So for a while now, every time I drive, my left peripheral vision occasionally tells me there is a Bichon Frise (or other little white dog) on a collision course with Cygnus. When I turn my head enough to actually LOOK at the “dog”, it is obviously a little dollop of dried bird poop on the driver’s side window. This afternoon we were driving around pulling Halloween pranks and I noticed that the “dog” has mostly disintegrated, probably from the heavy rain we had overnight. It was a warm night and we slept in the Lyme Lounge so we could hear the rain on the roof. And yes, I could’ve cleaned the bird shit off but I kept forgetting to💩

The first thing I managed to do this morning was to knock a full glass of water (a BIG one) off my couch table. Bad things about this? It was stoopid and it happened just at the GG came into the house from the Lyme Lounge so he witnessed my clumsiness. Good things about this? 1) It was just water. 2) There was no open laptop on the table at the time (or any laptop). 3) It was a plastic glass so nothing broke. But still, off to a good start KW.

Two grock trips today. The GG to Kroger (where I don’t really shop any more) and meeeee to Plum where I do shop (a lot) and I knew my mouse would be there. Then, after Halloween pranks, an afternoon of food prep and reading (me) and feetsball and blowgunning (the GG).

The pic features Dr. Frankenstein power-carving a pumpkin in preparation for our Halloween pranks.

Finally. It was mid-morning when I first heard of the Trump shit-bomb AI generated video. I actually googled a BIT but couldn’t find a source I felt I could trust. A facebook friend that I DO trust shared it so I eventually saw it. I dunno. People keep asking me various versions of why don’t I support him or what is he doing that is “bad” (for lack of a better word). Um. First. Lemme count the ways. Insurrection instigation. Chainsawing federal employees who are dedicated to their jobs without having a CLUE to what they DO. All of his immigration “policies”, too many to enumerate. But really. Dumping shit (AI generated or not) from from a fighter jet (or whatever it was) on peaceful protesters? Who created this? Some junior high kid? Or the president of the United States? It isn’t funny and I don’t know why y’all voted for him.

Hahaha. I started out with shit (bird) and I ended with shit (Trump).

I didn’t attend a protest today. Oh, it isn’t because I don’t agree with the No Kings movement. Not at all. If you know me in real life or ever read this boring blahg of blather, you know what a low opinion I have of Trump and his Sycophants of Stupidity.

I finished a memoir today by Beth Macy (Paper Girl), who grew up poor in rural Ohio (not far from JD Vance’s hometown). She clawed her way into COLLEGE and out of poverty and became a journalist. When her mom and other relatives needed help in later life (no college and still mostly poor), she began to travel back and forth to help them and ended up writing a book about the whole “project” (her word). The “project” meaning what had happened to her home town in the years she had left and how poverty (and drugs and lack of educational support and lots of other stuff) had changed her childhood community. It’s a complicated story. She is 10 years younger than I am but her eldest sibling contracted polio before the vaccine was available and has lifelong disabilities because of it. That means her sister is around my age. Yikes.

I did not get polio although I knew kids my age who survived it with disabilities. My parents (RIP) and I thank whatever gods there are who believed in scientific research enough to create a polio vaccine. And I thank those same gods that my parents believed in vaccines.

I didn’t go to a protest today. I am not really a protester. I didn’t have a sign. I loved the photos posted by my friends here on the Planet Ann Arbor and those in Sault Ste. Siberia. I live in a BLUE bubble but Sault Ste. Siberia (where our cabin is) is a RED area but there are definitely anti-fascists there. Some of the folks who protested I wasn’t surprised about. Others I was. Happily. A lot of us live in divided families. It’s hard.

I did not wear a witch’s hat but I was in simpatico with all the gals who joined the Dexter Witches Night Out festivities. By the time I walked out of the pub and took this pic, the festivities were basically over (although some of them may have continued at the pub) and taaaared but happy looking women were walking along the sidewalk with witch hats in their hands and toting bags of clothing or props or whatever.

