Yeah, I’m taking today and tomorrow off. I am a penny pincher when it comes to my paid time off. I have generous benefits, basically five weeks of vacation. I remember when I only had two. I hoard it like crazy until summer when I *always* use 2-3 weeks of it. I’m always terrified about scheduling it through the time-off “tool”. My boss is always cool about my plans (or lack thereof). As I said to her the other day, when you own property, you aren’t dependent upon reservations or tickets or whatever. I wasn’t being arrogant (and she knew it), just that when you own the place you’re traveling to you can go whenever you want to. In my case, it’s my childhood cabin. Still, I always try to schedule my time when family members are going to be there. Their schedules are tighter than mine and I can work from anywhere.

Today? I did not get OUT OF BED until 8:15 AM. I didn’t wake up at any time through the night. That’s unusual. I usually wake up a few times.I always check my phone when I wake up, Like, okay it’s 4-something AM so I can happily go back to sleep. This morning I didn’t wake up until 6:30 AM when the GG’s phone started vibrating like crazy. Someone from the North Country Trail called him at 6:30 in the morning. Okay… I went back to sleep until 7:30. I finally got up and outta bed at 8:15.

What did I do today? Mostly read a book, The Women of the Copper Country. I finished that and I am gonna join my husband and a daughter down on the beach to watch the sun finish setting. Nothing else to say except g’night y’all from KW.

This is not Granddaddy. This is Motor Bote Guy taking me for an anniversary ride the day AFTER the anniversary.

I dunno how we got on to the old granddaddy bathroom story. It has to do with the itsy bitsy teensy tinesy moomincabin bathroom, complete with RV shower. The ONLY bathroom. Back when one of the beach urchins was learning to use terlets, EVERY morning when SHE was ready to use the terlet, Granddaddy would be in there. “Granddaddy is in the bathroom,” we would chorus. One day when she came downstairs, the bathroom door was open and NOBODY was in there. With great surprise, she exclaimed, “Granddaddy is NOT in the bathroom.”

At least she had an indoor terlet to learn with. When I was her age at the Old Cabin, we had an OUTHOUSE. I much preferred the potty behind the big wooden living room door. Why would I want to go to the stinky old outhouse? At one point, The Commander told me I shouldn’t use the potty behind the door when there were MEN in the living room. I looked around the living room. My dad and uncles were there and we were never prohibited from using the potty when THEY were there. I didn’t think they could SEE us in there but who knows. Oh but Lewie is here. Never married, no children. He must be the man in MEN.

And ka-whomp! I am not only re-learning how to grokkery shop. I am re-learning how to cook for more than two sniggly little eaters. We’re having kebabs tonight and I bought what would normally be enough filet for us plus a day or two of leftovers (we have some sea scallops and veggies too). When I took a good hard look at the filet today I decided to make a Rocket Trip into Meijer to get a little more plus some lettuce, which we basically had none of. Meijer has pretty good produce but the lettuce is not like the luxurious Goetz Family Farm lettuce I get at the farmers market. I think/hope we have enough food. Eventually I will re-learn how to cook.

I have been counting heads ever since my kids were small. I still count heads now that they are 30-somethings. If I’m here. I’m sure they swim without me watching them when they’re here and I am not. When I was a teenager and young 20-something and used to have to bathe in the lake before work or whatever, I would ask The Commander to come down and keep an eye on me if the waves were big even though we don’t have riptides or undertows on our beach.

I used to spend whole days on the beach watching my kids and nieces and sometimes some of their second cousins, etc., swim. Last night I only had one head to count. It was gorgeous and hot and the water was fine and I shouldda been swimming with her.

I worked today. I was in my weekly meeting with Amazon Woman and she started out with, “You are really good.” My ego did not inflate because she went on to say it was always easy to hear me in meetings, etc. In other words, she was talking about my technology 🤣. I laughed and explained that I had first-world internet stuff here at the moominbeach.

I’m not sure what most people who haven’t spent a lot of time in the yooperland think it’s like. There are certainly areas where there’s no cell service. Tahquamenon Falls is one of them and it can be really annoying to try to meet up with other people over there without text messages. Here at the moominbeach, I have good cell service and a DSL (and fiber optic is eventually going in) and a couple of “switches” or whatever you call them. I have no problem accessing high-speed internet.

We have had internet here almost since the beginning of usable internet but in the beginning it was dial-up. When DSL became available, I didn’t telecommute to anywhere and we weren’t here for long periods of time so I just lived with dial-up. Then I got “stuck” here during The Commander’s last year. I was allowed to telecommute but it didn’t work very well with dial-up. After a couple of days of trying to work from cafes, etc., I marched over to Jamadots and the next day I had a DSL. AND a cable because the “wireless radio” on that crappy old laptop had died and I couldn’t use waaarrless wifi.

A text message alerted me that my lizard and her SO were arriving today. I knew they were coming sometime this week but I wasn’t sure when, probably my bad due to “post” pandemic brain fog or whatever.

