Say it in that voice that certain small-minded affluent white helicopter-type moms use. The voice that always makes me have to bite my tongue and sit on my hands. If I haven’t been able to avoid the person altogether by ducking into the pasta aisle.

I am not good at writing posts like this about touchy subjects, so I’ll undoubtedly step in it somewhere along the line. But it’s the laziest Sunday ever and This American Life was rumbling along and I started to pay attention to what turned out to be quite a disturbing story. One that parallels an incident in my own life. So I have to try. Bear with me here.

It was a toy story. FAO Schwartz had some sort of newborn baby dolls for sale adoption. They were displayed in a hospital nursery setting and employees who acted as nurses would facilitate the sale adoption, asking the little girls (or boys or whatever) things like, “Will you love the baby?” and “Will you read to the baby?”. One day a couple of cool kids from MTV came along and adopted a baby and they talked about it on MTV and pretty soon every [affluent white] mom in the city was in there buying adopting a baby for her daughter and guess what happened? Well, of course! They ran out of white babies!

Problem. Sshhh! These dolls were still all the rage but nobody wanted to adopt asian or hispanic or black babies. Some of the moms would dance and fumble around trying to come up for a politically correct question for, “where are the white babies?”. Like, “Um, do you have a baby that looks like us?” Others would just barge in and ask, “where are the white babies?”

Sigh. Light-years ago there was such a thing as a Cabbage Patch doll. I don’t know why I thought my cute little blonde 3-year-old daughter needed a Cabbage Patch doll. Maybe because every other little girl on earth seemed to have one? Or maybe I just felt like burning money. And that makes me no different than the people I am complaining about [sigh]. Anyway, Leona Millie didn’t come from a fancy nursery with a nurse to facilitate the sale adoption. I dunno, maybe she would have if we had gotten her at FAO Schwartz. But we were at the old Toys R Us store over in Arborland. Leona Millie was in a box on a shelf. My cute little blonde urchin carefully checked out all the dolls and specifically picked out Leona Millie. There was no “nurse” around to ask stuff like, “Will you love the baby?”. Who *was* there was a pimply-faced checkout dude who, when we put our beloved new black baby on the conveyor belt, looked at me and asked, “Is this yours?”

Our friend and Fin Family Moominbeach neighbor, Paulette, wrote about the spectacular ice formations on the beach in a comment yesterday and mentioned possible plans to take some pictures. Of course, I jumped at the chance to ask for some. Rocket trips to the moominbeach are not all that easy when the snow flies and I am still coughing up crud from the virus of the week and the GG shows some signs of getting the virus of the week and we still hadn’t taken down the xmas tree, etc., etc., ad nauseam. Anyway, I am quite happily stuck on the Planet Ann Arbor this weekend. Picking away at cosmic debris, shoveling snow, cooking veggie enchiladas, shoveling snow, and generally lying low. Did I mention shoveling snow?

This afternoon, Paulette came through with some *gorgeous* photos of the ice along the moominbeach. We used to call these things “hummocks” when we were kids and they were so much fun. Big mountains of ice with caves and other interesting formations. Some of the caves were safe to play in, others formed a chute right down to water. They form along the second sandbar. I am not enough of a scientist to form a viable hypothesis about why they form there but I would guess it’s a combination of factors including wind and waves and the geography of the bottom of the bay. They were so much fun though. Not that we were able to get out to the beach much to play on them. Back in those days, nobody had a winterized home on the beach, so the road wasn’t plowed. We had to park at Lewie’s and I’m guessing our parents would snowshoe down to the beach, pulling us on the toboggan behind them. And, as much fun as playing around on the “hummocks” was, I’m sure there was plenty of whining before we got back to Lewie’s parking spot. “I’m cooooolllld. I wanna goooo hooommme.” Y’all know the drill.

THANK YOU, Paulette! For the photos and being our northern connection this weekend. Click here or on the pic for a few more. Paulette makes a cameo appearance in a couple of the pics. As an adult woman probably not too far off from my height (5-5 or 5-6), she gives an idea of the size of these ice formations or hummocks or whatever you want to call them.