We porterized ourselves at Dexter’s Pub tonight. We haven’t been there much since last spring and I laughed when our waitress recognized the Porters immediately. It had taken a split second for her to recognize the GG and me. Having spent my childhood as the child of a prominent small-town family and a wannabe wild child, I like to be a bit incognito in general so this made me happy

“Remember who you are and act accordingly” was what Moi Mama would often tell me. And just about had a hissy when I wanted to wear jeans to stay at the “fancy” Book Cadillac Hotel in DayTwa. There was some kind of bank meeting that I have very few memories about. I probably wasn’t even at the bank meeting. Mom probably took me and my brother shopping at the downtown Hudson department store where she had worked her first job out of college. My branch of the prominent family was not rich in any way shape or form but I always managed to come out of Hudson’s with a couple of new and stylish outfits. (Thank you mom.)

I appreciate modern hotel room amenities nowadays but that hotel room was NOT memorable. I would’ve rather have stayed with my Detroit grandparents in their quirky art deco house on Mark Twain. Breakfast nook? A basement display of artifacts and pictures from their wedding trip “around the world” that I never tired of? Yes. My grandparents were married a year or so before I was born. My bio grandma Emily died in a car crash when mom was 15. Bolette did not have any children of her own but was a wonderful grandma to me.

Back to the 21st century, what we were a bit unprepared for was how crowded Dexter was tonight. I had an inkling that a warm fall evening and uMich football game tomorrow might bring a lot of people out EVERYWHERE but I had no clue about the witch event. But we know enough to reserve a booth at the pub and it all worked out.

Cackle cackle cackle and g’night🧙‍♀️

A chicken coop (at the mouse/racc house) that doesn’t get used. It isn’t my business why but probably lots of reasons. Bird flu being one (a couple years ago) but also just general maintenance issues.

My mouse lives outside the Planet Ann Arbor city limits so she can have as many chickens as she wants, including roosters. For a while, we had a neighbor who had chickens and there was a rooster. I loved hearing him cock-a-doodle-doo early in the morning but others did not and someone (Luke of Perry Net) turned him in. Make no mistake. I love Luke. He is a new granddaddy and is gleefully scouting all over the place for toys for his grandson. A great guy but I do miss the rooster.

The GG spent umpteen bazillion hours today trying to get our webcams working, here and at Hoton Lake. For complicated reasons I was involved in the whole thing even though I didn’t wanna be, especially since I was involved in stuff at work today that made big whooshing sounds over my head, They always say BAs (business analysts) are not supposed to be involved in “technical stuff” but somehow we are still asked to deal with that stuff.

The GG had another zoom meeting with North Country Trail folks tonight, this one with an Ohio chapter. I don’t know those folks as well as our home chapter, the Hiawatha Shore to Shore up in my homeland, I don’t join these meetings but I love listening to them from the kitchen. The cultural differences are fascinating. The person who was running tonight’s meeting had a “midwest twang” that another person couldn’t understand. I could understand it but then I talk to “Indiuh” every day, So. Everyone is passionate about the North Country Trail and that’s the important thing.

Tonight the GG is zoom meeting with North Country Trail folks.

The first time he did a zoom call was in March 2020. You know when that was. I had just become a permanent telecommuter. I still am. My company has recently instituted RTO (return to office) policies but it doesn’t affect meeeee. There isn’t an office within 45 miles of me (any more) and in any case, I would just retaaaar if they really tried to make me drive in to an office. At the time I hired into this job, I didn’t think I would ever have a job again, And then I ended up with this one. 18 years. Jeebus.

So the first North Country Trail hike we took was in the yooperland when the beach urchins were teenagers. They stayed back at the moomincabin with their grandparents. We hiked from M28 to Naomikong. It was a long walk and we got lost a couple times because at that time the trail was not terribly well marked.

