Archive for December, 2009

I am ready for this to be over.

Friday, December 11th, 2009

whiteoutYou guys, I haven’t lived in Sault Ste. Siberia since I was 18. I plopped down on the Planet Ann Arbor for good when I was 25 and although I will always be a bit of a Yooper, I have some pretty deep roots on the planet. So it always cracks me up when I go into a store up here in the Yoop and some stranger befriends me and starts telling me all about their life, which usually resembles a soap opera. Like the time I went into Neville’s* and the woman behind me in line started asking me where to find the safehouse in town. Hmmm… Did I look like an abused woman? Or did I look like a social worker? Or what? (And yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I know that many, many, many, many women who are abused do not “look” like they are being abused. Still.) And then there was the time I was in the Rite Aid (or whatever it is) at the bottom of Easterday Hill and the cashier started telling me all about her boyfriend cheating on her and yada yada yada. She was just as cheerful as could be and we were both laughing but I was thinking, “Oh my god! I would kick his you-know-what out!” and “Get me OUTTA here!” *Finally* I got out of there. * This was not the time I had the misfortune to be sent to Neville’s for “Jim Crow”.

Today’s encounter at the Super Valu at the bottom of Easterday Hill was not quite that intimate. Today was a long day and I started it out in a very discombobulated way by getting up late. I was looking at my alarm clock and it said 5:43 and I was ready to get up and that was good because it was early and that would give me all kinds of time to futz around with the dishes and the Internet and I figured I would end up waiting for people and so I would take a little walk and they would call me when they were ready to go. But then. I grabbed my iPhone to check the weather and it was 6:19!!!!! I keep my alarm clock set ahead by a half hour or so. Guess what? After the power outage (remember that?), when I reset my alarm clock, I mindlessly set it *behind* by a half hour or so. Geeesh!

So, we were a little slow getting out but we managed and then the “snow showers” that were predicted almost everywhere in the Great Lake State turned out to be snow showers in some areas and bright sunlight in some areas and WHITEOUT between about Wolverine and somewhere north of Indian River. Fun times but we did manage to get up here and we took the Commander to lunch and I found a beautiful new ski jacket at Barish Brothers, which has been around since 1913 and is still owned by a descendant of the family who began it and they used to be our neighbors when I was a kid. They have a lot of nice stuff. They don’t have a website but they should for the Smart Wool sock selection alone.

End commercial. I put my new beautiful new ski jacket on and took off walking through all the snow. I walked down to Portage Avenue and along the locks. The sidewalks were not plowed and so when cars came speeding along the ice-covered street, I would clamber up into the snow by the side of the road. I clumped along through the snow until I got to the Super Valu, and as I was going in there, another woman about my age (without a new pink ski jacket) was walking in. She kind of looked at me sideways and then looked at me again and then she said something like, “I am ready for this to be over.” I said, “but it’s just beginning”. I commiserated with her and we both laughed but I thought, “how the heck do I explain that I don’t live here and it isn’t *always* as bad where I live although the winters can be long and ugly and I wonder if she knows that I actually *walked* to this grocery store today, *after* walking down the escarpment to and along the locks and, when I am finished with my shopping, I will walk back *up* the escarpment to The Commander’s house.

I love it here in Siberia. I love the people here. I love it down on the Planet Ann Arbor. I love the people down there. Cough cough, most of them, that is. I love both of those places (and San Francisco too…) Click here or on the dastardly whiteout pic for just a few more. They’re on Flickr.

Do you eat pink potatoes?

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

pinkpotatoAnd so, our power went out at 6 PM EST last evening and came back on somewhere around 4:50 AM this morning. The lights did blip on an hour or two earlier than that but only for a moment. I knew because I was sleeping on one of the couches in the Back Room.

It was all okay. We can last a night without power in our Landfill. After dinner downtown (where the power wasn’t out) we did a drive-around to try to figure out the boundaries of the outage. We saw flashing lights by the freeway entrance that I use every day to get onto I94 to get to work. We investigated. We realized that the traffic on I94 was going the wrong way and then we found that traffic was exiting the freeway via the awful *entrance* that I usually use to get to work. A transformer had blown up and power lines were down on the freeway and here’s the story that I found on my iPhone last night. Tht makes two days in a row that I94 between Jackson and Ann Arbor Saline Road was hosed for hours. Yesterday, a tractor-trailer hauling dog food rolled over or whatever (no injuries, be safe Grandmothertrucker).

