We are here at the Uncly Uncle and The Beautiful Gay’s house here in Gaylord. There was snow here today. There was also snow in Sault Ste. Siberia, where we’re going tomorrow.

Is it bad that I was so wrapped up in flow-charting a picky little work thing this morning that I tried to download a flowcharting app to my phone in the Frog Hopper driving up here this afternoon to do some more flow-charting? Is it also bad that I was grumpy when I couldn’t download the flow-charting app because the 4G wasn’t strong enough to handle that app?

Somebody tell me how the damn debates go. I do not think I can watch.

In general, I have nothing else to say today. Actually, I probably have plenty to say but I can’t locate the quadrant of my brain in which it resides. That is a good thing. It means I spent the last few hours hanging out gabbing up a storm with some fun folks instead of hanging out in the Landfill Chitchen arguing about polly-ticks (or whatever) with the GG. And yes, we argue even though we are (I think) largely on the same wavelength. At least this time around.

Good times. Good food. Mouse turds were found. Oops, I probably wasn’t supposed to say that… (Hey, we have ’em too…) Alas, the debates are now on… I’d rather be watching Honey Boo Boo >wink< but I’ll do my best >wink< >wink<

Good night from Gaylord,
KW

If you are one of the five people who can actually keep up with my boring blather, you have probably heard me refer to the decor at The Landfill as Student Ghetto / Early In-law. When we bought this place, the last thing I wanted to do was fill it up with a bunch of random furniture. I wanted to start slowly and buy stuff as we could afford it. We had moved from a two-bedroom apartment and we had what we needed. The place was kind of bare but that was a good thing. I thought. And then, the Gumper and The Beautiful Sally moved down to Florida for the duration and we ended up with a bunch of their furniture. I was kicking and screaming but the GG had a different emotional thing going on and I caved. Some of y’all have heard me kvetch about the Green Couch. But there is also the Reading Chair. Here’s a cute picture albeit it not one that shows the whole chair.

Here’s a bit better pic (of the chair, not of yer fav-o-rite blahgger). And that’s the baby Mouse who looks like she’s actually sleeping.

The Reading Chair was where I spent a *lot* of time sitting with my first baby, nursing her or talking to her or watching all the dogs go by out the window. It was where I read Mouse’s Train Ride to her for the first time and I can still remember her practically hyperventilating as I turned each “page”. I read many books to kids there. After Mouse and I dropped Lizard Breath off at Haisley for her first day of kindergarten, we returned to the Landfill and Mouse immediately climbed up into the reading chair. I was thinking something like, “Oh isn’t that sweet, she wants to read with her mama alone” and tried to get into the chair with her. Nothing doing! She wanted that chair for herself!

The Reading Chair was sort of ragged when we adopted it and after all those years, it became pretty darn dilapidated. I am in a deacquisitional mode (as you may know) and I don’t have much patience with old broken things and a couple years ago, I got overwhelmed and I decided it was time to get rid of the Reading Chair. I moved it to a spot where it could be easily be moved out the door and I waited for a good opportunity.

But then. Life is always busy around here and it sat and it sat and it sat and it sat and it became a place to dump stuff (which isn’t a good thing but) and it sat. And one day I squinted at it a bit and I thought, “Rendel’s.” I couldn’t get rid of it. It’s hands down a better chair than I would get at Art Van or wherever and even though I think we have *too much* furniture, I decided to give it a new life.

Today. The Rendel’s guys delivered my reupholstered chair. I think it’s beautiful. Even though that kind of tapestry isn’t really my “style” (whatever the heck my style is). In the end, I decided to go with a fabric that was at least reminiscent of what had been on the chair. She is beautiful. The delivery guys wanted to know if I liked her and could they tell “him” (their boss (their dad?)) that. I told them I loved her! They wanted to shake hands (of course I did)! I forgot to tell them, “I’ll be back.”

Neither do I. But I am thinking about the Jurassic Age right now. The one during which I gave birth to a baby dinosaur and a baby mouse within three years.

