If it’s not one thing it’s another. A long-awaited driver’s license f-i-n-a-l-l-y arrived today. Not mine and it doesn’t matter whose. It’s just another goddamn episode of pandemic life.

In our state we renew our licenses every four years. Every other renewal has to be in person. This year, in person renewers (like in April) were given extensions and allowed to drive with expired licenses. Until September 30. Problem? It was almost impossible to do business at the Secretary of State even after they finally “opened” (appointment only). At long last, they made special arrangements for in-person renewers with expired licenses to take priority.

Fine. Problem. MAIL!!! The license in question was renewed well ahead of time. But then… It didn’t arrive! MAIL! We were out of town for a week in September. I HAD THE MAIL HELD! Like I almost ALWAYS do when we are out of town for more than a couple days. When we got back, there was a whole bunch of mail in the mailbox. Held? Nope. Or at least not sure what was held and what wasn’t. But no drivers license. I would add that our mail delivery has been squirrely for MONTHS!

A call to the S.O.S. revealed that the license had been sent and they agreed to send it again. Still we waited. And waited. And waited. Nada. Today? Yippee-yi-o-ki-yay! I took an iPhone photo and texted it along with a bunch of happy frog faces 🐸🐸🐸

I know that rules are rules and our state government agencies are under as much stress as the rest of us but I have to wonder… Why couldn’t the state have allowed folks in this situation to renew by mail this year and have them follow up with an in-person visit next year? Alas, as I was typing this I realized I was re-thinking an idea I had last April. That wouldn’t work because COVID will still be with us throughout 2021. And…

Sigh.

I sat outside reading (and checking Twitter, etc.) for a while after work until it got too chilly, even with leggings, etc. When I came in, the GG was logging in to a North Country Trail Zoom meeting and one of our beach urchins crashed it, which was way fun. And I’m sure her crashing was fine with the other folks in our chapter because most of our active members are baggy old people. We are always looking for younger folks but… The young folks who are usually interested in hiking are also those who have successful careers, therefore no time. This “kid” is successful but she seems to be making a little time and I love it. Glad that my Planet Ann Arbor kiddos have had the opportunity to experience their yooperland roots up close and personal.

When I came in from outside, I slid the door to the GG’s lair shut so I wouldn’t be tempted to listen to the meeting and put my two cents in. I travel to India every morning plus various meetings throughout the week. We don’t use Zoom. We use what the corporate Mothership puts onto our laptops, which is Microsoft Teams. We do NOT do video. Amazon Woman (boss lady) who is BEAUTIFUL once said something like, “I don’t want anybody looking at me this morning.” You go girl.

Speaking of corporate… Email this afternoon that the tentative time period that employees who will eventually be returning to offices (not me) is now postponed until second quarter 2021. We are not out of the woods with COVID yet and won’t be for a while.

uMich students are now ordered (by the county health department) to shelter “in place”. That doesn’t mean that they can’t go to grocery stores, etc. and bars/restaurants are still semi-open. And there is apparently a uMich football game in Minnesota(?) this Saturday. MMCB is a uMich football fan but she does not agree with the uMich football team traveling around when other STUDENTS can’t (or are not supposed to) and snort-laughed when I opined that footballers are SPESHUL students. A life-long pet peeve of mine (details in some future blahg). My dad had tickets through his yooperland banking job for one game a year and we would drive down to the Planet, stay with our cousins and attend a game with them. Whole ‘nother entry there. As an adult, I couldn’t care less about football games but the Planet Ann Arbor is my adult home and I now enjoy (and miss) the ambience of football Saturdays.

I am glad my company is taking this virus more seriously than many of our politicians and educational administrators are.

I dropped my absentee ballot in the box in the Vet’s Park parking lot on Tuesday the 13th. It was received on Thursday the 15th. Blue voter. Fingers crossed and breath held.

The GG tries so hard. He braved a COVID-defying trip to Kroger the other day (to return FlaMan’s empty cans). He came home with sandwich thins and 10 small pumpkins, which he very neatly lined up along the front “garden”. The beach urchin who took this photoooo took one look and said something like, “I hope those are not *pie* pumpkins because *those* are very expensive”. Nope. 10 pumpkins for $10.00. With some glaring exceptions, the GG can be a pretty good cheapskate.

So a couple of squoils are quickly decimating these little pumpkins. I think I am only seeing two. A little black squoil is hanging around but doesn’t seem to get in on the squoil spoils. Are they discriminating against him or is he just too young (small) to hold his own against him? I suspect the second. Photo credit to one of my beach urchins. And to give the GG credit, it’s entirely possible that he EXPECTED the squoils to decimate his pumpkins. I do know that it has provided great entertainment for many passers-by.

