This is not the best pic I have of Barry Bagels. I have better, way funnier ones. Like the time I dumped a whole big cup of coffee on the floor and had to call out the troops to help me clean it up. Or the life-size bobble-head of Barry himself installed after he died. Or back in 2007 when I arrived with my first iPhone and MMCB₁ was inspecting it and accidentally took its FIRST PHOTO! Of a bag of bagels she’d just bought. I used it as my screen saver for quite a while until a beach urchin inadvertently changed it, not understanding its [rather silly] significance.

I don’t know when Barry’s opened but I have been going there a looooonnnng time, ever since the beach urhins were in grade school. I learned how to order a double cappuccino with hazelnut flavoring by copying my extreme extrovert friend, a woman who painted her living room royal purple one weekend when her husband and sons were out with the boy scouts. I took my parents there, one time spending something like an HOUR doing the usual Birch Point Beach gossip.

I was invited to join a weekly coffee clatch down at Zola when my older urchin went to middle school at the alternative “open” school. That lasted for a couple years but by high school the group was splintering (people were getting jobs, etc.) so a few of us west-siders migrated over to Barry’s. And have been going there once a week EVER SINCE.

My friends have been kvetching the whole time about how shabby it is. In particular, they hate the furniture. It is somewhat unwieldy but I tend to sorta go with the flow on that kind of thing so I have never totally understood their crabbiness.

The last time I got coffee at Barry’s was sometime last February. MMCB₁ then jetted off to Australia for a month and MMCB₂ was doing her Bubbe duty so wasn’t a frequent participant. Okay. What the hell happened in March? I got sent home to telecommute on the 12th. MMCB₁ had to cut her Australian stay short and scramble to get a flight home. She messaged me that she was coming home early and we should meet at Barry’s when she got here. I said “OK”, knowing that we would not be meeting but not wanting to add to her stress level. When she got home, she realized that and for obvious reasons we have not been back. We do FaceTime every week.

So, you are wondering how this long meandering story ends, right? Is Barry’s closing? No no no no no, it is not. It is RENOVATING! There have been rumors about a renovation for a couple years now and apparently it is HAPPENING! This is a shop that has always had a big take-out business and it is going great guns doing curbside with online ordering. Without customers underfoot INSIDE the store, this seems like a perfect time to renovate.

Alas, I’m not sure when I’ll go back inside but all of a sudden I have a hankering for a tuna bagel. Maybe I’ll do curbside soon?

I didn’t have any good photooos today. It’s dark when I walk and the rest of the day was spent chained to a laptop. But then. At the end of the day, I went out to dump the compost. And. When I turned around to go back to the Landfill? WOW! This was the view and I had my pic. Look at those shadows and that big squashy lens flare.

I also posted this to Instagram and Facebook. Facebook was just for kicks. I don’t post there much any more although I *do* keep track of what others are posting so mind yer Ps and Qs if you are sharing conspiracy theories ‘cuz I’m watching. Anyway, one of my Planet Ann Arbor friends commented “space laser?” I suspect what he really wanted to say was “Jewish space laser” but decided that had the potential to go south in some horrible way. I got it🐸. As The Commander would have said, “Why under the *sun* do we have somebody like *that* in the *government*?” I’ll let y’all figger out who/what I’m talking about🐽

Oh yeah, you’ve heard of 15 minutes of fame? Here’s my 15 SECONDS of weird. One of them anyway. So Cicely Tyson died yesterday, right? Years and years ago BK, I was galumphing up Liberty toward State. I think I was wearing my old down coat and jeans. I dressed differently back then. There was this Black gentleman who worked in a little hut in a small parking lot near where the Bead Gallery was between then and now. I schlepped up and down Liberty a lot in those days and we were friendly enough for “hi” and a wave when I passed. One day he FLOORED me by coming out of his hut and saying, “You look like Cicely Tyson”. Say what? Um, I am a Caucasian, blonde, WASPy-looking woman. I have never figured that out but Cicely was gorgeous and I took it as a compliment. Godspeed Cicely.

Actually, my usual doppelganger back in the day was Sissy Spacek. I was told I looked like her multiple times. Don’t take Carrie to the prom!🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

This is a clematis plant, one that blooms in the late summer. I sure wish my flashy purple June-blooming ones were still around. They kicked the bucket a couple years ago. But what a head o’ hair this one has!

Moving along. I got myself all [re]-set up with Word and Excel via a subscription. I shouldda known that’s how it worked. I think that’s how we get our work app updates. But I don’t manage updates at work, they come from Ivan and his gang up on the Mothership. I do not need Outlook or Power Point and Visio is fun but I don’t need it outside of work. But those two apps I needn and it was painless to update them so that’s a good thing.

This weekend I’ll have to figger out my new photo processing routine. My old one:

— Take an iPhone photo.
— Put it on Instagram if it’s interesting enough and app it there.
— Port it over to my MacBook Pro via email AirDrop.
— Upload it to Photos.
— Export it to Bridge (associated with Photoshop).
— Run it through Photoshop to create a web-optimized version and sometimes crop or correct color, if I didn’t already do that in Instagram.
— Upload it to my blahg.