I’ll post a pic later. Okay, it’s later and here’s an undated photo of The Commander snowshoeing in the Great White North way back in the day, sometime B.K. She got married to Grandroobly during WWII and that story will have to wait for another entry sometime. They moved around the southwest while Grandroobly served as an Army Air Corps flight instructor and engineer. He was preparing for deployment to the South Pacific when the A-bomb was dropped. That ended the war for Grandroobly and so they made their way back to the Great Lake State. By train, I think. The plan was to move into the old Lathers-MacMullan farmhouse in Garden City with The Commander’s family, at least temporarily. The Commander returned to her career as a buyer at the old downtown Dee-troit Hudson’s store. Grandroobly got a job with Chrysler (or one of the Dee-troit motor vee-hickle companies) and was going to finish the college education that got interrupted by WWII. Problem. He had a *terrible* time with the “hay fever” that went along with living in the southeast Michigan climate. He decided he needed to go home to Da Yoop and The Commander dropped her career and went with him. They went on to have interesting and successful careers in the frozen north and built the cabin on Fin Family Moominbeach that we all know and love. Oh, and eventually they had a couple of kids, namely yer fav-o-rite blahgger and The Engineer, who could even be reading this with Grandroobly from the other side somewhere. You never know. If so, hi you guys! Anyway, The Commander has lived up there in the Great White North for about umpty-nine gazillion years now and, as hard as life can be up there at this time of the year when the snow virtually never stops, I am not sure she would ever want to move back down to these parts. At least every time I ask her if she wants to move in with me, her answer is an emphatic “NO!!!”

So, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MRS. COMMANDER! May you have many more! And I KNOW you will feel free to correct any details I may have wrong in this little story about some of the parts of your life that happened long before a johnny-come-lately like me came along.

Yes. I am off the Green Couch. Again. Knock on wood, fingers crossed, don’t step on a crack, etc., etc., ad infinitum, that I don’t land there again soon. Still coughing but made it through a full day of work and feel pretty dern good, thank you very much.

What Would The Marquis Do? I have a burning question for The Marquis, one that I hope he will comment about or, better yet, write about on his wonderful biking/life blahg. I’m talking about snow and/or ice bi-cycling. There are a few guys (yes, they are all guys, sorry gals, all I can say is, “get out there!”) on my early morning walking route that seem to bike to work every day, rain or shine, three or four or six inches of snow on top of ice. I don’t think these guys are biking to work because they can’t afford motorized vee-hickles. In fact, I bet they all own fleets of Prii. Maybe even an SUV or two, just to keep the soccer mom in the family “safe” on the road (sorry, snarky today). So, Marquis? What *about* biking in snow and ice? I see these guys out there and just the thought of a fall makes my whole body hurt. Is it safe? Can you get special tires for snow? Do they really help? Does dressing up like the Michelin Man cut down on the road rash? What about when somebody’s family soccer mom (sorry, snarky today) is on the phone and doesn’t hit her antilock brakes soon enough and hits you? Etc., etc. We I wanna know! Er, re-reading this late at night, it all sounds really snarky but it isn’t intended that way at all. I have my own limits with my own chosen athletic activities but I don’t bike and I am honestly interested in this.

And Facebook? Should I join it? I’m on Twitter. I like Twitter. Probably not for the usual reasons, whatever they are. I’m on Linked-In. Despite the fact that I have some wonderful real-life friends on there, I hardly ever go out there for anything. It seems like the whole purpose is to collect links to other people but nobody ever communicates anything again. What am I missing? I am too tired to talk about Myspace tonight and Hi5 scares me! So, I always thought Facebook was for young college students, etc. I don’t want to be on Facebook stalking my kids. I can handle Twitter, it’s lightweight. Not sure about Facebook. I have been invited to join Facebook exactly *once* before yesterday and that was by someone we will only refer to as the DDRG and, I dunno, it just doesn’t seem appropriate to be friends with that person in an on-line venue. Yesterday. I got invited by Vicki! I have probably walked a thousand miles with Vicki. It would take a whole ‘nother post (or ten) to recount all of our walking adventures here but we wore out more than a few pairs of shoes and Ninja Turtle bumbershoots and whatever. And we had other adventures too. We ran the Forsythe Middle School Science Fair and I was there when she painted her living room purple and, well, you know. We are friends. Friends who don’t live across the elementary schoolyard from each other any more but still keep in touch when we can. What do I do? I dunno if I really *want* old high school people to find me… And I am not always sure if I want to know anything more about my kids’ lives than what they tell me. Maybe I’ve already answered my own question.

