Yes. Wasn’t it just last week when I was kvetching about how to dress for a walk in a 52 degree heat wave? Tonight, I am standing here in the Landfill Chitchen wearing a tank top and shorts and feeling pretty dern awkward about it with my rather pasty white arms and hairy legs (yes). Because it is… Well, right now it is *down* around 76 or so. But that fuzzy photooo shows the temperature via the Ninja’s dashboard this afternoon, as we approached the Saginaw-Bay City area on the southbound I75 SUV Speedway. Yes. 81 degrees. If I forgot how to dress for 52 degrees, I certainly don’t know how to dress for 81!

Our day did not start out anywhere near 81 degrees. When I took my Sault Ste. Siberian walk early this morning, it was in the 30s and raining cats and dogs. After that, The Commander took us out for breakfast at our fave Frank’s and, after a little bit of a reconnaissance ride around some areas of town The Comm doesn’t usually see, we slodged around a bit more and then got on the road.

The GG was driving as we approached the Straits of Mackinac and I looked up from the Sunday NYT xword (on my phone) to see dense fog. Ghost Bridge! Onward down to the Houghton Lake Group Home, where we had spied an unfamilar red vee-hickle via the webcam. We peered at the vee-hickle and kibbitzed and kibbitzed. Who could that be… We are such old gossips! 😉 Oh, we knew it wasn’t some kind of interloper. We knew it was some family member’s vee-hickle that we didn’t recognize. After all, whoever it was managed to fix the webcam!

We took the old highways from Mackinaw City to Vanderbilt before we hit the Speedway again. Fog rolled in and out under a sky that tentatively promised sun and hot temperatures. The ice was melting on the all of the lakes in the northern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula today. Houghton Lake is a *big* lake and when we got there, it was still around 50 degrees and it was foggy as all getout on Long Point. (The red vee-hickle there turned out to belong to The Beautiful Liz’s wonderful marital accomplice. We knew Liz’s car but didn’t recognize Randy’s.)

I am envious of Liz and Randy for being at HL today. Note to self: watch the HL webcam for ice out! Mr. Golden Sun seemed to be winning his battle with the lake ice at the time we left there today. If I had had my druthers, I would’ve decamped for the day at Houghton Lake with The Beautiful Liz. I would’ve dressed for the then 50-degree conditions, poured a glass of whine, grabbed a lawn chair, and sat down there all afternoon, watching the ice succumb to Mr. Golden Sun. Man oh man, that would’ve been fun.

Alas, we had to keep on bumpity-clunking down to The Planet Ann Arbor. I work tomorrow and so does the GG (thank you very much). Dressing for 80 degree temperatures? Well, lemme see. The predictions are for a low of 55 tonight and a *high* of 60 tomorrow. Back to typical April temperatures around here. It’ll probably snow on Mouse’s birthday.

Warning: I get ranty about a very controversial issue in this post. Read at your own risk.

Yes, we are relieved that the federal government did not shut down. The GG is a career computer mad scientist over there at “that darn” EPA. He is an emissions testing expert and is directly involved in all the stuff that goes on behind those stickers y’all get whenever you buy a new vee-hickle. The truth is that a shutdown would not have caused our household much hardship. We are not rich but we don’t live paycheck to paycheck either. And anyway, there’s *my* paycheck. The main thing I was worried about was having the GG haannnggging around not working. That would have made me get twitchy. How do I know that? Because been there, done that. In 1995. When the whole thing was quite a bit more worrisome, since I did not have a paycheck.

Now. People have been throwing the word “mandate” around a lot. Here’s the mandate this taxpayer would give her elected officials: get your butts in gear and work *together* to figure out how to balance the budget and devise a plan to eliminate the deficit.