I had some food planned for their visit but not a whole lot so I texted, “Is BBQ chicken okay for tonight?”. It was okay so I mobilized myself for a trip to Meijer…

I had a grock list but I didn’t put CHICKEN on it because that was my main thing to buy, right? I masked up and schlepped in to Meijer. I bought the stuff on my grock list. I bought some stuff that wasn’t on my grock list. I got to the Uscan and even though I had quite a bit more than the 12 allowed items, it wasn’t busy and I forged ahead and scanned my own grocks. As I finished paying, a woman sidled up to me and told me she loved my skirt. It was my long blue skirt. I love my long skirts too and told her thank you.

I schlepped out into the parking lot and it was pouring rain. The [unfinished] hem of my bee-yoo-ty-ful loooonnng blue skirt soaked up water like crazy so I was kinda sloshin’ along. I got ALMOST to Cygnus when I realized I HAD NOT BOUGHT CHICKEN! You know. The main thing I was buying? I took a deeeeep breath. I put my grocks into Cygnus. I sucked it up and MASKED UP AGAIN and went BACK inside Meijer to get chicken. My skirt continued to soak up water like crazy and I had to hold it up so it didn’t trip me and my Keen sandals were squishing around and squeaking like crazy.

By the time I got back to Cygnus, I HATED my skirt. And my sandals. Jeebus.

It’s okay. At least this year we can share space here and I can go to a grokkery store to get supplies on the fly.

Almost as long as I can remember, our friends in the Piedy Clan have hosted a 4th of July party. When I was a little kid I think there was a cookout followed by a big bonfire on the beach. Us little kids had sparklers and the big Piedy boyz shot off roman candles.

This event morphed into various formats over the years and there were a number of years when our clan didn’t attend. This was not due to any kind of feud or whatever. I think what happened is that as my generation started begatting, there became too many people for anyone to easily host it and we focused on our own families. We were still friends and remain so now.

It was the year my brother died that the Piedy Clan reached out and deliberately invited our clan again. It would take a whole ‘nother post to write about that but it has again become a tradition for both clans and has expanded to include other neighbors. It now takes the form of a potluck and there is no bonfire or any kind of fireworks. With any luck we’ll be able to watch the fireworks across the water at the res if it ever gets dark here in the land of the midnight 10 o’clock sun.

Then there was last year. I don’t know if the Piedy clan had any kind of get-together but I did not hear of one and if they had invited us, I would have politely declined. We were all holed up isolated in our own lovely spaces.

This year we gathered again. I’m pretty sure we don’t all have the same polly-ticks but nobody in these two clans is stoopid and we are all vaxxed. I won’t gush about how good it felt to talk to all of these friends I’ve known my whole life in person again. The two grandfathers of my generation bought the land together. Next year it’ll be 100 years since that event and our families are still here. We all wonder if our grandfathers had any kind of vision of what they were starting.

The photoooo is a shot of Guano Round Island as we approached it in the Motor Bote this morning. Taking a bote ride is a typical anniversary event for us but we couldn’t do it yesterday because there were decent sized waves. This morning? Glass. This year the engine only cut out once and it was easily restarted. We didn’t run out of gas and I didn’t have to row us back. And even though we were in Tippy Bote, I somehow managed to get in and out of the bote without flashing anyone 🐽

P.S. The res definitely has good fireworks tonight but some of us had to abandon the beach due to the moe-skee-toes🐽. I can still see them out my picture window.

As I entered the Wicked Sister restaurant a bit before noon today, I announced to the hostess that it was my first restaurant since March 2020. I was unmasked (I had one in my pocket). I have never understood the point of requiring people to wear masks INTO a restaurant and allowing them to remove them to eat. I mean of course you can’t eat with a mask on but this is cognitive dissonance to me. The restaurant was practically empty although more people arrived while we were there but we are all vaxxed so I said a little prayer to whatever I believe in and plunged in. I did wear a mask to the grokkery store this morning and I don’t plan on dining in frequently for a while. This was a speshul occasion though.

We were meeting my cousin and her husband there and we waited for a bit. My cousin runs on what we call “Pooh Time” and I run on, well, I’m not sure we have a word for the time I run on but Flash Bang might suffice. To illustrate our difference in “tempo”, back when we were kids and had outhouses, I remember watching her meander out to her outhouse (next door), stopping halfway there to inspect an insect or whatever. My style was to RUN to the outhouse and back, maybe doing a somersault on our homemade play structure along the way. We finally put together that they had stopped at the recycling center, which closed at noon today so they had no choice but to go there on the way TO lunch. Also, they had had a somewhat chaotic morning as one of their sons and his fiancee left today and they were preparing for a big influx of people this afternoon. More of my cousins.

A fun little sorta bittersweet thing happened at the restaurant. When our waiter ran my credit card, he noticed that my last name is the same as the doc who delivered him. Was I related? Yes, Yes, I was. I am his niece. And then I pointed at my cousin and said, “She’s his niece too.” My name is the same as my late uncle’s because I use my birth family name (I informally used my husband’s name when dealing with schools, etc.).