Ever read Birdbox? I love to read books set in the Great Lake State and this one was set in the Detroit area and met another of my reading genre criteria, which is dystopian fiction. I loved it a lot. We then watched the movie, which I was less enamored with probably because it was OBVIOUSLY NOT SET IN MICHIGAN! Jeebus.

At some point in time I learned that the author was writing a sequel. “Malorie” is now available and I started reading it this afternoon after work when it was sorta warm enough to sit in the back yard. I was leaking tears by the fourth chapter when the yooperland was mentioned and that’s all I will say for now.

If you are a Michigander (or even if you are not), and can handle dystopian stories, read the Birdbox books. Last I knew, the author was a resident of Ferndale, a close-in Detroit suburb.

Love y’all, Kayak Woman, life-long Michigander, upper and lower peninsulas.

I won’t bore y’all with our on-and-off flinging efforts over the last 15 years or so. I made some good progress. My mom died. She was NOT a hoarder and we were pretty direct about getting rid of things (I mean we took 95% of her clothing to the Sault Ste. Siberia Sally Ann the morning of her memorial visitation – in a snowstorm!). Still there was stuff that I ended up having to sort out and I still have some of it.

We do NOT (heaven forbid) live in a large house. Three bedroom 1959 Ticky Tacky “ranch” with three small bedrooms, one bathroom, a “finished” (and fugly) basement and a large added room. It was our starter house. It is still our house. What the heck? We paid off the mortgage in 13 years and have been largely debt-free ever since. Just saying there are good reasons for not moving “up” to a McMansion🐽

Okay. If you are not one of my nine reglear nucular taggers*, I have been telecommuting since March 13, 2020 and got turned into a Forever Telecommuter sometime in July. For various reasons, there is NO SPACE here for long-term remote working. Except the Green Couch. Which was fine for snowstorms, etc. The GG long ago took over one beach urchin’s bedroom for an upstairs lair. The other beach urchin’s bedroom had been pretty much cleaned out (by me) a while back but it was filling in with North Country Trail crapola.

I was sitting on the moomincabin deck when I got the Forever Telecommuter news so I didn’t really process it for a while but then I was like, “I NEED STUDIO SPACE IN THIS HOUSE!”

We have made slow progress toward that goal. I blame most of the lethargy upon myself. A lot of the stuff in that room doesn’t belong to me and I have just not had the psychological energy to deal with it. The GG has been doing some picking away the last month or so. Today he did some heavy lifting. I am not even 100% close to being happy with the results. I WANT TO GET RID OF THINGS!

But he did create these little iPhone/laptop vignettes down in the Landfill Dungeon. In neither case do they include every computer/iPhone we’ve ever owned. Some of those have been handed down or scrapped (beloved Strawberry iMac) and the Apple II+ musheens are in the other room. But apparently these all still faaaaar up. (So do the Apple II+ musheens in the other room.)

Happy or not about general flinging and earth moving progress, seeing all of these devices lined up in the Dungeon totally cracked me up.

* My [late] little brother mispronounced the words regular, nuclear, and tiger when he was young.

I can’t ever seem to predict what’s next around here. The GG spent a HALF HOUR this afternoon looking for a baggy of moose poop he collected on a recent COVID defying trip to the Great White North woods. At one point during his frenetic poop search, he had the audacity to ask MEEEEE if I knew where it was. No, I did not. I had been vaguely aware that he possessed some moose poop. But. I have not seen it! I did not do anything with it!

What does he plan to do with the turds? Turn them into “ornaments” by covering them with some sort of “sealer” and painting a blue North Country Trail blaze on them. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried!

It was a very stressful half hour and in the end he found them in one of the Ninja’s door pockets. Sheeeeesh!

And then, because yer fav-o-rite blahgger needed to get outta Dodge, we took a nice slow backroad cruise in Mooon Yooonit. I said let’s go south and west and so we did, down south of Saline, then a beautiful forever west on (I think it was) Hack Road. Eventually we turned north again, still sticking to back roads and here we are on (I think it was) Haab Road. Not a very long road but a very pretty one.

Good night and may you never lose track of your moose poop! 🧡 KW

Before the world went nutso back in March, the GG took one last trip north (this one was to the northern lower) and snagged the Lyme Lounge from the UU’s gargantuan garatchkey. At that time we were (I was) nervous about the coronavirus but we didn’t really have any idea how soon our lives would be pretty much upended so it turned out that he snagged it just in the nick of time. Because our subsequent Sunday afternoon plans turned into pulling the Lyme Lounge out to area state and metro parks, parking, and having a snack and a sip or two of liquid courage. Here is the day the Lyme Lounge returned to the Landfill last March.