Good night,
Your politically incorrect Virus Woman

Lemme see… Muscles? Rapidly atrophying from all this sitting/lying around. Kleenex Mountain? Several feet high. Oh not really. When I collect 10 or thereabouts, I make the effort to walk the 20 feet to the Blue and Only Bathroom and throw them out. But even if I didn’t, what the heck, I’m the only one here to care if there is used Kleenex everywhere and it’s my own blasted mucus anyway. Fever? Gone, pretty much. Cough? Oh let’s not talk about that. Or maybe we will. Actually, it is better but it is still as annoying as all getout. My respiratory tract is not totally filled with cement any more but I have coughed so many times that it hurts to cough. I suppose that’s progress of a sort? Energy? Hmmm. Yeah, I am still hanging out on the Green Couch but when I do make the effort to get myself up and moving, it always seems to have been a good idea.

Anyway, I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel (knock on wood) and I may even drag myself over to the Plum Market in a little bit to try to obtain something to eat tonight that I don’t have to actually cook. Heaven only knows what is in the refrigimatator at this point. Work tomorrow? I hope so. I am getting sick of being in this cluttered landfill that I do not have the energy to clean up.

I am not a stranger to this seat or the view out the window. Not because I get sick a lot, because I do *not* get sick a lot. I am pretty darned ticked off about being sick *twice* since December 23. But this couch was also my homework couch for a couple of years. It was where I wrote 40-50 page papers and coded web applications and painstakingly designed photoshop mockups. There was that one horrible court case project. The one that had me sitting by this window for weeks, papers strewn all over the couch and floor. It was one o’ them thar group projects that all the up-and-coming colleges think are the be-all and the end-all these days. Think again, you guys. My role in that court case project? I dunno. Just call me Mom. I got an A and I deserved it.

Click here if y’all wanta know the tune to today’s title. It was on the radio all the time when I was two years old. I remember it.

“Mom, how old was I exactly?”

She was asking how old she was when we first put her on cross-country skis and the answer is approximately three-and-a-quarter years old.

You might think that I could find maybe even one freakin’ picture of one or the other of the beach urchins on their first pair of skis. Not. We did own cameras back then. But you had to fuss around getting the film processed, negatives and all that stuff. You were stuck keeping (and paying for) pictures that didn’t turn out, you know, like when you accidentally take a picture of the inside of your pocket or whatever. Even if we’d had a camera with us, we were probably distracted by the guzzinto involved in putting a three-and-a-quarter-year-old on skis and an eight-month-old into a backpack.

But that little purple snowsuit is the approximate ski outfit that the little urchin wore. My main memory of that first ski outing is that due to some complicated arrangement of shifting the mouse backpack from one parent to the other, there was a period of about 30 seconds when the three-year-old was between parents and neither of us were quite in sight. I was skiing toward her, when I heard her cheerfully answer an unheard question from a well-meaning adult with, “No, I’m with my mommy and my daddy.” And she was, and about a split-second later, I came around the corner and into view. (And helicopter parents? This was *much* less dangerous than it sounds but you probably would have to be there to appreciate that.)

Really.

Things I did today despite my scratchy throat, runny nose, low-grade fever, and general feeling of malaise? Got up, ate breakfast, cleaned the bathroom, did a load of laundry, made my bed, chopped up a bunch of vegetables for spaghetti sauce, went to the National City PNC ATM machine, waaaaaaaitedd in a looooonnnnng, slooooooooowwww line at the post office, went to work and actually managed to muster enough brain power to translate some horribly convoluted requirements into a fairly clear specification. I think. I may change my mind on that, i.e., “what was I thinking?”

Things I did two days before xmas when I had the gastrointestinal virus from hell? Lay on the Green Couch and sucked ice chips. (I think I have used the word “lay” correctly there. If not, I’m sure Mrs. Commander will correct me.)