When you are a small-town doc with a long career in your home town, you deliver a LOT of babies so my entire life people have been saying things like, “Hey your uncle delivered me.” Actually, usually they would say, “Hey, your dad delivered me.” Nope. I can’t feature my small-town banker dad delivering a baby🤣. It was my uncle. More people remember my uncle than my dad (which is OKAY). My last name has died out in Sault Ste. Siberia so I haven’t heard this in a while. I have cousins who descend from him in the area but they use different surnames. So, a fun little blast from the past and I felt honored to hear from someone who still remembered what my uncle did in this community.

P.S. I hope none of this embarrasses my cousin because we’ve known each other forever and I love her and a slower “tempo” does NOT apply to brain power 🧡

I couldda droven up here to da yoop ANY day this week. Why did I choose today? I do not know. In fact I knew it would be busy the Friday before a Sunday 4th of July, even early in the day. It wasn’t terrible. I left early and took the Lansing route. US127 was MUCH calmer than the I75 SUV Speedway but eventually I had to merge onto that beast with its 85 mph traffic. That is a left merge and I haven’t done it in a long enough time that I fergot how it worked so lanes were ending on me like crazy and nutsos were not letting me merge.

Gah. It was okay. I managed to merge. There were no backups. I topped off Cygnus at our new fave gas stop in Waters. The Mac Bridge was clear although I got stuck for a bit behind a slow line of vee-hickles. I finally figgered out that a gravel truck was the cause of this backup. Big trucks are required to limit their speed to 20 mph and they DO, which is a good thing. I got over onto the dreaded grate and passed the gravel truck and all of the 4-wheelers behind it. Were they afraid to drive on the dreaded grate? I do not know. I am still experiencing a decrease in freeway driving confidence since the pandemic but it’s getting better. I have never been afraid of the grate. When I was a small child, my dad would drive on it on purpose to let us open our windows and look down at the water below. It can feel squirrelly though.

I masked up and braved the rest area just north of the bridge. First rest area since you know when. I had to PPPPPPP. I deliberately “held it” until then because I correctly figgered that rest area wouldn’t be crowded. I didn’t see one other person wearing a mask. Folks, vaxxed or not, it’s not over.

The GG drove separately (from the cFam cabin at Hoton Lake) and made sure he got here before me so he could turn the propane stove up HIGH, turn EVERY light bulb in the place on, and take ONE of my blue towels. He uses one towel, I use two. It felt like an inferno when I got here and I had to switch to green towels 🐽

And then. I put all of the grocks away and went out the back door to hang the bags up on the contraption there above the recycle bin. And then I turned around. What the heck is this chair doing here? The big heavy looking wooden one. Where did it come from? My guess was Hoton Lake. Although I’ve never seen this chair there, there is all kinds of unknown crapola in the shed.

He will not tell me anything about the chair except that he’s gonna fix it up. Yeah, roight. We have an odd collection of furniture here at the moomincabin and we need to re-jigger it but we do NOT need this chair so I hope this is not its intended final destination.

The Old Cabin is filled with cousins and we hung out with them for a while after a bit of rain chased me off the beach. We are ALL vaxxed. And now the refrigerator is at long last fixed and the GG is grilling Hawaiian brats from Best Choice (Hoton Lake), corn, and asparagus.

Cheers from the great not-so-white yooperland.

That means it doesn’t have a Freezer ‘hattan in it and I’m sorry buddy but I’m not there to fix it. Seeya tamarra.

Today. What is that smell? Alas, I KNEW what the smell was. It was the same smell we had last weekend when there was a dead rodent under the sink. We don’t have a constant rodent problem but they periodically come in so there are traps set but we forget they are set and…

I had to deal with this rodent myself. I do not LIKE to dispose of dead rodents. That’s the GG’s job. I especially don’t like to do this odious chore right now, knowing that our county has had hantavirus cases. The good news is (hahahahaha) I have a MASK (or four). So I masked up and fashioned a glub out of a plastic bag (the GG just bought glubs but I have no clue where he put them) and reached in, grabbed the trap, popped the rodent into the garbage, and took the bag out to the cart. Then I washed my hands happy birthday style, which I have not done for quite a few months.

Then. I had an errand at the Westgate Kroger and I needed gas. I have a love/hate relationship with the Shell station on the way to Kroger. It was the most convenient station for me on my way to Cubelandia (but not on the way back) but I *think* my debit card was once hacked from there. I’m not crazy about Speedway (the other direction) but couldn’t remember why except that the last time I pumped gas there my debit card wouldn’t work. But that happens all the time and I carry a couple of credit cards that do work and I pay them off once a week.

So, getting to Kroger was challenging because there’s a huge intersection that’s been closed because of a water main break and related HORRIFIC road damage and all of the little neighborhood streets are closed to thru traffic because people have been using them as speedways to get to and from Dexter and Jackson. I went all the way down to Crest and over to Liberty and back out. Don’t even try to follow all of this Planet Ann Arbor geographical mumbo-jumbo.

