I dunno where the heck to go here. Whaddya do when beloved family members follow the extreme right Orange Baboon crapola and refuse to get vaccinated. And what about those rich folks who insist that COVID-19 is a hoax even as they get vaccines for themselves. Like the Orange Baboon did.

I am fully vaxxed but I know it’ll be a while before my immune system fully kicks in against COVID-19. I am happy to keep doing grocery curbside/delivery for grocks with a side serving of Amazon. I will probably continue to do curbside/delivery forever although I will definitely go back into stores again.

But this is where I am. If you want to live with me or even socialize with me, you need to get vaxxed. It’s not all that bad. I had NOOOOO side effects. None. Nada. No sore arm. Do it do it do it do it. COVID is NOT a hoax. The only way we’re gonna get rid of it is by vaxxing everyone. Go for it. Please.

Love, Kayak Woman

I’m not sure if my blahggy friend Margaret remembers this but when I posted this pic almost 10 years ago, I was searching for a name for our new Subaru Outback and she came up with the Mean Green Musheen. That worked for me but don’tcha know with this family “Frog Hoppin'” almost immediately got inserted into it. Because green. And frogs.

The GG wanted to buy a brown car. He was thinking of woodsy type colors. I vehemently nixed brown. I said something like, “If you buy a brown car, you know what it’ll look like in 10-15 years.” Brown? Really? Why does anyone even make brown cars?

This loverly vee-hickle has been in the fambly for almost 10 years now. We turned it over to one of the beach urchins two summers ago when we bought Moooon Yoooonit. After she bought Orange Betty Oriole a month or so ago, the Frog Hopper returned to our driveway. Why? How do I count the ways? 1) Because our driveway is a MUCH more convenient place for folks to come and take a look than the “mountain” roads surrounding the beach urchin’s house. 2) Because ALL of the service/maintenance records are HERE in The Landfill, neatly filed. 3) The GG knows the vee-hickle inside and out and is willing to talk to people about it because… 4) He is retaaaarrrred (and doesn’t have anything better to do 🐽🐽🐽).

Anyway, she seemed to go to a good home to people who have experience with older cars and asked good questions. Like, when was the timing belt last changed?. Uh, [after much rummaging/googling] she doesn’t HAVE a timing belt, she has a timing chain…

The Car Gods were apparently shining down on us today because a half hour or so before the Frog Hopper sales transaction was scheduled… A car drove by. It drove by again, more slowly. It tentatively parked. I have various Amazon deliveries all week and I can’t really keep track of them and sometimes those folks drive unusual vee-hickles. This seemed different. Guess what? This young man was interested in my NINJA!!! He had spied it up in the top of the driveway with the Frog Hopper and Mooon Yooonit in front of it. Holy Toledo!

What’s a little crazy is that I have a new vee-hickle almost “built” online. I just need to double-check everything, “pull the trigger”, and write a check. So we will be selling the Ninja soon as much as I HATE to. But for now, the Ninja is not posted for sale anywhere. I don’t drive it very often in these COVID days but I do drive it, especially when the GG is outta town.

I dunno if this young man will end up as the new owner but we did take his number, so he has first dibs if he still wants it and can pay for it, etc. “Is it stick?”, he asked. Yes, it is. He shared that he wasn’t very good at stick yet but that he wanted more practice. I was encouraging.

Today degenerated into first-world household pandemonium and this is the “money” shot. Yes, really.

So the city is installing new water meters. You know the kind. They infiltrate your brain with the dreaded 5G network or whatever it is. Or do they infiltrate your water supply with microchips that implant themselves every time you take a drink of water? I don’t really understand this stuff. I do NOT subscribe to conspiracy theories.

Anyway, piece of cake right? The city recently replaced our gas meter and that took like five minutes (inside the house to check that the furnace/water heater started back up) plus weeks of entertainment out in the street. What could go wrong?

Water meter? Not so much fun. Five minutes to replace the meter but then they couldn’t get the water back on. As this saga dragged on, I was getting nervous. I can live without heat. I can live without lucky-shucky. And we have a generator that can help with those. Water? I cannot live without water. We RARELY lose water here. We have city water (not a well) and a gas water heater so no matter what the other utilities do, we ALWAYS have nice hot running water.

Today? Hmmm… Trying to think it through… I am very familiar with throwing buckets of water down terlets but there’s no supply of water hanging out here. I am not a prepper. Plus there’s drinking water and if you KNOW me, you know I don’t do well without a shower first thing in the morning.

I was emailing back and forth with my cuzzint Pooh this afternoon and she reminded me of what “running water” meant days gone by at our cabins at the moominbeach. We had cold running water in our kitchen sinks (and big kettles to heat it) delivered via a garden hose connected to our uncle’s well. If that system failed (and it rarely did), there was always Gitchee Gumee. You could do what my old coot called running water: “You run down to the lake with a bucket, fill it up, and run back up.”

The city kept saying we’d have water TODAY (they don’t want people pooping outside) but I was still nervous until I heard a strange noise behind me in the chitchen. An open tap was starting to RUN WATER! Yay! Until that happened, it was looking like they might have to dig a big hole out by the street. I’m glad they didn’t although it would’ve given me a much better pic for today.

