Sheesh! Those slackers over at the EPA have Columbus Day off and that’s today. Actually, I think it really *is* today. For once, I think the bank holiday falls on the actual date for Columbus Day rather than an arbitrarily chosen Monday of proximity. [Update re Dogmomster: the real Columbus Day is Oct. 12th.] Or, if you are certain misguided Planet Ann Arbor council members, you might wanna call it Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead. And maybe there should be such a holiday but that idea got shouted down pretty fast in the city council because it really wasn’t pertinent to the mechanics of running a city. You know, garbage pickup and snow removal and road repair and all the rest. Anyway, the GG didn’t have to drive home from the Great White North until today and, when I got home from work, I was mystified as to his whereabouts. His vee-hickle was here. His junk was here. The front door was locked but the back sliders were open. Hmmmm. Did a pile of old lucky-shuckial cyberbeasties collapse on him down in the dungeon or what? Dare I look down there?

I did the usual thing and tried calling his cellular telephone. Twice I was shunted off to voicemail. Then I texted. No response. I waited a bit and finally tried his cell again. This time, he answered. His response? “Well, I texted a few times!” Say what? I had received *no* text messages. I finished skimming the Planet Ann Arbor Snooze and then I faaaarrred up my MacBook and there was Twitter sitting there. With three tweets from you-know-who: 1) “Walking across Ann Arbor – It’s Summer. Right?” 2) “Downtown.” 3) “You are spacified.” Okay. I am ecstatic to be spacified but I do NOT have Twitter set up to tweet my cell phone and twittering at me is going to do me no good unless I am using my cyberbeastie AND looking at Twitter. Sheesh!

Anyway, one of my Twitters this morning was probably a bit cryptic: “Why does this have to be so frackin’ hard?” I guess most of my Twitters are pretty cryptic. I tend to “tweet” when I find myself in some totally bizarre situation that can’t be described so I don’t even try. Or when somebody thunders something really bizarre, like the other night, “Whaddya been eatin’? Space bugs?” and a couple other ones. I won’t say who I quoted there. A few of you who go way (WAY) back with me might guess. And yes, we were a bit tipsy. Drunk twittering. Sorry. Um. Yeah.

But that tweet this morning about being frackin’ hard had to do with the fact that I am working on a little photographic prodject (yes, I know that is misspelled, it’s intentional) and it has been one headache after another and now I am fighting World War III with a dern scanner! And various waaarrrs and plugs and things. I am actually pretty dern good at image processing. I even have four (count ’em) college-level courses in that subject under my belt. But I could not get the one blasted scanner that I NEED to USE for this particular prodject to TURN ON for the LIFE OF ME! This morning. I was using it a couple weeks ago. I THINK everything is plugged in correctly. IT WILL NOT TURN ON!!! ‘course, with the snake pit of waaaarrrs underneath that particular cyberbeastie and the heap of stuff that plugs into it, who the heck knows whether I have it plugged in correctly or not. Except that I don’t remember UNplugging it.

So, when YOU get home (and you know who you are), will you PLEASE troubleshoot the snake pit and get that frackin’ blasted scanner working again? Thank you!

Actually, I was about an hour east from the beautiful town of Paradise. I was on Fin Family Moominbeach and I was there for approximately 24 hours. Whoof! Drove to Houghton Lake after work on Friday. Dragged myself out at 0-dark-30 Saturday morning to drive the rest of the way up. Hung out with Uber Kayak Woman, Radical Betty, Green Guy, Froggy, Moley, and some grumbly grunchy sorta beloved guy that made an after dark appearance. Beach-walked, trespassed, nonagenarian photographer’s retrospective open house at Alberta House Olive Craig gallery, bugged The Commander for a bit, explored the Claybanks area, or re-exlored in my case but I never get tired of re-exploring that area. Back to the beach in time for cocktails while watching the sundown. Up this morning, back to Houghton Lake to forage a quick lunch and then home.

