My kids are good drivers. My SF 20-something drove highway 1 down to the Golden Gate like a pro today. I may have spent a billion hours in the passenger seat of the POC sypervising teenaged permit drivers but I did not teach her how to navigate terrifying curves along tall, steep cliffs. Me, I was a little dizzy sitting in the right back (ocean-side seat) looking down (down down) to the Pacific Ocean. Typical for me. I did actually conquer the hill between the yarn stores this morning. Back to the hardland of early winter in my own beautiful but flat Great Lake State tomorrow. This is a quick iPhone update while cooking pasta @ Lizard’s house. That’s Mouse there making garlic bread. G’night, KW.

As some of y’all know all too well, I’ve developed the annoying habit of posting a photo to twitter whenever I cross a large suspension bridge. I’m sure it is particularly annoying because the only large suspension bridge I ever cross is the Mackinac Bridge. I cross that bridge a lot! Well. Today. Of all things, I crossed a different large suspension bridge. On another planet. Riding a bicycle! Yes. A bicycle. You can’t ride a bicycle across the Big Mac. You have to get on a bus or whatever to get your bike across.

I am not particularly out of shape, at least not as out of shape as I look. I am a power walker, a day-hiker, decent amateur cross-country skier and kayaker. Bicycling? Hmmm… I am trying to remember if I have been on a bicycle since the time we took Mouse’s girl scout troop to Mackinac Island. That would be somewhere around 10 years ago. [Edit: Mouse says 12 years and I think she might be right.] We biked around the island and the other leader and I took it upon ourselves to hang back with two of the girls who were struggling a bit with the eight mile trip. Wouldn’t you know, it started to absolutely POUR rain. This was in May and anyone who has spent any time in the Great Lake State in May (or July) knows it can be colder than blue blazes. On top of that, yer favo-rite blahgger, who GREW UP in the blasted Yoop, FORGOT to pack long pants for that trip. They were on my bed ready to go into my bag when I was packing. Who knows what I was thinking. I think I finally warmed up about a week after we got home.

On this trip out here, I had it in my head to WALK across the Golden Gate. Walking is a no-brainer for someone who tries to walk at least five miles a day. Guess what? Other people had some other plans in mind. My SF 20-something and her friend who owns a bike store (quick plug for Mission Bicycle here) thought it would be fun to bike. Gulp. All right. I guess I’m game. Hope there aren’t too many, uh, hills. Or too much traffic. And that I don’t get vertigo.

After some complicated navigation, we rented bicycles somewhere down near the wharf. I was trying to keep from panicking as the rental staff cheerfully went through the safety drill and pointed out all the places we could go (or not go) on the other side of the bridge. I was looking across the bay at all of those hills and, well, just wondering what I was in for. Then they fitted us for bikies bikes. By that I mean they gave us a quick eye-ball, grabbed a bike, stuffed a helmet on our heads, and made a quick seat adjustment. “Get on and ride over there, ma’am!” the cheerful young man said. Wobbly? Yeaahhh. Fortunately they suggested we *walk* our bikes down the steep crowded hill outside because I’d’ve probably crashed straightaway!

Did I make it? How did I do? Surprisingly, very well, thank you very much! Hills? Yeah, I had to walk up a few hills but I saw plenty of younger folks doing the same thing. Traffic? Hmm. I will never get used to biking with a lot of traffic around. Any kind of traffic, automotive or pedestrian, and we encountered both during our trip. But I managed. Hills? Downhill? Let’s just say I enjoyed the long, winding downhill into Sausalito but I was s-l-o-w as a turtle, constantly braking and peering behind me to watch for traffic. I made it and I wasn’t tired and I had a fantastic time and then we took a ferry back across the bay and we didn’t see the Blue Angels but we did see a stunt flyer and a 747 fly-by and all kinds of interesting water-craft. And I think I am done with this higgledy-piggledy account of my first bicycle ride in 10 12 years or thereabouts, so I’m gonna close this contraption up and head over to Lizard Breath’s house where our ‘hattan-making materials are stashed and then maybe a late Senegalese dinner.

Er, we will see what some of my muscles have to say tomorrow morning. You know, the ones that haven’t been used in 10 12 years or so.

Love y’all, g’night, Kayak Woman!