By the very next weekend, we decided our typical Planet Ann Arbor weekend activities were over for the duration. No Oscar Tango for dinner on Friday night. No Grizzly Peak lunch with our fave bartender on Saturday. What could we do? Well. We could trailer the Lyme Lounge over to… So I think this is our first experiment with that. We ended up at Silver Lake, in the Dexter Pinckney Rec Area parking lot.

Some of our fave pandemic snacks were peppered salami and cranberry goat cheese, with or without rice thin crackers. I *think* that this particular trip was on Lake Erie down in Monroe. The wind was strong enough to rock the Lyme Lounge around a bit. For some reason that eased the constant low-level anxiety I had been experiencing for weeks. There was crafting going on too, by the GG.

We did Lyme Lounge “afternoon camping” throughout the spring. I didn’t think I would be able to go to the moomincabin this summer and actually wrote a couple of impassioned FB posts about that, which I kind of regret doing now, even though I got a lot of positive comments, even from folks who don’t agree with my polly-ticks.

Eventually we decided we could manage trips to our yooperland cabin. For me, the planning was stressful because I wasn’t sure about whether I could get curbside pickup. It turned out that the answer was yes and no. I could get curbside but it wasn’t as solid a service as I get here on the Planet Ann Arbor. I schlepped uncountable groceries up there in case I could NOT get curbside. And that was stressful. I so missed the days (just last summer) when I could schlep in to Meijer or even to the park store for just that one lemon or whatever. But we managed to get to the moominbeach for some good times.

The moomincabin is now closed for the winter but we still have the Lyme Lounge down here at the Landfill. Today we hauled it out to Silver Lake and repeated our spring routine with various pandemic snacks and a wee bit of liquid courage.

Love y’all and be safe, KW

Life at the Landfill:

1) This bag of Trenary toast potatoes has been hanging around for a couple months now, both here and at the moomincabin. I am not a fan of Trenary toast. It is dried out mini-toasts flavored with cinnamon or whatever. This is NOT to dis the company that makes this stuff. A LOT of people really like it, including the GG. It is just not my cuppa. Actually it’s probably good for dunking but I am not a dunker.

So yesterday the GG came out with the Trenary toast potato bag with some potatoes in hand asking, “Are these potatoes any good?” They had great big eyes on them and were starting to get soft. Apparently he had put some potatoes into an empty Trenary toast bag… I told him to put the bag back inside and I would evaluate the Trenary potatoes tomorrow.

2) So then I had scheduled a Plum Market curbside for this morning. The GG took the Ninja on a 10 day trip and after I parked and clicked the link to notify the Plum that I was there, I COULD NOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME pop the trunk from inside the vee-hickle. Turns out it has a lock that the GG LOCKED at some point. Who knew? I probably knew at some point but it’s a 12-year-old vee-hickle and I have NEVER locked the trunk popper.

So I got outside and popped the trunk and… Yiiiiiy! A case or two of empty beer cans were rolling around in there. There are occasionally weird things in my trunk when I do curbside pickups. I removed a couple of old rifles one time but if there’s a chainsaw I just leave it there. I was puzzled about all those beer cans. For one thing, the GG was on a hiking trip with a Karen-ish woman who is a total teetotaler to the point of shaming other people for having a beer (don’t worry, he had a wee bit of sippin’ bourbon for when she wasn’t around). For another thing, the Utility Beer around here in recent years is Bell’s Two Hearted, NOT Budweiser.

Well. Of course. Duh. The GG stopped at FlaMan’s apartment on the way down to the Planet Ann Arbor and picked up all of FlaMan’s empty Bud cans from his apartment and THAT was what was in my trunk. At least it wasn’t chainsaws or rifles and my curbside gal said she had seen all kinds of things and we both gnoffed through our masks 🧡🧡🧡

I was skeptical when the GG was in the Duluth area hiking the North Country Trail in Wisconsin last week and sent me this pic of his AirBnB. My first thought (after my usual COVID cowardice) was that he was staying in that trailer. Then I thought something like, “He’d probably LIKE to stay in the trailer.” As it turned out it was NOT the trailer, it was a decent place, and he had two or three nights there. Alone and no shared bathroom, although I don’t think “we” are all that worried about toilet plumes.

And home to technical difficulties. Yesterday morning, I was two minutes away from a meeting that I had to RUN when my normally fast and stable wifi suddenly quit and I couldn’t get connected again. Panic? Yes! Do I remember how to set up a hotspot on my phone? Haven’t done it since two years ago when we were on our LSD trip to Florida and my work laptop wouldn’t connect to the hotel wifi.

