I am going to need to know tomorrow because today is my last day here in paradise aka the moominbeach. I have not paid attention to the weather on the Planet Ann Arbor in something like 10 days. I actually haven’t paid [too] much attention to the news either. Well, then there was this morning. We were headed off to a North Country Trail hike and I finally had to turn the damn radio off. I won’t tell you why. Guess if you dare…

I didn’t really want to do the North Country Trail hike today. It was my last day here and I was thinking I wanted to ramble around here on the moominbeach all day. But then I realized that there was a strong possibility that I would end up feeling lonely and at loose ends if I stayed behind. And so I went. And of course I had a wonderful time. My iPhone pedometer app made for a good conversation starter and fortunately I did not have to use this loverly outhouse.

Back to the moominbeach in the mid-afternoon. Relatively big nor’wester but still quite warm so whine up on the bank while reading Cryptonomicon. Grilled salmon for the GG, Grinchie, and me, then a visit from the Porters.

Good night. Hittin’ the road with the Trashmobile tomorrow. Wish I could stay here longer. Of course, I also remember how hard it was to leave The Planet Ann Arbor to come up here. Sigh…

Man, we are getting down to the dregs these days. I’m not sure it was exactly planned so to speak, but the GG and I made a run into town to pick up yet another load of cosmic debris at The Commander’s house. I will be glad when this phase is over. What is left is random and not all that interesting and… Well… Here is the Trashmobile, all loaded up for yet another trip to the moomincabin. With Washington School in the background. (I did not go to Washington School, I went to Stinkin’ Lincoln.) I did NOT go to the recycling center today…

We got back out here and I was not psychologically motivated to do much of anything but the GG was but I couldn’t exactly “help” with what he was doing. I can’t explain why exactly. For one thing, he has an identical twin and I think that those guys manage to work together without talking sometimes. I am the GG’s WIFE. I cannot do that with him, even after 30 years of marriage. So I went for a walk up on Birch Point Road.

On the return trip, I got to the old Read house and I goaded myself to take a bit of a walk down to Lewie and Doc Read’s old outbuildings. Even though there are BEARS in the general area. I remember walking (with my dad and Lewie and Doc and others) down the road beside the Read house. Back then, there was a garden with big SUNFLOWERS on the right, just as the road took a turn to the left. I headed left down to where the old shed/barn/whatever was. I thought that I remembered more buildings and maybe even a tractor or whatever. There was not much down there. The building below and a small doghouse-like structure. That was all.

Instead of retracing my steps up the old Read Road, I chose to go through the woods back to the cabin road. The walking was easy but some teensy tinesy little buglets kept getting into my eyes, nose, mouth, whatever. Yick. I knew that I wasn’t lost but I was almost starting to think that I was but then I got to the Light Line and I could see Paulette’s Yellow Cabin so I knew I was close…

And then I got back to the moomincabin and… The GG was in the middle of yet another flinging / organizing prodject! The shed. I did not help with this prodject. I am glad he did it. He did not fling anything. Tugsy is safe and so are all of the Tonka trucks.

In the end, we sat on the bank (above the beach) for a while. We have a north wind today, not our fave but it’s pretty warm and that made for a pleasant late afternoon on the beach.

Love y’all and goodnight.

BIG work day. This afternoon I was kind of wishing I was on the beach [alone, sigh] but then I saw Jeep and Pan working over next door and I realized that we are all in this together. [Whatever “this” is… ;-)]

This morning, I drove to town, threw a load of beach towels (and some damn underwear) into The Commander’s washing musheen and took a load to the recycle, my new fave home away from home.

Back to The Comm’s house, where I assembled and filled three banker’s boxes with some of the rest of the junk there. We are pretty much down to the dregs now. Switched the laundry to the dryer and, throwing caution to the winds, left the garage door wide open (dryer is in the garage but painter’s trailer blocks the view into the garage) and headed out to Glen’s for gas and grokkeries.

After yet *another* trip to the recycle (to dump off some random cardboard and old telephone books, etc., that were hanging out in The Comm’s living room), the laundry wasn’t quite dry but I was pretty much done so I took a walk around the neighborhood. And got nostalgic when I decided to cross through the schoolyard at Washington Elementary and saw this school bus that the beach urchins used to play on when we were visiting their grandparents.