A few years after that, the GG went to meet up with a bunch of folks that were trying to start up a sorta formal North Country Trail chapter. If I get it right, none of them knew each other and nobody knew exactly what they needed to do. Fast forward a bunch of years and the Hiawatha Shore-to-Shore portion of the trail is very well maintained. No way to get lost any more and there are all kinds of folks who maintain the trails and a few certified chain sawyers who take care of downed trees. The GG is one of the certified sawyers.

I was asked today if there was anything positive I could say about Trump. (‘scuse me while I blow the dead MOE-skee-TOE off my laptop screen.)

Um, nope. I think the same thing about him as I did when he ran for president the first time and when he was a “reality TV star” [snort]. Anything Trump does, he does for HIMSELF. He does not care about anyone else, including (I think) many members of his own family. When he says he’s gonna do things like end wars “on the first day” or whatever, he’s lying. He did not do that and could not have done that. We’ll see how long the Gaza ceasefire lasts. And whatever it was he said, late in his campaign, about how wonderful he was gonna be for women? That so pissed me off. He is not wonderful for women, from the reversal of Roe v. Wade to all of the chainsaw cuts he has made to lifelines for poor single mothers to obtain food and health care for their families. This doesn’t apply only to women BTW. It applies to all people who are struggling to raise families without decent jobs or other forms of support and often mental health issues, etc. And don’t forget, many people do not have any bootstraps to pull themselves up with.

I kinda hate memes but one of the memes that resonated with me today is the one that says something like “There are two types of Trump supporters: billionaires and idiots. Check your bank balance to figure out which one you are.” My bank balance is fine but I ain’t no billionaire by a long shot. Why are all of us little people, i.e., not billionaires, voting for him. Well. Not me. I cannot stand him, I don’t think he gives a flyin’ f*ck about me and the middle class that I belong to, and I didn’t vote for him in any of the last three elections. Flim flam man. That is all. Well, except insurrectionist. And yes he WAS an insurrectionist.

Sorry about the rant. Some days are easier than others.

I was hanging out slapping MOE-skee-TOES in the Landfill back yard after work this afternoon thinking something like, “dum de dum de dum, whatami gonna blahg about today?”

So Bob next door was making noise in his back yard. Not annoying noise, sounded like he was trying to muster a prodject. After a bit he air-knock-knocked at us in our back yard and asked the GG if he was up to helping hoist a patio table up over his fence. He had recruited a couple other neighborhood guys and one of them was extra friendly.

After a few fleeting comments from us and him about the yooperland and where the FinFam beach is he said (I think) that he had grown up in Sault Ste. Marie. And then he told me who his grandparents were. Ozzie and June. My jaw dropped just about to the floor.

I GREW UP LITERALLY NEXT DOOR TO OZZIE AND JUNE! Ozzie owned a garden/feed shop downtown and drove a truck with Green Thumb MacInnes painted on the side. Every year he grew a patch of corn in his back yard. The Commander always tried to do that too but it never came to much of anything and she would kvetch about how meager her corn patch was compared to Ozzie’s.

It turns out Ozzie and June’s grandson lives around the corner from us, in a house once owned by one of my best Haisley School PTO friends but that’s a story for some other day.

His aunt Bobby (Barbara) has been in my thoughts lately. She was something like six years older than me and I so looked up to her. We liked when she baby-sat us but she wasn’t our most frequent baby-sitter. I’m not sure she liked baby-sitting all that much and I am gonna guess me and my brother were known as brats. But she is still alive and doing well and I am happy about that.

Small world, eh?

This trip was kind of a rocket trip to the yooperland. He came home a bit earlier than he had planned. Of all things, he decided he wanted to hang out with meeee rather than other relatives. I dunno why. I think his siblings et al are much more fun than I am and most of them also agree with him about pollyticks.

I also wonder if he decided to come home because I texted that the refrigerator was fixed and beef stroganoff was in the hopper.

I can always tell when he is at the end of the block because I can hear the Lyme Lounge squeaking.