The GG said, “Did you try DoubleOaked?” Whut? I have been seeing DoubleOaked in the router (correct word?) list forever but I didn’t know it was US! I had been using trusty old Ratfink, thinking DoubleOaked was a neighbor. I shouldda known better than that since I have taken a Bourbon Trail tour at Woodford Reserve! So back on (after a little more futzing around).

But he has a new computer. iMac I think? Big one. I only use laptops these days, MacBook Pro and Dell something or other. Mac OS, IOS, Windows, MTS? An OS is an OS is an OS. But the old iMac wouldn’t back up. After a couple days of futzing with that problem, the diagnosis was that we needed a new backup drive, so over to Staples and I THINK he is more or less back in business or getting there. And it sounds like the backup drive played some kind of role in my problem with Ratfink but who knows. I am of NO help in these kinds of situations. I have terrible karma with hardware. Crappy software I can usually bludgeon my way through. If I LOOK at hardware, it disintegrates or melts or blows up or whatever.

Alas, I am probably next for a replacement. My MacBook Pro is a 2013 model and I’m pretty sure it can’t handle the latest and greatest OS. I’m not sure about Photoshop either. I have CS3 which I bought on student discount when I took classes at WCC and that was like 15 years ago. Onward.

P.S. Bad Orange Man, you did not “save” college football and I do not want your stupid signed Trump-Pence football. Jeebus!

Setting: Landfill front room, Planet Ann Arbor

Cast: Kayak Woman, the GG

Act 1

GG: Going to the hardware store.

KW [naggingly]: Mask?

GG: [walks out door in silence]

Act 2 [10 minutes later, not near enough time for a trip to the hardware store]

[GG pulls in the driveway and comes back inside]

KW: ???

GG: Need a mask.

KW: 😳

P.S. In all fairness, he probably walked out the door in silence because he didn’t HEAR me because he’s been wearing earphones lately. I was initially annoyed but now I’m thinking it has its advantages…

I’ll letchy’all guess which color 🐽🐽🐽

As a COVID Coward, I’m gonna let Mr. Mxyzptlk be first on November 3rd this year. Not even gonna fight him for it.

A while back, I thought I saw news that the Planet Ann Arbor was going to install extra ballot collection boxes throughout the city. I kept checking back and checking back and checking back. There were links that supposedly led to lists of ballot box locations. I would click them and see… nothing.

The only ones I knew about were one *inside* city hall and one at a satellite office in the UM Art Museum. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to navigate downtown Planet Ann Arbor right now? Construction city with streets closed for outdoor dining, etc. <kidding>I guess it’s legal for the GG to drop it off for me but I didn’t feel I could quiiiite be sure it would make it to its destination 🐽</kidding>

Yesterday! I got a message with a link to new ballot box locations and GUESS WHAT? Vet’s Park parking lot! That’s an easy walk from here! Although I drove over in Mooon Yooonit. My morning was filled with meetings and stuff and I had already done Dark Walk.

I miss the walk to Haisley and all the people and the sticker and walking through the woods after and even the line but I don’t miss it that much.

Anyway it’s done and now we nervously wait. I sure hope I filled my ballot out without mistakes!

P.S. As a child, I can remember The Commander enthusiastically saying she was gonna vote a straight Republican ticket. As the GOP careened (or is it careered?) farther and farther to the right, she changed her tune and in the end became an enthusiastic Obama voter.

P.P.S. Upon re-reading this, I am WELL AWARE that my voting experience in this annus horribilis was light-years away from so many other people in this country. I drove up next to a ballot box in an empty parking lot and put my ballot in the slot. And drove home. I didn’t even wear my mask…

Once upon a time in the Jurassic Age, some sort of Senate “hearings” pre-empted all day-time TV. All I remember about it was a whole bunch of “Ah don’t recollect” from various old fossils. Kee-reist.

I fergit when this was but it was pre-kids for me. I think. I fergit what the hearing was about. We didn’t have computers then, at least not computers that could connect to the intertubes and pull down news (and Senate hearings). We MAY have had an Apple II+ by then? Was I even hanging out with the GG then? Ah don’t recollect. If I needed background noise, I used the TV.

What I dooooo remember is reading a newspaper article in which some poor taaaarrred old mom of a pre-schooler was lamenting that the Senate hearing pre-empted Sesame Street. She turned on the TV and her kid’s response to some old fossil “not recollecting” was, “He not Cookie Monster.” Indeed. My kids had mixed feelings about Sesame Street and one of them derisively dismissed Bert and Ernie as “those silly guys.” But that’s beside the point.

I felt like that kid when I flipped on NPR this morning. I am getting bored with the programming on my preferred station because they seem to play the same jazz every weekday but I haven’t gotten around to finding a replacement system and I do like to hear a bit of news from time to time and the traffic report even though it doesn’t affect me any more. This morning. OMG. Do I want to listen to Amy Coney Barret’s confirmation hearings? I’m pretty sure I do not. She doesn’t look like an old fossil but She not Cookie Monster (or even EMU jazz).