<rant>And here’s a special message to the GOP. I am an independent socially progressive FISCAL CONSERVATIVE!!! I want to see smaller government just as much as you do. But I possess two (count ’em) X chromosomes and I will not entertain the idea of voting for any one of you until you promise to keep your filthy hands away from my body. (I wish I could quote how the GG stated it last night but I’d like to keep this somewhere near the vicinity of a PG rating.) You can be anti-abortion if you want. That’s okay with me. I am pro-choice but with VERY complicated feelings about the whole issue that I don’t want to argue about here, now, tonight. BUT. Planned Parenthood (which cannot use taxpayer dollars to perform abortions) also provides services geared toward preventing unplanned pregnancies!!! Guess what? If we can prevent more unplanned pregnancies, fewer women will seek abortions. I think that’s a good thing. Don’t you? I guess not. I do not get why you folks don’t get it. Or is it really just that you don’t want women to have any control over their own reproductive lives? Well? Is it? If so, you are not getting my vote. Ever.</rant>

Ah yes. I love the smell of wood smoke in my hair. And even though I have showered the smell of wood smoke off my skin, it still lingers in my hair. It is from the campfaarrr the north country trail folks had going when we arrived over at Betchler Lakes for the monthly hike this afternoon. Managing one of these hikes is always a bit like herding cats (and I’m glad I don’t have to manage them). You never quite know exactly how many people will show up. Or whether they’ll arrive at the right time or even at the right place. Sometimes there is car-spotting to organize. And we have folks of *all* ages, speeds, whatever on our hikes.

Today, we took a simple approach. Everyone walked in as far as they wanted to and then turned around and walked back out. Yes, there was snow. There wasn’t always as much snow as in the photoooo (it’s about, I dunno, 6-8 inches deep there). There were long stretches of trail that were dry. Or wet but not snowy. Fortunately, there was enough snow at the trailhead that I got smart and switched out my sandals for boots. I needed them. The “group” I was with walked almost five miles total. We finally turned around when the drifts started to get deeper and more frequent. We decided we weren’t really interested in doing a death march.

I am feeling that nice, fuzzy-around-the-edges kind of exhaustion now. Having a glass of whine, surfing the ‘net and writing my blahg. And my hair smells like wood smoke.

Good night,
— KW

Back in Da Yoop again. I really kind of wanted to stay on The Planet this weekend. I have work to do at my job. I would’ve rather worked in my loverly, dog-poopy cube today but I am managing to get something done up here. Not easy but I did slog through some stuff while the GG and the Comm were napping this afternoon.

And then I took a walk. You guys. I am trying to write this with The Commander talking and the GG kind of wah-wah-wahing. So it isn’t easy.

I walked all seven canal bridges in the beautiful city of Sault Ste. Siberia today. Fort, Ashmun, Bingham, Johnston, Spruce, Portage, aaannnddd, after a long walk, the other Portage bridge. I had a little trouble with the fact that I had to cross one of the Portage Street bridges twice. That absolutely threw my cute little streak of Asperger’s Syndrome (or whatever it is) into a major loop. Unfortunately, with an odd number of bridges over the canal, there’s no way to cross all of them on a walking loop without doing one of them twice. I somehow managed to talk myself down off that ledge and walked over the first Portage bridge twice.

Sigh. We were sitting in Penny’s Kitchen today having lunch. I didn’t know anybody there. I couldn’t help thinking about the days when we would have to drag two tables together to accommodate everybody. Radical Betty would be holding court and, at some point, Cam would declare, “I am going to the refrigerator!” And that means the bathroom, because the Penny’s Kitchen bathroom is as cold as ice. Do I miss those gals? I have no words.

Gorgeous today here. People were out walking and biking and working on cars in their driveways and, in one case, singing and playing guitar on the front steps. That guy got a thumbs up from me. For all I know, we may have attended high school together. But I didn’t recognize him.

Don’t let that big snowbank fool you tooooo much. It’s a leftover. It is pretty dern warm here today and I was HOT when I finally got back up here to the Comm’s house. There was talk about going to the grocery store for a few little items, so I sent the GG and The Comm to do that. While. I. took. a. shower.

