When you can’t think of anything to blaaaaaahhhhhgggg about, sometimes it helps to go back through old photoooos. In this case, VERY old photos, as in taken via our first digital camera, the Sony Mavica. It saved photos on FLOPPY DISKS so I was forever schlepping around extra disks plus batteries, double As I think.

So, this photo is of a couple young yaggots in a production of “The Revenge of the Space Pandas or Binky Rudich and the Two-Speed Clock”. I don’t normally post pics of people without their permission but one of them is my kiddo and I know the other kiddo but this is sooooo old, both of these people are successful adults now. Hahahaha! I DOOO remember this particular kid once when my mouse had her learner’s permit and was driving us to a rehearsal. His mom was passing us on Stadium and he was in the front passenger seat of her car and I will never forget his face when he realized that MOUSE IS DRIVING! Anyway, after she got her legal license*, he and other kids rode with her many times to and from rehearsals and cast parties usually in The Indefatigable (1992 basic Jeep Wrangler) but sometimes the POC (1996 Island Teal Chrysler minivan).

Anyway, did we perform this play at the “verushky” house (formerly the UU Church until it went mega) or did we perform it at the Ann Arbor Academy? I can’t remember but it was a small, improvised venue in any case. I don’t really remember much about the plot but I remember we had soooo much fun doing this play. I think the panda kids had a lot to say about their costumes and eventually those with long enough hair made panda-like pigtails but I couldn’t find a pic of that tonight.

I was never into drama as a child but when it was offered to one of my kids, she glommed onto it big time and then the rest of us got into it too. My “role” was never much to do with what was going on on-stage although I spent a lot of time running around backstage. For one play I was a one-person orchestra, riffing off some virtuoso French flute music alone in the orchestra pit at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre.

Mostly I kept track of data and money, etc. Rehearsal dates/times, cast lists, tickets, programs, you name it. If I could do it on or with my computer, I owned it. Miss those days sometimes. Oddly enough my beach urchins never seemed freaked out about having their moom around at their preferred extra-curricular activity. I did try to stay out of their business though.

*The GG taught our kids (and our nieces and friends and cousins of all degrees) to drive WELL before legal driving age on an abandoned airbase in the yooperland. My kids also took drivers ed as SOON AS THEY WERE ELIGIBLE. The more supervised experience the better before driving solo.

A few years ago on my birthday (in January), I was in the chitchen and I heard what I thought was thunder. Except. That. It was January and the sky was clear so no thundersnow. It turned out to be a meteor. Yes, really. It was found on the ice atop an area lake a day or so later.

This afternoon we had a thunderstorm. Just a mild one although there was a lot of rain. And no meteors. Our mouse and raccoon were here for dinner. There’s Low Earth Orbiter and Oriole out in front of our house. It still feels weird to have family members over for dinner but I felt good about it tonight. BBQ chicken thighs and orzo salad with feta, kalamata olives, tomatoes, and cucumbers. I could have done better on the salad but it was more than edible.

Around the time our family/guests arrived, I asked the GG to put music on the pod. The supreme court hearings had been rolling along in the background all day and I said to the GG that if he didn’t put some music on, he might find himself bailing me outta jail. I am sorry. I think our republican senators simply don’t want to put a Black woman on the supreme court no matter how qualified she is. I think it’s that simple and from listening to her speak, she is DEFINITELY qualified. What a bunch of frickin’ idiots. Interesting that today’s NYT spelling bee had three forms of the word idiot in it… (Hope that’s not a spoiler for anyone.)

I am at the end of tonight’s disjointed entry and I am not in jail. G’night.

I listened to the supreme court hearings most of the day. Sorta anyway. I did listen to some of the words but not always closely and sometimes I was listening more to tones of voice. Man splainin’ anyone? Whether or not you have a law degree, if you haven’t practiced law in umpteen years, maybe you should defer to a woman who has a distinguished law career? And isn’t a politician? Oh, too much to ask, I guess…

That senator from the south? Maybe you know the one? I don’t want to kill him but couldn’t we just send him to a luxurious tropical island somewhere? Pay his bills there? With the stipulation that he STFU? Jeebus. For one thing, I don’t think a person’s chosen religion has anything to do with their job performance, whether you are a supreme court justice or a lowly systems analyst or whatever. I don’t know much but I think we were taught in elementary school that this country was founded (for one thing) on the basis of religious freedom. I *think* that means that no matter what religion (or none) you practice, you are eligible for citizenship here and all of its associated privileges. I didn’t hear him melt down but some folks say he did and I was looking for Southern Senator Meltdown Memes off and on throughout the day. The closest I got was the three-eyed kitten, a tragic story that I won’t link to.