P.S. Neighbors on both sides offered water if we needed it. I am grateful 🧡 but so glad we didn’t.

So, after MUCH procrastination, I finally kick-started myself into starting what I know is going to be an excruciating process to organize and weed out family photos. One. “Album”. At. A. Time. “Album?” They aren’t all stashed in neat albums, instead there are albums in many form factors and boxes and ziploc bags and some old framed photos. You name it.

The first album I grabbed was greatly encouraging. It was filled with crappy photos of European scenery my parents took with a cheap camera. I trashed almost all of those. The second album… I got rid of a whole bunch of identical CRAPPY sunset photos my dad took at the moomincabin in the 1990s. I took a bunch of similar ones. My iPhone takes photos 100 times better than those. But there were also other things in there. Parties at my dad’s bank for one. I stashed those to reconsider later.

Today. I hit a bit of a snag… It was MacMu relatives that I mostly have never met because they died before I was born or I was too young to know I was meeting them. The Commander had LABELED THE PHOTOS! She didn’t usually use last names but I’ve been hearing about people like “Aunt Lillian” and “Grandpa Lathers” and “Carrie Chapman” my whole life. The Comm obviously knew these people intimately. Me not so much. Plus, her family lived in the Detroit area and I grew up in the Yooperland. We certainly visited her family a few times a year so I know all my first cousins, etc.

It was enough to get me to dust off my Ancestry app. I bought a subscription a few years ago but don’t use it often. Today I fell into a rabbit hole. I think I sorta knew that Carrie Chapman was one of my great-grandmothers but I didn’t know which one (mom’s dad’s mother). She may also have been the person who claimed Johnny Appleseed as an ancestor. His real name was Chapman so it may or may not be true. If true, I certainly didn’t get any of that DNA since I have a Black Thumb when it comes to gardening.

Today’s rabbit hole doesn’t mean I am diving deeply into genealogical research. What I did today was to stand in the center of it all swinging wildly and probably some of it was not accurate. What helps with that branch of my family is that many of them settled in what used to be a farming area near Detroit. Now not so much. The big multi-generational farmhouse that The Comm grew up in was replaced by a Burger King and not sure what’s there now. (I was able to tour that house once but only vaguely remember it.)

And then… Man oh man. When I want to put something in the trash. I NEED TO PUT IT IN THE TRASH. I MEAN OUTSIDE! I put the photos I trashed in a small wastebasket near my “office”. This afternoon, I heard the GG rummaging in that area. WHAT. ARE. YOU. DOING? He saw photos and wanted to investigate. NOOOOOOO. These photos are MINE to save or trash and I will trash them if I don’t find value in them. I have been in the cFam family forever and I SHOULD KNOW BETTER. I think The Commander would approve but I am glad that she at least lightly labeled the pics in that one album because a better picture of my MacMu family tree is emerging.

I chose this title because when I posted this on FB, a couple people who didn’t know my brother (who died in 2005) thought this was my husband. There is a resemblance in this photo but they do/did not really look alike.

It is interesting that my family and the GG’s share similar heritage, being mainly British Isles/German. I am mainly Scot and he is not. He has more German and Irish than I do but I have some of both. I have NO French but my children do 🐸.

Years ago, we took a trip to Fla to visit the GG’s parents with our then toddler (first child) and her Mean Old Grumpy Beautiful aunt Susie. We had a great time but it was interesting that often when were oot and aboot people sometimes presumed that Suz was married to the GG and I was his sister. Why? I think it was because she was a beautiful redhead and me and the GG both have(had) blond(e) hair. If you don’t spend a whole lot of time analyzing our other facial features, I suppose we could be taken for siblings, especially if you were trying to assess whether the redhead or the blonde was somebody’s wife.

Facebook kinda blew up (in our little corner of the world) after I made this my profile pic and then the GG did the same. My brother was kind of a heart throb for women but he wasn’t someone who “horned around”. He married at 22 (or so) and never cheated on his wife or family unless you count borrowing a tuba from the local high school cheating. Actually that might equate “horning around”. Sorry to get down into that rabbit hole.

I attended his wedding (WITH THE GG!) in Houghton Michigan. I didn’t marry the GG until a couple years later. Now that I think about it, we picked up my step Grandma Bolette and drove her to my parents’ house in Sault Ste. Siberia. We continued to Houghton that night and the parents drove her the next day. We drove her back afterward. Man oh man…

Done done done for the night. Love y’all/yous.

I’ll ‘fess up to waking up SUPER grumpy and cranky today. I have still experienced ZERO vax side effects so I couldn’t help wondering if “grumpy” was a side effect. I suspect it’s more related to the marital discord we experienced over the taxes last night. Oh don’t worry, this is a First World problem. We go through a version of it every year. Voices may be raised but violence doesn’t ensue and the tax stuff was signed and sent off this morning.