I’ve been hearing about the hill between the yarn stores for a while now. Today I found it, all on my own, without directions. Without even looking for it. The GG and I left our hotel this morning and started walking. I had a couple of items in mind to photograph and I did that and we kept walking and all of a sudden there was Imagiknit! A yarn store. Right there. We hung a left straight up into the blasted sky. Seriously, the sidewalk was so steep, this here flatlander had to watch her *feet* and just keep trudging on to keep from falling down! Up, up, and up, we went. At the end of two looonnnnnng blocks, there were some staircases. Up we went. Dizzy? Yes. Still. On the landing halfway up the staircase, a homeless guy was organizing his belongings for the day, muttering and jabbering away about whatever. I wondered, “how the heck does he *sleep* here without worrying about falling off the staircase and rolling down the hill?” It got worse past the staircase. It turned into a street and sidewalks again. This time there were stairs cut into the sidewalks in some places. That was a little better. I thought. Then I came to a driveway. It angled up the hill and down into the street all at the same time. I couldn’t go another step! I forced my head up and peered warily across the street. That sidewalk had a few more steps cut out. I thought I might be able to manage it. I inched myself around, headed back down, crossed the street and went up the other side. I made it up that little stretch and beyond but we never did get to the absolute top of that hill, so we did not go down the other side, therefore we never found the yarn store at the *other* end of the hill. I guess that makes me determined to go back and conquer that hill some other day.

That was just the start of the day. I have no idea how many miles we walked today. We did some stuff in the mission and then we took the Bart down to somewhere in the financial district and then we walked over and all the way up to Coit Tower. I bet most of the other folks up there today did not walk all the way up. Then we walked back through China town and a big fancy shopping district with Macy’s and the whole works and got the Bart back to the mission and walked back to the hotel. I am done. I put a new photo set on Flickr. Some familiar San Fran tourist-type views and some not. Click here or on the photo.

There is a certain small mouse that has apparently decided to take a walk-about and that has caused a certain amount of stress here at The Landfill. Missing aminals tend to do that around here. It is almost easier when a live aminal dies than when a stuftie goes missing. When a live aminal dies, there’s a body and a little funeral ceremony in the back yard and then we move on. Missing stufties? Where did I last have that aminal? Could it have fallen out of the car? Honestly, I think our missing mousket is probably buried under one of the Landfill Sludgepiles. Maybe she’s just taking a break from all of the rocket trips to the north country we took all summer. I think she will return. In the meantime, guess what I found? I found Yellow Tigger Mouse!

Tigger Mouse is, lemme see, I guess she would be 50 years old now. Maybe 49. She belonged to my childhood dog Tigger, the dog I got the summer between kindergarten and first grade. She wasn’t really only my dog. She was the whole family’s dog. But I was the reason we got one. Because I was *terrified* of dogs when I was in kindergarten. This was a bad enough problem when we lived in our house in Sault Ste. Siberia. The Commander could sort of protect me from dogs there, although, honestly, the overall dog/people relationship was a little different back then but that’s a whole ‘nother blahg entry. At the cabin, there was my cousins’ wonderful dog Fury and the Mullins had some kind of beagle that I think I was afraid of.

So. A stray puppy showed up at my dad’s boss’s doorstep one day. A cute little yellow, long-haired mutt. Cocker Spaniel/Collie/Golden Retriever. Whatever. Knowing that my parents were looking for a dog to get their hypersensitive daughter over this ridiculous fear of dogs, my dad’s boss’s wife called The Commander and, after a visit to the vet to get some shots, Tigger was mine.

I waited all afternoon with a whole bunch of cousins on the old logpile outside the Old Cabin for my dad to arrive with Tigger. Guess what? When she did arrive, I was TERRIFIED of her!!! She was jumpy and wiggly and yippy and, well. It wasn’t until later when she FINALLY got tired enough to go to sleep in the box that was devised in the Old Cabin for her bed that I began to calm down a bit. I tentatively softed her head and by the next day, I think was not afraid to pick her up.

I have never been afraid of dogs or cats since that day. I am sometimes irritated with dogs whose owners who don’t seem to know how to keep their dogs from bothering people who just want to walk without, well, being bothered.

I didn’t name Tigger. The princess that fought with the tomboy in my 6-year-old self wanted to name her something lame like Blondie or Goldie. Fortunately, one of my aunts, I think it was Bubs, decided that her name should be Tigger, from the Winnie-the-Pooh books that we were reading in front of the fire that summer. That name stuck. Thank you, Bubs!!!