THEN. I went out to Wagner and up to Miller to get to the dreaded Speedway station. I fed it a credit card and that was fine and then I remembered why I don’t like to get gas there. Kee-reist, it was busier than all getout and there were lorries EVERYWHERE and one was blocking me from getting outta there and I had to back up and that was fun because there were cars going every which way behind me. I will say I like Cygnus’s backup cam a LOT better than the one the Frog Hopper had. It helped a lot but I CERTAINLY still swiveled my head.

So that was that and IIIII am having a freezer ‘hattan here in the back yard on this beautiful evening and I am all packed except for perishable grocks, phone, laptops, and cables. Packing food is a lot easier this year but I think I am experiencing PTSD from last summer because I am way more stressed about it than I probably need to be 🐽

The Commander once told me that she shifted her housekeeping routines, etc. about every three years. You know, cleaning “schedules”, grock shopping, menu plans, etc. At the time, I was in the throes of child-rearing (think teenagers?) and I thought, hmmmm… I change my routines about every five minutes.

I’m sure she went through a similar thing when we were kids. I remember one day when Bad Boyfriend was trying to get past First Base on our living room couch (no one else was home) and F-Troop (his term, from an old TV show) came galumphing up the back steps from the garage entrance. F-Troop was my mother, my little brother, and Tigger the dog who must’ve been in her garage shelter, otherwise, she’d’ve prob’ly been growling about the attempted shenanigans in the living room. Perhaps she WAS growling from her shelter anyway, sensing what mightta been going on. She was a SMART dog. Bad Boyfriend or not, that little group of mammals definitely resembled F-Troop, at least that day. I was 15 and both embarrassed by them and relieved that they arrived because I luvved that boyfriend but as much as I wanted to be ready for Second Base, I was NOT.

Nowadays, I get what The Comm was talking about. My grock shopping habits have shifted yet again. COVID force-shifted them and vax et al are shifting them yet again. NOOOWWWW? Being a full-time permanent telecommuter allows me to do my shopping at 0-skunk-30 any day of the week. Almost no customers are at the stores when they open and I (still a mask-wearing COVID coward) have always loved to shop ultra-early and now I can (masked).

Hahahahahaha! This early shopping taaaarrrs me out! Jeebus. I hit up the farmers market when it opened at seven. I bought my last load of shelling peas and a couple containers of hummus. Took them home, then hit up Plum when it opened at eight for a scandalous amount of meat, seafood, and other stuff ($200 worth) to take to the moomincabin for a week or so. And like can I siddown now?

And then the GG called me from Best Choice at Houghton Lake to ask if we needed anything? I couldn’t think and I couldn’t hear him but I think he bought boneless chicken breasts and cherry bratwurst. That’s great but we can also vax-venture into the Sault Ste. Siberian Meijer to pick stuff up. It isn’t Plum or farmers market but you CAN always get what you need.

A storm rolled through today, not a huge storm but enough to provide drenching rain and a bit of a cooldown. TeleCubelandia features a big nine-paned window almost from floor to ceiling and on the other side of meeee from the window are the fugliest bushes on earth. I imagine there are MANY other folks who’d’ve torn those things out ages ago. We can’t bring ourselves to because they provide habitat for birds, henries, and squirrels, etc., all great entertainment.

This setup is also why I haven’t MOVED teleCubelandia to a more office-like space but that is also because I really want to PAY Certified Kitchen Lady and her crew to help me re-design, well, my whole house (except for the kitchen and bathroom, which are already done). But that’s an argument. At the least (and this is VERY unpopular) I want to get rid of the Green Couch at long last. It is broken and every time it gets “fixed” it breaks again. Within days. And no, I don’t weigh 600 pounds or anywhere near that. It is a piece of Early In-law furniture that has seen better days. I did not sign up for it in the beginning and I never expected it to be part of my permanent office furniture. (We’ll talk about how many cFam members have been sick on the couch some other day – including yer fav-o-rite blahgger🐽)

Anyway. In the dark before the rain started today, I kept seeing these eensy weensy teensy tinesy lights winking on and off in the bushes. I could not figger this out until I saw one of the lights go off and a little body fly off. Fireflies. At something like two in the afternoon. I don’t know where they hang out but they left when the rain started.

I went to my bank’s ATM today. I have not used an ATM since B.C. I have hardly used cash since B.C. Now that I am going to the farmers market again, I need cash again. Wow, was this ATM fancy. It gave me all kinds of options and let me save certain settings (like no receipt) and it looked like I could even pick particular denominations but all I needed was 20s so I didn’t explore that. But I’ll be back. The only problem is that my bank is no longer in Maple Village so I had to go all the way out to Zeeb to use an ATM. Oh well, Cygnus needed some exercise.

Soooooo blaaaahhhhh and slodgy today. Oh, don’t worry, I’m not sick or anything, just kept having to prop my eyelids open. Was it the heat? Yes probably. Or more likely the humidity because as far as I know we didn’t get past the 80s today. Typical summer temperature here. I *determinedly* kept the doors and windows open and did NOT turn on the A/C. Ran the house fan early but had to turn it off for the stand-up so I could hear people.