I am not an ACB fan but some of you probably know that. I may (or may not) go into this in more detail some other day. Today I turned the volume way down. I had meetings anyway. The next few weeks are gonna be rough…

I wish I was clever enough to come up with things like this but I am not and I do not know who did.

It’s Sunday and so I followed my childhood family’s tradition of taking a drive out into the country. “Country” is a bit different in 2020 Washtenaw County than it was in 1960s Chippewa County. Then we would drive for miles and miles along paved (or not) two (or sometimes one) lane roads lined with trees and rarely encountering any signs of civilization. I liked and disliked these drives. I’m sure we had books and art supplies for when we got bored with all of the treeeeees. I do remember sitting in the back seat looking at the map. Fibre, Raber, Stalwart, De Tour, Eckerman, Strongs. I would get excited when I knew we were approaching one of these little burgs, expecting to find a candy store and maybe some trinkets. Alas, if there did happen to be candy/trinket stores in these places, we rarely stopped. My parents liked to ramble along the yooperland back roads and that’s what we did. After Sunday School and church, that is. None of us were religious at all (I knew that for myself at a VERY early age) but if you wanted to be successful in the small town that you grew up in, you went to church. We were mainstream Methodist, not some speaking-in-tongues cult.

As bored as I would get on a lot of those drives, I grew up to enjoy back road rambling. I fortunately married a guy who shares that with me and we have spent a lot of time driving along through miles of trees.

Back road rambling in Washtenaw County is not the same as it was (and still is) in Chippewa County but there are plenty of deserted roads and our beach urchins grew up riding in the back seat as weeee navigated those roads. No need to wait until after Sunday School and church because we don’t do that stuff. There are plenty of “candy/trinket” stores out in Washtenaw County and we would occasionally stop at one but not all that often.

Today I took myself out into Washtenaw County in Mooon Yooonit. I drove a kind of square. I drove down to Liberty and took it until it dead-ends on the eastern side of Mill Creek and you have to make a right onto Dancer. I took Dancer up until it meets Island Lake, then went through Dexter (extremely busy!), then took Joy over to Stein and Tubbs down to Huron River Drive over to N. Maple and home.

I was sorta looking for fall color. There is plenty of it but everything is pretty dry and I didn’t get any photo ops. I didn’t set out to look for polly-tickle signs but as I drove, I started noticing all of the Biden/Harris signs and then I saw a ByeDon sign. I didn’t think to get a pic at the time and then regretted it. Turns out our next door neighbors have this sign, so here it is. I did not see ONE Trump sign. Four years ago we took a drive out in the county and there were Trump signs everywhere.

This is one little county in Michigan and this county’s largest city (Ann Arbor) is largely “liberal”. I am still very nervous about the upcoming election. Trump has been a terrible president and I want him out. And do NOT tell me “you are a smart ‘girl’, do your research”. You do your OWN damn research. Stop drinkin’ the Kool-Aid.

I posted the ash tray photo on Instagram and a friend was wondering why it included the line about the Federal Reserve. I don’t know but I do remember my dad traveling at least once to the Federal Reserve bank in Minneapolis. During his visit, he had the opportunity to hold $1,000,000 in cash in his hand. I remember us kids were soooo amazed by the idea of a million dollars. And then the Michigan Miracle Mile? It’s the Soo Locks, as you can see by yesterday’s comments. The only “mile” I could think of was the I-500 snowmobile track but I think this ashtray pre-dates that and there are certainly other race-tracks in Michigan.

I’ll blahg about my dad’s journey into his career as a Successful Failure and my abandonment at the I-500 snowmobile race by Bad Boyfriend some other day.

I planned to do a whole bunch of sorting/flinging today. I didn’t. Part of it is that I’m struggling to muster the psychological energy to make progress with this prodject (intentionally misspelled). Partly it’s because it’s probably one of the last summer-like days of annus horribilis and I wanted to hang out in the back yard.

So what did I do today? I walked in the pitch black pre-dawn hours (I LOVE walking in the dark). A couple of curbside pickups (Plum and Whine Castle). Vacuuming chores with Rooooooomba and our purple Dyson cordless (so far unnamed but GREAT vac!). Other cleaning chores and opening a couple packages that arrived during the week that I didn’t open before because I didn’t need them immediately. 1) Colorful t-shirt fabric from the UK via Etsy to aid in Visible Mending some beloved cotton/whatever knit maxi-skirts (another prodject I’ve been procrastinating about). 2) CLOROX WIPES that didn’t cost an arm and a leg. I rolled the Amazon dice and got lucky. I ration those like crazy, mainly one a day to wipe Eco Terlet’s rim. TMI? In the COVID beginning I had to “rescue” a canister of wipes from outside where the GG was using them to clean tools! NO NO NO NO NO!

