Archive for May, 2007

The Ryerson and Purple Beach Glass. Omens for a good summer?

Sunday, May 13th, 2007

beachglass.jpg32 degrees or thereabouts this morning. Calm, quiet, and sunny. I left two beach chairs out for Jack and Jim. I hauled my kayak up over the bank and when I went back to get the paddle, there was a perfect piece of purple beach glass where the kayak had been. And then the Ryerson went by. Last boat of the weekend. But not the season. Because the season is just getting started. You guys, keep track of that place for us until we can get back. Make sure Froog behaves himself, after all, he is a guest this week. And haunt The Commander if she doesn’t turn off the stove.

Below are pics of some of our adventures this week, click on the thumbnails for slide shows. No, North Country Trail pics are *not* up yet. I’ll get there but there are about a quatrillion of those.

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click on thumbnails for slide shows

Burnt Out!

Saturday, May 12th, 2007

danaxegrad.jpgJust got back from a long hike on the North Country Trail, from the trailhead on the Tahqua Trail to the Lower Falls campground. Twenty people and a few dogs. A *lot* of time was spent dealing with the complicated logistics of spotting cars. The walking trail itself was 8.8 miles but the driving distance is more like, oh, say, lemme see, 10 miles from the lower falls to Paradise, six(?) from Paradise to the Tahqua Trail and 5 miles in to the trailhead. 21 miles. Give or take some. I lost track of the odometer between Paradise and the Tahqua Trail. Literally feet north of the Tahqua Trail entrance, a car hit and killed a young moose, providing quite some distraction. I’m not sure *exactly* when it happened but I *think* it was either just before or just after I drove that stretch of highway, heading up to spot my vee-hickle at the falls. Lucky break if that was the case!! Beautiful trail, lots of up and down, *lots* of up and down. I’d post pics of both the trail and adventures earlier this week but I am beat and the dial-up is too slow, so y’all’ll just have to wait a day or maybe two since I’m gonna drive back down to The Planet tomorrow. As Radical Betty says, “everybody is bailing out.” But we’re not, really. Summer is just starting a little earlier these days. Jay and Rey are supposed to arrive tonight or tomorrow and Bugs and Horsey will also get here tomorrow. And now I am halfway through an A-hattan and Radical Betty is here to have a drink and I think we’re cooking hamburgs on a bun and I dunno what else. I’m feeling kind of buggity tonight. Ciao Bambinos! Oh yeah, the kid in the middle of the pic is Daniel Regenstreif Axe who just graduated from Webster College with a Bachelor of Arts. Or some such thing. Yay!

Beach Soundbites

Friday, May 11th, 2007

Literally sound bites, the video is incidental here. It’s early morning on Radical Betty’s deck. Calm and fog, which burned off into a hot beach day. Don’t be too envious, all you beach folk. Today it is sunny, cold, and windy. Did I say cold? I am not kayaking and I’m glad I brought my ski jacket after all!

P.S. Sheesh! I am on dial-up right now and getting a first-hand look at how slowly videos load at these speeds. Readers with dial-up, I’m sorry! Just goes to show it’s a good idea for all web designers to use dial-up once in a while. Keeps us humble!!!

The Grinch Connection

Friday, May 11th, 2007

Online via The Grinch Connection. Just reporting. 😉 grok grok grok!

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P.S. Got online at Penny’s Kitchen today, NO problem. Do NOT know what was going on all week. Maybe the Internet gods were telling me to take a break already?

Bwa Ha Ha! Email Cheetah Online!!!

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

Via my new modem, cute little pocket-sized device, who knew? Except for ol’ Doc Burns and his posse, that is. And a trip to Brimley to reconnect up to Jamadots. After all that, I think I’ll fling a kayak into the lake! This is May? In Michigan?? In the Yoop?????

Ticks and Frogs and Spiders, Oh My

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

My modem is supposed to come today and maybe I’ll get online and maybe not and I still cannot get my Macbook online at Penny’s Kitchen, which is where I am at the moment, so I’m gonna write a really quick higgledy-piggledy type blahg and maybe I’ll get on again later and maybe not.

The last couple of days have been a total whirlwind and I miss my cousin already. Aimée returned a couple weeks ago to her home on Lopez Island, Washington after two months in Zimbabwe and Kenya. She promptly loaded up her car (and I mean loaded, kayak and skis and everything) and headed across country. Got here Monday night and left this morning. On to Maine to pursue a nursing degree (RN) in an accelerated program. Does this make your head spin and what is it about my cousins and I that makes us go back to school at this age? I dunno.