Yesterday I posted a gorgeous photo on my blahg of where I park at my work [almost] every day. I also posted it on facebook and today DogMomster posted a couple of pics — her parking lot and out her office window. I don’t have a window in my cube these days. I work in a cube farm, albeit a beloved one. If I want to look out a window (onto that pond), I just swing up outta my chair and walk a few steps and I’m there.

Back in the Jurassic Age, I worked over at “That Darn EPA”. I have to clarify that I worked for a government contractor (for years). I worked for Byron. In the early days of my career there, I was the keeper of a window that looked out upon a dusty old hallway with a shredder and I dunno what other kind of stuff. I can’t really remember. I don’t think that window exists any more but in the Jurassic Age, people were always coming to The Window. My job was handing out printouts to people and accepting hand filled out “data sheets” for keypunching and processing. I didn’t get paid very much and my buddy Byron wasn’t into training and during the first six months, I had some serious issues with the whole situation. I liked Byron but I was totally bored and there was a “tech supervisor” who absolutely drove me nuts with his Christian conservative misogynism. I thought I might have to quit and find another job but then (out of the blue) the “tech supervisor” quit and I didn’t get his job but I did get end up with a pretty big raise* and some new responsibilities. I taught myself everything under the sun including FORTRAN and, instead of quitting in six months, I stayed around for 15 years. It turned out to be a great job to raise young children by.

So, fast forward a bit. I had two kids. My supervisors created a part time job for me that allowed me to share child care with the GG, who also worked over there and they allowed us to devise our own schedule. He would drive over to work at six AM. I bundled the kids into the car and got there at two PM. He met me in the parking lot and drove the kids home. It was a cool way to avoid day-care but it wasn’t always easy. Were we tired at the end of the day? Yes!!!

Back to windows… I still spent a lot of time dealing with the The Window but by that time, I also had a cube I could retreat to. It also had a window. That window allowed me a view into my boss Byron’s office. If Byron wasn’t hiding from me (and he often was), I could see him in there. I will never forget the time he was printing ASCII nude women from the Merit Network on his dot matrix computer. I was *not* freaked about that and neither were the other young women I worked with. We totally cracked up. Look what the boss is doing! He was a wonderful boss and this didn’t feel creepy to us, in fact, I made sure to tell Byron’s beautiful daughter about that incident (and others) at his funeral a few years ago.

Those were the days. I have to admit that I don’t miss all of the ashtrays around that old office at the EPA but I do miss a lot of the people I used to work with.

* Don’t get me wrong. It was a huge percentage point increase but dollar-wise, it just barely allowed me to pay my rent and car payment.

I galumphed out of the Landfill this morning with all my work gear, locked the door, and immediately remembered that it was something like 30 degrees. I was dressed for fall with tights and a silk/wool turtleneck, etc., but I HAD NO GLUBS ON! I knew that the forecast was sunny and mid-50s and I had locked the door (why, I do not know because the GG was still inside), so I made the executive decision to suffer for the few minutes it would take for the Ninja to warm up.

Okay. Zippity-doo-dah. Off to work. Aaaandd, for the second time this fall, my cute little Ninja took just a weeeeee bit longer to start than it usually does. The Ninja is such a zippy little vee-hickle that I think of it as new but truth told, we bought it four years ago. It’s probably time… I mean for a new battery, not a new vee-hickle. But it did start up and then I looked at zeee veeeendshield and there was water all over it so what did I do? I flicked on zeee veeeendshield vipers. What would you do? Oops. Errrr, sgratch, swish. That was H₂O on there but it was in its solid state. All right, where is zeee veeeendshield viper scraper. Of course there was one right there in the driver’s side door pocket. This *is* The Great Lake State and we don’t ever remove ice scrapers from our vee-hickles.

I will admit that the ice on my windshield was not particularly solid and it only took a couple of scrapes to eradicate it. I took off for work and I did indeed warm up pretty quickly. (What is really stupid about all of this is that I knew very well how cold it was this morning because when I took my 0-skunk-30 walk, I was appropriately dressed for the weather.)