And then. After lunch, I hung out in the back yard reading and savoring our Indian Summer. Aaaaahhhhh…

Met a new grand-nephew baby tonight. Wait. What do you call your 1st cousin once removed’s child? The baby is my 1st cousin *twice* removed but NOT any kind of nephew. My cousins are almost like siblings to me and I get confused sometimes. Anyway, the baby’s grandparents (my cousin and her husband) hosted a socially distanced pizza party across town on the deck at Chez Harry (her dad’s house). Does your brain hurt from all the begats? There’s a quiz at the end 🐽

Right at the beginning of the COVID era, we lost my aunt Bubs. She was my dad’s much younger sister and the last of the four siblings in that generation. She did not die *of* COVID. A broken bone sent her to a rehab facility where she could not have visitors, including her husband (because of COVID). She was quite fragile and my uninformed opinion is that being surrounded by strangers is a major factor in what did her in.

She left behind My Dear Uncle Harry, whose house we met at tonight. Fortunately we had summer-like weather today so we could all be outside. Even though all of these people have been isolating forever, I remain nervous about indoor gatherings. You have to take your mask off to eat! The grandparents, who flew from the left coast, did the responsible thing and isolated in an AirBnB, then got a COVID test before moving to Chez Harry for the remainder of their visit.

Some flinging has taken place and I came home with this loverly door prize! And yes, it actually means something to me. It is an ashtray from when my dad and granddaddy ran the bank. Small-town bankers. I already have a couple-three of these around so I will happily add it to the collection. I collect very few things these days but this artifact makes the cut. I have no clue what Michigan’s Miracle Mile is.

This will not be a polly-tickle post. I managed to find the debate on TV last night and I started to watch it and then… Oh hang it all… Why bother? I knew I could get any information I wanted this morning via the internet. I loved Kamala saying, “I am SPEAKING!” Yes! You go girl. The fly? I have no words except maybe 👀. But I switched over to Green Acres reruns PDQ and didn’t see the fly until this morning.

So this is about my recent total failure to port photos from my iPhone to my MacBook in a reasonable way. For a long time there was some sort of free “cloud” thingy (that I never understood) that ported my photos over automatically every day. I think it deleted them when there were 1000 or something? Like I said, I never understood it. All of a sudden it stopped doing that.

I am capable of bludgeoning my way through tech issues, like today I was dealing with a series of gnarly UNCOMMENTED old-skool javascript functions that I think my previous (beloved) boss wrote something like 10 years ago. I got what I needed out of them for today’s project and decided a complete exhumation was not a productive use of my time.

So did I try to figger out why my photos stopped porting over? Naw. I came up with a workaround, which was emailing pics to myself. That is a major pain in the you-know-what but it worked and it worked for a couple years. Until about last Friday when the host service started bouncing them.

Dum-de-dum. I hate bothering The Guru (he’s a friend, NOT my husband) when he is on “vacation” but I forwarded one of the bounces and said something like, “I don’t understand all of this gibberish but it looks like they are complaining about meeee sending things to meeee”. And I’m pretty sure that’s what it was. I ‘splained (sheepishly) about emailing myself photoooos to get them from one device to another and I think I can still hear the sound of him banging his head against the wall!

Airdrop? Duh? Airdrop? Jeebus. It took me a while to figger out how to use Airdrop. My main problem was that I couldn’t find the photos once they landed on my MacBook. But I finally mastered it and yes it is a lot easier and more efficient than emailing photos from one device to another.

The pic is from over a week ago at the moomincabin when the GG closed it.

P.S. Oh man, we won’t even talk about the thwarted plot to kidnap/kill? our state’s governor. This shouldn’t be a PS but I am struggling to process it. Stop it stop it stop it!

A few things…

Again!

I do NOT form my opinions by listening to NPR. NPR does rumble along through the background of my life. It was background noise on my Zen Commute. It became my background noise when I moved to TeleCubelandia. There are certain things I perk up at when they come on. Like the Sunday morning puzzle and jazz shows. I’m getting a little taaarred of the weekday jazz because it gets repetitive. But I’m not really actively listening to any of it because it’s in the chitchen, at a low volume, and my super ears don’t really hear most of it.

Today I had to say that if my opinions sounded the same as NPR’s opinions, it was because NPR must be getting their opinions from me! That is not really true of course. None of the NPR reporters have any clue who I am or what my opinions are.