We have been bombing around at Iroquois, Naomikong, the beach, town, you name it. Trying unsuccessfully (for the most part) to get onto the internet. Cleaning the cabin (little bits at a time), having lunch at Penny’s, taking ticks in to the experts for identification. I dunno what else. Beautiful on the beach today but I’m feeling a little melancholy, missing the old days and all that rot. Got millions of pics to post but sayonara until later (maybe), Email Cheetah.

Don and Jack and Offline Blahgging

Wednesday, May 9th, 2007

donandjack.jpgBoy oh boy, it sure is hard to be a blahgger when you don’t have an internet connection. Couldn’t get on at Penny’s Kitchen yesterday, do not know why. Couldn’t get The Grinch Connection working last night due to obsolete DSL modem. Could see a “Comtrends” (or something) wifi from Radical Betty’s but couldn’t access it. Where that wifi was, I have NO idea! So, I’m here at The Commander’s doing a quick little blahg before I go off into the wilderness again. Today’s subject is Jack and Don’s birthdays. Jack would’ve been 88 today and Don would be 91 (right?) on the 11th. So, click here or click the picture to see some pictures, old and older. We’re going to celebrate by hiking up at Naomikong and lasagne out at the cabin. Other than that, Aimée is here for a couple of very short days and I’m just going with the flow here. Adventures and just hanging out. My new modem is supposed to get here tomorrow. With luck, I’ll get back on line at the cabin. Back into the black hole. Sayonara, Email Cheetah.

Email Cheetah in a black hole

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

ports.jpgFirst of all, I ordered a modem today. It is supposed to allow me to hook up my Macbook to The Internets with just a dial-up connection. I cannot for the life of me figure out how Apple got the idea that it was okay to quietly start selling laptop computers without modems. Do they *really* think that everyone in the world has wifi access? What about my cabin in The Great White North on the Shores of Gitchee Gumee? Eh? I mean, it is *possible* to get a DSL there. But what do I do with the DSL during the 8-9 months of the year the place is uninhabitable? I’m not sure it’s possible to get a month-to-month contract on those. And The Grinch Connection is not connected. Because “old stuff” doesn’t talk to “new stuff.” I’m sure y’all are wondering something like, “well, didn’t you *know* you were buying a computer without a modem?” grok grok. Yeah, I’m wonderin’ that, y’ stoopid ol’ bag! Grok grok [Shut up, Froog.] NO, I did NOT know I was buying a computer without a modem! In fact, it was two months later that I figured it out. And that was only because Marci was scrutinizing the ports one Monday at coffee. Am I embarrassed? Only a little. I think that Apple should have written in big red letters on the outside of the computer, “NO MODEM!” Sheesh! I also think they should give me a free modem, but I’m not sure I have the psychic energy to fight with them over $49. Lesson learned? You betcha.

So, if I am not Email Cheetah for a couple days, it is because I have to either MacStumble around the woods trying to find a wifi connection or drive in to town and use the one at Penney’s Kitchen or Cup of the Day or behind The Comfort Inn or The Commander’s house or whatever. Cheers!

Speaking of the beach, low water is the word.

Monday, May 7th, 2007

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Click, click, click

Watching for deer and cops. And cougars.

Monday, May 7th, 2007

I don’t know why it’s always so hard to change coordinates but it is. But I’ll be fine after I get on the road. I always am. Seeya on the beach!

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click on pics to enlarge

The Grand Poohbah of Prime Number Sieves and Other Mathematical Pursuits

Sunday, May 6th, 2007

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click on thumbnail pics to enlarge

I spent quite a bit of my childhood being envious of my cousins. They either lived in exotic locations, like The Planet Ann Arbor, or they were older than me. Much more interesting lives in either case, or so I perceived. I share my birth year with two female Fin Family Moominbeach cousins. These two cousins both belonged to the category of “lives in an exotic location.” In Pooh’s case, that was The Planet Ann Arbor, Aimée lived all over the place, including Alaska and the DC area. We had the Fin Family Moominbeach in common and these cousins were particularly special to me and, when I wasn’t being a total pain in the you-know-what, we were all the best of friends and eventually we all became first-time mooms in the same year!!