This is an oooold photoooo of our beloved friend, The Professor. I’m almost afraid to say how oooold it is. Er, 25 years, I think. We haven’t seen him in, oh I dunno, maybe 22 years if I had to hazard a guess. The Prof was here on the Planet Ann Arbor today and I trundled all the way across town to meet him and the GG for lunch. And guess what? He does not look any different!

The Prof and the GG worked together all those years ago. And meeee too. He lived on here on the planet and/or one of its satellites back in those days and even stayed here with us at the Landfill for a short transitional period in his life. He is responsible for our beloved Paul Winter CD and our Christmas Day tradition of watching that wondrous old Christmas movie, Metropolis (the much disparaged one with the rock score, thank you very much). And many other things.

I have lots of memories but I’ll only share two. One per beach urchin. Elizilla was around 1-1/2 when The Prof was staying here and one night he baby-sat for us while we went to a play. Elizilla loved The Prof but, after a while, she decided that it was time to go and find her mama. It was winter, so Elizilla handed The Prof a pair of the GG’s glubs. She then peered at what The Prof was wearing as a jacket. The Prof and the GG had the same zip-up LLBean sweater in those days (which I wish they still sold…). After a bit, she silently decided that he would be warm enough in the sweater. That was what her dad wore…

Next, she handed the prof a set of car keys. The keys to Mama’s Little Gold Car aka the 1979 Ford Fiesta that I owned at that time. The prof played along for a bit. He helped her put on her jacket and glubs and hat and stuff and they went outside. They got into my car. She pointed at the ignition! At that point, he decided he needed to re-direct her. I can’t remember exactly how that got managed but she decided they would walk. They went inside to get her beautiful new blow-up globe, a gift from the prof himself. She instructed him to put it in a paper grocery bag and they were off again. With hilarious encounters along our street. Dogs and drunks and curbs and more.

The Prof didn’t interact with Mouse as much. By the time Mouse was born, he was on to new things in other places. But he did visit a few times then and I will never forget a day in our back yard when Mouse was three *weeks* old. The Prof picked her up and, as he was holding her, she was eyeballing him in the kind of way that only Mouse can. *Who* under the *sun* are *you*?

I don’t have the words to express how happy I was to see The Prof here on the planet today and once again bask in his sparkling intelligence and energy and creativity. I have missed having him around here on the Planet Ann Arbor all these years. Love. That is all.

The photooo is for Le Marquis. Some people may call it the Lionel Bridge but it’ll always be the Drop Acid Not Bombz Bridge to me. ‘cept I think that the “Not Bombz” part of it has been grafittied over now.

Actually, Le Marquis figured into a terrible horrible no-good very bad “packing” dream I had last night. Something about him refusing to carry my red plaid suitcase. Does anybody else ever have packing dreams? This one was combined with a “traveling” dream. (There was a bathroom component to this dream too, as in trying to find a public toilet and only finding surreal totally bizarre non-working and/or non-private devices. I won’t go any further with that except to say that Le Marquis was not involved in that part of the dream.) Anyway, I really do own a red plaid suitcase. It’s an old fashioned one that I got when I was a little kid. I loved it dearly then but I haven’t used since I can’t remember when. I use an old LLBean duffle bag for land vee-hickle trips and a rolling thingy for what air travel I do. Maybe I can sell give away my red plaid suitcase at our garage sale?

And then there was the Plum Market this afternoon. Man oh man, what a zoo. People. All you Planet Ann Arbor progressives? Will you get a grip? You are bringing your own bags to the grokkery store. Can you not pack them yourselves too? I mean, I don’t expect people like The Commander to do that. I think that people should jump to do things for The Comm. And many of them do. But. I stood behind a healthy looking *much* younger woman than me and she seemed clueless, lolly-gagging around, fumbling with the credit card scanner. Yes, it is the cashier’s job to bag the grokkeries (if there is no bagger, and there wasn’t). But. All lines would move a lot faster if all of us able-bodied folks would bag their own grokkeries. Like I did. And [theoretically, at least] we’d all get outta there faster. Who knows. Maybe she had a debilitating headache? If I were prone to headaches, I’d’ve had one too with the screaming kid that could literally be heard all over the store. I can’t complain about that though. Been there, done that. :-/

Lotsa stuff going on [or not] in the next few days and maybe more. Who knows what I’ll have to say about any of it. Or not.