One never quite knows what the weather will be like anywhere in the Great Lake State at any given time in October (or any month, actually) and that goes about quadruple for Fin Family Moominbeach. So I had every kind of clothing including my ski jacket along with me. I didn’t need it. It was absolutely, positively, drop-dead gorgeous! Just cool enough that socks and a polartech vest were comfortable in the setting sun.

Click here or on the picture for 24 photos of my 24 hours. These photos have all been web optimized and have lost quite a bit in the process. The originals are gorgeous. No kudos to the amateur photographer, the angle of the light and the fall color are responsible. Hmmm… Maybe I should take an actual photography class from someone who actually knows what they are doing. Yaknow, so I could actually learn how to do this stuff right! I have to wonder what kind of career that kind of experiment might lead to… But I’ll stick with what I have for the foreseeable future.

Sayonara,
Kayak Boomerang Woman

P.S. Er, yes I know that Dennis’s outhouse is in there twice. I’m too taaaarrrred to fix it. Anyway, outhouses are important even if they only get used during plumbing emergencies.

Fly Honda Express! Er not? So that cute little incident in the picture caused the first big slowdown. There were apparently no injuries. Otherwise, I wouldn’t’ve posted it, what did y’all think? I will admit to muttering epithets about documents from Crackerjack boxes. Seriously, it was a young couple and they looked terrified and I’m glad they were okay. And I could tell that because I was going about two miles per hour. And then. Of course there is that whole marvel of modern engineering, the Zilwaukee Bridge. The broken Zilwaukee Bridge. The one that three lanes of heavy traffic have to squeeze down to two and detour around. What the heck was I thinking, leaving at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon and taking the I75 SUV Speedway? I know better. I could blather on and on and on about the idjits on the road tonight but, really, y’all just do not wanna know.

Then there are those slackers over at the EPA, who not only get to take Friday off this weekend. They get Monday too. Er, at least the GG gets Friday off. Technically, he works a compressed schedule of four 10-hour days. So even though he often works Fridays, not to mention putting in a few hours on a Saturday or Sunday, he *can* take Friday off if he wants to. And Monday? Heck, I have training on Monday afternoon.

Anyway, he drove up here early in the day and walked over to the Spikehorn for dinner and a ‘hattan and when I *finally* got off the blasted I75 SUV Speedway, I picked him up there. I could’ve ordered food there to take out but 1) I didn’t want to wait for it and 2) I didn’t want greasy barroom food and 3) I wasn’t really all that hungry. So we are here and I am cooking rice. And really, that’s about all I need. Oh, and a ‘hattan. And there’s a reason (or two) that we are wasting gasoline by driving two vee-hickles this weekend but it’s long and involved and I don’t wanna talk about. I hope the UU and The Beautiful Gay don’t get into a big mess at the Zilwaukee like I did.

G’night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite,
Kayak Woman @ Houghton Lake

P.S. Wish I would’ve brought some purple LED lights up here! For the ambience, don’tcha know.

Well of course! You make breakfast dinner! What else? Um, just as soon as I get done with this blahg entry. And btw, the pic for today has nothing whatsoever to do with all of this. It’s Lake Nipigon back in 1953 before I was even alive (prob’ly on the way, though) and I am struggling with a photo prodject and it is one of the guinea pigs I’m testing for my prodject, so I’m posting it and y’all can just deal with it.

Anyway, if I am home here at the Landfill for a weekend and don’t have too many field trips scheduled, I can actually almost get ahead of the meal plan for the week. I cook just a little bit ahead and we have leftovers a couple of nights and I am not a bad cook when I actually put my mind to it, so the leftovers around here are not [usually] all that bad. If I am not at the Landfill over the weekend, the week is a big morass of constant late-afternoon stops at one grokkery store or another. In either case, as the week progresses, I end up feeling more and more pressed for time and by about Thursday, I am flying in the dark by the seat of my pants. Which isn’t always the best thing, believe me.