We eventually went home. The GG built a huge faaaarrr in the faaarrr-place. We have two couches in that room and we each fell asleep on one of them. It is not the biggest house but it is what it is and it has its perks. And so, when the power was out all over the west side of our planet, I was comfortably sleeping in my clothes in my own house. It was wonderful but if it had lasted a few days, it would not have been quite so wonderful.

Good night
Kayak Woman

Power out, high winds

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Out from 6 PM to around 4:50 AM. More later.

geese

sigh…

Tuesday, December 8th, 2009

mykidsI’m not exactly sure where this photo was taken. I wasn’t there. I was at work. It was a year ago or so and I just sorta thought it would be a good thing for the GG and the Beach Urchins to hang out somewhere without me. And so that is a pic from last year when I wasn’t there because I was at work. Work! As in, I have a JOB! Oh man, we won’t go into all of that job stuff. I think that this Christmas, I will take more time off to be with my beautiful California daughter when she is home. And my beautiful Mousket daughter too.

I left work just a bit early today to do some shopping. There were vee-hickles everywhere downtown and I had a terrible time getting through the oncoming traffic to park in the tiny little street lot that I wanted to park in. But then, the stores that I went into had very few customers. And the inventory seemed pretty sparse in some stores. For so many years, I could not afford things in some of the Planet Ann Arbor stores. Now I can, sorta. Except I do not want to accumulate any more stuff. I just hope that our stores survive.

Those are my beautiful baby girls. The ones who are old enough now to tell their moom what to do. I love them to the point of distraction.

Cheep cheep cheep

Monday, December 7th, 2009

bridgeMoom’s cheep xmas. People are always asking me what I want for Christmas. What I really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really want is three things. 1) A day of peace, hanging around tinkering in the kitchen, cooking for the Beach Urchins. 2) Going for a *walk* in Miller Woods or wherever in the mid-afternoon (hopefully with the Beach Urchins) to keep myself from going insane from hanging around the house all day. 3) A garbage dumpster in the driveway.*

Because I go through this pain every year, I started throwing out Christmas suggestions around Labor Day weekend. Supposedly people were writing those suggestions down somewhere or at least making mental notes about them. Except. What I am thinking? I am married to a man! Make mental notes? Hmmm… Anyway. Now it is only a couple weeks before Christmas and I am as frazzled as ever by work and life. What did I say I wanted for Christmas? I dunno. My camera threw an error message back in early October and I have been thinking about upgrading anyway but it has been fine ever since and lately I haven’t had time to take photos. I hate to vacuum (I mean I *really* hate to vacuum) and so the Roomba has always been an intriguing idea for me. I especially like the New Yorker cartoon where one cat says to the other, “I think I saw you on YouTube riding a Roomba”. But what if a Roomba doesn’t work out in my house? It would just be another expensive toy gathering dust.

Getting real. I have this looooovverly several year old MacBook here. It’s the one with the mailing tape around the edges. I notice that they don’t (?) make plastic cases any more. Wonder why… I can live with the mailing tape. What I can’t live with is the spinning beach ball. Because, folks, my beloved MacBook is filled to the brim. New hard drive? More memory? The technical expertise to surgically take apart my beautiful mailing-taped computer, upgrade its guts and put it back together? Why is that not a good gift? I dunno. I am sitting standing here wondering why not. Cheep? Prob’ly not. But it is cheeper than a new blasted MacBook Pro.

* We HAD a blasted garbage dumpster in the driveway after the tree fell on the house in 2008. That would be the second tree that we’ve had fall on the house. Did I throw anything into that very handy dumpster? NO! Why not? I DO NOT KNOW!!! Yiiiiy!!?!

Hey mom! Is that a Thunderbird?