Because “everybody” at work seems to be getting the vax this week, we spent probably the first 15 minutes of the morning stand-up talking about our vaccine experiences. The stand-up is supposed to last 15 minutes total 🐽. I mentioned that I remain side effect free after two days. Except that I was EXTREMELY grumpy. Could that be a side effect? That got a laugh. People in general are experiencing mild things like arm pain and I don’t think grumpy is a real side effect.

My work team is not exactly the youngest bunch of folks except for our colleagues on the Indian subcontinent. I would place a strong wager that I am the eldest at this point. I so miss W1.5 and FZ and others who have retaaaaared. It’s such a nice cozy little job and somehow I managed to snag it after the age of 50. I wasn’t even really looking for a job. I don’t expect I’ll ever get booted out because of age, unless I get truly loopy but that is unlikely for at least another couple decades. It’d be more likely because of downsizing (and I am not naive enough to think that age isn’t ever a factor in the decisions involving who to lay off). It’s okay. I would be sad to be laid off but I am prepared for it if it happens.

Dopey? That would be the GG. I tried to tell him something like THREE times this morning and he kept walking out of the room or the front door or wherever like he hadn’t even heard me. Sometimes he does that when he’s wearing earbuds but not today. Fortunately it wasn’t important and anyway, iDeep pinged me from India at that moment and I knew HE was interested in my opinion. Eventually the GG came home from dropping the taxes in the mail and a “ride” and crashed out on the couch in the back room for a few hours. He was a bit more lucid after he woke up.

I was looking for this pic whatever day it was I wrote the book blahg about Firekeeper’s Daughter. No luck and yet another note to self, ORGANIZE YOUR DAMN PHOTOS!!!

Today my “memories” served it up. 10 years ago today, we were at The Commander’s house in Sault Ste. Siberia for the weekend and I got up early as usual to walk down to the locks and back. That particular morning, Mr. Golden Sun was NOT hiding behind a cloud. Instead he served up this beautiful gradient. I had an early iPhone at that time and look what it did to the colors. The one I have now (it’s just the XS, not one of those fancy 3-camera ones) would probably take a more accurate pic but I really like this old one.

The Comm was hopping around that weekend, cooking for us and carousing just like the old days. A few weeks later, I had to make an emergency trip up to the yooperland with the result that eventually I had to move her to an assisted living facility. I was hoping this would work out in a positive way. We did not have to sell her house and it was a half mile up the escarpment so she could visit it pretty much whenever she could get a ride there. I once suggested she take taxis and we acted out *this* little “twitter” play:

The Commander [indignantly]: WELL! Do you know what a taxi costs?
Kayak Woman: No mom, what does it cost?
The Commander [outraged]: FIVE DOLLARS!

For a split second or so I toyed with the idea of giving her an envelope full of five dollar bills to pay for taxis or trying to arrange to pre-pay the taxi company for rides but I let it go. I couldn’t help remembering though, that when I was a small child and we only had one car, she called taxis all the time. I think they were 50 cents then, which was probably as much as five dollars is in 21st century dollars.

It is very hard to lose your independence. She maintained hers into her early 90s and gave it up with great difficulty.

Anyway, I don’t walk this part of the escarpment any more. Her house is long sold and when we go up there now, we stay at the moomincabin, seven miles or so up the river as the crow flies, to where it makes the turn into Gitchee Gumee, and I walk the beach.

So far I am feeling FINE if psychologically a little muddled due to the surrounding background emotional and non-specific anxiety issues. I mean, it’s been a looooong year. But it’s okay, I know how to deal with that kind of crapola.

It was harder than heck to find a vax here in the southeast Great Lake State, even for us old baggies. In the end, it was my mouse who found it. She doesn’t qualify via age (yet) but she is a grocery worker. Even so, grocery workers didn’t seem to be prioritized anywhere. Why, I cannot fathom. They are front-line essential workers! Nevertheless, she persisted and found a church in Ypsilanti that was partnering with Rite Aid for a popup clinic. Grocery workers were on their list. We registered and got in. It was very well organized and the staff was lovely.

Oddly enough, the day after I told my boss I would be MIA for a while today, she and a whole bunch of co-workers had also snagged appointments. Most of them are going to Ohio. That state apparently has more vaccine than it has demand for and some stores are taking walk-ins. One theory put forth by the “experts” on nextdoor neighbor is that more people in Ohio are resisting the vaccine, the implication being that political reasons are in play.

Thanks to my mouse who drove me over there and my lizard who ordered us a pizza for tonight. I am in fine shape for cooking (knock on wood) but it’s a place I’ve been wanting to try and I think she wanted to do something for us. Best daughters!

What’s disheartening is that our state’s case numbers are skyrocketing again. There were a couple days of 500 in February. Today we had over 4000. And we won’t even talk about Fla, where everyone seems to have given up. People, keep those masks on and get those shots into your arms. We are not done with this yet.

Well. One thing that happens tomorrow is that the Soo Locks opens for the 2021 season. It’s happening a day early, midnight tonight, March 24th. I’m not exactly sure when this pic was taken. It was at least 10 years ago or so? It prob’ly wasn’t the Polar Vortex Year (2014) because we wouldn’t have been walking the beach that winter and the botes navigating Gitchee Gumee were ramming through the ice they were locked in.