There’ll undoubtedly be more about Aimée later this week but today it’s all about Pooh because it is her BIRTHDAY!! Hopefully a less expensive one than my green Honda had. So, some Pooh Trivia, in no particular order:

  • She is ultra smart.
  • She is good at math and science.
  • She won a prize in grade school (or sometime back in the dark ages) for making a prime number sieve. Do y’all know what a prime number sieve is?
  • She used to be a systems scientist.
  • Now she teaches math and science and stuff to teenagers.
  • She is married to The Marquis. They met in high school.
  • She and The Marquis like to ride bikes and play pickle-os.
  • She is a quilter and a beader and a knitter.
  • She holds the title Mad Scientist of Easter Egg Dyeing.
  • She is a biblioklept. Keep your book under lock and key at all times or she will steal it and read it, the whole dern thing, before you’ve even noticed it’s missing.
  • She is good at beating up on computers but she is not a blahgger.
  • She once won a hat contest and we won’t talk about the Oscars.
  • When she was little, she used to call cookies “cookily-cookilies.”
  • She has two boyz of noyz, Volume Dan and Nuclear Dave. They are 22 and 19.
  • It used to take her forever to go out to the outhouse and back because she would always stop to watch bugs and things along the way.
  • She lives in St. Louie.
  • She likes aminals, especially guinea pigs. And so do I. Neither of us have any guinea pigs any more.
  • Her brain moves faster than her body. The exact opposite of her cousin Kayak Woman.
  • Do NOT even bother trying to play Scrabble with her. She will beat the pants off of you! Got that, you nagers?
  • Oh yeah. Her name isn’t really Pooh. That came from Winnie-the-Pooh. Her name is actually Anne, which is the same name as her cousin Kayak Woman, with the e on the end and everything. When she was born, her parents lived in Colorado and they didn’t think we’d ever get to see each other very much. Wrong! 🙂

And that’s not all. I could probably go on forever. Add your own Pooh Trivia to the comments if you want. And HAPPY BIRTHDAY Pooh! Love you!

I wonder if anybody ever called Queen Elizabeth “Lizard Breath.”

Saturday, May 5th, 2007

I have been assigned the horse, uh, hey, who’s my horse? Grok grok. It’s Street Sense, y’ stoopid ol’ bag. grok grok. Street Sense. Thanks, Froog. The Mad Scientist has prepared his annual slurry and his horse is Scat Daddy. I think that Scat Daddy is a horrible name for a horse. Yes, I know horses poop. I’ve been to Mackinac Island more times than I can count.

I usually pick my own derby horse. I do it by which name I like the best, not by what the odds are. One year, I picked Green Alligator. Now, *that* was a name! I was scoffed at but then Green Alligator actually came in fourth! So there!

You can pick horses by their names if you aren’t doing any betting. And I’m not. I am not much of a gambler. I was pretty good at penny poker on the band bus back in 7th grade. Bet they don’t allow *that* any more, eh? But all these fancy casinos and things I just do not understand. We went to one once, to celebrate a relative’s birthday. I like the relative a lot but, from the get-go, I did not care for the casino. Smoke and noise and expensive drinks and a cheesy band in which one saxophone player never blew even a single note, just danced around with a big grin on her face. The GG stuffed a twenty into my hand and said something like, “go put that into one of those slot machines.” I didn’t want to be too much of a party pooper, so I did. And promptly lost *all* of it. NEVER AGAIN!

This year, I don’t find any of the horse names all that appealing. No Green Alligator or Sinister Minister. So I’ll stick with my assigned Street Sense and we’ll drink our yearly mint julep. It’ll all be over in a couple minutes and after we sing My Old Kentucky Home, we’ll switch over to Prairie Home and get on with our boring lives.

What horse did you pick? And do you think anyone ever called the Queen of England “Lizard Breath?”

An expensive birthday not exactly on the calendar.

Friday, May 4th, 2007

Hey, Bro’, this post is for YOU! So park your lake freighter or whatever vee-hickle you’re driving at the moment, siddown, shaddup, and READ! 😉

100,000. I noticed the odometer reading when it was at about 99,982 or so. We were in the green Honda and had just gotten onto the southbound freeway at Harrison and I planned to watch it turn over to 6 figures. But I forgot and the next time I looked at it, it read 100,011.

The scheduled maintenance light had been blinking for about the last month. Tentative May travel plans had finally firmed up and required both Hondas. It was time. So Wednesday morning, I called up Howard Cooper and asked when I could get it in. “How about 8 am tomorrow?” Okay! That was perfect! I figured I’d drop it off and walk home.