So. Today is Thursday and we had actual new food Sunday and Monday nights. And good leftovers on Tuesday. And a mish-mash but still good leftovers last night. And that was about enough. So what to do. Go out? Too social. (Yeah, I know I’m lame.) Take-out? Maybe about once every six months. Grokkery store. Yeeeeeearrrrggh. And then I remembered about breakfast dinner! Maybe about the one thing the Beach Urchins ate relatively enthuiastically for a few years. In those days, it was eggs and toast and hashbrowns and sausage or bacon. Tonight it’s gonna be some variation on the Crow’s Nest scramble, eggs scrambled with spinach and onion and garlic and tomato and feta and maybe some Greek olives. And I just happen to have a bag of hash browns in the freezer. And now. I better git goin’ and cook!

G’night! Kayak Woman

Make that a loooooooonnnnnngggggg “ng” and end it with a little bit of a hard “g” sound. Check out the little audio player down at the bottom. Those of you who cringe whenever you see one of those on my blahg can rest assured, Froggy is not in it. Froog Fans, I’m not sure when he’ll be making his next appearance. He’s being very secretive these days. Spending a lot of time in his laundry basket. Although we are enjoying the peace and quiet, I’m sure he’s only up to no good.

Anyway, there’s that old saying, “I married you for better or worse but not for lunch.” When I come home from my work, I need time to chill alone for a bit. Read the newspaper and write my blahg and tink around with dinner and/or various little chores. Laundry anyone. Or garbage patrol. I dunno. I am gonna guess that, given that we can both keep our jobs into forever (and who knows about that), the GG will be eligible for retirement well before I will. I am not sure how I will deal with having a house-husband. He will have to find a new career or some kind of serious hobby. Preferably one that doesn’t take over the dungeon that I’m trying desperately to clean out. Y’know, 6:30 is a good time. Last night he came home at 8:00 or whatever and tonight he practically followed me into the driveway at 5:30. I am kind of used to this. It’s been going on for a long time. But I do need to have a little space at the end of the day, since morning is often just a big fire drill where I practically break my neck to get out the door by the time I want to. Ah well. I have no more words.

Meetings are interesting in my business. Nevertheless, we got our work done. But when a meeting participant said that he used to be a tour guide in a dinosaur park, my ears perked up. I know where that is! You were in high school? Sigh. I was a young moom with my first baby! And she was fussy the day we were driving back from St. Louie past that old dinosaur park. The one with the big brontosaurus in the front. And maybe an elephant a mastodon and I dunno what else. I also dunno why we were on the back road that day. It was a long drive and the cute little urchin was just about at the absolute end and it prob’ly wouldda been better to just take the blasted freeway and get it over with. God knows, our kids spent a lot of their lives in automotive vee-hickles. Sometimes it was better for everyone if we just got it over with. Anyway, she was fussing and crying on and off and the GG was holding her. No, she wasn’t in her car seat. I know. When I was a kid we didn’t even have those. And then. The dinosaur park came along. I said, “look at those big aminals!” The GG held the little lizard up to the window to look and, magically, she stopped fussing! She *looked*! Unfortunately, that ploy lasted maybe about 10 seconds and we were past the place. It was December. The dinosaur place was a seasonal business and it was definitely not open. I doubt if we’d’ve stopped if it had been open. It was getting toward the end of our trip home and we just wanted to get there.

I don’t know if that little encounter was what started it or not but the Beach Urchins’ childhood was filled with dinosaurs. We listened to the Wee Sing Dinosaurs cassette tape every time we drove to nursery school or anywhere. Mouse would say, “Dinosaurs On!” whenever we got in the Jetta. And so we would listen about the brachiosaurus playground slide (and I think he was a schoolbus too) and I forget what else. We had the dinosaur tape and all kinds of dinosaur books and plastic dinosaurs and the whole works and Lizard Breath, for many of her early years, would say she wanted to be a paleontologist. When she got to first grade and they studied dinosaurs, her teacher was amazed when she asked the class who knew what you called people who studied dinosaurs and the normally quiet little Lizard was the first to answer.