When our most recent supreme court candidate actually got a chance to talk and I was able to listen, I was impressed by her. I don’t know much about being a lawyer but I am always impressed by someone who tries to explain things transparently and put them into context. Too many lawyers do not seem to know how to do this (I’ll talk about crappy lawyers some other day). Except when The Southern “Gentleman” was grilling the candidate unmercifully about her religion, she pretty calmly tried to get her questioners to back up and listen to the facts and context surrounding various cases she has adjudicated. I felt that she succeeded but who knows.

BTW, I listened to the hearings on NPR but I got my OPINIONS from listening to the CANDIDATE answer questions from her GRILLERS. Not from NPR pundits although some of their comments corroborated my independently formulated thoughts.

Yup. At this point in time, that would be me. Red wine because that’s my preferred taste in whine. Blue? Because I have totally shifted over into the blue end of the polly-tickle spectrum since I was a child and my parents voted for republicans. Back then I thought my parents could do no wrong.

As the Republican party shifted farther and farther to the right, my mother started to vote for Democrats. She would have HATED The Former Guy aka The Orange Baboon. I’m not sure whether my dad followed her over to the blue side of the polly-tickle spectrum or if he just gave the whole thing up. Voting is secret, right?

As I remember Republicans in my childhood in the 60s, they were for smaller government. I don’t disagree with smaller government. But I don’t think today’s Republicans are serious about smaller government. And yes, one of the things I am talking about is pro-choice rights. How soon does the average woman know she is pregnant? Not usually at six weeks. But we won’t go there tonight as much as I want to.

What about book bans? I wrote about this a few days ago and today I found the Red Wine and Blue site. So if we are gonna ban books, who is gonna decide which books to ban and what criteria are they gonna use to ban them?

The peepers are singing their song in the marshes in the hollows between the Manchester Mountains. We WILL get more snow but unless there is an extreme event, we are probably done with shoveling, etc. Let it melt, let it melt, let it melt.

Given what’s going on in Ukraine, somebody pointed me toward “Everything is Illuminated” by the author of “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (EL&IC). I read EL&IC a while ago. I guess before I had a goodreads account because it doesn’t show up as “read” or even “want to read”. I remembered that I liked EL&IC a lot so I tried this book out. It was fine. I gave it a 4 on goodreads. I think the author has Ukrainian roots but I’m pretty sure he didn’t write this book in the last few weeks. I kinda wonder what he is thinking now.

I have heard a few people say that the Ukrainians WANTED to be “liberated”. Liberated from what? And by Russia? Whut? If that’s true, why does the United States have so many Ukrainian-Americans? People emigrate to other countries for good reasons. A Russian fighter jet flying low over your house is one of them. I think most people want to be “free”. Like so many other words (strong, tough, weak, whatever), it’s a word that needs to be defined. To me, “free” means I can read whatever I want, say whatever I want, go wherever I want, buy whatever I want, etc. But I also need to be responsible for my words and actions.

Anyway I am now re-reading EL&IC, which is written from the POV of a young boy who has lost his father via the 2001 World Trade center attack.

What were you doing that day? I was working on YAG stuff on my computer in my house without the radio on (unusual). I made a quick [ahem unmasked] grock trip to the Westgate Kroger and I heard people talking about some kind of a plane crash. At like 11:00 AM, the GG came home from work. I (jokingly) asked if the US government had fired him. He looked at me like I was crazy. “You don’t know?” No, I didn’t know. And then I did.

I’m rambling and I dunno where we’re going from here. The pic is from the mouse house.

Oh yeah, there were at least three more trips to the hardware store today.

The first three (or four) hardware trips were related to the plumbing issue in the pic. I’m not sure what the last one or two were related to but the GG was in engineer mode today.

The mouse and raccoon are spending the weekend at a cabin in a state recreation area in the northern lower. There was so much slush on their driveway that Oriole (Subie Crosstrek) could not make it all the way up. This isn’t all that different than their current home in the Manchester “mountains” except that the roads there do get plowed.

The funny part is that some young 20-somethings in a “little” Honda something or other managed to venture up to the mouse/raccoon cabin and got stuck. The raccoon figgered out how to build a road to get them going again.

Way back when we drove the Indefatigable (1992 Jeep Wrangler) to Hoton Lake in April when it (the jeep) was pretty new. We were out on the back roads when we encountered a couple walking down the road toward us. Their vee-hickle was STUCK. We put them into the Jeep (the beach urchins were not very happy about sharing seats with them) and drove up to where they were stuck. The GG built a “road” for them and got them going and then we definitely followed them out to make sure they made it. They wanted to pay us for our help. Nope. Pay it forward!