My stopgap until the weekend is:

— Take an iPhone photo.
— Put it on Instagram if it’s interesting enough and app it there.
— Upload it to my blahg from my phone.
— Switch to my MacBook Pro to add the text to my blahg.

Will have to come up with a new procedure. The Guru had a photo processing app suggestion a while back, which I can’t find now so I’ll have to pester him 🐽. I’ll get there. I will miss Photoshop. I took three classes in it and one in Illustrator and they were fun and I was not all that bad. I’ll have to make sure I have jpgs of some of those prodjects, especially the totally over-the-top daffodil one. But onward.

🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼🌼

Yeah, the new one is on the left. The one on the right will be relegated to the Landfill Dungeon, where it will join the MacStack. It is a 2013 model and I am NOT going to give it to a relative, let alone SELL IT! WHAT! Nope, you need a new one. I’ve been through the usual email password hell and some long thing with Photos and I seem to be pretty good to go now. I am mourning the death of my ancient student-obtained photoshop app but I *will* move forward. I can deal with this but I will have to craft a new photo processing routine.

It’s kinda weird that these days I ALMOST don’t need a laptop. I mean I use my iPhone for almost everything I do on the internet. Except when I have enough to say that I need a REAL keyboard to touch type long email messages or blahg posts or whatever. I do use a Dell laptop for work and do plenty of touch typing on that thing. Looks like I’ve lost Word and Excel too. I do use those apps for some things. I’ll try to figger it out this weekend. I will buy those if I need to. I don’t think I’ll buy PhotoShop.

Mini book blahg? The Firebrand (Marion Zimmer Bradley). Re-telling of the Iliad from Cassandra’s point of view. Read it as a youngster and loved it then and now. Book hangover on this one. Once Upon a River. Michigan girl making choices I wouldn’t have made but she also didn’t have the family resources I had. A couple Lisa Jewell books that got me through a few weird days. Then Fireweed (Mildred Walker) arrived via paperback. Young couple in the yooperland in the depression era. And finally, Valentine, which is a wonderful page-turner and I’m not done with it.

You’ve heard of Skater Boi? Well, here is Scooter Boi. This was a necessary test drive but I did not enjoy it. Fortunately (for him), he refrained from getting within a few feet of my personal space.

As annoying as this was, it was a Good Deed. It’s FlaMan’s scooter and lifeline to shopping (and the bar when it’s open🐽). It broke a while back and the GG schlepped it down here to troubleshoot it. After a few days of tinkering and some phone calls, he decided that the motor was dead. So. New motor, a few more days of tinkering, and it is ready for service back at FlaMan’s abode.

And ANOTHER Good Deed! Looking for pics for a niece. He FINALLY found some buried within some of The Commander’s stuff. I think he spent a few hours on this. I was happy. As much as I wanted to help, I didn’t really have time and my family photo archive is totally out of control at the moment.

In the process of sending scans of those pics, we all got into a Text Storm of memories of life with siblings and cousins back in the day. Me and my cousins fighting over the Pink Plate at the Old Cabin. My beach urchins fighting over the Pink Cup at Hoton Lake and later on, the Army Green Cup. Yes, really. And salami for breakfast at the moomincabin.

And I may be the only one who remembers when the older beach urchin had these fancy bottles with baby-hand-sized holes in the middle that she could get out of the refrigerator by herself. She would only use pink or white bottles, not yellow or blue. One afternoon the younger beach urchin NEEDED A NAP and the older one PITCHED A FIT because all there was was a blue bottle, the white and pink ones being “shitty and old” (her description of dirty). That woke up the younger one (not happy) and I went ballistic, left the older with her grandma and took the younger down to the beach. Where various Piedys waxed eloquently about how cute and happy and well-behaved my kids were, KNOWING NOTHING about the shit that had just gone down. I do miss those days.

Oh, and don’t look at Scooter Boi’s hair too closely. He has a hat on anyway. He claims he isn’t going to get it cut until he can SAFELY go INSIDE Knight’s for dinner. THAT IS OKAY WITH ME. I DON’T WANT HIM OUT AT THE BARBERSHOP. But, y’know, he could COMB IT, fer kee-reist. Haystack anyone? I shouldn’t talk because mine is as bad or worse.

He did a third Good Deed today but we’ll talk about that later.

Doom-scrolling Twitter as one does, I came across a random post from MSNBC saying they are going to highlight women who have changed their lives and careers AFTER the age of 50 in very positive ways.

Anyone can apply to be featured. I certainly will NOT. But NOT because I don’t identify with the phenomenon of becoming SUCCESSFUL after 50. Because I most certainly DO. When I was 50, I was severely underemployed, making something like $500 a MONTH managing a youth theatre guild. I loved it until I didn’t and then I quit rather abruptly. We won’t talk about that today except that my brother and dad died around that time and for a while I was having a harder time than usual finding some solid ground on which to put my foot.