But. Helloooo… It is October and this is Michigan and more warm weather is almost certainly in our future but this morning was a little heads-up that things *will* go downhill. Last night, my phone weather was alerting like crazy that there could be a frost overnight, and there was. I like to be alerted about lightning and tornadoes and derechos and things. What I don’t understand is why a frost in early October in our upper great lake state merits an alert. The farmers in this state know to expect a freeze at this time of year. It isn’t anywhere near abnormal.

I took that photoooo from “my” work parking place this morning. It’s almost possible to make believe that there are no buildings across that pond. I don’t really have an assigned parking place at work. It’s just that our parking lot is a bit overbuilt and almost nobody (except me) ever parks in the third row out from the building by the pond. So I have picked a spot and I can’t believe how irritated I get on the VERY RARE occasion that someone parks in “my” spot or even next to it. Except when it’s a bird-watching crew there to observe and photograph our diverse avian pond denizens. Those folks are welcome to use my spot!

Usually when I talk about “urban hiking”, I mean that I am walking around down on the trails near Barton Dam, an area that doesn’t resemble a city at all, even though it is only maybe a mile and a half away from downtown Planet Ann Arbor. The Barton Dam trails are wooded with a meadow in the middle. It’s maybe a five minute drive from The Landfill (and it’s also possible to walk there from here), and you can “hike” a mile or two or maaayyybe three if you walk all the way along the berm and back. A quick getaway when even our own woodsy (but rather densely populated) neighborhood is just a wee bit too much.

Today, I had a mission in the downtown Planet Ann Arbor in mind (it’s a secret mission of sorts, don’t ask), so we took the opportunity to take a true urban hike, all the way downtown, over to U of M, across the diag, up to Washtenaw Ave. and back. It has been ages since I have walked the diag. The photo shows the top of the building at the end of the diag (it would be the beginning of the diag if you entered from the other direction. I dunno if it’s because nowadays I walk around with a camera iPhone in my pocket or because I am “old” but today, I actually looked *up* and saw these towers. I’m sure I have seen them before. But I don’t think I have ever really *noticed* them. Of course I had to instagram it.

I did not go to college at U of M. I grew up wanting to but through my own inattention to the college application process, I did not get in. No, it wasn’t because of my grades (or my SATs, kee-reist!). As much as anything, I think I spent too much time trying to dumb myself down in junior high and high school, in a desperate attempt to be “cool” enough to fit in with my classmates. Yes, that was really dumb. Kee-reist!

I have walked across the diag about a billion times. I don’t remember the details of most of those walks. The walk I remember was once when my old coot was still young (like I am now) and walked all over hell and gone no matter where he was. We got to the building in the photoooo and he hung a louie and we went *inside* that building with the two towers. He opened a door on the right and we went inside a room with a big pool-type thing with scaled-down boats in it. A naval engineering laboratory. How the heck did he know that was in there? Because he spent his freshman year at the U of M. And then… Mysteriously… He switched to Moo-U. He did not flunk out of the U of M. Not the guy who, a few years later was rated superior as a WWII pilot / flight instructor or the guy who aced all of his banking classes.

I can’t tell you what happened to my old coot because I have only once in my life heard him say anything about it. It was cocktail hour at the moomincabin and he was sitting there drinking a ‘hattan and watching the boats go buy and he blurted something out about a probably long-dead professor, referring to him with a word he probably later used to refer to his WWII enemies. I did a double-take! Say what? As much as I wanted to, I didn’t ask him or The Commander for the details. I didn’t really want to know any more. I think it is okay for people to take some secrets to their graves.

So, the Old Coot may not have graduated from U of M and, actually, he didn’t even finish his bachelor’s degree. WWII interrupted his studies and he never quite managed to get back to them. He did go to banking school. Through the U of M, I believe (I have those records but haven’t processed them yet). So what? He was a very intelligent person and he had a successful and *honest* career, unlike, well, you know…

In the long run, I live on the Planet Ann Arbor because I love it here and have always loved it here and it is in the Great Lake State so I can drive to The Group Home at Houghton Lake and The Moomincabin. I don’t have to take a plane ride. Although I am getting more comfortable with those… 😉 A part of me wonders whether I would’ve settled here if I *had* gone to U of M.