It’s not Fool Moon yet. That’s in April and I’m not going this year. It’s a very cool outdoor event but it can be crowded and I’m just not ready yet, even though I’m probably as immune as I’m gonna get, at least for now.

The truth is I’m still not really ready for any kind of Prime Time yet. Restaurants? Not yet. In that case it’s as much about the service issues that are probably still happening, at least on Friday night. Last summer when we briefly braved a few restaurants (four for me, I don’t even wanna know how many for the GG), the service was often as slow as molasses. I did NOT blame the restaurants or their beleaguered servers. They were excellent but working under horribly short-staffed conditions and I tipped well as I always do. Just that I don’t really want to spend a couple hours in any indoor space with a bunch of other people, many of them unmasked. I mean, how can you eat with a mask on.

I said I would blahg about the “Eide family trilogy” when I finished it. I did, a few days ago, and then a relative decided to read it so I decided I better get on the stick. (Geez, my dad used to say that and just now for the first time ever I wondered if it had a meaning I’d never thought of before 🤣🤣🤣)

Anyway the books are “The Lighthouse Road”, “Wintering”, and “Northernmost”. The first two books are set entirely on the north shore of Minnesota and the boundary waters, the “shore” meaning Lake Superior. A lot of the third is set in Norway and Svalbard. These books (like most) have their flaws but I liked the story and the writing (especially his descriptions of the natural areas the characters encountered). I think my relative will at least like the “adventuring in nature” parts of the story but I won’t be offended if they decide it’s not their cuppa.

Some folks on Goodreads complained that the books jumped back and forth throughout the years and they couldn’t follow that. I don’t usually have any trouble with that kind of story construction and thought that this one was particularly clear. The first book would have worked as a stand-alone with some loose ends left dangling but lots of books are like that. The second and third largely followed other people’s stories but it was all the same family. They provide info about some of the loose ends in the first book and it all kind of loops back together in the end.

The one part I didn’t like was a chapter or so of gratuitous sex in the third book. There was some sex in all of the books but it was usually relevant to the plot and not explicit. I am not a prude so I was only annoyed, not offended but I don’t really want to read descriptions of somebody’s “cock” in a book. But that was a very small nit and at least it wasn’t a mushroom p*nis 🐽🐽🐽.

Gotta go, we’ve got virtual porterization going on.

So here’s my semi-annual daylight savings time rant. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve heard it before so feel free to skip it.

I *like* the time change. I understand the cons (more auto accidents, etc.). I remember the days when the beach urchins were out of sorts for a week or so after the time change – didn’t matter if we were springing forward or falling back. It doesn’t bother me. Actually this year I hardly noticed it. I slept a wee bit late last Sunday like until 6:40 or so but hey it was SUNDAY? I only had to reset one clock this year. It was Gertrude’s (stove), and that’s five seconds of clickety click. My phone and bedside clock automatically change and I no longer own a vee-hickle that doesn’t change its own clock. Now, the flip side of that is that Cygnus was low on veeeendsheeeeld viper fluid this morning and reminded me literally every two minutes or so. Ping… Ping… Ping…

There’s yet another move to end the time change, this time nationally. One of the most egregiously stupid arguments I’ve heard for this was that it would mean more sunlight per day. Really? Who are these people we seem to be electing? Switching to permanent DST is NOT going to give us more sunlight. It is going to give us more sunlight AT THE END OF THE DAY. There’s a tradeoff there and it is LESS SUNLIGHT IN THE MORNING. I am on the west side of the eastern time zone and I am not looking forward to 9:00 AM sunrises in the winter.

I have experience with this phenomenon. Another year another legislature once decided that the Great Lake State’s upper peninsula was more aligned with Wisconsin, which is in the central time zone. So they moved us into Central time for a while and that amounted to year-round daylight savings time, meaning the sun didn’t rise until well after 9:00 AM in the winter. I was in high school then and getting to school meant walking four blocks south, then a couple blocks ACROSS THE TUNDRA (no sidewalk or street). In the dark, often with blowing snow and/or minus 32 degree temperatures.

I know a lot of people don’t like the time change but I wish our national legislators who are pushing it would spend a few weeks in Sault Ste. Siberia in January before casting their votes. I do not think a lot of people think this issue through. I also don’t know what the answer is. I just wish our elected officials would put some more thought into it. Or maybe we should put some more thought into who we elect.

Today was Tax Day here but I won’t rant about that. You’re welcome.