And then I remembered that I was supposed to meet Sandy for breakfast at The Broken Egg at 8:30. The Broken Egg is on the corner of N. Main and Miller. Was this going to work? Could I get there on time? Yeah, I figured I could. Howard Cooper is out on State St., almost all the way to Briarwood. I could drop my vee-hickle off at about 10 to 8. That never takes more than a couple minutes and I’d have approximately 40 minutes to walk into town. Piece of cake.

Except, did you ever hear about the best laid plans? I got to Howard Cooper at about 10 to 8, as planned. As soon as I mentioned The Magic Number, the usual short vee-hickle drop-off conversation catapulted into a long discussion about the timing belt ($740) and platinum plugs ($170) and, oh yes, the regular service ($320, but $255 if I did the timing belt). Total: $1060. With coupons.

I should’ve been expecting something like this but my jaw was just about on the floor. Even though I knew it probably needed all this stuff, I didn’t feel quite prepared to make an executive decision. I called the GG’s office. No answer. I called the old Master of the Universe phone. Straight to voice mail. So, I gave Steve the service guy the keys but put a hold on the whole thing until I could get back to him. By this time, I’d spent 15 minutes there and I realized I was going to have to really book it to get across town in time for breakfast.

I started galumphing along down State St. simultaneously engaging in a frantic volley of phone tag. The GG’s office again. No answer. The Master of the Universe phone again. Why I bothered with that, I don’t know, it was obviously turned off. Finally, I had the inspiration to call the EPA front desk and have the GG paged. No luck but I left a message and that did the trick and he finally returned the call. Yes, go for it. So I left a message on Steve’s voice mail. Do it! He called back to confirm. Yeah, go for it! Whew! That was over!

Or not. When I got home, Steve called again, this time rambling on about ball bearings and engine splash shields and whatnot. More phone tag ensued and when all was said and done we were talking $1438.60 — with coupons — and an overnight for the vee-hickle. Whoosh! I have to admit, I was just *dying* to spend 1400 bucks on something.

Okay. This vee-hickle is (knock on wood big time) the best vee-hickle I have ever owned. It has 100,000 miles on it. It drives just about like it did when it was new. The body is in good shape except for some little parking lot type dings. But whaddaya gonna do? Zee veendshield vipers do not turn on all by zemselfs. It has had exactly *two* problems in its entire life. The alternator went bad at about 3000 miles, obviously a warranty repair. And once, the check engine light came on. I forget what caused that but it was some minor thing like an oxygen sensor or whatever. By contrast, we didn’t quite hit 100,000 with the POC but, by the time we sold it, it had been through at least two sets of brakes, two major air-conditioning repairs and countless other problems, large and small. One time the darn thing was on the verge of falling apart. And zee veendshield vipers turned on all by zemselfs. Definitely spent a lot more than $1400 fixing problems on that vee-hickle over a similar number of miles.

Happy birthday old Honda! May you have another 100,000!

It was my brother who suggested the Honda Accord when I decided I wanted to get a sedan, so thanks old boy.

And, yes, I did get to The Broken Egg for breakfast yesterday morning. I was late but I made it.

Eureka!

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

I don’t know, sometimes you have to just about bang your head against the wall to get your brain to make any sense.

I have convinced The Commander that May would be a good time to visit us on The Planet Ann Arbor. I *think* it’s something she wants to do. *I* think it’ll be fun and I bet once we get on the road, she will too. She proclaimed, “Well! I wouldn’t want to stay much longer than a week!” Octo-women are awfully busy and she has a bunch of home improvement stuff going on and I know she wants to get back to that. And that’s okay, a week is about my limit too. 😈

As small as our house is, there’s plenty of space for a guest and there are also plenty of beds. But the place is pretty disheveled after 22 years and I had some work to do. When The Commander and Grandroobly used to come and visit, they would sleep on the hide-a-bed in the “back room,” aka family room type A-dition. Grandroobly used a little flashlight to keep him from tripping over the trash or falling down the stairs as he wended his way through the house to the bathroom in the middle of the night. This time I thought it might be handy to put The Commander up in her own private space. So I decided it was time to clean up Lizard Breath’s room.

Lizard’s room is not really all that messy. There are rooms in The Landfill that are a whole heckuva lot worse, with Your Favorite Blahgger being the main culprit. But it has been a while since Lizard’s been home for more than a couple days. She spent half of last summer living and working in Kalamazoo and ended up with something like three days here before leaving for California. Not enough time to sort everything out, especially with about a gazillion friends to spend time saying farewell to. And with two passengers and camping gear, not everything would fit in her car. I mailed quite a few of the important things out to her but there’s still a lot of stuff left behind. I doubt she even wants all of it.