Tigger was a wonderful dog for me. (Others may not have been so enamored. ‘nother blahg entry.) She lived to be 13. I said good-bye to her as I was leaving for my sophomore year in college. Tigger Mouse was her favorite toy her whole life. She was a smart dog. You could say, “where’s your mouse?” and she would go and find it. Today. IT STILL SQUEAKS!!! LOUDLY! AFTER 50 YEARS!! Or thereabouts. How many squeakin’ dog toys do you know that still squeak after 50 years?

No, Chloe Belle. I love you but you can’t have Tigger Mouse.

Yes, I am packed.

Except I have no idea whether or not it was the swine flu. It probably wasn’t. It was a mild 24-hour type virus and I am not even coughing or sneezing or blowing my nose now so I am just not sure what the heck this was. They keep saying that folks of a certain (my) age have immunities to the H1N1 virus. And maybe we do. And maybe that means we don’t *get* the swine flu or maybe it means we get a stupid little 24-hour cold-like virus. But I really don’t think I had the swine flu. If I did, I hope I didn’t pass it on to anyone. That’s one of the reasons I stayed home from work this morning…

I am just ducky tonight. I actually think I am pretty close to 100%! We watched a moooovie from Netflix last night, Being There to be specific. We’ve both seen it before, back in the Jurassic Age and wanted to watch it again. The GG watched the moooovie, I drifted in and out. I slept on the Green Couch last night. Under the purple lights draped across our front window. I forced myself into a slow start to the day. I did not do my 0-dark-30 powerwalk. Instead, I took my usual shower and then hung out on the Green Couch checking email and twitter and facebook and blog feeds et al for a while. I got down to business with my work computer around when the sun was coming up and I got a lot of work done on my latest project and then Mouse and I went to Panera for lunch and I headed into my office.

I wasn’t really all that sick yesterday but this morning I felt the familiar sensation of my body kind of knitting itself back together. Kick that blasted virus out.

Sigh. I so seldom get sick, when I do, it always seems to sneak up on me and smack me upside the head. Where did *that* come from? I work in an underpopulated building with many, many empty cubes. The bathrooms are spotless. My cube is a good size and although there are inevitably meetings, much of my work is done on my own. I don’t have to share my computer with anyone. Either my work computer or my personal computer. I have my own work phone and it rings about every few months. I could go through a similar list of stuff about my house. It may be cluttered but I clean the kitchen and the Blue Bathroom just about every day. In essence, for the most part, I share germs with myself!

So. Yesterday. I was gallivanting all over creation all day, mostly on foot. I felt wonderful. I had all the energy in the world and not one single scrap of congestion. This morning. I got up and coughed a little bit. It was one of those kind of dry coughs as if there was something in the air that was tickling my throat. I ignored it. I felt great. I took my walk and ran a couple of errands on the way to work. I was on a roll! This afternoon? I am okay. I am sitting up. I can stand up without any problem. I am lightly but fairly consistently congested. I am tired but I don’t feel like I’ve been run over by a train, despite the photo. I don’t have a fever or a sore throat or any significant muscle pain. Just a little dragged out and congested. I don’t want to say out loud what I *don’t* think it is. That might jinx me!

Any other day, I wouldn’t think much about this. It would turn into whatever it would turn into. I could take a day off (or even two) and hang out on the Green Couch all day. I could maybe get some work done in between naps. But I’ve got a plane to catch in about 60 hours. And a spec that’s a wee bit overdue (not entirely my fault) that I wanted to publish before I left. I know I can handle being in California coughing and sneezing and blowing my nose. What I can’t handle is being in California coughing and sneezing and blowing my nose *and* feeling like a wet dishrag. I want to walk when I am out there. And take photographs of something besides all of our usual Great Lake State haunts.

I’ll be sleeping on the Green Couch tonight. If I sleep on the Green Couch, I [usually] get a better night’s sleep. Nobody tosses and turns (except me) and I can adjust the covers so I’m not too hot or cold. I think I’ll skip my walk tomorrow morning and maybe I’ll even decide to stay home and work (or not) from the Green Couch. Corporate America does have its perks and sick time is one of them and I don’t use much of it. The last time I did take sick time it was because my long-suffering cat-herding boss took one look at me and boomed, “GO HOME!!!!” Aye-aye, sir!