After the laundry was finally dry, I headed back out and (yikes!) Suzy Homemaker was in whirling dervish mode. Mostly I tried to stay out of her his way. I tinked around out in the garage and actually I managed to LIBERATE A BOX! Just one box but that is progress. We were scrambling to find boxes earlier this summer!

In the middle of all of that, the UPS truck arrived with an expected delivery and I was out there to talk him down off the ledge about turning around behind our garage. He did fine and then I had to scramble to get a return package into the mail. Which meant ANOTHER trip into town. It all worked like clockwork and at the end of the day, Suzy had cleaned every square inch of every surface on the first floor of the moomincabin. It looks clean and it FEELS clean. AND THANK YOU, Old Boy or Suzy or whoever! He also rearranged the living room furniture a bit. I think I like it this way. For now. It can certainly be changed. 🙂

We ended up at the Cozy Inn for the regular Thursday night fish dinner with whatever beach folks are around. We were talking about the good old days of outhouses and bathing in the lake. The GG and I were on the younger side of the crew tonight (although we are not that far behind) but we ran into a young North Country Trail member there tonight and I have to say we are MUCH older than her and she remembered OUR names (mine! even though she has met me exactly twice). Could we remember hers? Uh… I finally forced the issue and told her that we were having a “senior” moment (or whatever it was).

It is a beautiful evening here on the deck at the moomincabin and we are hanging out with the Mean Old Grunchie Old Grinchie and so good night.

I mean really. We have at least two of them here. I was thinking that one of them came from my beach urchins and the fancy one in the garage was from Dogmomster’s kids. But she doesn’t seem to remember it. Anyway, it is handy to have a small refrigerator on the deck for beer. It saves room in the regular refrigerator and, as npJane just pointed out, if you’ve been on the beach and your feet are sandy, you can grab a beer without rinsing off your feet and head right back down to the beach. I take a liberal approach to who has access to the beer in the deck refrigerator and when. Which is pretty much, anyone anytime. I mean, I don’t want to be buying beer for everyone on the beach but if you are staying in the Old Cabin or over on the other side of us, go for it. I don’t even want you to replace it. Maybe text me if you take the last one just so I know. But we don’t drink a lot of beer so although I want to have some around, I don’t really want to have to schlep it downstate at the end of the season.

A day of leave-taking. I get a little fidgety on the day someone is leaving. Today it was the beach urchins. It isn’t even that I wanted them to stay, although I kind of wished they could. This particular trip, Lizard Breath was a great help with various organizing / flinging operations and I needed help. There is all the legal stuff (and I am working my way slowly through that) and then there is just the flotsam, jetsam, and cosmic debris… … … It is really hard to deal with your parents’ estate while working a full time job. I could use about a month up here but I am not going to get that.

Anyway, I remember when the parents were still alive and I used to come up here with the beach urchins for a few weeks every summer. We always had WAY TOO MUCH STUFF with us!!! And the morning we left, I would be running around like a chicken with its head cut off collecting and packing stuff, followed by The Commander trying to make sure that I didn’t forget this or that random item that she didn’t want to have to trip over for the rest of the summer. I TOTALLY understood about that but it would still drive me nuts because every time she reminded me about one thing I would get so scatter-brained, I would manage to forget something else. The best way for *me* to pack myself, a couple of little kids, and a crapload of cosmic debris is to *focus* on it until it’s done. And *then* ask, “Moom, is there anything you think I’m forgetting?”

I am traveling light these days. Arguably. When you travel to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, you have to schlep clothing for whatever weather you get. I don’t schlep my ski jacket in the summer but I have plenty of warm clothing and often have to wear it. Other than that? Sleeping bag, any cabin laundry I need to return, computer crap (fits in ONE backpack), and maybe a bag or two of grokkeries although we have comprehensive grokkery stores up here these days including one small but decent one three miles down the road.

Today was a bit deja vu except that the shoe was on the other foot. The beach urchins travel pretty light these days too but this time around, they were taking a few things sorted out from The Commander’s cosmic debris home with them. I found myself quietly freaking out just a wee little bit. Will they remember this board or that butterfly or this little box of stuff? Between The Comm’s Other-House-the-Real-House-Where-She-Lives-Some-of-the-Days and the moomincabin, we now own some kitchen utensils in duplicate, triplicate, quadruplicate, octuplicate… The beach urchins are certainly not taking all of the excess but they had each identified some things that they wanted. And then there was the bag of garbage that I forced upon them. Heck, Liz, it is double bagged and it’ll be in your trunk and it can go straight from there into my handy dandy Planet Ann Arbor garbage cart. (Thanks, kiddo, love you!)