BUT. I was taking community college internet-type classes and I was ACE-ING them. I can’t remember exactly who it was but someone cautioned me before I enrolled that I would probably flunk the mid-term. Well. I don’t flunk tests EVER and NOPE! AAAAAAA. I had the attention of the faculty and one of the faculty placed me in an internship with the LSCHP and 13 years later, here I am, making more money than I EVER have in my life and kinda still scratching my head about it all happened because I didn’t think I would ever in my life find another job. Disclaimer below, also, I am not Warren Buffet…

I’m not here to brag! Oh no no no no no! I am here to say that it IS possible for a woman (or ANYONE) to re-start a career after the age of 50, no matter what people say. I will not apply to be one of the folks they interview because I don’t really do anything that important, at least not in a big way. I’m not in congress or working on COVID vaccines or teaching (which is a HEROIC and sadly underrated career).

I’m also here to encourage young people, especially our VALUABLE “creative types”, who may often wonder if they’ll ever be able to buy a house, etc. Don’t give up. Things will most likely get better for you. I am a creative type too. I know. Don’t give up.

Lookin’ like a Fin in this old pic, my dad’s face/expression. Sometimes I look more like a MacMu.

Disclaimer: As always, I work for an at-will company so who knows how long it’ll last but I will be okay if/when it eventually ends.

So we’ve got this beeyootifful faaar going but nobody is really back in the Back Room to watch over it so every time I hear a popping sound, I have to go and check to make sure a spark hasn’t landed on the carpet. And, if it has, grab my big faaaaaar glubs and remove/extinguish it before it has a chance to burn our house down.

This mid-century modern faaaarplace has “screens” that you can draw across it to keep sparks from escaping. I HATE the screens. I once bought a stand-alone screen off the intertubes but I didn’t like it. It just did not fit my [ratty old] mid-century modern house. I have a 1st cousin once removed who is a GENIUS and if he lived closer to me, I would commission him to make a mid-century modern type faaaarplace screen for me.

This cousin lives in Utah but he and his fam do NOT belong to the Mormon faith (and never have). I know as much or maybe as little about the Mormon faith as anybody else. I have been pretty familiar with TWO Mormon women in my life.

One, when I was a kid, I worked with Ava (who is long dead now so I think I can use her real first name). She was hired as a keypuncher (yes, it was that long ago) and she wasn’t really very good at her job and wasn’t very teachable although she wasn’t totally stupid and really wasn’t cut out to be a keypuncher.

The specific incident I’m thinking of is when she grabbed a co-worker’s bag lunch and scrunched it. She thought it was funny. Another co-worker who immigrated here from Chile, said “Ava is dangerous”, dangerous in a Spanish accent.

And then we got involved in YAG (a youth theater group) and one of the first directors we encountered was a card-carrying Mormon. I will never forget when she told us parents (in Mouse’s first play) that her religion didn’t allow her to teach children how to fight (on stage I mean) so she had HIRED some other folks to do it for her. She is a Force of Nature and YAG is gone but we are facebook friends because I love her.

We have a lot of hilly glacial terrain here in the Great Lake State but we don’t have mountains. Well, except that I remember hearing as a kid that our own Mission Hill in the eastern yooperland is the remains of an ancient mountain. I dunno if that’s true or not.

It was a beautiful sunny day today so we took a drive in the afternoon. I suggested we go south toward Mr. Golden Sun and so we did for a bit but the GG turned west and we ended up out in Sharon Township on the crazy glacial hills type road that leads to our mouse’s house.

So much of the surrounding area is flat flat flat and then… This photo doesn’t really do the driving conditions justice. Lots of twisty turny steep up and down gravel/dirt roads enhanced with bits of ice here and there. I was glad we were driving s-l-o-w-l-y up and down all of these hills because if we had been speeding, which I’m sure a lot of folks who live there do, I’d’ve been dizzy if not vomiting.

We even drove up their driveway and I was a bit dizzy looking at the ice on the driveway and the steep drop-off on one side of the driveway. I didn’t remember that from summer but there was no ice then…

I am a moom and I couldn’t help thinking about how many times they drive in and outta that place on those roads or at least the driveway. I cannot allow myself to worry. They are responsible adults and I have to trust them and I know they like living there!

Glad we took Mooon Yooonit (SUV) today and not Ninja (cute li’l Civic with performance taaaars). On the other hand, as the GG just reminded me, my mouse has droven my Ninja in and outta there a whole buncha times in the last couple months via borrowing her.

A Finfam cousin’s son (my 1st cousin once removed) shared this pic of my old coot waaaay back in the day on Facebook. The pic is in my archives (somewhere) but I can’t find it so I stole it off of his Facebook feed. GOTTA GET TO my massive mess of photo archives in an organized way…

So he identified my dad as a true American WWII hero and I guess he’s right, although this pic is actually a posed pic from when my dad was in high school, not from WWII. His own granddaddy (my dad’s older brother) also served in WWII. My dad never saw action. He served by learning to fly and teaching others to fly out in our country’s southwest. At the end of the war, he had orders to report to the South Pacific but then we dropped a bomb or two and he didn’t have to go.