Back when the beach urchins were tween and teenagers, we never expected their friends to knock on the door or ring the doorbell when they arrived. Nope. If you knew us you came in the door and either squeaked or grokked. Our doors were unlocked throughout the night for the most part. I miss those days…

Okay, I kinda fell off the world when I tried to switch (or not exactly) from Goodreads to StoryGraph last spring or whenever it was. I was successful at transferring all of my Goodreads stuff to StoryGraph. What I struggled with (and I knew I would) was keeping two book apps up to date. So I haven’t been updating what I’ve been reading in either app. My bad.

Also, I have been doing audio books since the beginning of the summer. I dunno why. I never glommed onto them before. They’re working for me now. I dunno if this situation is temporary or not.

The Glassmaker is one book that has left me with a book hangover. There is an interesting structure to this novel, which it set in Venice and begins in the 1400s and ends in the COVID era. That is all I will say.

Another that I read was Buckeye. It’s set in Ohio. A lot of the North Country Trail goes through Ohio, plus there is the Buckeye Trail, which often intersects and/or joins the North Country Trail and the GG has hiked a lot of it. I just finished this one this afternoon but I think I’m going to have a book hangover from this one too. A lot of people like to disparage Ohio. If you are snowbirding south to Crazy Old Florida on the I75 Snowbird Geezerway, it can be a drag but Ohio has a rich history and a varied terrain. And Lake Erie is its northern border. Buckeye was a good book although I was appalled at some of the choices the characters made along the way. No one hiked the North Country or Buckeye trails.

That’s the Lyme Lounge and Mooon Yooonit parked at the Tahquamenon Falls lower falls campround.

What are you doing/looking for? I must’ve asked this question umpteen bazillion times this week. The GG was getting ready to rumble and, as usual, where is it? 10% of his stuff is always missing and it’s always a different 10%. That’s a quote from his dad but it applies to the GG too.

This refrigerated bag was missing. He was wondering where the heck it was. I couldn’t remember *what* he was talking about. Oh yeah, I ordered candy from BonBonBon for him last Valentine’s Day. I never heard how he liked the candy. I didn’t expect the bag and I wondered if it was a wee bit “girly” for him but nope. (He uses one of my mom’s old purses too.) He couldn’t find the bag yesterday and was gyrating all over the house looking for it. Obviously he eventually found it.

At the end of yesterday, after a whole week of in and out and around and about, he was fussing with TAXES! Oh, the rules have changed (like they do every year). Okay. That’s what we have an accountant for, roight? Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s great to understand these things even if you hire an accountant to actually file the taxes. Just. Oh. My. God. The kind of frenetic energy involved in tax stuff drives me nuts.

On another kind of topic, of course I can retire any old time I want to. I am feeling better about the whole idea knowing that when I do decide to, I will be leaving a big part of my bailiwick to someone who seems to be able to learn the part of my job that involves html, css, and some fugly, gnarly old javascript. “I’ve always wanted to learn to code,” he said today. The opportunity had never arisen. Man, this “kid” is a fast learner. He isn’t even intimidated by the javascript. I have to keep hanging back from hand-holding. That is a good thing.

I stepped in it a bit this morning during the daily standup. A colleague based in Florida is an expert kayak fisherman who reported that sometimes the bigger fish down there can pull a fisherman in a small bote along a bit. That reminded me of Nantucket Sleighride. It is a song by Mountain from 1971 when I was still in high school. It’s kinda long and I won’t be insulted if you bag out.

I always loved the song (and Mountain) but it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I actually looked up what a Nantucket sleigh ride was. Which is when you are on an old-fashioned whaler and you snag a whale and it takes you for a ride.

I work with a whole bunch of people from all over the USA and world. I don’t know where all of them live and they don’t always know where I live. When my fisherman friend told about being towed for a bit in his kayak, I un-muted and interjected “Nantucket sleigh ride, when you are being towed by a whale.”

A new person (to our team but not to the company) immediately said, “Oh you are from the east coast?” Nope. I am from Lake Superior. No whales in Gitchee Gumee. I said that the reference was from an old Mountain song. I’m not sure anyone actually got the Mountain reference but this person lives in Massachusetts albeit not near the shore. I was dating myself but I didn’t care. At this point we moved on into the actual meeting.