I tried HARD today not to flutter around and say things like, “Don’t forget this butterfly.” I busied myself with small tasks. Dishes dishes dishes (I am a fanatic dishwasher on any day). Cleaning the shower and toilet. Cleaning out various wastebaskets that seemed to have dead bugs and other icky looking residue in the bottom. Other than making absolutely sure that the one bag of garbage was clearly in the path of the departing 20-somethings, I tried to stay out of the way. It was [I think] okay. It’s a new age these days. There is no one staying here the whole summer, the beach urchins are equal partners in ownership, and we all know that from now on, we are operating under a pack-it-in/pack-it-out philosophy.

My uber-cousin Terri and her beautiful daughter (who is a blasted JUNIOR in high school now, somebody stop hitting the fast forward button) left yesterday. The beach urchins left today. They texted as they passed the Spikehorn Restaurant near Houghton Lake. I am missing those people. We would probably drive each other crazy if we all had to live together all the time, especially in this small, sometimes cluttered space. But I do miss them all.

I almost password-protected this post, not because it is secret but because I am pretty sure that one or two of my five readers are squeamish about dead aminals and guns and things. In reality, it’s a relatively tame slice of life-in-the-north-woods kind of post but be warned that some bits *might* be disturbing. So read if you dare.

Anyway. A young relative of mine recently had an accidental encounter with a chipmunk that ended in tragedy — for the chipmunk. I won’t detail it because I know how awful I would feel if I were involved in the demise of any living thing (beyond moe-skee-toes and things, of course). We *like* chippies and other small aminals! This relative found herself in the position of having to fling the poor little beastie into the woods and said she felt that with this event, she had achieved full adulthood.

And that reminded me of the time The Commander willfully killed a chipmunk. As the story goes (and I know I am gonna mangle it but she isn’t here to correct me…), she and Grandroobly and another bank couple were whooping it up having a dinner party one night. As it turned out, in addition to all the usual bank-type dinner party hi-jinks, they needed to kill a chipmunk. Why? Because it had bitten someone and they needed to send it in to be tested for rabies. It needed to be dead. The *men* were mucking around trying to kill the chipmunk by putting it in the freezer (and drinking I dunno, probably scotch — those bankers, don’tcha know). Their strategy did not work. Finally, The Commander, who grew up on a farm and therefore presumably had a bit more experience with life and death, took matters into her own hands. She lowered her voice as she told me, “*I* killed the chipmunk.” I think she smothered it. I’m sure she wasn’t all that happy about doing it but whaddya gonna do? She didn’t want her friend to have rabies either.

So, this afternoon we were slugging down on the beach with npJane and a chipmunk actually came down on the beach for about 20 seconds and they usually don’t hang out on the beach (they probably know they are raptor bait) but that got us started on the chipmunk stories and then I remembered the porcupine summer…

The Commander was always interested in serious crafts and fiber arts and back in the 1990s or thereabouts, she took a class in the local Native American art of making quill boxes. So she was looking for a porcupine and I don’t think she was quite prepared to pick a dead porcupine up off the road like someone else I know >wink<. Wouldn’t you know, a “nuisance” porcupine had been marauding my uncle Don’s garden. One day Don had had enough and, knowing that The Comm wanted some quills, he shot the porcupine* and delivered it to The Comm, who put it into a drywall bucket. We have plenty of those around here, don’tcha know…

As it turned out, the ALWAYS BUSY Commander didn’t have time to deal with the porcupine right away and then it started to stink to high heaven so she took it out back and flung it into the swamp. Yes, she said “flung”.

That was almost the end of the story. Later that summer, some of my cousins and I took our kids on a rock walk to Cedar Point. We rounded one little interim point and somebody saw a sorta porcupine-sized aminal scoot into the woods. I didn’t see it and I’m not sure what it was but my cousin’s son said something like, “Well if it was a porcupine, we could get my grandaddy to shoot it and then Fran could fling it into the swamp. Yeah.

* You have to know that my uncle wasn’t out there shooting guns all the time. Those Fin boys (my dad and his brother) knew how to use guns but I NEVER saw either one of them actually shoot a gun. My uncle was a doc who delivered a LOT of babies in the area. When I was at my high school reunion last weekend, people were telling me, you know your dad delivered me. Well, not my dad, my uncle. My dad? A guy who… Well, I’ll tell that story some other time >wink<. At any rate, my uncle spent his career bringing babies into the world and sometimes quite heroically saving them, including my brother. He brought many more lives into the world than those he took out.