I continue to be extremely upset and befuddled about some of the incoherent political rants I see on facebook from people I think should know better. I dunno if any of these folks read my blahg but I am kinda horrified. I dunno why y’all/yous (facebook posters) think that the Orange Baboon did anything to help our country. Did y’all/yous ever read any of his tweets? No. You didn’t. And you said so. Y’all/yous should have. He doesn’t care about you.

I’m angry but I kinda get that you are concerned about your/our retaaaaarment income. I am concerned too but I’m probably okay but I am concerned about other folks. Read (or watch) Nomadland. I LOVE to travel around in our cute little Lyme Lounge camping trailer. But. I DO NOT HAVE TO LIVE IN THE LYME LOUNGE FULL TIME! I love sleeping in it parked next to the moomincabin or the Group Home or a state park near a bathroom with showers, or even the driveway at our house. We do not live in the Lyme Lounge because it’s the only dwelling we own.

And if you are in a position to actually pay your employees enough wages to pay for housing, food, utilities, and health care, PLEASE PAY FOR THAT! And don’t complain about Obamacare…

The call interrupted my VERY IMPORTANT (🐽🐽🐽) work this afternoon. “Will you go out to the Hoton Lake webcam and copy a bunch of pics down into a folder?” Why? Because the next door neighbors had their garage torn down today. And so I did. (And BTW, I didn’t know I could drag photos from my browser into a folder until today).

This is a change worth documenting. The cFam bought their land/cabin back in the 60s. At the time, most of the cabins were very rustic sometimes ramshackle structures. They did have indoor plumbing because with the population density in that area even then, outhouses and even septic tanks would be a bad idea. Otherwise? The cFam cabin was set on a slab and when the yard flooded (often), the cabin flooded. We used to joke that the Gumper (a WWII Navy guy who served on the Hornet) was trying to use caulk to keep the water from coming in.

And then there was the time that we and our toddler daughter turned in upstairs late one Friday evening. As we were settling down, the Uncly Uncle arrived and promptly dropped his pillow into a few inches (yes) of water downstairs in the kitchen. Splash-Shit!

One time I was prattling along with a couple of Haisley moms about the cFam cabin’s flooding problems. At a break in my monologue, an open-mouthed mom asked something like, “Doesn’t that rot out the walls?” Well, yes. Yes it does. LOL!

Eventually, a few years after the Gumper died, his children formed an ownership LLC and they tore the place down and built a new, modern chalet-style dwelling. Modern heat and plumbing and laundry facilities and probably most important it is built high enough that no amount of water in the yard can flood it.

The cFam neighbors that we knew for many years were the same ones the cFam kids knew when they were kids in the 60s. Those folks are dead and the new folks who bought that rustic cabin are apparently working on updating their property.

I don’t watch the Hoton Lake webcam frequently but others do. One of the funniest, if you want to call it that, series of webcam pics happened a bunch of years ago. I was working at Cubelandia and the GG told me to look at the webcam. In the first pic, the pontoon bote was there safely in its hoist. In the next pic, like 20 minutes later, THERE WAS NO BOTE! Say what? TORNADO… It’s okay. The Bote Boyz (cFam and outlaws) fixed it all up quick and we’ve been taking it to the Tiki Bar ever since. Except last summer…

I haven’t been to Hoton Lake since February 2020 because COVID. Miss it and hope to get back soon, after VAX.

That’s what I was doing when I looked up to get this pic of the leafless tree above me. I don’t think I actually noticed the plane and its vapor trail until after I took the pic?

Doesn’t our blue sky look beautiful? It is and it was in the 60s when I took the pic. Mouse was doing an outside visit before her work. Her purpose was to take pics of the Frog Hopper so she can sell it but she and the GG were walking around the yard talking about gardening and composting and whatever. I am a TERRIBLE gardener. I like the idea of growing things but I don’t find it very much fun. The GG mentioned some ideas that I hope he acts on.

As much as we are enjoying Mr. Golden Sun, man oh man, do we need rain! Notice I didn’t say we needed snow. Done with snow for 2021 although I am pretty sure we’ll get more. We’re now at that post spring equinox time of year that when we do get snow, I don’t usually bother shoveling because I know it will probably melt the next day and not re-freeze as a slick sheet of ice. But we do need rain. A lot of it.

I finished Firekeeper’s Daughter today. I could certainly spot some flaws but I loved this book. It was set in my home town. There were a couple of locations that I didn’t exactly recognize but mostly I did and I could sorta figger where the protagonist lived, which *may* have been up in the neighborhoods on the escarpment where my parents lived when they bought my grandparents’ retirement home, which was comfortable but certainly not fancy. It took a couple of years to sell that place

I might have more to say about this book but in the meantime, I am wrapped up in COVID vaccination discussions, aka we’re getting there. Once again, I am sooooo glad my parents didn’t have to deal with this crapola. Oh man, all the days we had lunch at Penny’s Kitchen and Karl’s Cuisine and the Palace Saloon. Love the little city of Sault Ste. Siberia.