When it comes to Trump (who was the main topic of conversation), I follow his Twitter feed and listen to what he says. From there I form my own opinions. I have NEVER been a Trump fan. That goes back to well before he ran for prez. He has always come across to me as a narcissistic con man and I could never see what other people saw in him. So I was horrified when he WON the presidency and I STILL don’t understand now why he has so many supporters. If NPR sounds like me it’s because they have come to the same conclusions I have.

Socialism? Communism? What “ism” will we descend into if Trump is not elected? In my opinion, the only “ism” Trump is interested in is Trumpism. Vote for Republican candidates if you really believe that Joe Biden will magically turn the USA (a large and VERY complicated country) into some kind of unrecognizable socialistic or communist society. But please don’t vote for Trump. He does NOT have your best interests in mind. He cares only about himself. Well, maybe Ivanka…

But (you say) Biden is not a saint. NOBODY is a saint. Biden has made mistakes and will continue to make them. We all do. But you and I and Biden do not deliberately try to hurt other people by our actions or policies. You can argue whether Trump is deliberate or just does his own thing and damn the consequences for other people. I guess I would go with the second.

I am undecided about watching tonight’s debate. I’m not sure I can even find it on TV. I’m lucky if I can find Green Acres reruns. I hope Harris CREAMS Pence. I hope she doesn’t get COVID19 from him. I know he has tested negative but with White House virus protocols, who really knows? And I don’t trust the plexiglass.

GO KAMALA!

P.S. Apparently it was a very Karen-ish morning on the Wisconsin section of the North Country Trail and that may be why I had to deal with all of this afternoon’s polly-tickle crapola🐽

I did not wake up to any kind of earth-shaking news this morning. I woke up to the same old same old Trumpian crapola. I’m “home” and I’ve beaten the virus. But he has not (although he certainly may (but remember Herman Cain)) and he ripped his mask off for a balcony moment. Despite his “schooling” or whatever it was he said, I don’t think he yet understands COVID’s rules. Epidemiologists are still working to understand those rules. Sigh.

I do not have depression issues but man oh man I was dern grumpy this morning. Nevertheless, I persisted. I dredged myself outta the rack and took a dark walk and when I finally faaarrred up my work laptop, there was iDeep pinging me from India. Yes yes yes, call me! And he did and then there was the morning standup and a meeting with dev that I crashed. This all helped me cope with my temporary mood crapola.

My Mouse/Racoon and I were planning an afternoon whine meeting here in the Landfill backyard today. We were thinking about getting takeout from Knights but that didn’t exactly work out for various reasons, mainly because the Frog Hopper needed a taaaar repair. The whine meeting turned into a ‘hattan meeting while they were waiting for the Frog Hopper’s tire repairs to be finished.

We were talking (among other things) about Ayn Rand books… Mainly The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I think I need to read those again. I read them as a teenager/young adult and I liked them for a while… …until I didn’t. I can’t put my issues about them into words so maybe I will read them again… We’ll see.

The pic? It is a “volunteer” impatiens plant that somehow established itself in the brickwork underneath the hoses.

P.S. Godspeed Eddie Van Halen.

This was probably my fave of the Orange Baboon’s nutso tweets this morning. I mean really? Euphoria drugs anyone? I loved when @lakesuperior later tweeted “ROCKS AND WATER. VOTE!” I still don’t understand what the space force is. I’ll vote for blue water and rocks over bad orange crapola any day.

Yetch. Other than that, I do not really have any words for today’s stream of craziness out of Washington, DC. So I’ll talk about Softy Beanbag instead. See her there flopping outta the GG’s backpack?

The GG is in demand by various women as a hiking companion. Many women do not like to hike alone and are even nervous in small groups. I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND although there are places I am not afraid, like down by Barton Pond. The GG is one of the few men that most women are not afraid to hike with, so he is off for a week or whatever with a couple groups of women including the “softies”. They call themselves that because they do NOT backpack (I don’t either). I always like to say I need a shower in the morning and whine in the evening.

Anyway, I told him if he was gonna hike with the softies, he HAD to take Softy Beanbag. She belongs to one of the beach urchins and has a long history with our family. Early on we were at the moomincabin one summer and the GG was not and Softy’s urchin was going through a wee period of telephonic anxiety and didn’t really want to talk to the GG on the phone. Softy had stayed with the GG so “she” would talk to the urchin from the Planet Ann Arbor. “Softy Beanbag” is on the phone for you. Different kids require different tools and this was one of the tools that worked for us with that urchin. Plenty of other tools did not 🐽

Another time, the GG was conscripted to chaperone a 2nd grade field trip. He packed up Softy into a little backpack with her head peeking out. One of the teachers said to him, “I was having a really bad morning until I saw this.”