Okay. I wrote everything above this sentence this morning. Now, after a full day of work I am still ambulatory but I am draaaaaaagggginnnnng *ss. I didn’t take any sick time last year until the very last week of the year and I do NOT want to start out this year by taking sick time. I need to publish a big great gray green greasy trenormously long limpopo document tomorrow. Thank the gods it was basically finished weeks ago and all I need to do is review it one last time to check for any gotchas. But I still have to do it.

Here at the Landfill? There is a mess in every room and the Christmas tree is still up and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is rodent crap around again. I do not have the energy to deal with any of it.

That is all,
The Abominable Kayak Woman

P. S. I need Kleenex! I don’t usually need Kleenex so I don’t usually buy Kleenex!

Grandpa Garth said that as he walked in our door one evening back in the 90s. I don’t even think he said hello first. He was in transit from his cabin at Houghton Lake to his home in Florida and he was spending the night at the Landfill. And. He had stopped for dinner at the legendary Freeway Fritz! Exit 144 (Bridgeport) on the Michigan stretch of the I75 SUV Speedway.

Grandpa Garth was always on the lookout for restaurant deals and he was not shy about doggie-bagging anything he couldn’t finish. Once when we were in Florida, he managed to pay $41 to take something like 11 people out for dinner. And there was a bonus! The Beach Urchins and The Beautiful Renee ordered the only thing on the menu that they thought they could eat, macaroni and cheese. Guess what. It was *not* the old familiar fluorescent orange Kraft stuff. They refused to eat it. Grandpa Garth took it home and ate it for lunch the next day and had a pretty darn good time gloating about it, if I remember accurately. It’s okay. That’s all part of what we loved about Grandpa Garth.

I never ate at Freeway Fritz. It was an offshoot of the famous Zehnder’s in Frankenmuth. It isn’t my favorite kind of food to eat. I mean, I think the food is probably wonderful. It’s comfort food and, actually, I am cooking some comfort food tonight. But I bet Fritz’s fare would be much, much more than I could eat, especially while traveling. I do better eating a minimum amount for long car rides and I don’t usually like to break up a rocket trip to the Great White North by dawdling over a menu waiting for food and checks to come. Sorry. I know I am a b*tch that way. But I have been to Fritz about a gazillion times for gasoline and restrooms and coffee and snacks for kiddos, etc., etc. A convenient, clean, friendly stop.

So, I got up this morning to weather forecasts of all manner of ice-related gloom and doom. I was out walking before dawn and ice started coming out of the sky and by the time I got back to the cabin, I was an icy mess. With a scratchy throat.

We hung around the ice-covered cabin until early afternoon. I was a little nervous about how the freeway would be but only our little backwater road was icy. The main roads were fine and so was the freeway. And then. We were looking for gasoline and a place to switch drivers. Let’s stop at Freeway Fritz. Yeah, okay. Until we pulled up. Um, this place does not look like it’s open!??!! And it wasn’t. It closed in October, a victim of several converging situations that, along with the faltering economy in this beautiful Great Lake State, pushed it over the edge. Goodbye Fritz, we will miss you!

Ski? Why, yes, we did. It was great but it was not quiiiiiiiite as good today as it was yesterday. But who could complain, fer kee-reist? A brilliant January sun slicked the snow up just enough to make the conditions go from fast to slippery. Not quite the two glides forward, one glide back that often happens with late winter skiing but enough to get us overheated on what little climbing we had to do. And the ski ranch was overrun with customers. Almost too successful. That’s a good thing, given that some winters have only a few weekends with enough snow to ski. But there were a *lot* of people on the trails. Of course, we could’ve gone elsewhere to a trail without a warming hut, et al. And an earlier start might also have been a better plan. Snow would’ve been colder, fewer people, etc. What can I say. Lazy, lazy.