This lovely is Softy Beanbag, a fave personality since just about forever. She dates from a big birthday party we held a bazillion years ago for the younger beach urchin. In addition to all of the younger kids, we also invited a friend of the older beach urchin for “company”. I’m thinking this was 4th and 1st grade. We didn’t expect her to bring a gift but she did and it was Softy Beanbag.

My 🐭 pretty much immediately dressed her up in some lace panties and a couple other clothing items that I *think* The Commander made but maybe they were in fact stolen from a doll or whatever. The next time I met up with the moom who helped choose Softy and showed her the lace panties, she CRACKED UP!

I may say too much here but Softy’s owner was/is what I learned to call a spirited child/person. I suspect I was similar but I am old and taaaaared now and prefer to watch the children play. Like Becquet (6 today, I THINK) learning to ride a two-wheeler and Branch Manager Petra (2 years) carrying a branch almost as big as she. But I digress.

There were times when I was at the moomincabin with my kids without the GG. He was gainfully employed and I wasn’t. The reverse is true today. Softy’s owner approached telephone calls with her dad (or anyone) with quite a bit of trepidation in those days. I don’t particularly do well with phone calls myself so I understood this. Softy was usually tasked to stay on The Planet Ann Arbor with the GG in those days, so when we connected by telephone, he would put Softy on the phone to talk to the younger beach urchin.

Softy Beanbag is still here at the Landfill and although we may eventually adopt out a lot of our stuffed aminals, Softy will stay here with us. Her owner is a full-fledged adult now and doesn’t need to talk to the GG or anyone through Softy.

A quote from the first chapter in the book I started after work today:

I cut through the parking lot behind the student union toward the north end of campus. The bluff showcases a gorgeous panoramic view of the St. Marys River, the International Bridge into Canada, and the city of Sault Sainte Marie, Ontario.

Yes. I have walked this walk early so many times. I walked it from my parents’ house up on the escarpment, the one they moved to when I was in college. It is SPECTACULAR when you happen to hit it when the sun comes up. Even if it’s still dark, the lights from the locks and bridges to Canananada are gorgeous and if you are lucky there may be a freighter going through.

Once, post-911 / pre-COVID, I arrived at the locks park as a freighter was going through. (It might’ve been the freighter in the pic – a salty – but not sure.) The locks had opened for the year at midnight and it was dark when I got there at 7:00 AM. I approached the person on duty at the “guard house” saying, “I’m your first tourist!” They looked at me like I was nuts. I showed that all I was carrying was my iPhone and they waved me on in. What a world we are forced to live in these days.

So I became aware of the book “Firekeeper’s Daughter” last fall and it finally dropped this week. I rather laboriously plodded through my last book and jumped on to download this one today. I don’t know the author personally but she grew up in Sault Ste. Marie (Michigan) and the surrounding areas and I think some of my yooper friends actually have met her.

This is a YA fiction book and I am loving it. Yes, when you drive south of town, you turn left at the Dairy Queen corner to get to the middle and high school. Except I only went to that high school the last two years of my public school career. Before that, I walked “downtown” across the canal on the Johnston Street bridge. Man that was a cold walk when the temps were well below zero.

More on this when I finish it with the caveat that I am not Native American in any way shape or form and so I can’t begin to understand all of the context surrounding the issues discussed in this book. I grew up there but I come from a WASPy type family.

Somebody was complaining on Nextdoor Neighbor earlier this week that My Fave Grock store had stopped stationing folks out front to sanitize carts. I had noticed this when picking up curbside but figgered it was because “we” — via science — have pretty much figgered out that COVID is not readily spread by touching things. Not that it’s bad to keep things clean in general, but this cart sanitizing stuff at the store entrance is theatre. Apparently changes were also made inside but I haven’t been inside a grockery store since early March 2020 so we won’t go there. But some of it was about the cashiers and I do have opinions there.

The problem is that the conversation QUICKLY devolved into discussions about what grocery workers are paid/should be paid and then it went further down the rabbit hole surrounding why people are working these “low-level” jobs and shouldn’t education be more affordable and blah-de-blah-de-blah, well, there was TOOOOOO MUCH and I had to quit reading it. Don’t these Nextdoor neighbor people have JOBS? Sigh, I know not everyone posting to Nextdoor neighbor is employed.

*I* have experience running a cash register. It wasn’t a grocery store, it was Tempo, a now defunct discount store similar to KMart. I worked there summers and xmas vacays during college as a “checkout girl”. Yes, we were mostly female.

I *loved* that job. This was back in the day when a cashier used a mechanical musheen with rows and rows of keys to press. Not only did we have to press buttons for an item’s price, EVERY item also had a “department number” and certain items also had a “tag number”. We had to calculate the sales tax by adding up numbers (in our heads) on a set of little tabs that sprung up when we hit “total” and the final price showed up in the display. And we had to “count back” change when people paid cash (which they MOSTLY did in those days). There were quite a few checks (which were a pain) and a few credit cards (which were a MAJOR pain in those days). Complete flip from nowadays when we swipe or tap or whatever aka buy online🐽🐽🐽

I was GOOD at that stuff. I had a lot of the stuff in the store memorized, at least the department number and price, tags were more related to what we called “soft lines”, which is mostly clothing and changed all the time. Because I didn’t have to touch each item in order to swipe it over a scanner, I could often get a customer’s purchases “rung up” almost before they had them on the conveyor belt. (Wait! Did we even have a conveyor belt? Not sure.)