Not that I didn’t get anything done today. I was up early to take my walk, then I made short work of the shambling mound of dishioshios I left for myself overnight and did a load of laundry. And work was what it was, a long series of small prodjects, questions, and tweaks, nothing too taxing, no big rabbit holes.

Outside in the back in the late afternoon with leftovers warming in the oven, here’s this young henry (this year’s model I believe) a few feet away from me nibbling on my flowers. Now there is Rumbly Thunder to the west. Weather apps show small pop-up type storms. With any luck we’ll get enough rain for at least a quick cool down? My hopes are not high.

Thinking about my friends and relations in the PacNW. The highest temperature I have experienced is 106, here on The Planet Ann Arbor in 2012. How do I remember that? Because at the time, I still had an old-fashioned analog indoor/outdoor thermometer in the Landfill Chitchen and the outdoor side GOT STUCK on 106. The Ninja had also reported 106 on my way home from Cubelandia. Then there was the time when both the outdoors and my baby 🐭 had temps of 104. It was roseola (already diagnosed) and I know it sounds odd but we actually sat in a kiddie pool to cool down. No central air in those days.

Cheers from a much more awake KW 🐸🐸🐸

P.S. A pop-up storm did come through, dumped a bunch of rain, knocked the power out momentarily (and I had to figure out how to re-a-start the dern switch). And gone… Marginally cooler but still humid…

Haircut? Haircut? Haircut? Yes yes yes! The last time I got my hair cut was March 2019. I am not a frequent hair cut person from the getgo but I do like to chop it all off once in a while. A mom bob please?

My fave hair person is Kaitlyn. She’s my Detroit beach urchin’s gal and she does a wonderful job on my scraggly old hair, turning me glamorous until the next time I wash my hair, which is always the next morning🐽. She’s based in Detroit and getting my hair cut had turned into a mother / daughter event culminating in lunch and whine at Green Dot or Ottava Via or wherever.

Fall of 2019 I was thinking of when I might next get her to bob my hair. Kaitlyn turns up her nose at the term “mom bob”. She is a professional and a perfectionist and she doesn’t really do “mom bobs”. But she also understands that I don’t really want anything ostentatiously fancy. Anyway. Before I got around to thinking about WHEN to get my hair cut again you know what happened, right? It starts with a C and ends with 19. And now my dance card is filling up with trips to the yooperland and Kaitlyn is busy with clients who have been waiting and may have worse issues to fix than hacking off a bunch of scraggly unruly hair.

So, back sometime in March 2021, my 🐭 asked if I wanted *her* to cut my hair. Well, yes I did. She is not a trained pro but she is pretty good and has done it before. That got postponed forever. First, we were not vaccinated. After we got vaxxed (together 🧡), she was busy or I was busy. I mean mostly she was busy. I am always busy but I am almost always HOME whereas she is an essential worker and travels quite a lot when she has time off.

Today! Both of the beach urchins and one of the SOs came over for dinner. I asked my 🐭 if she would [finally] cut my hair. YES and she brought her hair-cutting scissors for good measure. This crapola is what she cut off. Kinda looks like dog hair, eh? On her sister’s good advice, she did not try to cut it as short as Kaitlyn would have. That’s okay. It is short enough to bounce and when life settles down in the hair-cutting biz, I’ll pay Kaitlyn to make her magic.

I am the chief cook and bottle washer around here but I did not have to lift a FINGER tonight. Well except I INSISTED on doing the dishioshios and that’s kind of a mess but it’s my mess because earlier today I ALMOST ran the dishwasher but decided to wait and in the end there were too many dishes to fit into it so I washed some of the overflow by hand and left the rest soaking in the sink. I’ll make short work of the whole mess tomorrow morning. Tacos with chicken and friends, fancy rice with lime and whatever, and strawberry shortcake.

It was sooooo much fun but I am EXHAUSTED now. Everyone has checked in as home safe and the GG is [thankfully] space-i-fying me.

Oh yeah. 🐭 also gave the GG a fluff cut. He has been getting occasional haircuts throughout but the back of his neck was, well, fluffy 🐽.

This is what I started to write on Friday but we got porterized before I finished it and after whooping it up until a weeeee bit past my bedtime, I posted something else. Except… I didn’t post it until this morning. Wups.

So, on Friday, some key people were out, I was not in a hot seat of any kind, the GG was off visiting FlaMan, and it was R-A-I-N-I-N-G cats and dogs. Which was REALLY nice because boy oh boy it has been DRYYYYY.

I can always find things to do but then some interesting stuff came up on Instagram and I took a little break for a side trip into family history.

One of the beach urchins is an EXPERT at various fiber arts things. She knitted during class throughout high school and college and worked at a yarn store during those years. Spanish teacher? “You can’t knit in class.” After weeks of straight As? “Okay, you can knit in class!” Yarn store owner? “Sometimes people don’t take 🐭 seriously because she’s so young so I have to gently prod them in her direction – 🐭 is really the expert on that technique.” Yes. Me? I know how to knit. In no way can I do the kind of stuff 🐭 can do. We are all good at our own personal set of skills and talents.

