This is the second time this week that I have seen a deer during my morning walk. This time I was close enough and the deer was moving slowly enough that I could get a photo to prove it. I forget how many deer we have per acre here on The Planet Ann Arbor but it is enough that our ever-lovin’ city council is actually considering a controlled hunt. We’ll see how that goes over in this city of tree-huggin’, I-don’t-eat-anything-with-a-face libruls. A lively debate is surely ahead of us if our council thinks hunting within the city limits is a viable plan. Me? I’m a tree-huggin’ omnivorous librul and I see this issue in RGB, not B/W. I have more questions than opinions at this point.

So, as the Guest of Honor (aka Occupant of the Hot Seat) at my latest spec review this afternoon, I was presented with one of Louie-Louiiii’s beautiful home-baked bundt cakes to share with the group. A Friday afternoon meeting calls for food! It was gorgeous and the review went well too, thank you Zeus.

And then I walked downtown to meet up with the GG at the Oscar Tango. It’s been a couple weeks since we’ve been at the OT or been porterized. The annual Old Car show was going on on Main and Liberty and then we schlepped on up to our loverly old Landfill on the west side, stopping to UrbanP in West Park.

I am pretty much out of words for tonight, plus I have a couple of emails to write yet. So good night! Love you all. All five of you! — Kayak Woman

I potted these fleurs Memorial Day weekend, like I pretty much always do these days. A tribute to The Commander, if you will. There is plenty of beautiful plant life on the shores of Gitchee Gumee but most seasons you have to get up close and personal to see much of anything besides a billion shades of green and brown. Unless you pot colorful flowers, like these impatiens.

I can’t remember when The Comm began setting out these big pots of impatiens but she did it for many years, including the last spring of her life. I think she liked to add a bit of vibrant color to the beautiful woods. I figured if impatiens could survive the rugged weather conditions at Gitchee Gumee, they might survive my black thumb, so I started potting them here in the Landfill back yard. Lo and behold, I was successful! (Except for the year a virus killed them.) I plant them here at the Landfill every year now on Mother’s Day. Since Lizard Breath has moved back here to Detroit, she always brings me plants from the Eastern Market. Love. Also, nowadays I make it a point to pot some at the moominbeach.

It is a bit dicey to pot flowers like this as early as Memorial Day in the yooperland on the shores of Gitchee Gumee. Last year (2013) it was so [frickin’] cold that we brought them *inside* at night. This year, the weather was fine Memorial Day weekend but we didn’t plan on being back up there for a month and who knew what kind of Polar Vortex might dip down onto the Great Lakes before then. It can be damn cold in June. When I was staying up at the moomincabin a few years ago during the vortex surrounding my mother, I was wearing long pants and socks to bed and sometimes a polartech jacket and I was sleeping downstairs in the room next to the bathroom. This year, we stashed the impatiens on the ground behind the back deck when we left after Memorial Day. Water (rain) and sun there. I was nervous upon driving in the 3rd of July. Did they survive? Yes, they did, in spades! I hoisted them up onto the deck and there they be. I betcha Pooh will water them if they look dry but I bet they won’t need watering.

We are being threatened by none other than a Polar Vortex next week. As I think the article states, that doesn’t mean we will have frost, just wimpy high temperatures. I also think that using the term Polar Vortex to describe this forecast is a bit of hype (although I generally like this weather guy). In the Great Lake State, we are surrounded by huge bodies of water and they like to play with the jet stream and about a billion other bits and pieces of whatever makes the weather. It isn’t all that unusual to have chilly weather in July. We’ll see what happens.

P. S. The moominbeach impatiens are thriving. My impatiens down here on The Planet Ann Arbor are threatening to take over the world!

Crossing Bruce Street at Arborview, maybe 6:20 AM. I know that there are deer in the adjacent neighborhoods if not mine but I don’t usually see them. No, I didn’t get a photoooo. Just can’t do it all. So here’s SanFran from I dunno exactly where (it was texted to me). Someplace up high?

The Queen Bee brought her *harp* to work today. We arrived at work simultaneously and I helped her get through the door. I am gonna bet that she won’t bring it to work again any time soon because the LSCHP arranged a little impromptu lunchtime concert. The Queen Bee is a lapsed flute player (like yer fav-o-rite blahgger) and took up the Celtic harp a couple years ago. She is a very humble person (like I am) and I know that playing for people was harder for her than leading a spec review but she did a wonderful job, plus being a techie type person, she talked about how the harp worked (red strings are C, blue strings are F), and how it differed from a concert harp and her philosophy about being an older beginner whose teacher encourages her to perform for more people than her husband (also a new harp player) and their cats. And the wild turkeys that hang out looking in her window. Here’s a close-up of a bit of the strings and tuning mechanisms on her harp. Although the harp was beautiful, I was mostly interested in fascinated by the business end of things.