Both of my urchins went on to other interests and maybe are still discovering their interests. I know I still am. I guess, in the long run, listening to the Wee Sing Dinosaur tape over and over and over again prepared me for Weezer CDs, which was really just a few years later.

Secret: I actually *liked* Weezer. I never got tired of listening to it in the POC’s crappy CD player when we were driving north on the I75 SUV Speedway. Especially that sweater song. 😉

Actually, my dungeon is not deep blue. If it were, I might like it better. It does have a scary black hole in it that various bits of flotsam and jetsam float above. Kind of like spider webs. Oh, wait! I think they *are* spider webs.

Anyway, thanks all of you who have suggestions for how to get rid of stuff. I know there are at least a few of my five readers who are probably in a relatively similar boat. You know. You bought your house a gazillion years ago, right before you had your first baby. And you actually *like* your house so you have never moved. Or almost never. I know Dogmomster does not like her house (she’s moved once, within the neighborhood) but that’s a whole ‘nother story involving a certain ghost engineer and it is Dogmomster’s to tell, when and if she wants to.

The problem here is not so much what to do with stuff. There are a lot of places you can take stuff around here. Recycle Ann Arbor is now accepting old cyberbeasties and other lucky-shuckial crap without grabbing a chunk out of your wallet in the process. Maybe the city got tired of finding old stereos dumped in the parking structures? The Scrap Box takes all kinds of stuff for kids’ craft activities. It’s even close to my work. And I know that there are probably places I could take our huge stuffed menagerie.

And therein lies the rub. It isn’t just the [grown-up] beach urchins that don’t want to get rid of the stuffed aminals. In fact, one of them tentatively approached me a year or so ago. “Moom, you know, if you can find a good home for some of my aminals, it would be okay.” Like, really, Moom. It is okay. The truth is that I have just as hard a time parting with those old friends as anyone. They were active participants in our lives for so long. There are the Mice: Speedy Water Janet Pop Mousey Mushroomears, New Mouse, Bouncy Bow Pink Bow Blanket Mousey Mushroomears, Hisse, Purple Mouse, Crissy the Police Mouse. I could go on and on just with the blasted Mice! And there are all the others. Black Velvet, Squealy and Scrambly, Cocky and Crashfly, Softy Beanbag, Scree-scree, Jupy, and I’m fergittin’ who else. It’d take me all day to list them.

But I can’t get rid of them. Last weekend, we were walking around Mouse’s neighborhood in kzoo and we encountered a house with a condemned notice on it. I dunno what the story was but it looked like a pretty rickety affair with a creaky-looking porch and steps and some junk on the porch. And a pink stuffed teddy bear. Quite the worse for wear. No, neither Mouse nor I rescued the bear. Neither of us need any more stuff in any category and this bear looked like it might be carrying lice or scarlet fever or whatever. But we were both thinking about it and we had an awful time walking by that house. Whose bear was that? Where is the child who loved it?

So. I will slog through this long, horrible, ugly project alone. The stuffed aminals will be the last to be considered and I won’t consider them without their owners’ input. If y’all are going through some of the same kinds of dredging projects, do not get me wrong. I love hearing about how you are doing. Your challenges and successes and what you have done with stuff. Me? I had a dumpster in my driveway for about a month after the tree fell on our house and I was so overwhelmed by work and life while it was there that I don’t think I threw *anything* into it. Sigh. Onward.