Hey, where is our Beach Boy? I mean, after the big nor’wester yesterday, there was only hard sand to put our towels on today. We need a beach boy to rake the sand up into that regular soft stuff it usually is. We cannot lie down on this hard stuff.

Beach Boy, where are you?

And what about those beers? Where are they? You don’t expect us to go up there and get them ourselves, dooya? That’s your job. Better yet, how ’bout some gin ‘n’ tonics? This is a beach, roight? Actually, beach boy be damned. Maybe the GG could figger a way to pipe beer or ‘hattans or G&T’s or whatever down to the beach from the moomincabin.

Not much to say about today. Laundry, business, and lunch in town, then a beach afternoon with kids and cuzzints. Lasagne. Whine walk after dinner… That is about all I have to say tonight. Love y’all.

–KW

I have been procrastinating about sorting out the sheets and blankets here at the moomincabin all summer. Personally I have just about given up on making beds while I’m here. I bring a sleeping bag. If the temperatures decide to go down into the 30s, I put a comforter over that. But when people fly in from wherever, they are not carrying sleeping bags with them and I like to be able to provide a bed with real sheets for guests. The last few years, the sheets and blankets have gotten into a horrendously disorganized mess. Today, Lizard Breath helped me get a good grip on sorting them out and we neatened up the totally disheveled sleeping loft in the process. This prodject [intentionally misspelled] but we are out of the gate. One thing I do know is that we do not need any more linens.

Of course I found a few artifacts that can’t be flung. Like Tigey here. Tigey is 50-something and he is my brother’s first beach towel. Isn’t he cute? My first beach towel was not as fancy as Tigey but just as beloved. It was striped in various blue and green colors. It didn’t survive the years intact but occasionally some very familiar looking cleaning cloths resurface.

And then there are artifacts that are really cool but you are thinking something like, “Where would I put this and what would I do with it?” And serendipity happens. Like these old spectacles I found in a box of Mac family papers and letters and stuff. They once belonged to Carrie Chapman MacMullan, aka my great-grandmother. Wouldn’t you know that today my Mac clan uber-cuzzint was scheduled to arrive. I showed the glasses to her and of all things, she actually has a small collection of old family spectacles. You’ve got ’em, cuz, she’s your great-grandmother too! I did take a picture though.

It was so hot last night that we left the screens in our doors all night. That is a rarity and Grandroobly in particular didn’t like to do it in case a bear decided to break in. No bears broke in and it was still pretty warm this morning, until a front came through. Here we are at Clyde’s Drive-in, where it was chilly and windy and spitting rain at us. Our waitress was in good spirits despite the cold. Actually I think it was a probably a relief. (Lizard Breath took this beautiful photo).

Guess what? This is a terrible photo but it does provide evidence that some of these POCs are still in existence. (What you can’t see is that that seagull had just snagged a onion ring. When you go to Clyde’s, you CANNOT leave anything resembling food — including ketchup — on the tray because the seagulls will dive down and grab the food off your tray.)

Okay, then what? We vegged for a little while and then we headed out to the garage with the idea of sorting out books a bit. We didn’t get very far on that but somehow we migrated back into the moomincabin and embarked upon a very successful kitchen utensil sorting / flinging prodject [intentionally misspelled]. Like, how many wooden spoons does one cabin need? I’m sure we found at least 10. NPJane arrived mid-afternoon and we spent the late afternoon having a beer in the little hollow in front of the Old Cabin, where you can almost pretend it’s a Beach Day, even when it isn’t.

Oh, and I dunno who this guy is or why he has taken up residence on our deck but we have *got* to get him to move along. He’s scarier than the vampires and werewolves that used to hang out at the outhouse back in the day.

Can I just say wow? It was a supreme beach day today and I had to draaaag myself off the moominbeach this afternoon. Do I really have to go to the high school reunion dinner tonight? I had a really good time on the boat tour but my inner resources for social interaction are soooo limited. How will I navigate tonight?

If anything, it was easier! Who knew? I started running into people out in the parking lot and rolled through several relatively in-depth conversations out by the bar, then settled into a seat at a table with a few people I really *wanted* to connect with and didn’t have to struggle to make conversation with. And The Beautiful Mimi dredged this photoooo up from somewhere. I bought that “crop-top” at Woolworth’s. I think I was maybe 12 or 13? There aren’t too many photooos of me at that age.