Good weekend here at The Landfill. 10 miles of walking today and lots of flinging. The next couple weekends will be ultra-busy.

Love y’all
KW

Lemme see… Woke up at 0-skunk-30 and made my usual iPhone rounds… Weather? C-c-c-c-cold today… Leggings, socks, [sandals], silk/wool turtleneck sweater, scarf, polartech jacket, glubs. Twitter? The usual grab-bag of polly-tickal / news type stuff except… Oh wait! It’s Saturday! Roos Roast posted an instagram on Twitter. As I was dragging myself outta bed this morning, our fave coffee purveyor (sorry Sbucks) was *already* downtown *at* the farmer’s market providing coffee to his market neighbors. I took a shower and then, grok grok grok, git outta bed, Roos Roast is already at the farmer’s market. Let’s get going!

After our walking trip to the farmer’s market, I walked to the Plum Market and then there was another [driving] trip to the farmer’s market and *then*, us Landfill denizens commenced a pretty darn good flinging session.

We were interrupted at one point by a person at the door! No, it was not someone trying to find Knight’s Steakhouse >wink< It was a polly-tickal type person. I don’t normally like to answer the door but this person was on my wave-length and that’s as far as I’m gonna go with that.

So, in the midst of all this activity, I was scouring my collection of vintage Sunset Magazine cookbooks for a recipe. It was the Fiesta Salad that Radical Betty always made when I was young and I was pretty sure it had originally come from Sunset. Beans and tomatoes and other stuff that I couldn’t remember. For a while, it was a moominbeach favorite but I don’t remember it being served for a long time. Finally, I sought out the huuuuge shoebox of recipes that I grabbed from The Commander’s house after she died last February. The recipes in this box were curated by The Commander and there are handwritten recipes from her mother-in-law (my grandma Margaret) annotated “for Frances” and *many* others. The Comm was democratic in her inclusion of recipes. Along-side recipes from my grandma are recipes from the likes of students in The Comm’s high-school “home-ec” class and Pengo Janetto. And many that she clipped out of newspapers or magazines. I hope I can someday find the “chop-suey” recipe she served us as kids. I really liked that one. It had water chestnuts. Grandroobly, not so much >wink<

So, scissors? I can haz them. Can I haz 20-something pairs? Yee. I have been picking away at my “studio” down in the Landfill Dungeon. I have a whole bunch of scissors here in the Landfill Chitchen. Turns out I had even more scissors down in the dungeon. I now have a whole bunch of scissors packaged up to take to Kiwanis next Saturday (or whenever we manage to get down there). Somehow, I got on a roll today and cleaned off my whole “sewing table”. It was once the Courtois clan’s dinner table when the GG and his nine siblings were kids and it was a good sewing table for me for a while, until, well, you know.

I cleaned this table off today. And you can see the ancient Electrolux vacuum cleaner down there. The one that I got down on my knees with today and dredged up old beads and threads and (a few mouse turds but not enough to freak me out and anyway, I think they are old). I could’ve let Roomba do it but she wouldn’t have picked up pins and needles that were stuck in the carpet. I did that by hand. I don’t have a before picture because I had no idea at the beginning of today that I would clean that table off. I’ve cleaned it off before. I dumped junk upon it again. I will probably do that *again*. Sighhhh…. Pride can go before a fall and I don’t want anyone who is knee-deep into the Flinging Process to feel bad about the fact that I actually have a clean table in the Landfill Dungeon. There is still a lot to do down there (note the mattresses…). Anyway, I am sure I will backslide again. Two steps forward, three steps back…

At four PM, the GG was napping on one of the Back Room couches. He deserved a nap. He also did some damn good flinging today. I dredged him off the couch again and we went over to our new fave hiking trail for a late afternoon walk. While we were hiking, our daughter was at our house wondering where the heck we were. We were sorry to miss her but we were in a good place and, all in all, it was a pretty darn good day. Don’t you think, @tmotu?