And then there are days like today when we got up early and managed to arrive at Lake Erie just as the sun was rising over Celeron Island. The last time we went down there was approximately a year ago and we haven’t been back since. No particular reason, just busy. I am linking to that post because I expressed my thoughts about one of my favorite urban parks there and they haven’t changed. It was very hot that day. Today, one year later, I hiked in polartech socks, sandals, and 50-cent knit gloves. The light is always beautiful down there and so unlike Gitchee Gumee. We ran into a painter who was meeting with friends to paint landscapes. I just used my trusty old Powershot and home-grown amateur photography skills. Thank the gods for digital cameras because I would spend a fortune wasting film otherwise with all the crappy photos I take. We walked for two and a half hours and were back home on the Planet A-squared with Panera in hand just before noon, giving me the afternoon to dredge the dungeon. And I did do a *little* dredging before I needed oxygen. Perfect day? Knock on wood big time.

Anyway, click here or on the pic for a very lightly captioned slide show.

It is Saturday and I am home here at the Landfill this weekend. We are out of town a lot on weekends and I use the occasional Saturday at the Landfill as a catch-up kind of day. I always hit one of the big box grokkery stores at the crack of dawn, usually the Jackson Road Meijer to stock up on stuff that I can’t reasonably just walk over to the Plum Market for. Y’know, like toilet paper. The rest of the day is chores and errands.

Today the first errand after putting away the six bags of grokkeries took me downtown. I was unsuccessful and I did not last long. About 20 minutes, maybe. I hate to shop on a good day and I was just not in the mood today to share *my* downtown with a bunch of outta-town football fans. And all of their big, fancy vee-hickles and whatnot. The generation (mine) of wretched excess. I am sorry. I have lived here for a long time and I am jaded. Anyway, I met up with the GG, who had gotten downtown under his own steam. And we headed out to…

Ann Arbor Granite‘s new showroom on Jackson by Quality 16. No, they do not sell monuments there. And don’t hold your breath. Our last big errand was to Kinko’s (again, don’t ask), whose help I need on another little project, only to discover that I was really not prepared yet. And there were no blasted guinea pigs.

So. Home. What’s next. Well. There are too two Big Projects on tap. And I am not sure I can totally wrap my brain around The Great Kitchen Gut until I manage to make at least some headway on Operation Dungeon Dredge. Today? A bag of garbage, a few papers to recycle (honestly do we need the papers for the old washing machine that Big George hauled away?) and 1.5 boxes of give-aways. I made little dives down into the Abyss but I had to keep coming up for air. How did we get so much stuff? The Generation (mine) of Wretched Excess. When we moved into this place we didn’t even come close to filling it. I can’t even figure out when it got to critical mass. The hardest part is what to do with all the crap I bought the kids over the years. I am pretty sure they don’t want to spend their limited time at home making agonizing decisions about what to get rid of. Do I try to do at least some of it for them? Leaving special stuffed aminals alone, of course. They read this blahg. Kids, I’m not *really* asking you to answer. If you want to, you can do it privately, I don’t expect you to comment. Mostly though, I am thinking out loud. Wondering how to put order around complete chaos.

We are heading over to Knight’s again. This time we have a dinner reservation. It’ll be fun. Yes, some o’ them thar football fans’ll be there. I don’t hate them. I’ll be ready for that particular kind of ambience now that the day is done. It’ll help remind me not to act like a baggy old witch. Pour me a ‘hattan and let me kick back a bit.

Oh heck. I’m posting this. I may tweak it later.

Oh, yer wonderin’ what on earth is that ghostly looking pic? It is a tree down under the water in the Manistique River and Sam (archaeologist, not dog) took it a while back and loaded it up into my iPhoto. She has a pic on her blahg today of that same boat launch, I think. And if you want something even more interesting check out Jay at Raincharm for her annual Toilet Parade. Yay for flushy toilets. And outhouses too. If they don’t smell too awful.