Nowadays she has a collection of three spinning wheels, a couple sewing musheens, and now FOUR (count ’em) looms. She posted a pic of the newest one and said she thought they had all come from the Sault Ste. Siberia public schools. I gently corrected her. One (the one in the pic) is a loom I remember The Commander (her grandmother) using when I was a baby. When I was in high school, The Commander became a “home-ec” teacher (shhh, don’t tell her I called it “home-ec”, she’ll throw lightning bolts at me!). When she retired, she absconded with rescued the school loom, which nobody had used in decades. The other two were gifted by Our Northern Correspondent, who is a very talented fiber artist, rug hooking and basket making and probably other stuff I’m not remembering. I believe these are also rescued vintage looms.

The pics are of The Commander set up to use her loom on the moominbeach. I *think* this is before I was born but not sure. I knew I had them somewhere in the MASSIVE mess of pics in my MacBook photo app (digital hoarding, anyone?) but it took some creative searching to find them. Nevertheless, I persisted (and tagged the heck out of them once I found them!). And here they are.

So today started out early on a high note as I hit up the farmers market (for more peas, asparagus, and garlic scapes) and Plum (for other stuff), we took a river ride to see how high the river was, ending with a pass by Swan Corners to see the swan parents and their EIGHT cygnets. Then I did a massive pea shelling session, then… I found myself fighting a sinking spell in the late afternoon.

What isn’t happening today is dinner in the back yard with the beach urchins. Why? Because the Detroit freeways were so flooded that cars were abandoned all over the place in several FEET of water and I’m gonna guess that mess is still getting cleaned up. We said, “Don’t come over. We’ll do this tomorrow.” And now we’re under a tornado watch. We have had very little in-person contact with the Detroit beach urchin since February 2020 but what’s one more day?

I am still not ready to eat in downtown restaurants. Our state “opened up” this week. I figured downtown would be nutso even with torrential rain (which we needed) and restaurants might be under staffed.

I was ready to porterize us here at the Landfill. I made pizza. Just basic ones with pepperoni, mushrooms, and green pepper And cheese of course. Atop frozen dough from Zingerman’s via Argus Farm Stop delivery. Our guests were fine with that.

And Corona beer…

I got the invitation first thing in the morning on Facebook. I accepted it immediately. It’s the Birch Point Book Club and I already know all of the members or their relatives as well as some of *my* relatives.

I have never belonged to a book club before. Years ago, the Haisley Mafia passed around that old bridges of Madison County book with vague plans to get together someday to discuss it. We never did get around to it and I’m gonna guess if we had, there’d’ve been more w[h]ine and gossip than literary discussion 🐽. I had a love/hate relationship with that particular book. On the one hand, I couldn’t put it down. On the other hand, the writing was meh. Not that I could coherently tellya why.

This club has been going for something like five years. I knew about it but wasn’t formally invited. Oh, that didn’t bother me one iota. I know I could’ve joined at any time. I. Just. Didn’t. I am an introvert and not much of a joiner. It goes with my profession. Years ago I can remember the LSCHP telling somebody he could never get his team to do anything social. Actually, he could get us to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day down at the nearby wings joint.

Anyway. I read over 100 books a year, at least the last few years since the beach urchins introduced me to the GoodReads challenge and I (of course) started to compete with myself. Discuss them? I don’t have the chops to coherently discuss literature, even with the fantastic intro my high school honors English teacher Mr. “Piffer” provided me with.

I am mainly drawn to “literary fiction”, dystopian stuff, some sci-fi, “weird” stuff, and interesting memoirs but that’s an incomplete list. I dislike most romance crapola and chick lit and THAT’S an incomplete list. I sometimes get into reading through a series or a few books with related themes but often I just grab whatever looks good at the moment. And sometimes it’s HARD to pick the next book.

i have already read “Firekeeper’s Daughter”, which is the next read for the book club and loved it. Maybe I’ll read it again? We’ll see. Will I be able to discuss it? Hmmm. Fortunately people that are smarter than me apparently lead the discussions. Maybe they’ll let me be quiet at first until I get the hang of it. Of course, this particular book is set in my hometown so who knows what I will say. They might not be able to shut me up🐽

This is all contingent upon my “dance card” this summer. I need to get totally straight about the date of my beloved MacMu cousin Teri’s memorial event. It’s at our favorite restaurant in East Lansing and it turns out to be where she and her husband met. That’s all just background noise. I wouldn’t miss Teri’s memorial for any reason🧡🧡🧡

Just finished a thoughtful and often hilarious book about hoarding (Mess). The author describes his journey to clean up his apartment along with other hoarding-related topics. Famous hoarders and psychological issues and various hoarder support strategies and organizations among other things. I noted that many of the people he interviewed in the process admitted to have a bit of a hoarding thing going on themselves. That includes people with successful careers studying hoarders or helping people de-hoard. Go figger. We all have stuff.