We were walking home from downtown and it was raining and I gave the “kids” in the pickup truck the best directions I could. Basically, getting to Dexter from where we were in the bowels of our labyrinthine neighborhood involved turning around, then going east and south. Twisty turny enough that I hate giving people directions to anywhere from the bowels of my neighborhood. I did think to ask, “Where are you trying to get to?” “Knights!” was the reply. I totally cracked up. How did I know that? It’s the second time this week one of us has fielded that question. The first time, people actually came to our *door* to ask! I wonder how they guessed that we would know where the neighborhood steakhouse / pub was? The problem is that Dexter, the street on which Knight’s resides, is totally torn up at the moment. You can get to Knight’s but the route is not straightforward. Knowing Knight’s clientele, they will not lose much business.

It was a beautiful walk downtown to the Oscar Tango tonight in a sweet sweet rain. Chilly (upper 40s) but no wind. That house in the photo is on Crest Street, two doors down from the famous 111 Crest house, where some of my fave cuzzints lived back in the day. I remember many good times there. My old coot’s bank always purchased a set of season tickets to U of M football games and we would travel down here once every fall to attend a game. The routine was something like this:

• Leave Siberia when school got out on Friday afternoon.
• Dinner at the Sugar Bowl in Gaylord. Steak sandwiches (medium rare) with fries for everyone. Coke for kids and beer for parents. (The Sugar Bowl is still alive and kicking!)
• Arrive Ann Arbor in the late evening and raise havoc with cuzzints.
• Donuts (?) and cider for breakfast Saturday, then Pooh and I would walk downtown and shop all the “hippie stores”.
• Get dropped off at the game via Chez Harry (who was probably greatly relieved to get rid of everyone for the afternoon, I know I would be). The parents had the high-falutin’ bank tickets. The rest of us would just walk in and pay something like $2.50 a person and sit in the *un-crowded* end zone. Yes, really.
• Us kids would walk home (or at least Pooh and I did, not sure if Jay and The Engineer also walked, or maybe they walked separately). The merry-go-round at Allmendinger Park was what was on *my* agenda. It wasn’t a fancy merry-go-round with horses and whatnot, just your everyday garden-variety playground type. Up in the yooperland, we had to go to Brimley State Park to use one of those and you can bet we didn’t go there very often because you had to *pay* to get in, don’tcha know. At any rate, Pooh always obliged me about that stupid merry-go-round.
• The rest of the afternoon, I dunno. Maybe we walked up to Virginia Park? Then dinner and hanging out in the basement playing records (Herman’s Hermits maybe?) and watching TV
• Sunday morning, breakfast and then — alas — we would head back over toward the freeway, out Huron/Jackson and up N. Maple past the neighborhood I have now lived in for about a gazillion years. Who knew? Sort of a reverse deja vu.
• Northbound I75 and eventually home.

We are actually *in* town for the second weekend in a row. I am back into some semblance of a flinging mode and some others have also made some inroads. I wonder what we’ll get done…

I have come to hate the phrase “doubling down” in the last few months. I do not really understand it. I can only guess (via wiki) that it somehow comes from the game of chance called Blackjack. I have not played Blackjack since I was about 13 and when we played it, we played with poker chips and, believe me there was no cash backing those chips. My dad used to give me a roll or two of pennies to play poker on the band bus but that’s a whole ‘nother story… And no, it was not strip poker.

I was never any good at Blackjack or any other game of chance. I *was* good at a totally brainless card game called “Spit”, which I could not describe if I tried but the key to success was to be fast. I am fast. Sometimes too fast. I am lucky I didn’t injure my “flute fingers” playing Spit. Oh well.

So, I don’t really understand what “doubling-down” means. I don’t understand Wikipee’s Blackjack description and I *totally* don’t understand how and why our political candidates seem to be using it. But then there are a lot of other vague terms that are being bandied about: vouchers, small business, middle class, trickle-down [anything], my fave “job creator” (what?) and a whole bunch of terms related to the latest fad in education, which seems to be letting big business executives take over our public schools. We’ll go there some other day. Define these terms for me, please Mr. Politician. I am a systems analyst. I need details. What the hell do you mean by the phrase “double down”? What are you going to change? Have you thought through what this will do to *all* of your constituents? Even those who do not have a voice? What will be the unintended consequences? Hmmm?