I hate when I’m walking down the sidewalk and some insane bi-cyclist comes whaling silently up behind me and — at the very last possible nanosecond — says, “on your left!” In the first place, it scares the beejabbers right smack outta me. In the second place, it is dangereuse! I mean, do you really think that I am going to be able to process “on your left!” in a split-second? Hmm. Which direction is left? Which hand do I write with? Which way do I jump to get outta your way? Do *I* go to the left? Or do *you* go to my left? Or. Or. Sorry, guys but it is not enough. I am all for bicycling and I don’t even mind if some of it happens on the sidewalk. God knows, the streets are like a raceway around here. Mouse rides her bike downtown a lot and I want her and all other cyclists to be safe. But if you want to share the sidewalk with me, you need to either slow down to a crawl and pass me carefully (or even walk your bike by me), or get yourself an old-fashioned bell and start ringing it about a half a block away. You know, just like the five-year-olds do. jingle jingle jingle ring ring ring jingle jingle jingle. Be as obnoxious as you can.

Fortunately, the cyclist I ran into (or [fortunately] not) in the dark this morning was a knight in comparison to the “on your left” folks. I love when my morning walk is in the dark but every fall it takes just a bit of time to get used to it again. Who is that person looming out of the shadows? Is it one of my fellow walkers? What kind of aminal made that quick movement? Does it spray? This fall, I frequently encounter a guy on a bike commuting to work. He swoops down from somewhere up in my neighborhood at a great rate of speed. He has a strobe light on his handlebars so he’s pretty easy to see. But being a bicyclist, he’s silent. I tend to walk right smack in the middle of the street in the early morning dark, unless I am on a busy thoroughfare and I am only on one of those for one block. When I’m in the middle of the street, I can see better. Skunks and things don’t surprise me by scuttling out of hedges right next to me, etc. I can hear motorized vee-hickles, usually from a couple blocks away. I can hear if the school bus or the Able Electric truck is coming. I have plenty of time to get out of their way. Not this cyclist. But, this morning, I heard jingle jingle jingle from about a half a block away. It was enough time for me to look around and figger out that my cyclist friend was swooping along on what could have been a collision course with me. It was plenty of time for me to get to the side of the street. As he passed me, he called out, “Thank you!” and my reply was an enthusiastic, “Thank *you*!” Gasoline prices are down sharply around here this week, at least temporarily, but I am all in favor of bicycle commuters and, for that to happen, we all have to share the pavement.

And it is time. Sigh. I love the cold but I hate when I have to replace my front storm door’s screen with glass. But it has been too cold the last couple days for us to leave the big wooden door open with just the screen in the storm door and when the big wooden door is shut, there’s just not enough light coming into the front of the house. So today we reluctantly put the glass in. It’s okay, to balance that out, we also put up some bee-yootiful purple mini LED Halloween lights. To go with the orange ones. I’ll post a picture one of these days!

Well, first of all, a little disclaimer. I guess have already declared my political colors for this particular election but I didn’t post that video link yesterday to try to disparage the Republican vice presidential candidate. Not exactly, anyway. How well someone plays the flute has no more bearing on whether they will make a good president than, say, whether they run five miles a day or collect stamps or eat a vegan diet or whatever. Or any other of about a billion trillion gazillion habits and personality traits. One of the things that struck me about the video was that despite the poor quality of the playing (and, yes, it was pretty bad) she managed to smile and act confident throughout the performance. I think those are qualities that can serve politicians well. At least help them get elected. Beyond that, well. I dunno. I guess I better shut up.

Because, here I am, once again headed toward the kind of household conditions that might someday get me featured on Children of Hoarders. Click if you dare and, if you do, scroll down a bit and check out the videos. *Most* of the upstairs of my house is not too terribly bad. I clean the Blue and Only Bathroom every day, or probably 350 out of 365 days. My ugly little kitchen is pretty cluttered but I know where everything is and the cooking and food prep areas are pretty immaculate. Living rooms? I have two of those. I hate the name “family room” for whatever weird reason, so the Aaaaa-dition on the back is called “the back room” and the living room that you stumble into when you open the front door is “the front room”. They are *fairly* uncluttered but in desperate need of dusting. I noticed that as I was hanging up my orange LED Halloween lights today.