After avoiding the room for many moons, I started out slowly, picking through it a few minutes at a time. Yesterday, I got to looking at the bed and began actually *making* it in at least a relatively proper fashion. Liz’s room is in the middle of the back of the house and it has two doors. The “back” door is a slider (a *persnickety* slider) that opens onto the landing at the top of the basement stairs. The room is only a little bit wider than the length of her bed and sometime during her teenage years, she placed the bed so that it blocked the back door. I assume this was for purposes of privacy, to keep people like Kayak Woman from traipsing through her room.

So, yesterday, I was struggling with making the bed and, in order to deal with the foot end, I kept having to either walk all the way through the house around to the back door of her room or clamber over the footboard. Until… EUREKA!! I was hit by the lightning bolt that this room belonged to someone with a California driver’s license! There was no reason I had to leave the bed that way any more. I could put it wherever I wanted. And we could actually *walk* through the room if we wanted to. Like we used to do before it was someone’s bedroom.

Make no mistake. I’m not getting rid of anything (except empty envelopes and old plastic bags and stuff like that). I couldn’t throw out my little lizard’s stuff if I tried! And there’s no reason to. I’m putting it into drawers or boxing it up until she has time to deal with it. But I can rearrange the room. And we can walk through it again.

I miss the days when the door was blocked and she and her friends would be in there giggling and playing music into the night. It was a really *long* time before I could even begin to get started on cleaning it. But I think I’m going to enjoy having another route through the house again, after all these years. Love you, Lizard, hope this is okay…

Here are before and after pics and a *very* hastily arranged diagram of our loverly home, aka The Landfill:

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(click pics to enlarge)

Wake Me Up Quick!

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007

You know those old “freighter comes inside the bay” dreams? Well, how about a freighter that comes whaling along through the woods down to the beach on the Don & Katie side of the cabin and then plunges into the water, breaks apart Edmund Fitz style, and sinks?

The Troll Under the Railroad Bridge

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

Email from a school buddy: “School’s out. So what kind of trouble should we get into next?”

My reply: “Let’s go hang out under the railroad bridge and ambush potential [web design] clients.”

Okay, so we decided that meeting for breakfast would be safer. But what *is* next? Last year, when school got out, I spent about the next six weeks in a total fog. I had only taken one class that winter (long boring story) and I had quit The Craziest Job On The Face Of The Planet the fall before. That was all good for a while because as it turned out I spent most of the winter commuting to either the Henry Ford Hoosegow or the Yoop. For a little while, I thought I might have to actually drop that one class but I stuck it out and, in the end, I was glad I did. But then school was over and I had no job and my dad and my brother and all kinds of other people and aminals I loved were dead and I couldn’t focus on anything except driving and the only reason I was still getting out of bed at 0-dark-thirty and walking every day was because I am *programmed* to get out of bed at 0-dark-thirty and walk every day. Sheesh, was that sentence long enough?

Anyway, after a summer of shuttling back and forth to the beach, a year of *intense* classes, and a dream trip to California, I am moving along under my own steam again. Er, sort of, but “sort of” is a definite improvement. This was a very successful school year and not only in terms of grades. What’s next? I’m not completely sure but at least this year I have a *list*:

  • Dredge up Jason’s old lectures and regain fluency with javascript and the DOM.
  • While I’m at it, I should probably do the same thing with the CSS positioning lectures.
  • Work on my internship.
  • Learn php.
  • Learn more than the basics of flash actionscript.
  • Tear apart the wordpress file structure and style sheet and attain fluency at designing themes.
  • Redesign my blahg. Or maybe I should say *design*, since I did the current “design” in about five minutes.
  • Work on my business site.
  • Create a web and/or powerpoint presentation of the Twinz of Terror’s north-country trail trip from L. Michigan to L. Superior.
  • Shuttle up and down the I75 SUV Speedway to Houghton Lake and the beach (duh).
  • Figger out how the heck to get my beeyootyful new Macbook to connect to The Internets up there on The Shores of Gitchee Gumee since it doesn’t have a modem. Um, Apple? What were you thinking?
  • Keep on working on The Landfill. Five minutes at a time if that’s what it takes.
  • Flute, beads, fabric collage, finish knitting my socks, keep up with The New Yorker, read Harry Potter 7 and who knows what else, etc., etc.
  • Hang around under the railroad bridge and ambush potential [web design] clients.