There is one baby goat out at Jenny’s Farm Market this year. Not sure if he’ll be the only one or not. That’s not the Jenny’s Farm Market baby goat in the photo. That’s Billy Goat (dunno his real name). He is not very gruff but he does like to eat cameras. And probably just about anything/everything else. Jenny’s has some ducks too. When the baby goat gets a little too friendly with them, they quack him out of their space. Quackquack Quack!!!

By the time we got to Jenny’s, hmmm, lemme see, what had we already done… We (the GG and me) left the Landfill on foot at 6:45 AM, walked over to and through Bird Hills Park down to the river and then over along the river and tracks to the Northside Grill, where we met up with Mouse. It was maybe 8:15 by that time. Yes, those teenagers who sleep until noon or one or two do grow up and they are capable and sometimes eager to get up early. After breakfast, we headed out to Jenny’s and then the Dexter Cider Mill before home and chores and an expensive run walk to the Plum Market for just enough groceries to get us through until Wednesday night.

Not the most exciting day on the face of the planet, the Planet Ann Arbor anyway. That was okay with me. Rocket trips are getting to me so it was nice to be home for once. Although the ongoing Battle of the Thermostat was getting to me by the end of the day. Yesterday, a spouse-swap was offered to me on Facebook on the basis of where to set the thermostat. By a stranger. Or friend of a friend would probably be more accurate. Interesting use of Facebook. Spouse-swapping. Who’da thunk it. We partially solved the thermostat problem late this afternoon by replacing the screen in the storm door with glass. I guess it’s time. It may well be warm again but I think we’ll live without the screen. I can’t stand having the big wooden front door shut. No light gets in and it makes this place feel like a dungeon.

Anyway, work tomorrow (hi-ho!) and, er this afternoon too (ho-hum) and if my long-suffering, cat-herding boss doesn’t decide to chain me to my desk, I’ll be goin’ to San Francisco on Thursday morning. With flowers in my hair. I’ll be sure to wear them. Seeya there? (er, you can tell I don’t travel outside the Great Lake State very often, can’tcha?)

Moi mommy moight be proud and the cute young woman with the gorgeous red hair at Chico’s oughtta be pretty happy today. Can you count to 400? Dollars, that is? Because once I got over my usual clothing store terrification, that’s what I dropped. I liked her a lot and I hope she got a good commission off of the baggy old kayak woman in the rather dirty REI polartech hoodie, long tie-dyed skirt and dirty chaco sandals, bare feet and all.

First, I am not wealthy and I am not bragging about spending $400 on bizcaz (business casual) clothing. I mean, there are plenty of folks who *are* wealthy enough to do that on an hourly basis. But I’m not one of them and I don’t spend $400 (yikes!) on clothing very often. The wolf has never been at the door here but we have always spent our money to make sure our children had what they needed and clothes shopping is hard for me these days. My brain makes a herculean effort to drag my sorry *ss out to the mall (or wherever) to look for clothes. About half the time I *do* get into an actual clothing store, I have a panic attack, back quickly out of the store, and head for home with my tail between my legs. When I get to all those cosmetic sample sharks in Macy’s, it’s all I can do to will my body not to cut and run like the devil, rodent from hawk! I do *not* do perfume! I wear the same mascara I wore in about 7th grade (no, moi mommy didn’t loike me to wear that then). Thank you Maybelline!

But. The weather changed last week. The four or five mix/match outfits that I was making do with all summer suddenly seemed inappropriate. And too cold to wear for my lunchtime walk. A couple of my usual winter outfits are too warm for now. I think I wore the same skirt FOUR DAYS last week. I can mix/match shirts/sweaters up to a point and accessorize with scarves (a couple of Radical Betty’s are living on in my wardrobe, thanks beloved aunt). But I was running dry. And so.

I made one of my occasional dreaded pilgrimages to Briarwood Mall today. I like Chico’s but I freaked out at first when they descended upon me. A customer? Yes. Let’s get her. Hawk and rodent again. I choked out the words “I know your size system and I hate to shop” and then somehow I got into the groove a bit and the redheaded woman was actually helpful in pointing some things out. And there was a MIRROR IN THE DRESSING ROOM! There didn’t used to be mirrors in there at Chico’s. You had to walk outside to look at yourself show the world how you looked in the stuff you were trying on. That kept me away from Chico’s on many days. Today. A mirror! Inside the dressing room! Thank you god!