Way back in the day one of my nieces was giggling about my mom leaving her purse in the Mission Hill cemetery during a family excursion there. An excursion that my nuclear family was not part of. Oh, not that we weren’t welcome to join it, just that we weren’t in the yooperland at that time.

The photo is of the Spectacle Lake overlook. I have been there many times since I was a child. The graveyard is behind me. Native Americans are buried there as well as immigrants like most of us USA citizens are. (Take a note, Trump.)

Once when we were all young and childless, me and the GG and my brother and his wife took an evening drive up onto the Spectacle Lake overlook. We were joined by several young Native American men. One of those guys kinda glommed on to my brother in an ominous way. I was nervous about that. The rest of them were more interested in the WWII telescope kinda thing the GG had set up and were having fun talking to him. We made it out of there with no altercation. The place is usually flooded with tourists and I think that is the only time I’ve ever been nervous about being there.

Grandma (before she was Grandma) and I once ended up on the Spectacle Lake overlook on a garbage run. The dump was (and still is) on Plantation Road but mom and I were talking a blue streak (I was about 22) and she missed the turn. I knew she had missed it but I didn’t say anything and the next thing I knew, there we were up on the overlook. Of course we didn’t dump our garbage there.

Grandma’s purse was found right away but that began a mini-career of me sweeping behind people and watching for their purses. Henry Ford Hoosegow (downtown Detroit) bathroom anyone? My mom’s purse. I keep everything important zipped into my right-hand polar fleece vest pocket. That’s my purse.

At least not today*. You get a random mishmash instead.

Um, how ’bout the Greek omelet the GG brought home for me from the Coney Island near the Toyota dealer where he had Mooon Yooonit in for scheduled maintenance early this morning. As is usual I ate half of it (came with hash browns – yay!) and saved the rest for tomorrow.

Our unseasonably warm weather finally took a dive today although it was still very warm this morning. Rain moved in and now at the end of the day, it is something like 54, a more seasonable temperature for our area.

Among the many tasks my own personal “task rabbit” undertook today was replacing the screen in the outer front door with the glass door. As much as I hate this, if he hadn’t done it on his own, I would’ve asked. It’s gonna get warm again but the temperatures are on a general downward trend and I don’t like the big wooden front door shut during the day because I love whatever outdoor light I can get.

*Zip-tying ANYONE is an atrocity. Children? Jesus, save the children at least. One of the other atrocities is the hint that furloughed federal employees won’t get back pay and the gleeful (via my lens on this issue) way it is being presented.The GG and I have been there done that. Thankfully, the GG did get back pay and so should the folks who are furloughed by the Trumpian Idiocracy. I’ll go there again someday when I am calmer.

A quote from an Indian woman (“East Indian”, not “wild Indian”*). I picked up the GG, this woman, and another EPA person from Metro one night. Had they been in DC? Probably.

It was long enough ago that the beach urchins and I went inside the airport to the arrival area. On the way to the airport, I saw through the rear view mirror that Mouse had totally fallen asleep in the middle seat of the Exxon Tanker Valdez (1987 minivan) and was sorta flat out with her head hanging off the seat into midair. No shoulder belts in that seat in those days and child seats weren’t required for kids her age. Three, I think.

I took a deep breath. I said, as calmly as I could, “Lizard Breath? Could you take your seat belt off for just a moment, pull your sister up into an upright position, and put the armrest up so she can rest on it?” Little Cat Z, all of 4-5 years old, was ON IT.

The other issue we encountered on that trip to Metro was that going through security, Speedy Water Janet Pop Mousey Mushroom Ears had to go through the scanner. I fabricated an explanation that calmed my mouse down about that.

The passengers were successfully picked up and we made it safely back to Ann Arbor and it was when we dropped the Indian woman off that somebody asked what was going on in the ditch outside her house. I laughed (silently) when she said the quote in the blahg title. Because I live with a guy like that too. (I bet the GG doesn’t even remember this.)