And then. Dun dun dun. There is the basement dungeon. For 24 years, the dungeon has been the catchall for anything that didn’t “fit” upstairs. Old, moldy papers from the 1970s and before. Old, dead computer equipment. Lucky-shuckial gear. Camping stuff. Old toys and games and [sigh] stuffed aminals and baby clothes. My fabric stash. Heck there is even stuff that was here when we MOVED IN. 24 YEARS AGO!!! YES. That was a long time ago. This is stuff that we have NEVER used. It wasn’t ours to start with and we have NEVER used it. Did I say that already? It was bad enough before Ike rolled through. He was a lotta fun to take hikes with but then he peed all over my basement and now all of our crap is all over the place. It looks kind of like some of those videos on Children of Hoarders. Maybe I’ll get brave and post my own video this weekend but don’t hold your breath.

I am done. I don’t know exactly what my strategy is yet. I do NOT want to spend every weekend I am home here on the Planet for the next year going hucklety-buck slogging it out. I am thinking. I WILL figger it out. It is STRESSFUL living with a bunch of crap and I feel like if I don’t address it NOW, someday (and it will be YEARS from now), my “babies” will have to be the ones to sort it all out. I don’t want that.

Sayonara, over and out,
Kayak Woman

I swore to myself that I would lay off the political/economic blather after the last couple days. I really do NOT have the knowledge to act as a pundit. Fortunately, I think my five readers are capable of forming their own opinions. Then, late this afternoon, that good ol’ bunch o’ tootlers, the Floot Loop Group, offered up a video I couldn’t resist. It was too close to home and I’ll probably burn in hell for posting it, but.

I am a flutist. Or flautist. Or flute player. Take your pick. I prefer “flute player” but I’ll prob’ly use “flutist” in this post because it’s quicker to type. Ever since I was a little kid, I knew I wanted to play the flute. I was fascinated by [pictures of] the fingering mechanisms. Two of my older cousins played the flute and I greatly admired them. When I finally got to 5th grade, I was the first of three new flutists to get a tone. I don’t remember that, it was told to me by another of those flutists years later. I know it was true. I don’t even remember much about being a beginner. I went through the whole beginning band book in about two weeks. Nobody EVER had to bug me about practicing. I LOVED playing the flute. That’s me in the picture. I know. It’s a HORRIBLE posture for playing the flute and I can’t tell but I may have been reading a magazine and/or working on a crossword puzzle while I was playing. Judging by the afternoon sun coming in the cabin window, I wasn’t seriously practicing in that picture. I was playing through my virtuoso repertoire — it’s in the yellow milk crate — for the sheer joy of playing the flute. Nailing all of the notes (well, probably most of them anyway) in perfect time while playing with every musical nuance I could put into it. I was in college then, playing first seat in whatever group I was in. Except for the time Lucius Malfoy Thaddeus Hangerburger sold out to the Grosse Pointe band director and made his kid first and knocked me down to third. Third? And all the jazz guys coming along down in the bowels of the music building were askin’, “what the hell happened, she couldn’t even play the Rimsky-Korsakov solo today.” I just smiled the cheesy grin my bro’ used to use when he had to give up a solo to an inferior player because of politics. But that kind of crap is probably why I don’t do music as a career. It’s okay. I’m good at computers too. Who wouldda thunk?

Anyway, Sarah Palin is, or was, a flute player. I bet she hasn’t had much time for that in years. I know I haven’t. But, she did play the flute in the talent portion of her 1984 run for Miss Alaska and this afternoon somebody on the floot loop group posted a link to the video and here it is. As I said, I am done (I think) with the political/economic talk. I am sitting here watching in shock and awe and wondering what the heck is next. All I have to say is that it takes a heckuva lotta guts to get up in front of an audience and play a flute solo, even if you are a good flute player.