There are so many days I don’t really have anything to write about. Today (for what little it’s worth), I am choosing between two topics. Daylight savings time was first and foremost until a friend sent me this link about the J&J vax this afternoon. If you don’t wanna click, it somewhat vindicates the J&J from being considered substandard to other vaccines.

That’s the vax that I got, almost a year ago. A couple months after that cases were very low in the Great Lake State and elsewhere and we were told we could abandon our masks if we were vaxxed. Around the time that “advice” came out, I was still doing curbside pickup and delivery but I soon started a bit of in-person shopping and even went to a few restaurants. I DID NOT ABANDON MY MASK. My gut feeling was that we weren’t done with covid and we certainly weren’t. I still don’t think we are.

Around the time boosters started to become available, there was talk via various sources that the J&J wasn’t as effective a vaccine as Pfizer or Moderna. The red-headed step-sister* of covid vaccines? Of course that gave me pause. Nevertheless, I lollygagged about getting a booster because I am pretty low risk, mainly because I hardly ever come into close contact with anyone (except the GG) without a mask.

So, if you know me or are one of my five? nine? whatever? regular readers, you might know that I got breakthrough covid (from the afore-mentioned GG of course🤣) a couple months ago. You also might know that my ONLY symptom was a cough unless you count EXTREME ANNOYANCE but that’s not a real symptom. As I’ve said before, I’ve had worse symptoms with the good old common cold.

The article corroborates thoughts that I have had since the beginning. (DISCLAIMER that I am not a scientist.) I will NOT give TFG credit for Operation Warp Speed or whatever it was. I WILL give credit to all of the scientific folks who somehow managed to develop vaccines and test them for safety and effectiveness in a very short period of time. I also believe that those folks were standing on the shoulders of many who came before them. They weren’t starting from scratch. That said, with a global pandemic going on, I don’t think they had the time to study the nuances of how each vaccine would fare in the long run. There is still a lot of data to analyze so who knows what conclusions will eventually be drawn.

I got the J&J because it was the first and easiest available to me without driving to Ohio or whatever. Why “we” didn’t pour as many resources as possible into getting needles into arms as quickly as possible, I will never know, but I know that a year or so ago it was not easy for any old Joe or Jane to get a vax.

*Red-headed step-sister? I was thinking that was a euphemism for being sub-standard. The google brought up a bunch of porn sites? What? My late sister-in-law The Beautiful Susie was a GORGEOUS redhead and I loved her dearly. She was the GG’s younger sister, 9th child out of 10, and we sorely miss her. Not sub-standard or porn star.

The Pensioner walked in today after 18 days away. He was on the phone with his brother and the question was, “Did we get that car insurance rebate yet?” Such a wonderful greeting.

The deal is our state has ordered the insurance companies to rebate $400 per vee-hickle for mumble-mumble-pandemic-reason. We have two vee-hickles. And no we haven’t gotten the check yet. I looked online and our insurance company had NOTHING about it. I’m sure they don’t want to call attention to it. I did find a news article saying it would be sent out beginning in the second quarter but some people have already gotten theirs. I mean, it’s $800 dollars. That’s not chump change but it isn’t gonna break the bank if we don’t get it immediately. (I’m not trying to make light of this. I know there are people who need every cent they can get their hands on and I’ve been there.)

Then there was a bunch of rummaging around in the Landfill Chitchen, thankfully I wasn’t in a meeting or I couldn’t have heard anything. That culminated in Himself carrying a bag of trash and an plastic water bottle into TeleCubelandia to ask if I recycled water bottles. I am Garbage Woman and yes I do but it’s complicated. I take the CAP off because Recycle Ann Arbor doesn’t like caps. I do NOT crush it (he was in the process of crushing it). I’m not sure whether that makes any difference or not. I mean, we throw all of our recycle into a big cart outside the front door. I’m thinking it might be easier for their musheens to sort recyclables if a bottle is not crushed? But who knows.

It wasn’t until later that I noticed he has once again grown a John Bolton mustache. This was an early pandemic phenomenon but he eventually shaved it. It’s baaaaaack!

Things I don’t do while he’s gone: drink coffee in the morning (or any time) and listen to satty-lite radio on the pod in the evening. Things I don’t do while he’s here: worry about the frickin’ smoke alarm going off in the middle of the night for NO REASON and worry about dungeon lakes. Actually I don’t really worry about dungeon lakes that much even though I hate dealing with plumbing problems. I HATE HATE HATE our smoke alarm system. I’m pretty sure it CHIRPED once and I braced myself for a bunch of shrieking and “fire, fire, get out,” like what it did early one morning last fall. Fortunately it didn’t do that.