My dad (and his brother) were in college when that war started. Their dad served on the Chippewa County draft board at the time. He had such a hard time sending other people’s kids off to war that he told his boys to arrange their affairs and enlist. And they did. My dad’s older brother was in med school and served on a destroyer.

When the war ended, my dad never really returned to college, even though all of his Army Air Corps pilot school ratings were EXCELLENT. I’m not sure exactly why this happened and it’s too long a story for today.

He took The Commander from her Detroit area home and family to Sault Ste. Siberia and did factory work (tannery) for a while. Around the time I was on the way, his dad (a bank president in town) hired him to work at the bank. My dad took (and aced) banking classes somewhere in Wisconsin and turned out to be as good a banker as HIS dad (who I don’t even think finished high school) and eventually became the bank president in his own time.

Successful failure. My dad was really smart and capable and he could’ve done whatever the heck he wanted to do in life. But he settled for a slightly smaller life in a small town. It was okay. The people he knew there GREATLY respected him for his honesty in the banking business.

We were never what you might call rich but we never wanted for anything we needed. Our house was modest but my parents were also able to manage to afford a modest seasonal cabin on our nearby family beach property. I am following in their footprints. My life is not fancy in any way shape or form but it is a good, comfortable life that we are easily able to pay for. And we still have that seasonal cabin up there on the moominbeach.

Image credit: Ben, artist of various media. Posted with permission.

Man oh man, it is soooo nice to wake up and not have to spend time processing whatever stoopid crapola the Orange Baboon tweeted in the wee hours. Insults and lies and FIRING PEOPLE(!) and other various alternate facts and covfefe and whatever. It is soooo nice to have a president who actually has a COVID plan. Is Biden’s plan perfect? Most likely not. But it is a starting point, one we needed at least a year ago. And it shows he *cares*.

It is soooo nice not to have to listen to crapola about COVID going away in what was it? Two weeks? We all knew better. Or about hydroxychloroquine or injecting “disinfectant” or shining lights into people’s bodies. I bet Dr. Fauci is ecstatic that he no longer has to share any kind of space with such a big [COV]idiot. I’m glad Biden threw him a lifeboat.

I wish I had made a list of all the stoopid things the OB said/did throughout his tenure. Other people have made them. One Sunday I think it was somebody at the Washington Post who counted something like 94 rage tweets. I mean THAT DAY ALONE. I tended to spend a few minutes RAGING (quietly to myself (mostly)) and then moving on. I look forward to Biden tweets, which already seem to be MUCH fewer and more measured than the OB’s were.

How about those mittens? I saw the pic of Bernie in his handmade mittens early this morning and I *loved* it. Whatever you think about Bernie, he’s from *Vermont*, fer kee-reist. I’m from the yooperland. I know about cold. I don’t know what the temp was in DC yesterday but he was clearly prepared for anything. AND didn’t care a whit what any fashionistas may have thought about what his outfit *looked* like. Much like yer fav-o-rite blahgger when she is walking around at 0-skunk-30. When I encounter a person walking around without a hat when it’s like single digits, I am THAT woman who asks, “WHERE IS YOUR HAT?” Bernie doesn’t have a hat, does he? Hmmm…

I was slammed at work all day and it wasn’t until mouse texted me today’s pic that I had an inkling Bernie had become a meme. In this particular one, he’s “photoshopped” into a Google streetview pic of our fantastical mansion (j/k). The artist said it represented *himself* waiting for mouse to drop off grocks for us at the Landfill.

I have complicated feelings about Bernie politically but we won’t go there today. I love that he was outside my house.

Love y’all, KW🧡

First a disclaimer: this is NOT what the weather is like here today. This was during the 2014 Polar Vortex winter, the year that “Canada got drunk, stumbled down onto the US, and fell asleep”. Someone else said it. I dunno who.

This year? I have not worn a pair of winter boots yet. Keen sandals every day and January is starting to wane. Okay, I wear my Keens with tights and Smartwool socks between my feet and my sandals and (usually) Yaks between my sandals and the road/sidewalk surface. Of course by posting this I know I am tempting Snowmageddon.

So, what else to say about today… I had the radio on through the inauguration although I wasn’t really listening because working. Relieved? Yes yes yes… But not gloating. I know too many people who were tRump supporters. We have a lot of work to do to figger out WHY. I do not believe the whole thing about Bernie and AOC are gonna flip us into “socialism” and George is gonna pay for it. Even if I did believe in that, why would tRump be the “savior?”

So what is it? tRump supporters, what is it about your lives that tRump made better? *My* life has been improving for a good many more years than tRump has been in “power”. My success has more to do with falling off a cliff into a GOOD JOB (and working hard at it) than anything tRump did during his tenure. Not to mention I was born into a life of relative privilege, although my nuclear family was *far* from “rich” when I was growing up. Outhouse stories anyone?💩 (Seriously, that was just in the summer. But still.)

“We’ve been played.” I was kind of surprised that some QAnon-type folks were quoted as seeming a bit disgruntled that nothing “happened” to disrupt the inauguration today. The Secret Service did not step in and take over to spirit the whole Biden/Harris crew into some dungeon somewhere for some kind of inquisition. Did I detect a whiff of disgust about “Dear Leader?” Just a whiff maybe but nevertheless a whiff. I mean, did those Q folks REALLY think tRump ever gave a crap about them? Or had any real power over the Secret Service? Jeebus.