The tone of a 40th reunion is so different than that of a 20th. Back then I felt intimidated by all of the wonderful things people were doing. Me? I had a husband, kids, a house, and a good job that I liked but I wasn’t making a whole ton of money and I didn’t really feel like I was living up to my potential. Did other people feel like that too? I don’t know. At the time, I felt as though there was a wee bit of oneupsmanship going on. Looking back on that, I don’t think we were really trying to outdo each other. It was more like we were desperately wanting to feel successful ourselves and who best to compare ourselves with than our high school classmates.

It was all so much more casual this time around. Yeah, we talked about our jobs (or the ones we’ve retired from) and our kids and grandkids (those who have them) and our parents’ deaths or whatever struggles they are having. This time, I didn’t even think about measuring myself against others. In a way that’s odd because for the first time in my life, I actually have a job that I like *and* pays pretty darn well. But who cares? Have I lived up to the potential of my intelligence and education? Maybe not exactly. But I have “made it” somehow. I am not a world-class flute player or the CEO of some big company or whatever but I have a good job and enough money to live on and a fantastic family and some good friends and I just don’t care about much of anything else any more. I got the sense that I was not the only Soo High 1972 grad who felt that way.

Somebody on the boat tour last night expressed the opinion that our class, from a high school in what some folks describe as an isolated, rugged outpost, sent a lot of folks out into the world who have done very well and made the world a better place. We have, although I don’t think we have any household names among us. I am not one of those but I do not think I have made things worse either.

Cheers to the Soo High Class of 1972. Seeya in five years. Or for our 60th birthdays. Or in Lansing.

So, hopefully after this morning, I am finished working for a bit and can spend the next week doing a combo of flinging, hanging out with beach urchins and cuzzints, etc., slugging around on the beach and… Going to a high school reunion. Yes. It’s the 40th. I know y’all were dying to know that little tidbit.

There are several events this weekend, including the Soo Locks tour boat cruise that happened tonight. The last reunion I went to was the 20th. I am an introvert. I don’t do very well in crowds. I was sort of off on my own tangent in high school. I mean, I practiced the flute (and/or the piano) about a bazillion hours a day among other things. I won’t go into detail about anything else but suffice it to say that (like many other people) I get nervous about meeting up with people from high school. In large groups at least. Onesy twosy I can handle.

Enter Facebook. I am actually connected with a fair number of 1972 Soo High graduates on Facebook. And have met up with some of them in person a few times in recent years. These were people I never expected to see again. That made it a bit easier to make myself go to the reunion this year.

Of course, once I got there? My middle name would be “Awkward” if somebody besides my mother had named me but OF COURSE I had a good time. There were people that I didn’t really interact with in high school and didn’t recognize without looking at their name tag. Why not? I dunno. I missed out! There was the whole Stinkin’ Lincoln crowd. In a way, I remember the kids I went to grade school with almost better than the high school crowd. There were the OMG hugs! Overall, I loved talking to folks tonight. I was shy and didn’t talk to enough people. That was my bad and I’ll have to do better tomorrow night. I think I will make my own little cute badge that says, “I like you but I am an introvert. Please approach me!” I’ll draw a little smiley face on it.

P.S. The bathrooms on the boat are MUCH better than they used to be (or maybe we were on a different boat). The last time I was on one of those boats, the bathroom was kind of like a rocking ‘n’ rolling outhouse.

I am not sure I am done with this post but a whole bunch of people (relatives, not high school reunion folks) are on our deck playing around with a laser kaleidoscope. Life is good. Love y’all, especially my fam and class of 1972.

Good night,
KW

Today? Much more boring than yesterday. No international “incidents”. I spent much of my time working from beach today. I am fortunate to have Mouse here to cook for me. Homemade bagels for breakfast (and no, she didn’t make them this morning, she schlepped them up), corn chowder (!!!) for lunch! Homemade pizza (including the dough) for dinner. I am light with words today (and you are happy about that after yesterday’s rather disjointed screed) so, this is what the beach looked like when we got here yesterday…

Clouds yesterday afternoon…

Beach today with much more wind and Pooh reading and Mouse sewing. It could just as easily have been Pooh sewing and Mouse reading but this is what it was today…

And here’s a view from *inside* the moomincabin.