My cube neighbor is working on a list of miscellaneous defects* right now. Miscellaneous defects come from just about anywhere you can imagine and then some. That includes some of the specs I have written. So, she has been wheeling her office chair around into my cube with quite some regularity. And there was a lot of “when was I going through all that pain?” stuff from both of us as we untangled the problem at hand. Meaning “was it last summer or two (or three) summers ago that I was working on the spec from hell?” Don’t get me wrong. We both love our jobs. It’s just that when we are past the fun, exciting creative part of a new prodject, there is often a lot of repetitive stuff. Keeping ancillary documentation up to date, writing user documentation, or whatever.

After one of those sessions, I answered her “When did I go through that pain?” question with, “That was the summer before last.” And then I started thinking, “I have been here for a while…”

Today isn’t some kind of a milestone anniversary at all. It’s approximately 3-1/2 years since I first buzzed the building receptionist to be let in the front door. I was not looking for a job like this one. I was a community college student at the time, taking a higher level class in user experience design. The prof assigned us all (six of us) to internships. When I went to the first class session, I had no idea this was going to happen. I knew we would be doing “client work” but I figured I would be writing 50-page analyses of various “clients” websites and I figured those analyses would be promptly filed in the circular file.

To my huge SHOCK, I was assigned to an actual corporation. And. The prof pulled me aside at the end of the session to tell me privately that my internship would be paid. Unlike the other internships. Well. Of course, I was happy about the idea of being paid ANYTHING at that point in my life. The drug test? I was freaked out! Oh, not that I wouldn’t pass it. When I left my last corporate job, they were just starting to test new hires and I swore to myself that I would never subject myself to a drug test. Ah well… Something made me suck it up and do the whole freaking thing. And then, after I was officially hired, I showed up for my first actual day of work and the person I now call the long-suffering, cat-herding person was not there! My (now) cube neighbor had been tasked with trying to orient me until the LSCHP came in.

When the internship was just about up, I was offered a real job. I had gotten pretty dern used to being a vagabond by then. I wanted the job. (I wanted the money too.) But. Could I adjust to a 40 hour a week schedule after all those years of being a vagabond? I took the job and I have [mostly] adjusted. I am now cozily ensconced as a subject matter expert on the stuff that I do. (I have even received a small promotion, which was fun, but note that I am NOT on an upward track here. I’m not interested in my boss’s job, let alone the CEO’s.)

* I don’t usually talk about the details of my work but we use our own variation of the project management process that most other software/web application shops use, so I don’t think I’m revealing any secrets here.

It’s the weather I can’t get the hang of. For months and months and months and months now, when I have woken up (woken up? sounds weird…) at 0-skunk-30 and checked the weather on my phone it’s been the same old, same old. 25 degrees. Or 16 degrees. Or 7 degrees. Maayyybeeee 32 degrees. I put my layers on and choose the appropriate headgear. Do I need my YakTraks? This winter? Usually. In fact, just yesterday morning, it was 32 degrees and I was in pretty much full winter walking regalia. I did *not* need my YakTraks. Actually, my feet were warm enough in my Chaco sandals with polartech socks over tights. Business as usual.

This morning? 52 degrees? Say what? I almost couldn’t remember how to get dressed for a 52-degree walk. I knew I didn’t need a ski jacket or any kind of long underwear (aka tights). Still, as soon as I walked out the door, I realized that I didn’t need my glubs. Or my ski band for that matter. I went back inside and ditched my glubs and my ski band. And grabbed an umbrella. Oh yeah, the forecast also said something about rain. (And thunderstorms. Sssh… KW didn’t quiiite notice that…)

I started off and it was about a mile and a half into my walk that a wee little bit of precipitation started coming down outta the sky. Within a couple blocks, it was raining pretty hard. Wait! Was that thunder? Or was it just a gravel truck rumbling down Jackson (a couple blocks away). I do not walk in thunderstorms. I am scared of lightning! I walked a few more blocks and didn’t hear any more “thunder”. And then. FLASH-BANG!!! Yiiy!