P.S. I lied in the first paragraph. He did give me a “well hello there” when he first came in. The car insurance thing was the second time. Also, I don’t really know anything about the pic. It’s just something he sent me from O-haaa-o.

Listening on NPR to a Black mother talking about the book bans that parents are trying to enact throughout the country these days including some books that talk honestly about slavery and the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Jeebus! Why are we talking about banning books (again and forever)?

Me. 16 or thereabouts. I was reading books that The Commander was buying and we would discuss them, at least lightly. She bought a bestseller called Portnoy’s Complaint. I asked, “Can I read it when you’re done with it?” The answer was, “Of course!” The book disappeared. I found it in a drawer somewhere and I very sneakily read it. And I GOT why she hid it from me. Because gratuitous sex anyone? The thing was that I already knew what “sex” was (she knew that, I was SIXTEEN!) and I found the book pretty gross. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book by that author since. It’s not that I am a prude, just that sex has its place in literature but this was just toooooo much sex. Did I learn something from that book? Yes I did.

I had my own kids and I did NOT censor books for them. Ever read Gorky Rises or almost any of the Roald Dahl books? We read ’em all and others. Not that there was graphic sex in any of those.

The book Mother Earth Father Sky sat on my parents’ moomincabin bookshelves for years. It’s probably still there. It is a GREAT book. It has a lot of sex and violence in it but also a lot of other interesting stuff about life as imagined on the Alaskan coast thousands of years ago. One of the beach urchins read it when she was about 10. *IIII* read it when I was 50-something? I greatly enjoyed it but then I remembered that my kid had read it… Did she learn something? Probably, although she may not have understood all of it. It certainly didn’t seem to permanently scar her.

Sixth grade for the other beach urchin. Young Adult (YA) books were assigned and supposed to be read in increments (a chapter a week or whatever with class discussion). Try telling that to my kid, who was reading brick-like fantasy books at the time, plus the Shakespearean plays (I can’t even read those). Her class was reading a YA book that included Native Americans and she finished the book the first night. A Native American baby had died of smallpox. This kind of freaked her out so she asked meeee, her moom, if that kind of thing happened. Alas, I had to tell her it did. Did she learn something? Yes. Did I call up the school board to rant and rave that she was reading a book that temporarily freaked her out a bit? Hell no. (YA books are GREAT by the way.)

We do have to protect our children but I do not think we should be protecting them from history, facts, or having ideas. And if they run into facts and ideas that might be a bit beyond their years, finding it out from a book is probably better than finding it out from the Mean Girls in the Bad Bathroom at school or the internet.

What a weird weather day. I let myself sleep a little late because daylight savings time and then I waffled about a trip to Miejer. But then I just got myself up and over there.

The roads were dry but I was a wee bit later than I usually get to Meijer and, while the store was not crowded, the UScan? This Meijer UScan is something like eight-ten stations with a sort of “feeder” aisle. Usually when I get there at 0-skunk-30, I waltz right through the aisle and get to pick my UScan. Today… A couple of musheens were broken and there were more people than usual and I had to wait in line. The woman in front of me was NOT masked. I kept my distance.

Eventually the line started to move. I was at the front of it when the guy behind me (*masked*) asked if “that” UScan over there was open. No. No it wasn’t. Nor was the one next to it. And a few others. Some of them had green lights and some did not. Both of us eventually got outta there. When the UScan gal (unmasked) told me the broken musheen was now available, I told her thank you and added, “You’re having a morning.” Yes.

The roads were dry for my whole trip but sometime later in the morning I looked out the window and snow was coming down to beat the band. Apparently the area roads were plagued with accidents most of the day (SLOW DOWN PEOPLE). I decided not to shovel the sidewalk because I knew it would all melt (and it has) so I was a bit embarrassed when I realized our next door neighbor had scraped it for me.

Actually only the first pic is a bomb cyclone pic, from the GG who is still hiking the Appalachian North Country Trail somewhere in O-haaa-o. The second is one the UU (aka the GG’s identical twin) sent me. It is NOT a bomb cyclone pic. Just typical yooperland March (and April and May) weather and he is passing through Trout Lake. (Thanks for letting me steal your photo if/when you read this.)