Watching TQB and her husband (he works there too) play the harp made me want to get back into music too. We’ll see if I do it. The photo below is the kind of stuff I *used* to play. I think I can still play the Jolivet. I could probably do the Ibert Concerto and playing through the entire virtuoso Flute Music by French Composers book was once a favorite way to relax. Yes, playing through all kind of semidemiquavers and hemisemidemiquavers was relaxing for me. I don’t think the Jolivet goes beyond semidemiquavers, at least not in the opening.

I don’t think I will take my flute to work!

You know the kind. Bumpity-crash onto the Planet Ann Arbor yesterday afternoon and bumpity-flop butt in seat over at Cubeland today. At least my butt hit the seat and not the floor. But what to blahg about. I do not know. Work? I can’t blahg about work but I can say is that I am in the discovery phase of a new prodject and that phase of *this* prodject involves combing through some obtuse old documents and diagrams and plenty of sitting back digesting with feet up.

My job varies wildly between wild and mindless copying / pasting / editing html code to debugging javascript to teasing out the answer to life, the universe, and everything, at least in the online banking industry. I was into the deeeeeeep stuff today, where I worked at a snail’s pace picking away at making sense of some old diagrams and spreadsheets, translating them into a new spreadsheet that I could understand. You don’t want to read about that. But there was quite a bit of Feet Up. Figuratively speaking, that is. I was wearing a skirt.

I always wear skirts to work. I know I’ve said this before but I am much more comfortable on “Jeans Day” when I am not wearing jeans. Actually, I haven’t owned a pair of jeans in years. I do own (and wear) various pairs of black leggings. I wear them on hiking / skiing expotitions or around The Landfill when it is cold here. My leggings are the sturdy kind that don’t show your butt and they are warm enough for walking around during most Great Lake State winters, as long as I’m wearing tights under them. I throw a long wool skirt over them when it gets really cold, like I did during the Polar Vortex. (You have to know that all of us are still recovering from the Polar Vortex!)

I think people at work are accustomed to me not conforming to Jeans Day by now. Some people over there think I am “fashionable”, which totally cracks me up. I am definitely *not* fashionable but I know what clothing will look okay on me AND BE COMFORTABLE and I buy it all online. I think more people (of every gender variation) should try skirts out. They are so comfortable and, if you are female and need to urbanP, you can manage to do that without mooning anyone who might be within sight.

I can’t usually get a pic of the toll booths at the Mackinac Bridge. I’m either driving or there isn’t enough traffic to slow us down enough to get a pic. Yes, we have a commuter card. Our commute is a bit different than the commute of those who actually drive across the bridge *every* day to work or visit family or whatever. We do it frequently enough that the card is a convenience.

The bridge fare was $1.50 for MANY years, I *think* (but could well be wrong) since it opened in 1957. I cannot remember when it started to edge up but it wasn’t all that many years ago. Maybe 20 or something? The last fare increase was from $3.50 to $4.00 a crossing (it’s more if you are hauling a trailer — as we sometimes are — or driving a truck or whatever).

The GG first obtained the commuter card during the years my parents started to need a bit more help than they wanted to admit. I’m not sure it saves us a whole lot of money since we aren’t traveling across the bridge every day like people who live on one side and work on the other but it has been a convenience. Today, we were in the commuter card “only” line and it was *slower* than the regular lines, so we switched over to the regular line, where we could hand our card to the friendly woman in the booth.

So, pretty smooth drive down and the neighbor across the street (I’m guessing) has already snagged the little plastic Woldemort shelf units that we hauled down and put out by the curb this afternoon. We were a bit north of Flint when I handed the wheel over to the GG. I checked Twitter and it proclaimed a surprise line of storms coming toward the Planet Ann Arbor. I looked at the weather and yes, there was a line of storms. One after another heading straight to the Planet. I could see the clouds from that line of storms from our location on the I75 SUV Speedway. I believe we arrived maybe 20 minutes after those storms moved on out to the east.

So home and work tomorrow (hi ho!). I always hate leaving the beach but our garden city is so lush and beautiful right now.