Panic? Yes. Called the GG. He asked, “Are you wet?” Well yeah. But. “There’s lightning! Come get me!!!! Waaaahhhh!” Of course, by this time, I was two-thirds of the way home and, since I cut about a sixth of my route off in order to take a shortcut, by the time he got out to the car and around to where I was, I was right at the entrance to the schoolyard. From there, it is a quick quarter-mile to home. And lightning? Not another flash the whole time.

Ninny? Yes.

Of course, by the time I left work this afternoon, the temperature was down in the lower 40s again and I had not worn any kind of jacket to work.

Note to self. Next time you see “thunderstorms” in the forecast, check the blasted weather *map* too!

It doesn’t feel like I got a lot done this weekend but I sort of did. We were home here at the Landfill and I mean, we were pretty much *home*, the whole time. Except for Friday evening downtown and a bit of urban hiking down by Barton Dam this morning to check on our birdhouses.

Yesterday, I think I talked myself down off the ledge about five times. The ledge being the ledge where I commandeer a Landfill vee-hickle, set the GPS for “Planet Ann Arbor Apple Store”, and hit GO. The GG has been hogging my loverly 4-year-old taped-together MacBook laptop to make mollified mooooovies for his North Country Trail buddies. Why? Well. We have computers that can write to CDs. We have computers that can write to floppy disks. We even have computers that can write to those old floppy disks, as you can see in the photooo. (You are lucky that yucky looking pipe and a few waarrrs are all you can see of the Landfill Dungeon.)

I have lost track of how many computers we own. Actually, I am starting to need two five-fingered hands to keep track of my own *personal* computers. The only computer either of us own that can write to a DVD is my loverly 4-year-old taped-together MacBook. The one that I keep thinking is on its last legs. Except that it seems to just keep humming along. Oh, it is slow and slodgy and I have been holding the dern thing together with mailing tape since it was about six months old. I’ve been thinking about replacing it since sometime last summer. But it keeps going, so…

Now the GG is needing a DVD drive. So he is using my laptop. And I am trying to figure out if I can live without a full-fledged laptop. I have an iPhone and an iPad. Well, I also have a Windows laptop for work (can’t ever remember which manufacturer) but I don’t use that for anything outside of work. I don’t need to. Because I have, you know, all my own stuff. We’ll see whether I buy or not… (I probably will, eventually…)

Oh yes! Inches forward? It seemed like I spent a lot of time slodging around this weekend. I mean, I did do laundry and pre-cooking (for the coming week, etc.). Also. I did. Fill. A garbage bag. With clothing I no longer wear. And made some other minor inroads into anti-hoarding. I didn’t do much but I didn’t slide backwards either. I have a lot of years left in me but I am going to simplify if it kills me. I will *not* leave the beach urchins with a bunch of crap to clean up.

Love y’all and slodge on,
KW

I dunno if it’s because we lost our daily newspaper a couple years ago or if it’s always been this way but our wondrous city council seems to operate in a vacuum. Because it seems that recently we were mere inches away from approving a landing pad for a Martian toaster aka “conference center” to be built right downtown on the old “library lot”. And nobody [me, anyway] knew it. The library lot is a city parking lot that is adjacent to the downtown branch of the district library. It was hands-down one of my favorite parking lots for the 30 years I’ve lived here and, as the sign indicates, I am not alone. Generations have parked there. And [almost] nobody stood up and said that this was a reeeally bad idea.

No more. As you may have read here before, a monstrosity of an underground parking garage is now being built where the library lot once was. I’m not even sure why a big parking structure is needed at that location but our illustrious city council got away with building that and then they apparently started salivating about what our beauteous city could build on top of it. To generate revenue, don’tcha know. The whole long complicated story about RFPs and letters of intent and developers and all that is too complicated for this baggy old *blonde* kayak woman to write coherently about in her baggy old blahg.