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

deloreanEr. Not so much. I was looking forward to dreading Christmas shopping today. It was possibly the last unscheduled day I had at my disposal to do the kind of shopping where you walk around randomly and hope that something will jump out at you as being absolutely perfect for one of your gift recipients. There was a problem with this. Except for Borders (Yay for Borders), nothing was open before 11 AM. Folks, it is December 6th. I work weekdays and next weekend I will be hanging out with The Commander and the *next* weekend is a party and I do not know when I will have a chance to do anything more than cyber-shopping or mad dashes between now and Christmas. So, we went to two Borders stores, and well, I can’t say if I bought anything or not (I might have) but if you are buying books, buy them from Borders please! I love Amazon but we just can’t lose Borders.

But y’all are wondering about the “thunderbird” and I am digressing. We wanted to hit the Apple Store today because I guess we are going to eventually upgrade our iPhones to the newest version but of course we can’t actually *do* that without visiting the Apple Store four or five times just to check things out… The Apple Store is in the dreaded mall. We got there just about 11. We parked out in the hinterland of the Penney’s parking lot. As I was gliding slowly across the parking lot in the Dogha, I saw that the ghost vee-hickle in the photo was parked there. Also out in the hinterland. I don’t think the GG noticed it until he saw me get out of the Dogha, take out my iPhone, and start taking pictures.

I eventually dragged the GG away from that vee-hickle. As we headed toward the mall entrance, a woman with a young boy asked, “Was that a DeLorean you were taking pictures of?” Oh yes, it was. Her young son was thinking Thunderbird. Not…

And then, as we wended our way home, I purposefully took a longer route than was necessary because yesterday, I had seen a DeLorean with a for sale sign on it. It was in a parking lot off Stadium Blvd. And yes, it was still there and not in as good shape as the one at the mall. I don’t think I have seen a DeLorean on the road for years and the pagan lurking inside of me is wondering if seeing two of them in two days is an omen of some sort. Don’t take me toooooo seriously here!

Update: If you at all interested in or curious about DeLorean vee-hickles, check out the DeLorean site. I was amazed to find out that they are still rocking along, at least in a small way. Read the FAQs. Good night.

Hmmm….

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

softsealLemme see… Places I went today: Jackson Rd. Meijer, Bed Bath & Beyond, Borders Arborland, Jackson Rd. Panera, Viking Sewing Center, A2 Library Pittsfield Branch, A2 Library downtown, Plum Market. What the heck was going on downtown today and what the heck are they building on the northeast corner of the Pi-Hi grounds? If I had a daily local newspaper I might know. But I didn’t even know they had closed the downtown library lot, which is probably my favo-rite parking lot *ever* until a couple weeks ago when I tried to park there. Or not. Underground parking structure? Oh joy. I’ve been parking in that lot for 30 years and I don’t think change is good in this case. Okay, that was a pretty long tangent. I listed a bunch of places I went today. Can you guess where I actually bought something? Besides the food-related enterprises. I am always buying grokkeries and why would anyone go to Panera if they weren’t getting lunch or whatever.

That’s Soft Seal oh-so-gently sticking its nose over my loverly old mailing-taped MacBook to inspect my latest color choices. Soft Seal used to help fidgety little beach urchins take naps or go to bed at night. In my dreams. I do remember snuggling little girls into bed with Soft Seal. I don’t remember whether they stayed in bed any more readily with Soft Seal or not. Anyway, The Commander made Soft Seal a long time ago and it has held up pretty well. I’m not sure what it thinks of those color choices. I kind of like them, what about you?

I still have almost no Christmas shopping done. I have very little time to do it. One of the perks of being a more-or-less SAHM is being able to go shopping early in the day before most of the world wakes up. In fact, I used to get annoyed when I would have to actually wait until 10 AM to shop anywhere but the grocery store. Now? Well, I do not like to shop at night. I hate crowds and I hate waiting in line and… Sigh. And yet. Really, I have to be in a shopping mood to buy stuff no matter what time of day it is. If I am not in that kind of mood, I will just about run screaming back to my safe little vee-hickle and high-tail it home. If I am in the mood, I will be flashing my debit card left and right. I am in the middle this year. I am forcing myself to go out and look around and not turn tail and run. But I am not inspired by anything in the stores. We all have so much stuff already. Sigh.