Here on the Planet Ann Arbor, we are not having a bomb cyclone. It was actually sunny a lot of the day but it is cold and blustery as all getout. A man who was coming outta the Plum at the same time as I was this morning was cheerfully complaining about the cold. I VERY cheerfully replied, “This is Michigan and it’s winter!” Come to think of it, I do NOT think he was wearing a HAT! I was at least wearing my ski band. I wanted to be wearing a balaclava but as y’all might remember, I look like a lady bank robber in that thing. Then again, I was not wearing a jacket, just a polartech vest on top of a winter-weight turtleneck that may or may not have a hole in the elbow. Can’t remember which one I was wearing. But what the heck, I had egregiously idled Cygnus at 85 degrees and put the bush warmer (sorry for the NSFW) on high.

Supposed to get warmer over the next few days? We’ll see…

I read a lot today (more on that in a future post when I finish my current trilogy) in between chinking at regular maintenance chores and reorganizing my winter flinging efforts. I have three boxes and counting for Kiwanis and some stuff to box up for the Scrap Box if I can ever figger out their covid-era donation schedule. It’s like they are only taking donations on Thursdays when the moon is green but then last fall they suddenly put a Facebook callout for paper grocery bags and whine corks. On a Sunday? I had a TON of pristine paper grocery bags from my Plum curbside days and a fair number of corks so I mustered PDQ and schlepped them over there.

It’s March. We got an inch or so of snow overnight and it kept coming down throughout the morning. Hmmm… Will I have to shovel or not? Will it melt today? If it doesn’t, I think I have 24 hours to get the snow and ice off my sidewalk before neighborhood tattletales can file tickets against me.

I don’t mind shoveling but I waited for a long time to bother to shovel. The temperature was in the upper 20s and projected to get into the 30s. And that’s what happened and Mr. Golden Sun did his best today so at the end of the day, our sidewalk was basically clear, if wet. Old Man Winter will definitely throw some more snowballs at us but he is on a downhill slide.

It’s the month of March and we certainly get snow in March so we’ll see what we get. I’m not convinced it’ll be a lot but who knows.

I got this pic from the GG in O-haa-o and all I could say was “don’t bring any of that stuff home”. I am flinging and when I finally get around to executing the “R” word, I will strongly consider hiring Kami Certified Kitchen Lady to help me renovate my whole house. The dungeon is a frickin’ mess. The people who owned this place before we bought it did some remodeling down there and it was kinda cute when we first bought the house but it is a frickin’ mess now.

Today was a bad and good day. The bad was a work rif. Not me, at least not this time but it could happen at any time. The good was that our Ukrainian friend was able to extricate his relatives from a refugee camp and they are now en route to the United Snakes of America.

I can’t even imagine having to leave The Landfill because of impending war. Not to mention the moomincabin and moominbeach. Why do we keep having to do this stuff?

I’ve been buying tights online from Snag Tights for a couple years now. One of the things I love about Snag besides the fact that the fit is wonderful is that they use models of ALL sizes to show their tights. (I’m not plus size but happy they support diversity in that way.) If there’s a caveat it’s that their shipping takes quite a long time. I don’t mind that because I always have a lot of tights hanging around and am pro-active about ordering them when I feel like my stash is starting to disintegrate. But the first time I ordered, it was Halloween-themed tights and I was wondering if I was gonna get them on time. I did 😃

Anyway, I got an email from them the other day saying that in addition to other efforts to support Ukraine, they had designed “Ukrainian” tights with a blue leg and a yellow leg with proceeds to be donated. I pre-ordered two pair. Other people are sending handmade quilts over there and those are needed along with stuffed aminals. I know how to quilt but am not actively doing fiber arts. For now, this is one small thing I can do. And YES, I WILL wear the tights.

They’ve found The Endurance! When the beach urchins were young, the grandparents had a book about this incredible journey at the moomincabin. I wanted to link to it but there are a bunch of books and I can’t remember the author 🐽. The grandparents and Radical Betty were in a book club run by the LSSU elder hostel The Comm and RB helped found. Many of those books became multi-generational family book clubs of a sort. Not that we discussed them much. I think the main thing we talked about from the Endurance book was to nickname my niece “Pengo Janetto Cookie Tester Penguin Hoosh!” (We’ll talk about “The BFG” some other day.)

So, down in O-haaa-o, it was snowing when the GG and his gal pals got up and there is the Lyme Lounge. There were tons of ticks (yick) yesterday so hoping those aren’t out today. Here it was cold-ish (28) but dry all day and got up into the 40s. I needed to drop something off at the post office and my drive over there at seven o-clock AM was loverly. A few traffic lights but NO traffic and NO ONE in the PO parking lot. The PO was closed at that hour but the lobby was open so I parked, ran in, threw my parcel in the drawer, and was home within 15 minutes.

Mr. Golden Sun is swinging north in a big way and when he makes an afternoon appearance, he hits my front window where my office is big-time. I was actually HOT for a while this afternoon.