Cashiers deserve MUCH MORE than the minimum wage they are typically paid. Today’s equipment is space age compared to my old mechanical cash register. I’m sure it calculates the sales tax and the change for those few customers who pay cash. Still I’m sure there is a lot of stuff for those folks to learn to do. Plus they are responsible for MONEY and for CUSTOMER SERVICE. And CUSTOMER SERVICE is one of the worst parts of the job but we’ll go there some other day. I was good at it but there were always THOSE customers.

I’ll quit for now but I am ALWAYS polite to cashiers everywhere. They are under-appreciated and underpaid. As a customer who was once a cashier, I can almost always tell when a cashier is dealing with a difficult situation or customer and I always try to be patient, not to mention offer a few words of support when it gets to be my turn if it seems appropriate to do so.

My parents took so many crappy pics of their trips to Europe but there isn’t ONE of MEEEEEE running my cash register at Tempo 😥. Then again, I probably wouldda shooed them outta the store if they had tried that🤣

A li’l Insty play this afternoon…

Lizard Breath [seeing the above pic, that I posted on Instagram]: Keep an eye on the laundry detergent…

KW: I think it’s too late 🐽🐸

Yes, the Froooog is still at it with his main vices, which are chugging “londry” detergent with a chaser of Listerine, then sleeping it off in the “londry” basket. He can’t abscond with the POC any more since it hasn’t been around since, hmmm, I dunno, maybe 2007? Our newer automotive vee-hickles have more sophisticated locking technology. He *does* occasionally take off on Buoy 22 for little flying excursions… I don’t have the keys to that. If you see it up there, you’ll have to report him to the Coast Guard.

I am also posting a pic of a St. Patrick’s Day pre-pandemic. We were porterized at the OT with Froooogggy and this is a GOOD photo!

P.S. I think St. Urho’s Day is wonderful (it was yesterday). I am so glad nobody wished me a happy St. Urho’s Day. It is a Finnish holiday. I think Finnish people are WONDERFUL and I love my Finnish friends. I. am. not. Finnish. I can lay claim to some Irish.

I earned my pay today and that’s about all you wanna know. So we’ll do some historical stuff instead. My cuzzint commented yesterday that her family (who owns the Old Cabin now) recovered an old bench with some of that leather. I spent the first six summers of my life in the Old Cabin. In my VERY FIRST summer, when I was six months old, I THINK all of my grandparents’ children (4) and THEIR children stayed at the Old Cabin (except WE may have just visited from town).

The reason I think that might be true is that my uncle Don was a doc in Sault Ste. Siberia and I remember him answering a phone ringing at the Old Cabin. He had to have a phone. He and his family were in the process of building their own cabin that summer and none of the rest of us had phones until decades later. I have exactly TWO memories of my first summer there, before I was a year old. One was hearing the susurration of the pine trees in the persistent onshore breeze northwest wind as my parents drove down the road to the cabin with me lying untethered in the back seat. The other is of the phone ringing in the Old Cabin chitchen and my uncle answering it. Yes I do have early memories, as vague and fleeting as they are.

For the next bunch of summers, we stayed at the Old Cabin with the rest of our cousins, having fun and fighting like siblings. I have two female cousins who were born the same year as I was so maybe you can imagine.

We built our own little rustic place next door when I was six and Radical Betty and Dcuk built an all-weather house when he retaaaarrred from his military career. MANY years later (and quite a few ago now), here is the faaarplace at the Old Cabin. I hope these folks are okay with me posting this pic. They are members of G4, my grandparents’ great-grandchildren, two brothers (my cousin Pooh’s children) and their second cousin (one of my daughters). How many of you GREW UP knowing your second cousins?

I was thinking that whoever took that pic cut off the top of the hooked rug up above the faaarplace. But then I found this pic of that rug. My great aunt Elizabeth (my grandaddy’s sister, who never married) bought this and I know the story but I can’t remember the details for now. My favorite memory of Elizabeth is once when a bunch of us little cousins were sleeping on the front porch and a big thunderstorm rolled through. She comforted us by telling us it was just the “gods” (Thor, I think she said) rolling bowling balls around.

So here’s the other side of that big old faaarplace.

And here’s a pic of the place in the winter. I was puzzling over this a bit. Who took it and when, etc.? Then I realized it looked like a scanned SLIDE. I am all for getting rid of crappy pics but not this one! It is what it is and that’s what snow does on that beach.

So, my dad created this birch bark scroll to document when his dad built the Old Cabin. 1924. Three years short of 100 years ago. How many people have been able to hang on to family land for that many years? I mean people who aren’t trillionaires.

As I hinted at earlier, my branch of the family does not own any part of the Old Cabin any more. We built our own rustic little cabin when I was six. I have always been happy about that. It was soooo much fun to watch our little shack get built and I always LOVED being there in the summer.