What’s next? As tRump always said, “We’ll just have to see what happens.” I am cautiously optimistic that at least now there are people in Washington who can speak in a language other than Word Salad, value scientific principles over whatever the charlatan of the day is peddling, govern by something other than Twitter, and are interested (apparently) in listening to us, the people of this beautiful country.

Just a bunch of random free association ramblings here. Feel free to move along.

No way could I get a decent pic of this. It was moving waaaay too fast and flipping around all over the place. Yes, it was a flying saucer sent from the planet Zephron III to my kitchen. The life-forms there are very small so if you wanted to conquer them, all you’d have to do is step on them (Old Man’s War).

So a package arrived from China today. It wasn’t addressed to me and I had no clue. I was thinking something like, “Not another remote controlled helicopter” but I think we bought those over at the old Ryder’s Hobby Shop here on the Planet Ann Arbor, not China. I’m trying to think what toys we *did* buy from China… And this was labeled “child’s toy” on the package. Yup. Child’s toy.

So I left it on the table for the GG to open when he got home from visiting FlaMan’s domicile where he exchanged full beer cans for (sorta) empty ones but otherwise seemed a bit disgruntled. I mean, this is a 100 mile round trip beer run and around a year ago, he and Mooon Yooonit almost bit the dust when somebody spun out on a lightly iced road surface at 70 mph. Roads were okay today though and the arrival of this new Flying Saucer gave him something to do to decompress.

So we have fewer than 24 more hours left of this chaotic American presidency. I don’t share memes on facebook but there was one cartoon on the Saturday that Biden was first declared the winner… It was the statue of liberty launching tRump outta town in a sling shot made out of a face mask. I mean the mask was around his butt. I can’t find it anywhere on the internet. I can find Liberty knocking him off a wall with a golf club and any number of other things. I think that face mask slingshot says it the best.

I hope we make it through tomorrow without any more violence. I hope I am able to concentrate on my job tomorrow. I have a training session to run tomorrow afternoon…

We’ll talk about Donny Osmond some other day🐲

I wanted to respond to a FB/highschool acquaintance in the Trump camp about what I thought Biden’s accomplishments were. But I don’t [usually] get into polly-tickal crapola on FB so I am thinking about what to write about that here in my own “private” space, private in the sense that most of that set of FB friends don’t know about it and probably aren’t interested in and/or capable of finding it. I’ll get into Biden another day, maybe Inauguration Day? With fingers crossed for the promised (begrudgingly, in my opinion) “peaceful transition” but also knocking on wood.

So I’ll talk about corn chowder instead. Specifically the corn chowder recipe The Commander left behind when she joined the Ghost Ship Ryerson Party Bote in the Sky. I’m not gonna share it right now. First, I’d have to dredge it up. Also, it is GOOD and we love it but I’m sure a lot of people have equally good corn chowder recipes. Ours does involve bacon…

Anyway, last night a MacMu cousin’s 20-something daughter (my 1st cousin once removed) was making “our” corn chowder and posted pics on FB. Her mom and aunt “Salwa” began bringing her to visit the moomincabin for a few days each summer when she was a toddler and my kids were I dunno somewhere in elementary school. Corn chowder was often on the menu, cooked by the Commander. This toddler was a Force of Nature and is now through college with a corporate job at one of our state’s large grocery chains. We are so proud of her. She and her mom still try to visit us each summer but we missed them last summer because COVID. But we missed our own adult children up there too because COVID.

Here is a pic of my Mouse making corn chowder at the moomincabin with a FinFam cousin’s *granddaughter* Cap’n *Queen* Leila (my 1st cousin twice removed). Another force of nature. See how she’s standing on a stool there? She is in middle school now, almost 13 I think, and I think she’s taller than any of us.

For a number of years her family lived next door to the moomincabin in the house/cabin her great-grandparents (my aunt and uncle) built when I was a young baby. Since C*Q*L is an extreme extrovert she was a constant visitor to the moomincabin. Especially when the GG was around. I’m not really very interesting but the GG is always doing something interesting in the GARAAAAGE or re-placing beach chair webbing on the beach or teaching her how to drive our little putt-putt motor botes.

We didn’t see her a lot last summer. Her family moved to a little town a couple miles down the road and, well, COVID. I miss this (once little) Force of Nature and I will have to make some corn chowder soon!

Yay! We picked up the Frog Hopper this afternoon to the tune of $3000 (brakes, suspension, taaaars, exhaust system and I fergit what else and not all of that was in this repair session, I don’t think). Oh, exhaust system. Yeah. I mean, I remember hearing how noisy that vee-hickle was a few weeks ago when it was out in our street. And I am now getting ads for some sorta little Subaru SUV-like aminal (Crosstrek?) every time I look at any kind of social media. Stay tuned.

