We bought it from a dealer in megalopolis (greater Detroit Metro off Telegraph Road) and it seemed to take an age to complete the transaction. I drove the the child with the ear infection home in the Exxon Tanker Valdez (our first of two Chrysler minivans). Little Cat Z rode in the new as yet to be named jeep with the GG.

I quickly learned to love the jeep — a basic Wrangler with five speeds and NO air-conditioning. We had some hot and windy rides in that car, kinda like when I was a kid and we didn’t own a car with A/C until dad bought the “banker green” Buick around the time he became bank president. My brother and I used to joke about that car. We were so young then. No partners yet and no kids. And he has been dead for more years than I am strong enough to count.

The GG had been hankering for a bare bones Jeep Wrangler for a while and I finally gave in. I took to it immediately and the first time I picked up mouse at nursery school in it, Teacher Annie was doing curb duty and she marveled at my new vee-hickle. I told her it wasn’t a car, it was a mid-life crisis. We were in our 30s then.

The GG’s brother Don (long dead, alas) decided we needed to name the jeep “The Indefatigable”. I was skeptical but that name stuck and wouldn’t you know, we drove the damn thing for 17 years. It taught our kids to drive on the two-track forest roads of the yooperland as well as many of their cousins and some friends. And they learned how to drive “stick” no less.

I can certainly drive “stick” although I don’t own a car with a manual transmission any more. I wonder if I will transition into the EV age. We’ll see. I’m an old dog but I can learn new tricks.

I had a vague inkling that a comet was passing by our solar system but I didn’t really have the details so I was surprised when the GG asked if I wanted to go out and try to catch a look out on Joy Road. Well. I know from my experience with Halley’s Comet that it can be difficult to see comets without a telescope. And it wasn’t dark yet and I had leftovers in the ohh-ven, etc. So I scooted him off with the promise of dinner and a freezer ‘hattan when he returned.

Okay, so we did see Halley’s Comet back in 1986. We took a trip to Florida that March. We drove our 1985 VW Jetta (5-speed manual) and we had us, Little Cat Z (18 months old), and The Beautiful Susie (one of the GG’s little sisters) with us. Susie LOVED Little Cat Z (and all of her many nieces and nephews) and she and LCZ totally bonded on that trip. Suzie taught her how to say alligator (“erderator” was LCZ’s rendition). Susie was a special friend of mine too and I miss her.

When we left The Planet Ann Arbor for that trip, our Jetta was topped by a hard crust of ice/snow. I don’t think it melted until we got past O-haaa-o. After our first night in a motel, Little Cat Z freaked out when we were packing the car the next morning and made extra sure she was outside the room and next to the car. I DO NOT WANT TO BE LEFT HERE ALONE was the vibe. I held her and looked into her eyes and explained that we would NEVER leave her in a motel and I don’t think we ever had that issue again. Small children are a lot smarter than everyone thinks they are.

So we were in the GG’s parents’ Florida condo and we had a great time. Because of Halley’s Comet, the GG spent many early mornings (like 5:00 AM) driving a half hour into the interior of Florida with his telescope to observe Halley’s Comet. He would arrive back in Bradenton just about when LCZ was waking up, which was still way early and we would take her out somewhere for scrambled eggs and friends.

The pics are from Coquina Beach. In the first pic, LCZ is pointing at a seagull. In the second you can see the seagull.