So, he was with the softies for a bit and now I think he’s with some of our regular Hiawatha Shore-to-Shore wimmen. He gets along well with all of these gals but I get the distinct impression that sometimes the conversations can be a wee bit tiring. I can be a gossip but it’s usually with my kids, my cousins, or his sisters and he can kinda tune that out. There is one woman in the group who can be a bit Karen-ish but she’s a regular and a known quantity. She’s why we call the Tahquamenon Falls Brewery “The Den of Iniquity”. We love her anyway.

Oh, okay, I have solo-driven to and from the yooperland a few times since you-know-when. Other than that, I drive to get curbside pickup, mostly at the Plum but sometimes at Sparrow and the Whine Castle. And one intrepid trip over to Cubelandia to clean out my cube.

Driving has been weird for me throughout the pandemic. As a teenager I was chomping at the bit to get my driver’s license. I got it when I was 16 but not on my birthday because there were not enough road test slots to meet the demand and I had to wait for one. I can’t remember how many months after my birthday it was that I got my license. I feel like it was early summer? My birthday is January. I remember that most of my friends had to wait even longer and were well into 17 before they could legally drive.

I have always been a defensive driver but also an assertive one (NOT aggressive, there’s a difference). I seem to be ULTRA-defensive since the pandemic. And slow? I am always aware of speed limits and try to stay within them or a wee bit above. Now? I am going slow? Well, that’s not entirely true. When I am on the freeway, I catch myself up at 80 sometimes and have to ease up a bit. I do NOT use cruise control so stuff happens.

Anyway, I HAD to get OUT somewhere today. It was raining and I took Mooon Yooonit down to the Huron River and drove her out almost to Chelsea, headed south via Dancer Road under the freeway, hung a louie onto Jerusalem, then south on Parker to Swan Corners. No visible swans today, maybe they are gone for the winter? But it was a nice little rain ride on the back roads where there was NO traffic. I could go as slow as I wanted to. Which is what I needed today. Like I was able to STOP and BACK UP to get this tree pic, flawed as it is with power lines and a rain streak on my veeendsheeeld.

Okay, I do not know what is exactly going on with Trump. Does anyone? I cannot stand the man or the fact that he is our current prez. His little COVID “victory” turn to greet his supporters cult members outside Walter Reed is annoying to me. Has he really made a miraculous recovery so quickly? I wonder. If so, cool… But… People all over Twitter are suggesting that he is infecting people by doing this. Um, probably not and what are the facts here? He isn’t infecting his supporters because he is being transported in some kind of “armored” car. And. He is PROBABLY not infecting the folks in the car with him because THEY have PROBABLY been outfitted (by Walter Reed) with medical-grade PPE to keep them safe from his infection. Alas, I doubt that equipment will keep them safe from his poisonous presidency.

I just want those of us who are anti-Trump to keep focused and not get side-tracked by gabbling about issues that we as private citizens don’t have answers to. Jeebus, I soooo miss the Sidetrack Saloon over in Ypsi… Work parties and lunches with some of my MacMu cousins and their dad Old Man MacMu, a COVID victim. Obviously I am side-tracked…

P.S. Okay, according to early morning Twitter feeds, I was wrong and a Walter Reed doc “blasted” the Orange Baboon for his cute little foray. Nov. 3? Out out out!

Every year late summer and into fall there is a booth at the farmers market that has fresh shelled lima beans. They are six dollars a quart (I *think* it’s a quart box) and every time I went down there, which was every in-town Saturday, I would buy four quarts.

I am not going in person to the farmers market this year because COVID. They have a curbside system but the process is a bit too much for my interpersonal communication comfort level because you have to communicate (in various ways) with individual vendors to buy things. I am using Argus delivery which is WONDERFUL but they don’t always have the full range of products that are at the farmers market, at least not at any given moment.

I had just about resigned myself to living without lima beans this year. They were not showing up in the Argus product list. I didn’t know if that vendor was not selling via Argus or if I was just not online when lima beans were available. Yesterday I was doing grocery orders and even though I didn’t really NEED anything from Argus I thought I would check it out. Lo and behold, THEY HAD LIMA BEANS! So now I have lima beans. And delicata squash and onions and potatoes and leaf lettuce from our fave Goetz Family Farm down in Blissfield. And some hummus that I like.

I turned on the furnace today. Oh, the furnace has been on a couple times already but it was not meeeee who turned it on. I was not cold then. Today, after a blindingly brilliant sun this morning, the afternoon turned gray and chilly and it was 56 degrees INSIDE. And I WAS a bit chilly. So I turned the thermostat up to 64 and turned on the LEDs under the kitchen cupboards and I am in fine shape.

Cheers! (and wear a goddamn mask!)