My grandparents and my aunts and their families still spent summers at the Old Cabin. We ran back and forth like crazy banging in through the door (no knock policy). Eventually, through land divisions, the Old Cabin ended up in the hands of my [late] aunt Bubs and My Dear Uncle Harry.

We STILL bang back and forth into each others’ cabins without knocking. Well, at least in non-pandemic times. And (in non-pandemic times) I have to tell my cousins’ wonderful children over and over that YOU DON’T HAVE TO KNOCK!

I watched the package delivery (as I do all package deliveries since you know when) of EIGHT of these thingies last week. I was expecting terlet paper and this looked like about the right size box for what I ordered (I did get the TP so we should be gootchy until about August even factoring in a summer moomincabin supply).

Our own Landfill seems to have become the Hiawatha Shore-to-Shore North Country Trail chapter’s clearing house (I am NOT complaining). At least we’re the southern terminus. A bunch of crapola made its way up to Iggy or wherever over the weekend. These saws will be distributed to trail maintainer type volunteers.

The leather is left over from my old coot’s stint as a Sault Ste. Siberia tannery worker in the 1940s. It was a job he obtained after his stint as a WWII flight instructor and he worked there until before I was born. This was part of the trajectory of careers that later in his life led him to label himself as a Successful Failure. My career trajectory is not all that different.

From everything I remember hearing about that time of dad’s life (since I wasn’t born yet), he liked working with the people at the tannery but, as factory work often goes, it didn’t pay enough to raise children and send them to college (I’m guessing here). By the time I was born, he was established in a low-level job at the bank his dad presided over. His career trajectory went up from there but Successful Failure is a good description of his life.

I grew up in a shabby little bungalow on Superior Street in Sault Ste. Siberia. We had a second story but there were eaves, making the walls slanted on the sides. But the eaves also provided storage space and at the top of the stairs in what became my brother’s room, several drawers were embedded into the eaves and those drawers held pieces of LEATHER. Scraps from the tannery. I was fascinated by those as a young child.

Again I am guessing but I *think* The Commander had some designs on those leather pieces. Most of them never came into being (because kids, finally), except maybe for a footstool(?) she may have recovered. It may be at Houghton Lake now?

I own all the leather now. I am so rich🤣🤣🤣. I will probably never do anything with any of it but the GG dredged some of it up today with the idea to make sheathes for these highly dangerous kniffy/saws. That wouldda been fine with me but apparently he found some ready-made sheathes that would fit online somewhere so we’ll see what he does.

If you are not a bourbon fan, you may not recognize that these are none other than Maker’s Mark socks! I found them in teleCubelandia today after the GG arrived home from yet another trip to the Great White North.

Apparently he bought a bottle of Maker’s Mark on an earlier trip and the socks came with the bottle but he accidentally left the socks at the Uncly Uncle’s house. They are too small for men and The Beautiful Gay is really more of a vodka gal, so she was not interested. Actually, TBG is a VERY elegant woman who probably wouldn’t be caught dead in any sort of booze socks. Her sister-in-law (aka meeeeee), yeah, bring ’em on. I’ll probably wear my Frog Socks on St. Paddy’s Day, even though no one but the GG will see them.

Yes, the GG is traveling and has been since last spring. I am not all that comfortable with it except that… 1) These are exclusively road trips in Mooon Yooonit (and occasionally Ninja) (and he can pee anywhere because he is a maaaaaan). 2) They are hiking trips, solo or with VERY few people. 3) He stays mainly in hotels/air-bnbs or the Lyme Lounge ALONE. 4) He takes his own food and supplements that by take-out food. 5) His polly-ticks are different than mine and I don’t totally understand what they are but he does comply with masking and social distancing.

Vaccines? Not yet although we are eligible by age. Friends and relatives are s-l-o-w-l-y reporting vaccinations. I am registered in a few places but have not received an invitation yet. I am PERSONALLY okay with this since I am “rich” (emphasis on quotes) and can hunker down in my comfortable house doing my cozy little job and earning a nice little chunk of change. I do not have grandchildren and while I miss seeing my adult children, we are okay. A lot of folks (going by Nextdoor Neighbor posts) are chomping at the bit and driving to places like Napoleon Ohio, which is a couple hours away (and has a beautiful courthouse). I have to wonder if those folks are taking spaces away from Ohio residents?

I think this nitsy-bitsy business of registering with pharmacies, etc. is not the way to go. When I was something like 10, the powers that be decided that EVERYONE needed a polio booster “shot”. Except it wasn’t a shot, it was a sugar cube. I’m not sure who mobilized the whole thing but my family enthusiastically joined pretty much every family in Sault Ste. Siberia down at the National Guard Armory to line up for our oral vaccine.

This kind of mass vaccination effort is what is needed EVERYWHERE to get our population vaccinated. The Orange Baboon trumpets his Operation Warp Speed thingy as something wonderful that he did. But. Why did the Baboonian administration not build the INFRASTRUCTURE needed to deliver shots into as many arms as possible as quickly as possible?