Me? I am going to create my own daffynition of “doubling down” (and kicking it up a few notches to “quintupling-down”). I am tentatively going forth into a new episode of flinging my sewing “stuff” (the fifth or whatever). How the heck did I accumulate so much? The photooo is just a small sampling of my sewing notions. I haven’t yet counted how many rulers are in that basket. Or scissors. Or zippers or tape measures. I am slowly sorting this stuff out.

Seamstresses, quilters, and fiber artists? I have thread here and a few zippers and some other stuff. If you need anything, check with me before hitting the fabric store. Mouse, I am mainly looking at you, since you are in the same town as me.

In my sorting process today, I found a long-lost but beloved pair of earrings. Long story and they need cleaning. My silver polish is around here somewhere and I’ll find it eventually but I am mostly happy that I seem to have re-a-started my de-acquisitioning prodject.

You know I am not gonna stop blahgging every day. Margaret is right that I am the only person who cares if I blahg every day (and I do know that Isa also notices whether or not I blahg). It can be a challenge though. It’s always been a writing challenge. Although I don’t fancy myself to be a real writer. I just play one on those ‘tubes. Back in the early days, sometimes there was also a technology challenge but it’s been a looonnnng time since I have had to warp my brain to deal with a tech challenge, even on Lopez Island.

I dunno. The last couple of years have been a slog. This year, I reached an employment milestone that granted me an extra week of vacation. For the most part (traveling to Lopez Island being a wonderful exception), I have spent every vacation day I have taken dealing with some sort of business: legal crap, schlepping stuff out of The Comm’s house to various places*, and cleaning The Comm’s house (more of that to come). And then there’s the moomincabin. And my own flinging prodject here at the Landfill. I’m just taaaarrred and that got me out onto a bit of a psychological ledge yesterday…

Let’s be clear here. I am OKAY! I am pretty sure I know exactly why I got out on that ledge and I know how to talk myself down from that position. Number one thing? For me anyway… Not enough *exercise*! Kee-reist!!! I still do my 0-skunk-30 walk *every* morning (except for the rare day that the weather is doing one of the four things I won’t walk in). But I have been bagging my lunch walk for a while now. I dunno why because I certainly have the physical energy to do it. And it has been a while since I have done any “cross-training” (aka kayaking or xc skiing). So, I re-scheduled my lunch walk to mid-afternoon when my brain needs a re-a-start anyway. One mile. It’ll have to do. After two days of that, I am already feeling better. And (ulp) maybe I will (ulp) join the yoga group at work. They are all old bags too. It isn’t hot yoga. And we just have to walk over to the next building. I can do it. Roight?

I don’t think I have any kind of serious mood disorder. When I was young, I sometimes experienced periods of time when I felt sad, etc. But I have never had any trouble getting out of bed in the morning and I don’t now. And I have learned that I can get through the bad days because usually (and that is a big usually) life will get better again, at least for a while.

* Again, the GG did MOST of the heavy schlepping and I do not have the words to thank him for that. The Comm loved the GG and in the last years of her life, I think she preferred him to me. I’m not sure how I could have married anyone better. Love you buddy.

When she runs outta steam, that is? I suppose I don’t really have to post something *every* day. I’m sure that doing that is tooooo much for some people. I know that it can get to be too much for the GG. The only person who ever noticed when I missed a day was The Commander, until the last year or so when her life became so complicated that she couldn’t deal with her computer any more.

I remember one time a fair number of years ago when I didn’t post for a day. It wasn’t for lack of trying. 1) We had some kind of a Comcast issue. 2) There was no such thing as an iPhone. 3) The Plum Market (with its Zingerman’s cafe and free wifi) didn’t exist yet. I ended up missing a day (sorta, it was complicated, let’s just say I was *late*) and The Commander *called* me to make sure everything was all right! I don’t think there is anybody around today who would actually *call* me (or text or email or facebook or whatever) if I missed a day. More likely, they’ll be thinking something like, “Whew!”