*”East Indian, not wild Indian” was how a once 5-year-old neighbor described her family. The mom is American (but not Native) and the dad is from the Indian subcontinent. They had six kids, the then 5-year-old was the youngest, in kindergarten with Lizard Breath. Dad was a truck stop preacher but I believe they now own and run a church across N. Maple from us. It used to be a Black church…

They are a good family and friendly. The mom once accompanied her daughter on one of our girl scout trips. We (30s and a few 40s moms) were a little freaked out. Like, will she care about the wine? It’s kinda verboten but I’m sure the girl scout organization knows it gets smuggled in. As we were packing up, she reminded us with a giggle that someone had left a bottle of Chardonnay in the fridge. Oh, ya don’t say?

Do y’all think the bag and raincoat clash? I do not because they are worn exuberantly like, “I like these colors/patterns together and I don’t care what anyone thinks.” The raincoat is handmade by the wearer (this was in 2016), the bag was purchased, probably at the Plum Market. On another note, “colorific” is being flagged as a non-word but I’m pretty sure the Spelling Bee accepts it.

I felt like making chicken pot pie today. I use a recipe that I think came out of Parade Magazine, which came to us for years with the Sunday paper. Apparently it was still published in paper form until 2022 but I had long stopped reading a *paper* newspaper by then.

This recipe, which I tweaked (as I often do) became a family favorite. It has a biscuit crust instead of a traditional pie crust. I think the recipe said to use Jiffy Mix but I tweaked it to use Joy of Cooking drop biscuits. I am a sub-standard biscuit maker but it works well enough. The “filling”, what lies underneath the biscuit topping, is chicken, carrots, celery, and potatoes, with a chicken broth/onion sauce.

It isn’t hard to make but there are a lot of steps and I worked on it off and on throughout the day, keeping up with washing the bazillion bowls and cooking pots along the way. And then it was in the oven. I looked at facebook and someone had “shared” a demonstration of cooking a chicken “dish” that was similar. But. Not. They dumped some frozen pre-cooked chicken out of a bag into a baking dish, topped it with frozen carrots and peas out of a bag, then topped it all with a box of Red Lobster biscuit mix. Easy peasy, five minutes tops to put together.

Okay, this would never do for my fam. I KNOW that chicken pot pies often contain peas. My fam likes peas and would probably not complain at this stage of the game, but they might raise their eyebrows. Peas? In OUR chicken pot pie?

Disclaimer on cutting corners when cooking. My recipe calls for carrots and celery. I always buy diced carrots and celery in little grab-and-go plastic containers. I am beyond done with dicing carrots and celery, not to mention that the GG and I could never eat a whole celery bunch/stalk (it’s complicated) before it rots.

We’ll talk some other day (or not) about how I think people receiving SNAP or other welfare benefits should be able to use those benefits to enable less stressful ways to feed their families without being scorned by grocery clerks or patrons.

Subtitle: I am so dumb.

I didn’t blast outta here to get grocks at 8:00 AM, deciding to have a wee spot of coffee first. When I did get into Cygnus X-1, the first thing I noticed was that there were two bottles of water on the driver’s seat. The glove box was open and there were papers and things on the passenger seat. And more water bottles on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Probably the most annoying was I couldn’t find my car hairbrush. I guess the water bottles distracted me. I cannot abide more than one or two water bottles in my car. And these are OLD water bottles that have been refilled umpteen bazillion times so who knows how many people’s (peoples’?) germs are on them. Ugh.

Because I was distracted by the water bottles, it took me until I got to the Plum Market (a few blocks away) and was inside talking to mouse to come to the realization that somebody had come into the driveway in the middle of the night, opened the UNLOCKED (yeah, I know) car, and rifled its contents. So, still processing that, I sent the GG a “Did you ransack my car?” text.

No, OF COURSE he hadn’t ransacked Cygnus. In fact, it turned out that Moooon Yooonit had also been ransacked. One small item was taken and replaced by a pack of cigarettes with TWO cigarettes left.