I hate FaceBook. I mean I am still “on” FB and have no plans to shut it off. I hate the ads. I hate the promoted posts. I hate 99% of the memes. I’m tolerating the Wordle posts while hoping they run their course (and I DO the Wordle, not to mention the Quordle). I hate the news articles with totally misleading clickbait headlines (but that is no way near as bad as it was five years ago).

I hate hate hate the idiotic political tropes by people who do not have the “tools” to RESEARCH whether or not a news source is telling you facts or garbage. Yeah, I know, all y’all are doin’ yer own “research”. Covid is fake, vaccines kill, professional scientists with long careers are lying, commies are gonna take over the country, Beto is gonna take our guns, undocumented immigrants are gonna take our jobs, yada yada yada. If that last is your fear, maybe getting some edumication might help? One meme I DID like was something like “they’re coming to do your nails and mow your lawn”. Not that either of those jobs are not honest, honorable work.

Today it was gas prices gas prices gas prices and Biden is bad Biden is bad Biden is bad. The good thing about this is that Cygnus is getting low on gas and when I finally get around to filling her up, I won’t be shocked by the pump price. I’ll do what I always do when gas prices rise, AS THEY DO no matter which political party has the majority and whatever else is going on. I’ll close my eyes and pump. And yes I DOOOO understand that it’s a hardship for many people. But it isn’t solely Biden’s fault. I am not an economist and there’s a lot I don’t know. I DO know that any rise in gas prices is due to extremely complicated political and economic situations. Like we’ve had for the last couple years. Make that five years. Or forever. Everything is in a constant state of change and no one person is capable of keeping ahead of all the variables.

Is Biden perfect? Of course not. Am I perfect? FAR from it. Would we be better off if TFG aka The Orange Baboon had won in 2020? I believe not. Can I articulate my reasons for saying that? Not tonight and probably not ever. “Hydroxychloroquine” might sum up the tip of the iceberg of my thoughts 💩💩💩

As I write this, I am thinking about someone I know who in the last couple days has made an emergency trip to the vicinity of Ukraine to pick up vulnerable relatives. They have made their way out of a war zone and are currently lodged in a refugee camp. I don’t feel like I can say much about this (actually I don’t KNOW much about it) but praying in my own godless way for these folks who have left their home maybe forever.

P.S. Mansplainers will be eaten by bears! You know who you are. I 🧡 you ANYWAY.

I have had three laptops in my possession since sometime last summer. Two of them belong to Corporate America, not me, and I’m not counting all the old repurposed MacBook whatevers that still reside here.

For whatever reason Amazon Woman and I had a meeting of the minds over the weekend where I remembered (again) that I needed to get the emergency laptop back to her and she suddenly needed it (for another team member). This kinda reminds me of a “double” dream that 🐭 and I had during pre-vaccine covid. I dreamed that I went into the Plum without a mask (I was exclusively doing curbside at that time) and was panicking about it at the front of the store. She dreamed that a co-worker reported that I was at the front of the store without a mask. I kid you not, these tandem dreams were within one or two days of each other 👻

Anyway, I told AW I needed to DRIVE (I did) and I would love to drop it off at her house. In the end, she needed to run an “urgent” errand to her kid’s middle school so I met her over there. This was not without some trepidation. Not because I didn’t know where to go. In fact, that middle school is probably less than a mile away from the Landfill and I have walked that neighborhood umpteen gazillion times in my life. I was worried that this was afternoon and if it was the end of the school day, all the soccer moms would be crazy-driving their vans and SUVs through the warren of little streets there and I wouldn’t be able to find AW’s car. As it turned out, it wasn’t crowded (yet) and she parked in a very easy place (and texted me her location) so the hand-off happened without incident.

I picked up my middle-schoolers at Forsythe/MYA when they didn’t take the bus. I would get over there early, park in front, and clean out the box of crap between the seats of the POC. I don’t think I have ever picked up a kid from Slauson although a couple of mouse’s friends were not afraid to call me from Pioneer High when they were sick and I was happy to pick them up. Landlines then and I “worked” from home, managing a youth theatre guild and doing non-profit treasury work.

Who I *have* “picked up” from Slauson is my cousin the Grand Poohbah and that was waaaaay back in the Jurassic Age when we would visit our cousins here on The Planet Ann Arbor. They lived more or less around the corner from Slauson and after a long boring day of going to museums and eating lunch at fancy restaurants where I didn’t really like the food, I would walk around the corner to Slauson to meet my cuzz as she was leaving. (This only happened once or twice.)