So, what can I talk about when I don’t really have anything to say? Well, there’s the warm *rain* I walked in this morning. Do you know how good it feels to have sustained rain after months and months of very occasional little dribbly five-minute rain storms? Today’s warm temperatures (50s) and calm winds were a bonus.

And there’s the photo that I point-and-shot with my iPhone on Sunday, walking in the Barton Dam park with Lizard Breath. Colors are starting to change here. LB came back to the Landfill with me, dispensed with the contents of a whole box of old middle school papers, etc., and had dinner with us. And a ‘hattan (she wasn’t driving). After so many years of living a five hour plane ride away from LB, it’s kind of nice to have her around the area. And she is even an active participant in my long-term flinging prodject (intentionally misspelled). Hee. I remember the first time we fed her a ‘hattan. She was not quite 20 and we were at Houghton Lake on Labor Day weekend and she was leaving for study abroad in Spain a couple weeks after. As I remember it, she was *not* impressed >wink< You do have to grow into ‘hattans, in my experience.

Things I don’t have the energy to talk about today are: 1) politics (can’t wait for this election season to be OVER), 2) pluses and minuses of my life this fall vs. last fall 3) full moon dream craziness (oh never mind, we won’t go there).

Photoooo from France, taken by one of my BFFs, none other than Sam (archaeologist, not dog). She and jcb are over there touring *at their leisure* after spending the last few years living through a period of life that has roughly paralleled my own. A period during which every time we planned a meet-up, we would end the conversation with something like, “unless stuff happens.” Because sometimes stuff *did* happen and our plans fell through. Sam is an oasis for me and I wish she lived just down the block but I’ll take what I can get and I am happy that she is rambling around France at the moment.

Anyway, she and jcb were off on a motor jaunt somewhere in the south of France and they rounded a bend (or whatever) and encountered a bunch of crates like the one in the photoooo. It is marked with a version of the GG’s last name. He does not have an “e” at the end. I don’t know the GG’s geneaology in detail. He claims to be more Irish / German than French but obviously there is also some French.

The family pronounces it [usually] like “Curtis”. Rumor has it that when the GG’s grandmother Myrtle married into the family, she changed the pronunciation. She lived into her mid-90s if I am remembering accurately and I knew her when she was still pretty darn spry and I can believe that story. She was quite a “pistol” >wink<

I did not change my name when I married the GG. I didn’t really have a strong conviction either way. I think in the beginning, as a young woman, I was trying to assert my “feminist” side. In the grand scheme of things, I am less a feminist than an advocate for ALL individuals to have equal rights and access to opportunities. That said, if I feel like I need to, I have no problem putting on my feminist war paint but we won’t go there tonight. (You’re welcome.)

Although I didn’t officially take the GG’s name, I had no problem giving his name to the beach urchins. I understand why people hyphenate names but it seems a little crazy to me. What happens a few generations down the road? What if your loving attentive helicopter parents name you Penelope Maude Smith-Jones-Brown-Black-McDonald-Curtis-Green-Boogabooga? C’mon, we need to honor our ancestors but this is going a bit too far. I know that there are other creative ways to handle this but in the end none of them translate down through all of the generations to come…

I use the GG’s last name informally when it seems convenient (yes, I am an opportunist in that way) and it certainly was when the beach urchins were in the public schools here. It could be confusing to folks at the schools until they got to know how informal I really am. Occasionally teachers or principals or PTO officials would tentatively ask me which name I wanted them to use. I learned to answer, “Just call me Mouse’s Mom.” I am different than a lot of the self-focused, over-educated (and often but not always under-skilled) people in this city because I don’t really care what name I am known by. I hung out over at that school to help students read or do math or use computers or to handle PTO books or copy the DAMN newsletter or burn boxes or whatever. I was there to *work* and “just call me Mouse’s Mom” broke the ice nicely.