I think I am set with some new *comfortable* and good-looking biz-caz stuff at least for a while so that nobody will be wondering why I am wearing the same blasted (beloved) skirt every day. Not that anybody ever did, come to think of it. It is a computing-type place with lots of geriatric employees. Like me?

Love y’all and good clothes shopping to those of you who hate to clothes-shop. I totally understand and maybe then some. Courage! Hmm. Wonder if REI has some more of these hoodies…

Am I tired? Yes, I’m tired. It’s Friday night. It’s 10:22. I have worked a few more hours than 40 this week and I plan to put some time in tomorrow. From home, thank the gods that I can do that. So I can leave for Callyforny without waking up at night dreaming about work flows and UI design issues and only the gods know what else while I’m out there. Heck, I’ll probably wake up during the night anyway, with the usual shoreline dreams. The Lake Superior kind of shoreline dreams, that is. I haven’t spent enough time on the ocean to have shoreline dreams about that. Maybe that’s a good thing.

We had a beautifully chilly summer here. It slowly warmed up into a beautiful warm (but not too hot) early fall. This week, the temperatures began to plummet and I think there was frost throughout the Great Lake State Thursday morning. I wore my knit glubs to walk that morning. Today? Not as cold but heavy rains half the day. A bad aminal or whatever it was kept me from getting vertical 15 minutes longer than usual this morning and that made me cut short my walk, so I could meet MWCB for coffee. Which I wanted to do. Sometimes it is so dern hard to fit everything in and still make time to be KW alone somewhere just thinking and being.

Okay. It’s late. I’m dead tired. Good night.

And I do NOT mean a chicken or a duck or a turkey or a pheasant or a quail or whatever other kind of bird gets stuffed and shoved into the oven. This ovenbird is a teensy tinesy little birdy that was lying dead on the moominbeach cabin deck last Friday when we arrived there to commence the annual closing of the cabin.

The moominbeach cabin has big picture windows. They are actually old storefront windows from somewhere back in the 1950s or whatever. My parents didn’t have a whole lot of money in those days and the folks who built the cabin were pretty creative about salvaging building materials. I hope I never have to replace one of those windows. Anyway, birds do run into large windows. A lot of times they glance off and fly away or fall to the deck stunned. When they regain their composure they fly away, seemingly okay. Once, a wild quail or pheasant or something hit one of our windows and died and The Commander plucked the feathers and cooked it for guests. Or so I’ve been told. I was living down here on the planet Ann Arbor by then and didn’t personally witness it.

The Commander is pretty blase about dead birds. When she was a kid, her older brother would collect things and put them in the freezer (I think they had a freezer) and once there was an owl in there for a while. Her brother grew up to the be the director of the Michigan DNR. He died too early and they named a conference center after him and you can see his name on road signs on both the I75 SUV Speedway and US 127. I gotta write that now because who knows how long that center and those signs will be there. Once again, our state is in dire straits and we’re asking the last person to leave Michigan to turn out the lights. Ho-hum.

The ovenbird we found was definitely dead but not decomposed, and so the GG and the Commander conspired to put it in a ziploc bag and into the freezer. It was transferred it to the Commander’s freezer in town and then down here. And so, I was rooting around in the freezer taking inventory and I grabbed the bag without really looking at what was in there and YIKES! it was the ovenbird!!! I am not all that squeamish about a lot of things. You know, spiders and non-poisonous snakes and things. But it’s just weird when you grab for what you think is a piece of dead meat and it is, well, I guess a dead bird is dead meat but it hasn’t been, well, processed into pieces of chicken or whatever. It wasn’t what I expected! Fer kee-reist. It’s kind of like the time I had the bright idea to put orange juice into a bottle for my baby. When she used bottles, they contained milk or formula and that’s what she was expecting. Instead, there was this strong-tasting orangey stuff. Her eyes lit up as if she had stuck her finger into a lucky-shuckial socket. She pulled that thing straight out of her mouth and then spent the next 30 seconds or so evacuating every single molecule of orange juice out of every possible crevice in her mouth. I think she was about seven the next time she tried orange juice.

Anyway, there is an ornithologist at the University of Michigan who actually wants this unlucky little ovenbird and so it probably won’t be in my freezer much longer.