We did get out though and, when we got back to the cabin, we took advantage of the relatively light winds to walk out on the ice. And so today, you’re gonna get pictures of that expotition icepotition. I don’t have much else to say. I am here with some of my gregarious, fun-loving in-laws and we are all blathering away about whatever comes into our heads and, believe me, we have solved all of the problems facing the planet and then some. We know it all. Or maybe not. I do know that Kathy my sister-in-law has been running a sewing machine off and on all afternoon and that is a sound I have literally heard all of my life. One that I love.

Click here or on the pic for our Icepotition.

Yes, I did get to ski today, thank you very much. For the most part it was just ducky but I do have one small rant to get out of my system.

<rant>Dear Hot Shot Skate Skiers. Yeah, you two tall skinny monosyllabic dudes in the blue and the red. Y’all dern near ran me over on that hill with the hairpin turns! I am a traditional style cross-country skier. I have been a traditional style cross-country skier since before you guys wore diapers. I am not the best skier on earth but I am pretty darn fast for what I am. Stamina is what I think you call it. But I do not skate-ski. When I get to that hill with the hairpin turns, I stop. I check to see whether there are any neophyte skiers lying spreadeagled across the trail halfway down. If there are, guess what I do. I WAIT! How long do I wait? I wait until they collect themselves and get out of the way. When it is my turn to ski down the hill with the hairpin turns, I ski in a controlled way. That means I do the trusty old snowplow turn to slow myself down going around the turns enough that I don’t catch an edge, career off the trail, and smash into a tree. So next time you guys get to the top of that hill — you know the one — please stop and look to see who’s ahead. You can wait the 20 seconds or so it’ll take me to snowplow my way around the hairpin turns and I promise, when I get to the bottom, I will get outta your way and back into the tracks that us traditional skiers use. Thank you very much.</rant>

Other than that, everything was fine and we skied every trail at the ranch and a couple of them twice. And don’t get me wrong. Skate skiers are not all bad. Those are the first two I think I have ever encountered that weren’t perfectly nice and friendly and willing to share the trail. The X-C ski ranch is not about hot-shotting or trail-hogging or competition in general. It is a family-friendly place where skiers of all abilities are welcome and new skiers of all ages are warmly encouraged.

I do know how much fun it is to go like a bat out of hell on skis. I was young once too. Now that I am an old bag, I have a different approach to the whole thing. If I am not going like a bat outta hell, I see things that I wouldn’t ever have noticed 30 years ago. The patterns of tree branches against the sky. Cloud formations. Changes in light as snow squalls cross in front of the sun. Piles of snow covering old stumps in the woods. I carry a camera or two with me these days and sometimes I even stop to take pictures. Novel idea, I know. Stopping on a ski trail. I promise, I don’t do it if there’s somebody right behind me.

Yes, of course, I took some pictures. Click here or on the nerdy guy wearing the earphones and drinking the blue death.

Not true. Not exactly. My resolution is the same boring old thing I have resolved to do every year for probably about the last 10 years. Divest. Deacquisition. Disburse. All of it. All the crap in my dungeon, that is. Y’all do not want to hear about that again, roight? Roight.

But wait, y’all are thinking. What is that in the picture? It looks like a tree. A big tree. It’s on the ground. Don’t trees usually stand upright. Here the baggy old kayak woman is blathering away about resolutions and all that old junk she has in her basement. And there’s this big tree on the ground and she seems to be totally ignoring it. What is the deal?

Okay, okay. Yes. It is a tree. It fell down. Go boom. Folks, this is tree number three for me. Can I just say, “ho hum?”

Seriously, this tree fell in the yard at Houghton Lake. It did not hit the fancy new cabin that we built because our beloved old shack was sinking into the ground. It did not even hit the garage. It did damage the old trailer. The trailer we used to haul behind The Indefatigable when we were in our Beverly Hillbillies phase of life. And it knocked down power lines, which cut off the lucky-shucky to the cabin, which really could’ve been disastrous.

Many thanks to Jim C and his electrician friend for interrupting their holidays, not to mention missing a very important football game, to drive up here and restore power to the cabin. And special thanks to Jim the neighbor for sharing his lucky-shucky with us via an extension cord so we could keep our furnace and other essential things going (you know, like the TV) until power could be restored.

Click here or on the pic for a slide show with commentary by Bob, the Uncliest Uncle of them all.