Newspaper or not, there were some folks around town who were watching this developing situation. And blogging about it. And, when it got to the point that our elected council members (you know, the folks we elected) seemed to be on the verge of actually approving one of their RFP responses, for the ugly hotel-conference center shown on the yard sign in the photooo, some of those folks twittered and formed facebook groups, etc. All of a sudden yard signs like this one I photographed at 0-skunk-30 a few days ago started to appear all over town. And… Then… Yesterday afternoon, AnnArbor.com reported that the city council placed a resolution on their next meeting’s agenda to reject a letter of intent with the developer of the so-called Martian toaster.

It’s not a done deal yet but it seems as though the council has heard from its constituents and is willing to abandon that egregiously ridiculous plan. I was thinking about getting my own yard sign but I am pretty confident that I won’t need one.

Okay. I know that our city council does have to concern itself with city development, et al. What I don’t understand is the scale of this project. This comes at a time when we have a huge deficit (like many cities in Michigan and elsewhere). Our mayor and council ended the annual leaf pickup last fall because “we can’t afford it”. Snowplowing was practically non-existent this winter. I can understand if my backwater street isn’t plowed immediately but the main streets were not plowed particularly well either. The most recent fire chief recently resigned, sending a letter to his boss saying that our fire department is dangerously understaffed. He is the second fire chief to do that in as many years. It goes on and on…

We elect our mayor and council members to manage our city so that the services we depend on are provided in a timely manner. We absolutely need public safety (police and fire) workers and garbage pickup. I know there are *many* other more complicated issues, and some of them involve downtown development. But I do *not* think that the city has any business using tax-payer dollars to run a conference center downtown or even float RFPs for such a thing. I am learning the slow, hard way that many people get elected to office so they can throw business in the direction of friends, relatives, and even random contractors who might be slipping money under the table. Not good. (Not trying to imply that our current council members are doing any of these things. I think they were just out of touch.)

I am not a very political aminal from the get-go but I am trying to pay more attention. When we have our next civic elections, I am going to be asking the candidates whether they are going to reinstate the leaf pickup. And what they think about downtown development in general. If they are for more big ugly air-sucking buildings [we already have some], I won’t vote for them. This city needs to be careful about balancing new development so that it doesn’t destroy the small businesses that make our city rock! If they want to reinstate the leaf pickup, I might (*might*) be interested.

We’ll see….

I am too taaarrred to try to pull any April Fools’ pranks on anyone. I am just about the biggest fool on earth in any case. I am soooo easy to fool. At least in social-type situations. I do not usually get jokes and I can be strung along for a good while on an April Fool joke. Thanks to fb and some folks at work who were having great fun calling their spouses to say that they were being relocated to Wisconsin (yeah, I know), I was tipped off pretty early in the day today. So I was a bit more on the lookout today than usual.

It was a busy day and I had a big presentation-type whoopty-do thingy to do this afternoon and we actually managed to get through it *early*, so afterward, a couple other gals on my team and I celebrated with a walk. Honestly, that qualifies as design work. Really. Finally it was time to call it a day and I walked downtown to meet up with the GG at the Old Town Barroooom. The Repotters showed up and NPJane made a cameo appearance but left her orange slice back at her barstool.

I don’t have much to say tonight and you are happy about that. It was Foolmoon tonight! Who knew? We spent about 15 minutes or so watching their parade of lanterns or whatever it was. It was great fun and I got a bunch of rather crappy photooos and one loooverly six-second fish-lip video that’s on facebook. And we ran into the proprietor of the Damn Arbor blog. And then I started turning a little orange around the edges and we all know that means it’s time for yer favo-rite blahgger to red queen back up to the Landfill and rack it up for the night.

One cause for celebration! It appears as though “we” have managed to thwart the Martian toaster from landing on our old library lot. With that, good night!