This terlet carousel about sums up my feelings about today🐽 Lemme see… Light snow flurries ALL day. Not the pretty kind although that’s a good thing because my Ninja is being droven as a commuter car at the moment and it is not really a good snow vee-hickle with its performance taaaaars. I am a moom. I worry.

Oh man, almost NO space-ification the last I dunno how many days. I got a wee bit of space-ification yesterday when the GG went out to buy me a bday gift. It turned out to be the wrong size, so I got a wee bit more today while he went out to replace it. It’s a bamboo dish drainer. I use one for air drying the dishes I don’t put in Bertie. I took a close look at mine a while back and realized there was MOLD all over the bottom of it so I put it on my xmas list but somehow there was a communication snafu so I got it for my bday. Except the 18″ inch is too big for my counter.

I didn’t really NEED or WANT ANYTHING for xmas or my bday. I mean, I’ve got a new laptop on order somewhere out there. And I am in a deacquisitional mode anyway. But I humored people by making a little list of items that I don’t really need or don’t really need yet. I’m angling to get back into some fiber arts stuff but haven’t really gotten geared up yet.

At the end of the day, I pulled some veggies out of one of the crispers and there was LIQUID splashing around in the bottom of it. That meant I had to PULL OUT THE REFRIGIMATATOR so I could get the drawer out (you don’t wanna now know) so I could clean it and repackage some of the produce. I think it was just water and I DON’T think anything is wrong with the fridge but now that I’ve said that, I expect it to crap out any minute🐽

So that was today. Oh, except I am re-reading The Firebrand, a “retelling” of the story of the Trojan war by Marion Zimmer Bradley told from Cassandra’s point of view. I am no expert on mythology in any way shape or form but I know this is a “loose” retelling. Still, it was a fun book the first time I read it and it’s fun the second time around. I identify with Cassandra because there was a period in my life when I predicted some horrible family events and no one would listen to me. We may or may not talk about that some time. Oh, rest assured, awful as it was, our “war” was a first world late 20th century American war involving lawyers and real estate developers and a land “conservancy”. No one died. (AND NO ONE STORMED ANY GD CAPITOL BUILDING.)

Actually people had to remind MEEEEE that today was No Politics Day. I mean, I well remembered what day it was but I started to veer off in a political direction on a “zoom” call that was set up to honor No Politics Day. Our daughters and a niece and a couple of significant others.

This set of people (more or less) has been occasionally meeting online since COVID, more so in the beginning when we were all trying to figger our COVID lives. One of our members moved to Hawai’i over the summer and I think we’ve met with her since then. The rest of us are all in the eastern time zone. Planet Ann Arbor, Manchester, Detroit, and Poughkeepsie.

All of the usual folks were online this afternoon and then another person joined. npJane! My “baby” cousin. For whatever reason, I didn’t realize she would be on the call. The more the merrier! I was eight when she was born and so old enough not to be jealous of a younger child and therefore “fight” with her as siblings and cousins sometimes do when they are relatively close in age. She was soooo cute and we all loved her.

As adults, she and the GG do moominbeach cabin stuff together and we carpooled up there quite a few times before COVID. Not this year, alas.

So it was great to hear from her and I am LOVING that her dad, my Dear Uncle Harry, is (at 90-something) walking around his neighborhood taking books out of Little Free Libraries and returning them to OTHER Little Free Libraries. I want a LFL in my front yard and if we ever get one installed, I will put non-perishable food items in it too. Every little bit helps.

Not to mention THANKS to all of the others on our call. I wanted to do so many things today, like go out to lunch somewhere, but no way. I had a great day and love y’all, KW

So where were we. I spent the day digging into file formats including a fixed format file with *490* character records. That was fun.

Some of us have been texting about automotive vee-hickles a lot today. The GG apparently thinks that “wimmen” like to drive cars that are “high” enough up that they can see out zee veeendsheeeld. This totally p*ssed me off. I have droven all kinds of cars in my life.

I liked driving minivans and jeeps and things and being higher than other vee-hickles. But I edge in close to 5’6″ or so, so I am not all that short (and he is barely taller than me!). Then we got the Dogha (2001 top dollah Honda Accord) and man oh man, I loved that thing. It was pretty low slung but I had no problem seeing whatever I needed to see and it was a V6, so well…

Anyway, the GG was taken down a notch or two after he expressed that particular opinion and various “wimmen” in his life ‘splained that what they were looking for was CLEARANCE between the ground and the chassis so they could drive on back roads, etc. Jaybus.

I love when some of these “wimmen” have polly-tickle disagreements with the GG and CALMLY remind him that, “YOU raised us on The Planet Ann Arbor AND you allowed us to enter the Community High School lottery.” Which they both won. Yes. We could’ve chosen to live in Oakland County where the GG grew up and lived/worked when we met. I have loved the Planet since I was a kid visiting my cousins here and this is where we ended up. I think it was a good choice.

Here is my box from Luke’s Lobster. I ordered lobster claws. I am sorry, I do not think I could EVER put a live lobster into a pot. But I like lobster meat and this wee bit will work well with the beef filet kebabs we’re cooking tomorrow night. I bought some tuna kebabs from Luke’s back in the fall and I think I will try their Jonah crab meat next. Everything flash frozen off the boat and delivered overnight.