Love y’all
KW

P. S. Why yes, that is a crack in the Frog Hopper’s veeeeendsheeeeld.

The weather radar was telling us it was going to rain and it did but apparently we got a lot less rain than the folks over to the west of us did because that yellow blob never did make it here. I was antsy. The little sprinkles we got made it hard to sit on the beach or even the deck (moe-skee-toes) and, after cleaning the stove (not really all that dirty), I needed some other chores to do and continuing to sort the bed linens was NOT the ticket. This is what the beach looked like earlier today with the Pineglen downbound and the Algosteel not too far behind it (but not visible).

Things livened up a bit when Jeep came over to shoot the shit visit. I suspected a bit of man-talk was in order and so I busied myself with little missions. I remembered when I was a kid and Jeep would occasionally come over on a boring, rainy Sunday to shoot the shit visit with my old coot. He always livened things up with his larger-than-life personality (and he was taller than my 6-foot dad to boot!).

So, while Jeep was over here, a little bit of a commotion was growing on the beach. It involved his grandchildren and kayaks but Pan was down there to supervise so there were no worries but I went down there to see what was happening anyway. The triplets had taken kayaks out and one of them found a spider hitchhiker, which caused that triplet to make a wet exit. All was well. The kids were not far off the shore where it is shallow (it was RAINING (sort of)) and there was plenty of help on shore. Including the beautiful Toby here, who would love to be able to keep up with Butter and Vivienne (not sure of spelling) but isn’t quite able. Such a good doggie.

On another mission, I spied the blueberries below. I think it’s going to be a good season. I hope I don’t get this song [it’s a YouTube video] into my head later this summer when I pick blueberries here. I will only be picking enough for muffins or pancakes but not for pies. I did not inherit the FinFam blueberry-picking DNA. Sorry.

Eventually, I started walking the beach (with ghosts again) and then I thought something like, “I *could* ask if [my cuzzint] Pooh wants to walk the beach.” I was maybe down at Dennis’s place by then and I texted her. Yes! She did want to walk the beach. And so a person came down from the shared path between the Moomincabin and the Old Cabin. It didn’t look like Pooh, it looked more like a yeti or something. Of course, it was the Mean Old Grunchie Old Grinchie. I’m not sure when the last time he has been actually *on* the beach. He only goes down there when he’s looking for yer fav-o-rite blahgger and so he was. But then, Pooh *did* come down and us cuzzints walked to Doelle’s like we’ve been doing forever. When we turned around to walk back, wouldn’t you know the GG was walking down toward us.

And so all four of us walked the beach together and I stopped feeling like I was walking with ghosts. And I found BEACH PEAS! I remember picking and eating beach peas when I was a kid. I have been looking for them the last few years without success. Here are what I think are beach peas down in front of Jeep and Pan’s house. I don’t know what it was about those purple flowers that pulled a memory out my poor old brain but I pulled out my iPhone pocket computer and googled and it certainly looked like Lathyrus japonicus to me. I may well be wrong about that genus and species. I am not a botanist.

I came up here to 1) come up here, 2) go to a Soo High birthday party, and 3) be with my cuzzints. All the rest is just fluff!

One of the problems with steadfastly refusing to own any other camera than your iPhone 5S (which has a pretty damn good camera but anyway) is that you can’t get a decent photograph of anything far away. The Marquis was down there today and he has some scary big cameras (and an iPhone whatever). Maybe he got a better photo than I did of this plassover and will post it. Or maybe not. It’s his blahg and he can do what he wants to… You would cry too… Okay I am officially off on some weird Lesley Gore tangent.

Anyway, we watched a plassover this afternoon. What the heck is a plassover? It is none other than a rainstorm that moves across Whitefish Bay and doesn’t hit the Moominbeach. It will always be north of the moominbeach, moving across Lake Tracy Superior into Canada. Sometimes there is lightning. Once when I was a teenybopper, we were all out at the raft and a plassover was happening and there was enough electricity in the air that our hair was kind of standing on end. The hair that wasn’t wet, that is. Somebody commandeered my uncle Don’s motorbote to retrieve us from the raft that time.

Today’s plassover was way north and I do not think there was lightning at all. Just a bit of rainstorm crossing Gitchee Gumee into Canananada.

We had a strong southwest wind this afternoon. It was strong enough that we bailed from the beach up onto the bank, which somehow shields us from the wind. I was the first to bail because I have spent enough days on the beach during a southwest wind in my life that when I felt the first bit of sand-blasting, I was done. Get me outta here. I know what this is about. Some of the others stuck it out for a while longer but eventually they joined me.