The gift I want to bestow on my children is that they be true to themselves. It isn’t always easy to start out that way but, in, the long run, it pays off.

Twenty-five hundred bucks.

Friday, December 4th, 2009

bartonI am reminiscing about the days when I could drop a vee-hickle off at the dealer or over at Ivory’s or wherever and walk home while they fixed whatever it was that needed fixing. And walk back to pick it up whenever it was done. That was definitely one of the perks of being a SAHM or whatever the heck I was for all those years. Now, not so much. I dread taking vee-hickles in for service. I don’t work *that* far from the Honda dealer. The problem is that it’s a totally unfriendly walking route involving a stretch of over-utilized high-speed two-lane road and then a freeway interchange with a morass of entrances and exits and merging traffic every which way. Don’t even ask me about trying to meet up at the dealer during the rush hour. Y’all know about that. Y’all were “working outside the home” all those years I was hiking around town.

So when dashboard lights come on these days, we procrastinate. Not that we never procrastinated before but it is worse now. The check engine light in the Dogha has been on for something like six months. The scheduled maintenance light has been on for a while too. The Dogha has at least 130K miles on it now. We knew we were in for a major investment this time around and we knew it would take a couple of days.

I dunno. If I had picked up the Dogha, I’m sure I would have have noticed that the maintenance light was still on as soon as I started up the engine. I HATE dashboard lights. I am pretty sure that I would have also noticed that the brake pedal was going all the way down to the floor when I had to stop before turning out of the parking lot, if not before. Back in the Dark Ages, I once had to downshift to get one of our loverly old manual transmission Fiestas to stop at stoplights. And don’t even talk to me about those regulation Moom Chrysler minivans… Grind would be the word. Anyway, I did not pick up the Dogha this time. The person who did (not saying who) drove all the way across town to the EPA with it. Somewhere along the way, he noticed that the maintenance light was still on and that the brake pedal went all the way down to the floor. Say what? It’s okay. This story has a good ending. Our dealer sent a tow truck out to pick up the Dogha and a couple hours later, they brought it back after bleeding the new brake lines, like they should’ve done before putting it out there for us to pick up. They were *very* embarrassed. We own three Hondas and service is usually wonderful.

Yes, we spent $2500 the other day. It was almost enough to kick my very low-level lust for Kevin, my favorite vee-hickle salesman, into high gear but not quite. The Dogha is my fave vee-hickle ever. Thanks to the (GM) Engineer (wherever the heck he is) for suggesting I get a Honda vee-hickle in the first place.

Good night from your own Kayak Woman

Do they make tricycles for the ears?

Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

dressformWell, do they? They make tricycles for the eyes. And they work really well. Don’tcha know. “We” are making a dress form tonight. Well. I am not making a dress form. Mouse is making a dress form.

I learned to use needle and thread as a small child. I was always fascinated with the Commander’s sewing machine. And her loom. When I was 12, The Commander taught me how to use a pattern to make a dress. I remember that because I think at one point, I crumbled about something totally unrelated to sewing and burst into tears saying, “I just wanna be a teenager, waaaaah”. WHAT WAS I THINKING??!?

I sewed a lot of my own clothing throughout junior high and high school and into college. I was young and thin and blonde then and the commercial patterns fit me (or didn’t but I didn’t know that at the time). I may have benefited from a dress form but I never learned how to make one. Nowadays, do-it-yourself dress forms are all over the internet. I made my own clothing until I was 30 and had my first child and then I just couldn’t figure out how to do it any more. I wasn’t really fat or whatever. I just didn’t quite fit the standard patterns any more and wasn’t good at modifying them. Things do go south a bit, don’tcha know…

My Mouse? Say what? Make a fancy ball-type gown for a dance? Make her own blasted pattern? Yes, she did do all of that. It was a gorgeous dress and it fit her perfectly. And that garbage bag in the pic is the beginning of a dress form that has progressed throughout the evening with the help of a friend. And that is about all I have to say.