Good night. Love y’all. –KW

Lemme see… Got up, walked, did laundry, packed, PICKED MY FIRST RIPE TOMATO (and ate it so, alas, no pic). Logged into work and did a few things. Went into full-tilt boogie PANIC mode trying to use the NEW TIMESHEET system. Uber-boss got me on the phone and talked me down off the ledge via shared desktop. Mouse arrived. We launched. Alas. The Ninja did not have the right “stuff” to play music from an iPhone. Fortunately that was figured out before we got to the Maple/Miller intersection. Which is a half mile from home. Back. Oh, you have one in Daisy? Okay, that means we don’t have to go inside the house. Aaaaaaannnnd again we are off!

Arrival at the moominbeach? 3:15 or so. Had fully planned on logging back into work and got toadily [ducking for cover] waylaid. By. The GG. Aunts, uncles, cuzzints of various removals or not, aaaaannnnd… Some stranded Canadians. On our beach. It was a woman with two school-age children. They were driving a jet-ski that had managed to suck a small rock in somehow. I am unclear about the details of where this happened or how they got to the moominbeach. But they were here and we offered what help we could. Which is hard to do in this day and age where every single blasted person is suspicious whether they are or not a terrorist or whatever. What happens if somebody finds out that we offered something (water, a bathroom, whine, whatever) to someone from that horrendously unfriendly country of Canada [huge sarcasm here]. The Piedies gave them some water. No one asked for a bathroom but we would certainly have allowed these “horrible aliens” access to one if they had needed one. Heck, the kids were swimming in our wonderful sandbar system, maybe they peed the water. If they did, I don’t care. We’ve all done that [and still do it]. There’s a lotta water out there.

This woman was stranded for way longer than she should have been. Her house (or cabin or whatever) is less than a mile from the Moominbeach but it is across the border. She called home for help and her family launched a boat to come over and rescue her. Alas. What was the US Coast Guard doing today? Harassing people. Mainly asking questions like, “Do you have a life jacket on board for every person?” or “Do you have your boat registration?” But. They were also nitpicking about the border. Which, if you are in a boat in the St. Marys River, is relatively indistinct. And so, when our stranded traveler’s rescue boat launched, it was stopped by our wondrous Coast Guard and turned back to Canada. Don’tcha know that the Canadians in the photoooo might be smuggling explosives in. Maybe they want to blow up the Sault Ste. Siberia Tower of History?

And so, now there are these [very nice] people stranded on our beach here in the United Snakes and their family (who live less than a mile away) cannot rescue her. What happens next? Does somebody [not me!] call the border patrol folks and and and what… Would there be some kind of big investigation of this woman and her kids? For what reason?

We have to ratchet down all of this security stuff. Today a nice American family [with some Canadian roots] met up with a nice Canadian family [with family in the US]. A Canadian family who apparently lives a similar life to the one that we live, with a beach and boats and yaknow, kids, etc. A Canadian family who happened to be in a difficult situation. It would be nice if we could ratchet down all of the damn god-forsaken security stuff so that some [goddamn] COMMON SENSE could be included. Like. These people are trying to rescue their family who are stranded at the Moominbeach (on the AMERICAN shore). We are on training exercises so we act like they are trying to run drugs or weapons or whatever over to KW on the Moominbeach [yeah, roight] so we are not going to let them cross over. Meanwhile, moom and kids are waiting here… … … Why could the coast guard not accompany the rescue boat over to the moominbeach and actually figure out what was going on. And provide some actual help…

Long story short: The Canadian family waited for our wondrous Coast Guard to leave the area and came over to our side and executed a successful rescue. I heard one of the guys who extricated the rock hand it to the male youngster and tell him to put it in his treasure chest. Terrorists? No way!

I do not know if I have the words here but fer kee-reist let’s stop harassing regular citizens unless there is a documented reason to. We have now had some storms move through and it is raining (thank you god, we need it). If that woman had been stranded in bad weather, I know that one of us would have gladly offered her shelter for the afternoon or evening or however long she needed it. We are neighbors and now friends, not aliens.

I felt like my tax dollars were wasted today. Our government nitpicked people’s boat credentials and “defended” the border at the potential expense of the lives of the folks who were stranded here on our beach. The coast guard could have accompanied the rescue boat to the Moominbeach and, if they had done that, they might have seen two families from different countries trying to work together to solve a problem and talking together as friends. If the USA and Canada cannot maintain a friendly border (like we used to do), I am not sure who can.