All roight. I posted the other day that I was sucked into a book (or three) and people wanna know. So here’s yer non-English major talking babbling about booooooks again.

That book was “The Nature of Fragile Things”. The book had some flaws but I got totally wrapped up in the story *anyway*. Adding to my interest, it was set partly during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

I have been to SF twice and LOVED it there. My fave was the first time when I flew out alone to visit one of my beach urchins. I do not much like to fly although I will do it (it’s complicated) but this was my first flight in 30 years or so and I was proud of myself for 1) managing to get a “cheap” non-stop ticket there and back and 2) navigating two airports and taking the BART over to Oakland or Berkeley or wherever. My urchin was gonna pick me up at the airport but had a vehicular issue at the last minute. I told her not to worry, I would manage and I did manage to BLUDGEON my way through. She eventually moved back to the Great Lake State – as planned – and now resides in Dee-troit City 🐸

A couple other books:

Shuggie Bain. A young boy growing up in an *extremely* dysfunctional family in Glasgow. He may also have been gay but that was only hinted at in the book, which was a good thing. This might be a hard book for many people to read. I enjoyed it and thought that it offered some hope. It helped to read the author’s notes at the end.

Everything Sad Is Untrue. This is an “autobiographical” novel written by an Iranian man who came to the US as a refugee when he was very young. I dunno exactly how to describe this book but I LOVED it. It is very humorous, even when he reports some of the horrible things his family went through. But he does report those things. There’s a lot of poop-talk in this but he wrote it from the point of view of a 12-year-old, so whaddya expect? 💩

I have now embarked upon “The Lighthouse Road”, which is set on the north shore of Lake Superior, between Grand Marais and what is now called Thunder Bay. When I was a kid, Thunder Bay was the twin cities of Fort William and Port Arthur. My family took a trip around The Big Lake when I was 10 or so and we began that trip by taking the FERRY across the St. Marys River to Canananada in Sault Ste. Siberia. Anyway, I am loving this book so far. When I encountered the word “seiche” in the second chapter, I knew I was home. I am learning a lot of new words too. In general, I’m liking the story, the structure, and the characters.

This one was of the best kind! A girl scout selling girl scout cookies. I will buy girl scout cookies any time. I mean, I have not sought out girl scout cookies in quite a few years. Sweet stuff hangs around here forever so why bother. But I will not turn down a girl scout selling girl scout cookies at my door.

She was very nicely set up with a fancy wagon. She was with her dad! Who stayed down on the sidewalk and gently coached her (say thank you, etc.). And their dog, who also stayed on the sidewalk with dad and was leashed, a constant source of contention here on The Planet Ann Arbor. THEY WERE BOTH MASKED! I saw them coming and sussed what they were all about so you know I slapped on a KN95 before answering the door. Actually I had seen them in the neighborhood when I returned from taking Cygnus out for a slow ride on the Pothole Asteroid north of town but didn’t know what was in the wagon.

I bought two boxes. Samoas and whatever is new this year. She proactively apologized PROFUSELY that there were no Thin Mints. That was okay. I was really just buying them to be nice and support the girl scouts. (I didn’t tell her that.)

My kids were in girl scouts and one year I bit the bullet and “ran” the cookie sale for our middle school troop. What could go wrong? Don’t we just send home order forms with the kids or maybe set up a booth at one of the grocery stores or something? And then I do some bookkeeping? On my computer, roight? Ohhhh no. This girl scout leader had multiple places set up on different days and at least one of them involved navigating the UMich campus. In the POC… … … This was all waaaaay out of my introverted comfort zone. Note to self. Always ask for the details of what you are getting yourself into.

To make matters worse, one of the dads was an uber sales-type guy and he was there at ONE of the booths trying to provide instruction on how to sell stuff. I think I remember him pulling money out of his shoe at one point? He was cheerful but WHAT? I was thinking something like why isn’t HEEEE running the cookie sale? Alas. I knew the answer. His daughter and a friend had moved to our troop from another troop and I don’t remember all the ugly details now but his daughter had cancer and died a couple years later. Knowing what he was dealing with, I just sucked it up and did the best I could.

I was not a girl scout myself. I was a camp fire girl because that’s what we had in Sault Ste. Siberia. Being meeeee, I was mostly interested in earning beads, which are like girl scout badges. I didn’t realize until I had my own girl scouts that most kids just need a safe place to have fun and talk and whatever. Sometimes they get interested in whatever activity or field trip is going on, sometimes not. I was often annoyed about this back in those days but I think I understand it better now.

But still, there’s a reason I work with computers, not kids 🐽