Annoyed (((but it’ll plassover)))

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

tunnelI think that my Pacific NW Coastal Internet buddy Stargazer has used this post title before. Or part of it. I don’t think she has ever had the part about the plassover. I am using it today. I am annoyed. With people, organizations, things, The System, employers (not mine), confusing web sites, drivers (always). You name it, I am annoyed with it. Or he or she. I forgot one! Printers! Once upon a time, it seemed like we had a plethora of nice new working printers around here. Now? One crappy one. Good thing I rarely need one any more.

Well, you aren’t gonna hear about any of the things that I am annoyed about in this entry because I am laughing my you-know-what off right now. Oh man, I can’t remember. Mouse says it was about door-handle serial numbers and, yes it was, but y’all do not wanna know, believe me.

And then there are those plassovers. What the heck is a plassover? Well. Back in the day, when I was a teenager up on Fin Family Moominbeach, we spent whole days on the beach. When it wasn’t 40-something and blowing a gale down there, that is. Our mooms (The Commander, Radical Betty, Bubs, and the White Tornado, when she wasn’t busy swooshing the germs out of bathrooms at warp speed) would sit down there for most of the day. There would be beer lunch on the beach with crackers and cheese. In the late afternoon, storms would sometimes roll down onto Lake Superior from wherever and big black clouds would gather. Once in a while, one of those storms would drop rain, thunder, lightning, hail or whatever right on our beach. But. Not always. Sometimes those storms passed us by, over into the hills of northern Ontario. Radical Betty was an expert at figuring which of the storms that were coming down out of the Big Lake They Call Gitchee Gumee would hit us and which were passovers. Except that one day when there may have been an extra beer (or two or three) for lunch, one of those storms came down and Radical Betty called it a plassover. Everybody gnoffed and gnoffed about that, for sure. It’s a plassover! A what? Oh. Hahahaha!

I don’t have a good ending for this except that whatever life threw at Radical Betty, she rose to the occasion and made lemonade out of it or plassovers or whatever. I’m not totally sure what I wrote there but I’ll get over all of my silly little annoyances from today and move onward.

Thaaaare’s a bad moon on the rise.

Tuesday, December 1st, 2009

stingNot really. It is the full moon tomorrow and it was rising as I walked out to my vee-hickle after work. It was gorgeous and I thought about the full moon rising at Doelle’s on Fin Family Moominbeach back in the day (or even Labor Day 2009) and somehow I got those old Creedence lyrics in my head from back in the 60s or whenever it was. Back in the days before I had my driver’s license and it was exciting to ride in to town in the Piedmont VW bug and back with the radio going at top volume. This was AM radio and I don’t think most of us even had FM radio in our vee-hickles in those days, let alone iPod jacks or satellite radio. We were stuck with staticky old AM, at the mercy of whatever the local disk jockey felt like playing that night. If he liked the Archies, well, you had to listen to the Archies (“Sugar, do-do-do-do-dooo-do, aw honey honey” ad nauseam). And then there was the news, which broke into the music every 20 minutes (“20/20 news news news” or something like that). And the ads…

Today I rolled home to the tune of NPR as usual. I don’t remember what they were talking about. I was grooving to my own beat. The beat of successfully taming the most gnarly MS Word documents on the face of the planet to the point that the next time somebody gets the booby prize, meaning that she who frees up first from the more interesting work of a new release has to update the user guides, those infernal documents will be easier to edit. I have won the booby prize two releases in a row now. It’s okay. I was on my game this time and *volunteered* to update them. I hope that gets me some kind of brownie points. I dunno what. Executive washroom privileges or a special parking spot, maybe? Naw, why bother. With our underutilized building, I can virtually park wherever the heck I want and every time I walk into the bathroom, it is empty and spotless.

It is December 1st. I have practically zero Christmas shopping done. I have no ideas. I go out to stores and I am not inspired. I do not want to buy worthless trinkets for people. Nobody wants anything. They are in the same kind of space in their lives that I am. Where’s the dumpster in the driveway? Even the 20-somethings. I’m not necessarily asking for advice. That’s just where I am right now. If you want to say what you want or what you are giving others, that would be cool. If you don’t, okay.