This book had me laughing out loud any number of times. I think my favorite story was when the author was initially struggling to get started on his “project”. Unbeknownst to him, his girlfriend and her mother (who lived in nearby apartments) tried to foist a steamroller-type cleaning woman upon him. She was a known quantity and he didn’t want anything to do with her. One day his doorbell rang and by the time he got to it, no one was there. As it turned out, it was the steamroller. She had heard him inside and stalked off to tell his girlfriend and her mother that she knew he was in there WITH HIS MISTRESS. His girlfriend was cracking up when she reported this. This cracked meeeee up because it kinda reminds me of the kind of relationship I have with the GG. His mistress? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I mean, I send the GG off to hike with wimmen ALL THE TIME. A lot of wimmen don’t like to hike without a [safe] man (rightly so) and his absence space-ifies me. I didn’t sign up for the pandemic and its ensuing 24/7 togetherness.

There are a lot of theories about what causes people to hoard and I’m not sure it can be boiled down to any one thing or even a set of things. I will say that there were/are hoarders sprinkled here and there on both sides of my family as well as both sides of the GG’s. There are neatniks too and everything in between. I cannot figure a common personality or history theme or whatever. As the book touched on many times, our hoarders were/are generally people that we LOVE. We just don’t enjoy visiting them in their living quarters. I loved the author’s descriptions of the interesting odors he encountered when visiting the homes of extreme hoarders, like one guy who had to kind of climb up a pile of crapola and “shimmy” into his house near the ceiling to get in and out. Been there, done that. I mean the odors, not the shimmying 🐽 (By the time the author visited, a very kind neighbor had gently helped the hoarder decrease the hoard so you didn’t have to climb and shimmy.)

I am not a hoarder. You can run a vacuum cleaner through my house without a problem. No “Goat Paths.” But we do have a lot of stuff that I would be happy to get rid of and I am at about the END of the things *I* want to get rid of for now.

Oh dear, I will have to cut this short. The GG just got off the phone with MDUH (who is moving) and has offered to take a table saw and a power washer and I fergit what else off MDUH’s hands. THAT, my friends, started to turn into an argument about WHO HAS THE MOST STUFF AROUND HERE🐽 I DO NOT but I guess I am done for tonight.

Mess is a good book if you are into that kind of read. Some Goodreads folks seemed to think the author sounded “pretentious” or whatever, maybe because he travels a lot and his girlfriend seems to pay for it? I dunno. That sounds like sour grapes to me. I found him hilarious among other things. To each her own.

…got majorly hosed overnight. According to unnamed sources, it is the largest water main break the city has ever experienced. It happened at 3:30 AM or thereabouts and early this morning there were about a gazillion helicopters flying around our end of town. We didn’t know WHAT was going on. Later in the day, we decided they were probably scoping out the extent of the damage.

First pic is looking north on N. Maple through the Jackson/Maple intersection. I used to drive north to home on this almost every day.

Next up we are looking south through the same intersection. I used to drive south to Cubelandia almost every day.

This is one of the most notorious intersections in town. It has been improved greatly over the years by the addition of right-turn only lanes in strategic places and a double left turn lane if you are approaching it on Jackson from the west. I have been dealing with it FOREVER from the days we bought grokkeries mostly at the Westgate Kroger. Plum Market dramatically changed that but I have still shopped at Kroger fairly frequently and am starting to again. For 13 years, I navigated this intersection twice a day to get to Cubelandia and back. If I was still driving over there, we’d’ve known about this earlier than the late afternoon.

Pics by the GG who walked over there while I was deep into a work rabbit hole.

P.S. To clarify some rather vague stuff in yesterday’s blahg, the Youghiogheny raft trip was definitely a guided tour. Five or six rafts maybe? What I mis-remembered is that we didn’t have a guide in OUR raft. There were guides in some rafts and other guides who went solo in kayaks and I remember one sitting (grinning) over a particularly dangereuse eddy. Stay away from this spot! I’m sure even in those days the outfitter was capable of handling a quick rescue if needed. People can be really stoopid around water.

I have often told people that when I met my husband he was cooking a can. That’s not exactly true. We met the night before but the next time I saw him was the next day and he was definitely cooking a can. On a mini-stove in a campground 300 miles away in Pennsylvania. It was a white water rafting trip on the Youghiogheny River arranged by my cousin’s work, a gov’t contracting tech company I later went to work for and stayed at something like 15 years.

The GG finagled his way into MYYYY raft and that’s us in the front (embiggen). My cousin and her boyfriend (now husband) are in the back. My memory of this trip was that we were in a raft with a GUIDE. Not. I enjoyed this trip but I am NOT a white water rafter and I have not done it since. I was TERRIFIED! We got “training” about how to deal with hydraulics, etc. if we fell out of the raft and I kept thinking, “I am never gonna remember this stuff if I fall out.” Of course, just about the first thing that happened was that my cousin fell outta the raft. Fortunately there were no hydraulics in that area and her boyfriend pulled her back in without incident.