The GG perused webcam photos and someone was in our driveway at, hmmm, was it 1:10 AM? We were sleeping in the Lyme Lounge and each of us have a vague memory of hearing something at some time during the night. Fortunately I didn’t go outside to drivewayP until 3:15 or so, so at least I wasn’t in caught in that act.

I am annoyed but not freaked out. Why? As long as we’ve had Next Door Neighbor (which I love to hate), almost EVERY DAY there are posts from people whose UNLOCKED cars were ransacked overnight. The perpetrators *almost* never take anything, just strew things around and make a mess. I dunno what they would do if they found a wad of cash (which I usually don’t have and wouldn’t leave in a car if I did) but they did not take the coins outta the rubber glove.

Waaay before Next Door Neighbor (40 years ago), we had a rash of these kinds of incidents in our neighborhood. Our then thief took our Tickly Toddle cassette tape out of Daddy’s Little Blue Car*. I wonder what that might’ve been worth to them.

I ALWAYS lock the cars before going to bed. Except last night I apparently didn’t. (LOCK YOUR CAR DOORS!)¹⁰⁰

The pic is one the GG took of WWII planes flying over down by the Big House, where Umich beat Wisconsin today. I didn’t see this flyover. If it had been modern fighter jets, I’d have heard them.

*Daddy’s Little Blue Car was one of a trio of Ford Fiestas. The other members of the trio were Mama’s Little Gold Car and The Orange Car (an unknown neighbor down the street).

80 degrees, that is, not the 1980s. People keep saying this is way too warm for October and they are not wrong. October can be a mixed bag in the Great Lake State. I am not a climate change denier at all but this heat is not all that unusual for this time of year. On the other hand, we can also have snow in October

We discussed the possibility of eating outside tonight but about the time dinner was ready, the MOE-skee-TOES were coming out and even though they weren’t all that bad, we headed inside to eat. MOE-skee-TOES? Yeah, they come out at dusk at this time of year. They don’t exactly target me all that much but even one bite is enough.

Obviously I don’t have a lot to say tonight. There’s our shed with the lights on and some impatiens that got potted around Mother’s Day and are hanging on pretty much forever.

Sayonara, KW. Typos be damned.

From the Never a Dull Moment department… We slept in the Lyme Lounge again last night. I got up and took a shower and then gathered a humongous pile of laundry. I schlepped it down the stairs and then as I walked into the pitch black utility room, whaddya think happened next (the light string is in the middle of the room)? If you answered “SPLOOSH!”? Ding ding ding. You win the booby prize. Which is a guy with a roto-rooter.

I sloshed through the water (it was very shallow), set the laundry basket on top of the washing musheen, and went back upstairs to text the GG, who was still out in the Lyme Lounge. A flurry of activity (and some waiting around) ensued until “we” (aka the GG) got a call that “Tommy” could be there in 20 minutes. Okay, we were on a roll. Tommy arrived and apparently the clog was 70 feet from the landfill, out under the street. But it was fixed by 11:30 or so and the GG was able to make his scheduled trip to FlaMan’s with grocks and things, only to find that one of their sisters had already visited with the same grocks the GG took up there. And I have probably mangled some of this.

Like I apparently mangled some of yesterday’s details about gov’t shutdowns. The GG actually read my blahg and apparently he WAS an essential employee and was “holding down” the lab. I don’t really remember him being out of the house a whole lot but like I think I said yesterday, I’ve probably blocked a lot of what went on during that painful time. At least the schools were not shut down🤡

In today’s title, replace “the moon” with “Mars” and “Alice” with “The Orange Baboon and Musk”. Oh, add Hegseth to that and make it a trio. What horrible people. I have, of course, seen a few episodes of The Honeymooners but I almost definitely saw re-runs because when I looked up the show, it was on mostly before we had a television set in my childhood house. We got one when I was two and there was one channel, CBC (Canadian), and I have VERY fleeting memories of Howdy Doody and that is about it.