Oh, okay. I guess COVID didn’t happen during Infrastructure Week…

P.S. I was just mashing potatoes while listening to somebody sing about doing the Mashed Potato dance from way back when.

Am I flinging again? I think I’m flinging again. Fingers crossed that today was not an aberration.

I’ve had some big ideas about getting back into flinging but two problems (well, besides random pandemic emotional weirdness) have had me stymied for the last year. One is that I am down to the point where I don’t *personally* have a lot left to fling. I was pretty direct about getting rid of a whole bunch of biz-caz clothing pretty much when I learned that we would NEVER be going back to Cubelandia. I still have a lot of possessions but, for example, I am pretty sure I am not finished with fiber arts. That’s another area of life that I’ve struggled with getting back into but we’ll save that for another day.

So what do I so with the stuff OTHER people own that’s in my house? I can’t really get rid of the GG’s stuff but I did manage to make a deal of sorts with another person who is still storing stuff here after college and a subsequent series of rental housing units. This is NOT a complaint. This is a person who is completely independent from her parents but, being a “creative type”, has a fair amount of stuff (mostly clothing) and The Landfill has been a stable place to store it. So the deal is that I am gonna bag things up bit by bit in my beautiful Plum Market curbside grocery bags and dole it out to her a bag at a time.

And then there are the photos… I am not quiiiite ready to deal with our own photos yet and we won’t go near my digital photos for now although they are a MESS! I am starting with my family’s photos. Oh, don’t panic. I’m not indiscriminately throwing all of them out. But yaknow? I don’t need to save umpteen bazillion CRAPPY photos of my parents’ trips to Europe when they were in their 70s.

They took multiple “elder” trips to Europe organized by college or elder hostel organizations. That was a GREAT thing and they always had a good time. They took a gazillion pics. They had some kind of crappy film camera. That was okay. Neither one of them were photography aficionados and they almost always lived well beneath their means.

But. The scenery and historic buildings I can easily find on the internet. There are very few decent photos of my parents (I did save a few). There are a LOT of photooos of the other people in their travel group. I know they were wonderful friends but I have absolutely no relationship of any sort to any of them.

So I emptied the Russia/Scandinavia album today and looking toward what to target next.

The stuffed aminals will be the hardest to fling. I have thought of this before but COVID squelched it but maybe if COVID ever goes away, we’ll do a stuffed aminal adoption day some nice day in our driveway. Freeeeeee aminal(s) to any kid who wants one! Or ten…

P.S. Thanks to my blahggy friend Margaret (and her MOM!) for helping me find the strength to start dealing with all those crappy old photoooos.

We lost power for 4-5 hours today. How did I know that the power went down? Well, it was NOT because the lights went out. At least not that I noticed. It was a bright bright bri-i-ight sun-shiny day and the only lights I had on were the blue twinkle lights across the living room. They don’t really show up in bright sunshine so I didn’t notice when they went off. A little string of LEDs across the top of the cabinets in the chitchen did NOT go out.

What alerted me to the power outage is that Gertrude started to beep and flash like crazy. WHAT is THAT? I couldn’t figure out how to turn all of that racket off. I finally figgered out that I would have to hit the circuit breaker to get all of that stuff to STOP!!! I flipped the light switch to light the Landfill Dungeon and it didn’t come on… Hmmm… Eventually I figured out that we were in a weird brown-out situation. Some lights would come on sorta. My phone charging station was working. I do not know the rhyme or reason behind what was working and what was not.

We do have a generator but the GG is outta town and I have no clue how to get that thing connected and going. Plus I am no wimp but it is HEAVY and I am quite daunted about schlepping it up the Dungeon stairs and outside.

The GG (who I called in a panic about Gertrude’s “fit” before I figgered out brown-out) was worried about me. Are you warm enough? Hmmm… It was 55 degrees outside and brilliantly sunny? Actually I was almost tooooo warm but I knew it would be cold tonight, into the 20s. And then there’s the whole how to keep my phone charged overnight and what to do with the frozen tamale order that came today plus all the other stuff in the freezer. At what point do I mobilize myself and get it all into a raccoon-proof cooler outside the back door?

All’s well that ends well and the power came back on late in the afternoon and I womaned up and turned Gertrude’s circuit breaker back on. I think I expected her to blow up or something but so far she is fine, over her seizure, and quietly heating up leftover salmon and rice for me.

A little disclaimer here… Our power company has a wonderful app that you can use to report outages and get updates on when they expect to have the problem fixed. I got pretty regular texts via that throughout the afternoon and although they finished a bit later than their original estimate, knock on wood we’re all good now.

My blahg also went down for a bit this afternoon, independently of the power outage. It was the GG(!) who alerted me to that, which was surprising because he can go days and days without reading it🐽 Anyway, The Guru had it fixed in a jiffy. I hope he (The Guru) knows how much I appreciate his technical expertise, service, and FRIENDSHIP.

The pic is from a several day power outage a few years ago. We did have the generator running then and since we had heat, water, a gas grill to cook on and, uh, phone chargers, it was kinda toooo much fun, like luxury camping.