Two things: 1) It is northwest winds that send waves up to decimate the beach, pulling kayaks and motor botes and beach chairs, etc. out to “sea”. 2) Southwest winds provide decent waves (some even have whitecaps) but those waves come catty-corner to our beach. They do not wash up the beach and take things out into Gitchee Gumee.

Plassover? What is a plassover? It is a rainstorm (with or without lightning) that passes across your field of vision while you are sitting on your beach or maybe you are out in Nebraska and you are driving your tractor or whatever. It is a poof of a little rainstorm and you watch it go by. Sometimes you are happy that you are watching it from afar. Other times, you are praying for rain.

Plassover? Well. There used to be Beer Lunch on the Beach. Do not get me wrong. Our moms didn’t get skunk drunk but occasionally they had a second beer and I believe that the term “plassover” came after a two-beer lunch on the beach (or possibly it was a late afternoon pick-me-up). I remember that folks laughed uproariously about the “plass-over”. I just plain miss those days. That is all.

First of all, Luna here has effectively rendered the back door inoperable the entire day! Seriously, I first saw Luna early this morning and now that I have returned from two (count ’em) social events, Luna is still there.

Then what? Morning was a little cool but it turned into a Beach Day. And here is a Flotilla. The triplets are in yellow, the GG in purple.

The 4th of July is not always all that hot here in the yooperland. Here’s a photoooo from 1960 when most of the cuzzints participated in a holiday parade. Complete with costumes. You can’t see Pooh in this photoooo. She’s behind UKW. Yer fav-o-rite blahgger is the bee-yoo-tee-ful hula girl and the bag head is our dear Mean Old Grunchie Old Grinchie. The little guy over on the right? Well, that, my friends, is The Engineer. He was not a happy camper. Why? Because his dear mother aka The Commander had somehow screwed up the tail lights on his automotive vee-hickle costume, which is in front of Susie (bending over).

I am *not* a social butterfly! Parties are hard for me even when I love the people at them. I have been to *two* of them today and I am barely functioning at this point. I neeeeeeed some space tomorrow. The first was the annual Piedmont 4th of July party. I do not have any photoooos of that one but I remember attending it back when it was largely a huge bonfaaaar in front of the McNott Old Cabin and the Piedmont boyz would shoot Roman candles out over the water. The second party? My ever-lovin’ high school class getting together on an off-year to celebrate our birthdays. We rented the Valley Camp (it’s an old lake freighter / museum). I didn’t even know you could *rent* the dern Valley Camp but yes, you can, and The Beautiful Mimi did and this is a view of the cargo hold from the ramp to the deck.

At this late date, I have finally *owned* the fact that I am an introvert and I think I bored about a billion people with that fact today. Did I have fun? Yes. Did I talk to people? Of course I did. Was I the life of the party? No. Did I care? No way. Guess who *was* there? My dear childhood friend Helen. I won’t go into detail about that tonight but it has been too long since we’ve seen each other and I greatly enjoyed sitting there talking to her and her husband. She isn’t particularly a social butterfly either. Oh, and we had a ringside seat for the Sault Ste. Siberia faaaarworks. This is a terrible pic but it proves that *we* were *there*! Good night!

P.S. I was told tonight that I write my facebook posts in “code”. That I refer to people by code names – like Mouse. How could anyone be so silly? Code name? [Cracking up!]

Launched from HL this morning (after a lovely evening with a nephew and his wife and child). Hit Glen’s Family Fare at Grayling for a loverly shopping trip. KW Power Shopping slowly through the store checking off needful things on her iPhone grokkery list. The GG wandering all over the place stopping in occasionally to contribute random things to the grokkery cart. It’s okay. We have more shopping in our future but we’re probably good until Saturday. I even remembered orange juice!

And so we got to the moominbeach and after unloading and doing some chores and connecting with various neighboring family members, I walked the beach. The beach is a lot smaller than it has been in the recent tropical years. This photo is from the eastern end, we have a regular sized sand beach in general.

The Amethyst Rock disappears and reappears at will. Or so it seems. For the last few years, it was not visible. And then, suddenly, it was. npJane spotted it first. This rock is much more beautiful in person than in this photo.

After a second beach walk and some beach-slugging with The Marquis and Pooh, I earned my whine by actually doing some linen sorting. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. I started with pillowcases. I ended up organizing most of the sheets. Not done yet but I’m on a good track. I rewarded that success with a whine on the beach. I was soon joined by The Marquis and then his son (who had recently arrived) and eventually the GG.

And then I walked up to get drinks for beach-sitters and some yeti or whatever was walking outta the woods. He had a gift for me. It is an iPhone amplifier and isn’t it beautiful? Of course we’ve been using it appropriately by listening to the Velvet Underground and other tunes on it. Love you Grinchie!