After that trip, I told my cousin I thought the GG liked me. Like LIKED me. She laughed it off and said something about the GG liking “all pretty girls.” We didn’t connect immediately but since he worked with my cousin we ran into each other from time to time and the next winter after a couple of trips to the moldy old cFam cabin at Houghton Lake, we were an item and here we are.

When the first trip to HL was being planned, I was surprised it actually happened. We were 20-somethings then and people, especially males, were not known to be very reliable, at least not in my experience. But a bunch of us took one trip up and then we took another trip and I met various cFam sibs on THAT trip and I was thinking something like, “This is a family I would love to be a part of!” After that, me and the GG started traveling up there together without work people. And. Here. We. Are. Orange Arguments and all 🎃🎃🎃

The thing is, I’m not *exactly* sure who sent me this pic. It came from My Dear Uncle Harry’s email account. Harry is a highly intelligent, sharp-minded person and he uses the internet. I’m sure he can handle email completely competently. It’s just that I’ve never RECEIVED an email message from him before. In any case, I LOVE IT!

Thanks Harry (or whoever) for the wonderful blast from the past!

That’s my title but it is not [mostly] my topic.

The Landfill Freezer has been outta control since March something 2020. I hit the wall on Friday when I had to empty it THREE TIMES to find a packet of Jonah crab meat I ordered from Luke’s Lobster a few months ago and never got around to using. I wanted to use it Friday and I COULD NOT FIND IT! FINALLY! On the third emptying, I spied my little packet of crab hanging off the back of the second shelf from the bottom. Whew! I won’t tell you how much that stuff costs (the GG does NOT want to know🐽) but I was happy to find it and made a crab, kale, cannellini, pasta, lemon casserole-style dish with it.

The refrigerator has somehow seemed easier to manage and is often quite empty. Over the last few days it has gone from quite empty to overstuffed. Dangerously so, especially in the form of some gazpacho I made yesterday. I put it in a big Copco bowl topped with a silicone flower lid. After maneuvering around that contraption for a couple days and slopping some soup on the adjacent egg carton, I decided it was an accident waiting to happen and found another container with a tightly fitting lid to put it in. And then cleaned most of the rest of the refrigerator out.

So nothing very exciting here today. We won’t talk about last night’s orange arguments. I’m reading a book published in 2021 (Legends of the North Cascades) where an “orange menace” is mentioned occasionally although (so far) he seems to be a momentarily passing theme. I like the book so far but I don’t think it’ll quite get a five from me but we’ll see. I’m not all that far into it. If the author tries to jam COVID-19 into it, my rating will sink but not sure that’s in the cards. Note that I HATE the “Orange Menace” too, just hope that this novel doesn’t handle him in a ham-fisted way.

I did give a five to “The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna”, a multi-generational Italian-American family saga. I really enjoyed this book but trigger warning for sexual abuse/incest survivors. There were hard things to read but I loved the overall story and the many strong female characters. Note that most of the male characters were also “good guys” but the protagonist(s) were female.

’tis the season and I am gonna make up for last year by hitting up the farmers market and/or Argus for as many shelling peas as I can get my hands on. This is half of what I shelled today. I like to shell them outside but had to wait until various rain storms moved through. I waited happily. We need rain.

I did manage to snag some shelling peas last year. I think I got some from Argus? And maybe my 🐭 snagged some from the actual market? At any rate, I was grateful for the peas I was able to snag last year but it’s nice to be able to obtain them in person. I am gonna go to the market every Wednesday and Saturday (the days it’s open) to buy more until pea season is over. It’s also cool that being a permanent telecommuter, I have TIME to hit up the market on WEDNESDAYS! A little bonus today, when I approached beautiful Cygnus with my peas, etc., the young man parked next to me started gushing over her. He’d owned a Crosstrek he loved but needed a twuk (as my brother used to call them).

Shelling peas are not to be confused with sugar snap peas and if the peas are not marked, I always have to ask. A lot of people love snap peas. You don’t have to shell them. I find the pods “stringy” and am not a fan. To each her own. The peas I got Wednesday and today (from two different vendors) were GORGEOUS!

So we have had dry weather here but the eastern yooperland is so dry that I got a weather alert today to watch for faaaars. Although rain is more typical of the yooperland, we periodically have dangerously dry summers and forest fires do happen. I became aware of this when we had a dry summer when I was about 10 and actually I believe a fire tried to get going a mile or so away from us. It was in a visible, accessible location and one of my aunts (I think) spotted it and it got put out before it was able to spread. Being a highly imaginative kid, I remember being scared to go to bed every night, expecting my parents to pull us out of bed in the middle of the night to flee a forest fire. And every time we drove past the DNR (or whatever) office on our way into town, we noted Smokey Bear’s faar danger rating – low to extremely high or whatever. Kinda like the daily COVID reports we get today.

Copper River salmon on the grill, asparagus and friends (scallions and garlic scapes), and leftover rice 🐽. Peeeeeas are in the freezer for now.

P.S. I didn’t see our friend Victoria of Protective Fish at the market today but her booth was set up. Yaaaay!