My dear [late] sister-in-law Suzie loved what she called Red Slobster and I miss her.

HB to the Mean Old Grunchy Old Grinchy and Our Northern Correspondent 🧡🧡🧡

…put some music on satty-lite radio. The GG is responsible for turning on satty-lite radio at the end of the day. 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, country, folk, whatever. I don’t really know how to “do” it. My laptop doesn’t connect to our “pod” or whatever it is. I am tech savvy. I could learn this. But it’s something I like him to do. I never know what music he’s going to choose next.

Instead of asking him for “music”, I’ve been turning up National Petroleum Radio so he can actually hear it. He complains that it’s “socialist” radio. I’m not sure if he really believes that or if he’s just harassing me. I’m still trying to figure out why people think that AOC and Bernie are going to magically change our EXTREMELY complicated culture into socialism overnight and I highly doubt that even George Soros has enough cash to fund such a gargantuan endeavor. I fear the Orange Baboon’s unhinged “base” more, what with their flaunting of guns and refusal to wear masks even though masks have now been proven to slow the virus from spreading.

Make no mistake. I am not anti-gun at all. I *own* guns, albeit inherited ones that I hope I never feel like I need to learn to use. I think there are situations in which guns are appropriate and I know and love people who enjoy using them responsibly. I don’t believe it’s a good thing for elected officials to flaunt them inside the nation’s capitol building. On the other hand, I am a STRONG mask proponent (just ask the GG). People who refuse to wear masks often don’t seem to understand the science behind viruses and NO THIS IS NOT THE “REGULAR” “FLU”. Mask-refusers are endangering other people’s lives. This HAS to change.

I spent the last part of my workday rolling my eyes at a loverly little cFam “drama” that was unfolding on the GG’s phone out in the back room. It was a first world drama (in a way) and I won’t go into detail except to say that even though I could only hear the GG’s side of the convo, I knew what was happening.

I will say that there are a whole helluva lotta people in this country who don’t understand what the $600 COVID relief checks are FOR. Like they are not “bonuses” or some kind of fun money. They are to pay bills and buy food and whatever.

I will go a bit further to say that I wish there were some “requirements” surrounding who gets them. The GG and I are not Warren Buffett and it was nice to get a little boost to our finances but we didn’t need it. It would be better to target payments to those who do and maybe give them a little more than a token $600. There are MANY folks in our country who need more than that. But our country is in the throes of various crises and although I am not all that trustful of polly-ticians, I think we are doing the best we can under the circumstances. I hope we can start repairing some damage after next week. I am only somewhat optimistic.

The photo is not tonight. Although it is quite warm tonight, it isn’t foggy at all.

I really have no words for what when went down today. Lost the house (twice), lost the senate (barely but still), lost the presidency, impeached (twice). I am feeling [somewhat] upbeat. I am also weary. The Orange Baboon and his cult (yes) have taken a lot out of my faith in my fellow citizens and we still have another week. Or more…

So let’s talking about washin’ dishes. Somebody on facebook posted one of those memes that has a long list of things and did you do this or not? This one was about cooking. Like have you ever baked biscuits from scratch (yes and I am not good at them), made a jello salad (maybe but can’t remember), mashed potatoes from “scratch”, whatever that means in terms of mashed potatoes (always and I guess it means not *instant* potatoes, yuck). Etc, etc.

I don’t do memes but one question caught my attention. Have you ever lived in a house without a dishwasher? Well, yes! Many times. Most of my childhood our shabby little Superior St. bungalow did not have one. When we finally bought one, you had to wheel it over to the sink and connect it to the faucet to run it. The Comm moved it up to the Dillon house and she was still using until she died.

We *still* wash dishes by hand at the moomincabin. The main improvement we’ve made in 60 years is to install hot water so we no longer have to heat dishwater in a big teakettle.

Not surprisingly, neither of my grandmas had dishwashers when I was a kid. Grandma Margaret (a few blocks away from us in Sault Ste. Siberia) had dishwashing help if she needed it from the two single women that lived in that house, her sister and my granddaddy’s sister (my great aunts). Bolette (step-grandmother in Detroit) *always* pulled me into the kitchen to help her with the dishes while the rest of the adults hee-hawed at the dining table. I *loved* this. She let me squish the soap suds around in all kind of creative ways and when she asked me questions about school, etc., she *listened* to the answers.

When we bought the Landfill, there was a dishwasher but it was noisy and didn’t really work all that well. Eventually we replaced it and *that* one was noisy and didn’t really work very well. At some point I just gave up and for about I dunno 10 years, I hand-washed the dishes. What the heck, I had plenty of practice.

But then… We encountered a wonderful Certified Kitchen Lady who helped us gut and replace our 1970s kitch. I still dithered and dathered about getting a dishwasher. I know most people don’t want to buy houses without them but we weren’t/aren’t planning to sell this place and I figgered whoever ended up buying it would HATE my teal blue subway tile, etc., and unceremoniously tear everything out. It’s happened a couple times in this house. So I decided to buy a new dishwasher.