Ho-hum. Nothing to see here. Just another I75 SUV Speedway odyssey up to the Yooperland for a nice long 4th of July weekend. Along with all of the billion SUVs hauling motor botes, all terrain vee-hickles, and jeeps and things. A few beeceeclettes and kayaks sprinkled in amongst all the motorized stuff. We’re hauling a kayak (the Purple Kayak) ourselves.

No slowdowns after we got 15 miles north of The Planet Ann Arbor but that’s business as usual. Lots of aggressive driving and passing on the right. People, if I am in the left lane it is either because I am going *fast* (which I was sometimes tonight) or because I am behind a line of s-l-o-w vee-hickles trying to pass an even s–l–o–w–e–r vee-hickle. Or I am trying to let people merge at a difficult interchange. Anyway, lots of cops too but they weren’t interested in me or my 75-78 mph speed. Not tonight, anyway.

We are stopping at the Group Home @ Houghton Lake tonight. Dinner was a bit of a challenge at 9 PM. We tried to stop at the Spikehorn Barrroooom because it’s on the way to the Group Home. All the tables were filled and it was a ZOOOOOO in there. I couldn’t hear myself think. Plan B was to drop off some stuff at the GH and head over to the North Shore Barrrrooom. Plan C ended up being what worked. Breakfast for dinner at the GH. I had English muffins and apple chicken sausage in the Frog Hopper and the corner store was still open so we grabbed a dozen eggs. Once back in the day, we were approaching the Moldy Old Cabin at around 9 PM and the corner candy store must’ve seen our headlights because they turned off their sign just as we were drovening in.

Moomincabin tomorrow along with a wee bit of bizniss in Sault Ste. Siberia. Hi ho. Or maybe Ho Hum? Faaaarworks going off all over the place. I love faaaarworks but maybe I’ll hang out inside this time. Or not. We’ll see…

This item made the cut. That is, I am keeping it. It was headed for the Fling Pile. I don’t frequently use a kitchen scale. I used to have a little postage scale but nowadays, if I’m unsure about how much postage I need, I just hop over to the post office and the uscan weighs the item for me. But something stopped me. I thought, “I’ll just look this thing up on eBay.”

I didn’t think it was worth any kind of real money (and of course it wasn’t, $50 was about the upper limit, $15-$25 was typical). I was more curious about whether it qualified as a “collectible”. I would say that it does. There were all kinds of “American Family Scales” out there in all colors and with various accessories. Instead of going in the Fling Pile, it made its way into the Landfill Chitchen, where it got cleaned up and now proudly occupies a space on my display shelf.

eBay can be a bit scary. For a split second, I coveted some of those old scales. If I had the right kind of space, I could collect them. The GG will be happy to know that I kept that impulse in check and we will only be owning this one white scale. I have done a *minor* bit of collecting on eBay, like a few red Bakelite utensils and some old Sunset cookbooks and Great Lakes Red Books when I can find them (they are rare albeit inexpensive, at least in the era I am primarily interested in).

Flinging is such a balance. I am terrified of hoarding. There have been hoarders in literally both sides of my family and also the GG’s. Hoarders are not not not not bad people, by definition anyway, if you are a serial killer and are hoarding bodies [eek], that’s a whole ‘nother thing. I also think hoarding living aminals (cats, etc.) is not a good thing. Other than those conditions, I am not even sure I would agree that hoarding is a disorder. Alas, I think that hoarders are largely at the end of a continuum. I do know that hoarders cause a lot of problems for those who have to live with them or clean up after them*. I did not get whatever collection of DNA might express itself via hoarding but, living in the same house for [gulp] 30 years after starting out with basically nothing except a small automotive vee-hickle, a sewing musheen and a flute, I’ve collected a few things. And then I inherited my parents’ stuff. And sometimes the grandchildren (or your spouse) *want* some of that stuff, even though none of it has any significant monetary value.

You don’t always know what someone else finds sentimentally valuable. Sometimes I find that I have flung something I didn’t think was valuable only to find out that one of the Beach Urchins (or the GG) was attached to that item. And then there are things that *I* remember from my early childhood that I thought were really cool, like some fancily painted wooden “hamburger shaping” devices that lived up in the top cupboards at our shabby old house on Superior Street. I loved them dearly, I bet The Comm decided at some point that she couldn’t be bothered about using them and didn’t want to *move* them (to Dillon Street) and flung them. I would love to have those now but I understand.

*By the way, The Commander was NOT a hoarder!