Finally, Little Cat Z rescued the guy in the pic from her work parking lot today. A proud moom moment for a moom who would be nervous about picking up a turtle.

I’ve come a long way since the Bill Clinton era gov’t shutdowns. If memory serves (and it may not), there were two, one very short, the other protracted. I did not do well during those. I was (by choice) not gainfully employed during that period. The GG was a federal employee. A non-essential one, as they say. And no, he did not keep airplanes from crashing into each other but those people are apparently non-essential also. go figger.

We were low on cash at that point. Not because we’d been living high on the hog, nope. I mean, we were probably spending more money than we needed to but in a poor man’s kind of way. What we were really doing was doggedly working on paying off our mortgage early. At 13 years. It was a 30-year adjustable rate mortgage and we had won that gamble just about every year we had that mortgage so I was able to make much larger payments than required.

I won’t detail that fugly period in our lives (actually, I think I have blocked the details of my then moodiness). When it finally ended, beaucoup bucks in back pay arrived and within a few months the Landfill mortgage was paid off as well as the POC, a beautiful but problematical vee-hickle. That was the last car we paid for with a traditional car loan.

By the next time a gov’t shutdown directly affected us, I mean in terms of our livelihood, I was working for Corporate America. My salary was plenty enough to keep us afloat, we had absolutely no debt, and the GG took the Lyme Lounge off somewhere. Of course I was ecstatic about our situation (compared to the last shut-down) but I always feel empathy for federal workers who are furloughed with no pay. Or in some cases WORKING with no pay. This is not how people should be treated.

This time around, he is retired and I am still employed (for now). If a social security check arrives late (and I always feel like I’m double dipping somehow although I know I am not), we’ll be fine. I’m not sure what else could affect us except maybe national parks/forests closing to the public.

I’ll rant (or not) another day (again) about how Trump runs over “little people’s” (like me) lives in his attempts to do, hmmm, what? Destabilize our country by creating chaos? Big Ugly Bill indeed. That’s why we are in this shutdown.

Disclaimers: 1) That is not my photo. A daughter sent it to me from her township fair last weekend. 2) I normally blur (or “rabbit peep”) out license plate alphanumeric characters when I post them but this is attached to an amphibious car and I bet this car is not normally on the road a whole lot. Throughout my life, I have on multiple occasions encountered amphibious cars at the mouth of the Tahquamenon River. Not sure if this one has ever been there or not.

Okay, at the end of Sunday night, I was really really cranky. There was no reason for this. I’d had a great day and was on a roll and people came for dinner and it was fun and then… I dunno… My moods can be mercurial although I have slowly and incrementally settled down throughout my adult life, watching my babies grow up into successful women and gaining success in a job I totally fell into. Alas, I still have my moments.

The GG and I were heading off to bed and I was still grumpy and then… Out of the blue he asked, “Have you slept in the Lyme Lounge at all this summer?” Well, no. I often sleep in the Lyme Lounge when we have an overflow of people bunking in the moomincabin. I would never put up a guest in a camping trailer unless they were really hot to sleep there. Also, a lot of people are way too tall to be comfortable sleeping in the Lyme Lounge. The GG and I are about at the upper end of comfort there.

But also, this summer, although we had lots of people around most of the time, they were not bunking at the moomin although we almost always ate dinner there together. Anyway. I was ensconced in the Little Bedroom next to the bathroom. It is my childhood bedroom although back then there was a bunk bed for me and my brother. And a dresser (or two?) plastered with monster stickers from the grocery store checkout aisle.

For whatever reason, the thought of sleeping in the Lyme Lounge IMMEDIATELY pulled me out of my stoopid funk. YES! We slept in the monster bedroom that night but yesterday morning I washed my sleeping bag and we had the best sleep out in the Lyme Lounge last night surrounded by crickets singing their song. I don’t normally have trouble sleeping in any case but this was extra good. Since the weather continues to be warm, I think we will continue to sleep out there until it, uh, isn’t warm.