So that meant we had to, you know, *buy* one. Man oh man, it is fun [not] to buy appliances with the GG. There was the time the ancient washing musheen gave out and we spent at least an hour at Big George while the GG and the salesman took apart *every* washer on the sales floor to determine if it had the same crappy “controller” that our old one did. Not my idea of a good time. Why am I here?

A version of that happened when we bought Bertie, our dishwasher. The GG pulled out the drawers on EVERY dishwasher on the floor and invited me to choose between them. Whut? While he was so occupied, I peered at the sales guy and said something like, “mid-price dishwasher that’ll clean the dishes.” I came home with an $800 or so Bosch and I started using a dishwasher again. It gets the dishes sparkly clean and it’s QUIET! There are still a lot of things I hand wash.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Looking for something else, I found this…

Myakka State Park, Fla, March 1986. She’s wearing some CUTE clothes we bought at some KMart store down there and a necklace of The Commander’s that I remember from when my fingers were small enough to stick them into the little half-spheres or whatever they were (my pinkies are still small enough).

I am puzzled by a few things here. One is that The Comm *gave* me that necklace all those years ago. Maybe she was taaaaared of it? And knew how much I liked it? And wanted to make sure I got it, even though she lived a few decades after that. I dunno. It’s not valuable in any way except that she always wore it when I was a baby and I remember it from then. The other thing is that I kinda panicked about where is that necklace? Do I still have it? Do I know where it is? And there it was in my “jewelry” box.

So that trip was my first Fla trip. We drove our 1985 VW Jetta down there with our baby and The Mean Old Grumpy Beautiful Aunt Suzie, the GG’s gorgeous little red-headed sister, to stay with their parents for a couple weeks. Suz is no longer with us. She never got around to having children but she loved her nieces and nephews to distraction and she and our little Lizard Breath had a great time bonding on that trip. They TALKED and Suz was who translated “erderator” from toddler speak to “alligator”.

Miss Suz a lot. We are infrequent Fla visitors. We went again with both our kids when they were young (Suz was living down there by then). And then I have been there a few times in the 2010s. The GG has been there more often than I have but many of his trips have been related to end-of-life stuff for family members and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get him to go there again.

Especially after our fall 2018 LSD Trip to rescue FlaMan from his crazy trailer home. The GG injured his hand cleaning it out and the Frog Hopper broke down and Hurricane Michael was on the way. We love FlaMan anyway although I will never forget driving up from Fla pulling a UHaul trailer, a guy on O₂ 24/7 and a DOG. We did escape the hurricane and there was no pandemic then, thank you very much. I was so glad to hit the Great Lake State border after that, bumpity clunkity roads and all.

We have so much fun!

Okay. Got up this morning. Coffee (tooooo strong coffee) and oatmeal for breakfast. Packed up, said farewell to MC, and headed out. Two hours or so from Delphos to the Planet Ann Arbor. Horrible fugly gray drive but no snow, thank you very much.

We hadn’t been home for very long and it was sometime around noon. The GG started rummaging the refrigimatator. Okay. What are you doing? I asked because I had a dinner plan and I didn’t want him to eat it. He was making a peanut butter sandwich, which was okay because that had nothing to do with my dinner plan.

And then… He surprised me by saying he was leaving for ALBION like NOW. Why are you going to Albion, I asked? I mean, we had just driven a couple hours on the freeway and he’s leaving again? Turned out he had walked 94 miles out of the North Country Trail 100-mile yearly challenge. I mean he had walked that many miles since January 1, 2021. The NCT does NOT go through the Planet Ann Arbor so it takes some logistical planning to get to it.

So he had six miles to go. The closest section of the NCT to our house is in Albion, 50 miles or so away. He drove over there and did the last six miles.

This pic is from today. He and MC hiked something like 44 miles in O-haaa-o this weekend. He sent me a picture of HIMSELF from that trip but his hands were positioned in a kinda weird way that made him look like he might’ve been roadP-ing so I didn’t post it. He wasn’t. MC would’ve clobbered him if he had, with my enthusiastic support.

Me? I attended a meeting in the car in which I was basically USELESS, then an afternoon of uploading user guides to a client-accessible “portal”. I think this is the FIRST TIME I have ever managed to do this without all kinds of pain and grief related to dealing with a complicated content management system. “Unbucketed item”? Really? What is a bucket. In this context, I mean. This old dog has done this enough times to know what she’s doing.

Oh and hello? The UU (the GG’s identical twin) ALSO finished his 2021 100 mile NCT challenge today, hence the second pic. Not in the same place as the GG. He needed snowshoes.

So, the Twinz of Terror completed their 2021 NCT 100 mile challenges on the same day. It is also the bDay of The Beautiful Gay, wife of the UU (one half of the Twinz) and my own kinda identical twin, in spirit albeit not DNA.

HAHAHAHAHAHA! I’m not sure the Twinz of Terror would appreciate this bit of Kayak Woman humor but they accomplished their 100 day challenge in… Drum roll.. One Scaramucci!