Archive for August, 2016

There but for the grace of god go I?

Thursday, August 11th, 2016

dogtrailerI know what I did all day today (and you don’t want to). I dunno what this guy (and his little dog) did all day. I saw him this morning here, at the Ellsworth/Lohr intersection and then I saw him again on my way home at the side of the road by the airport. This is a crappy pic as you might expect from somebody who is sitting at the light with her mouth hanging open (whaaaa?) and wondering if she has enough time to open her phone cam, then scrambling to do that. It is a very unwieldy trailer with a cute little dog scrambling on top of that “bundle” of whatever it is. There is a sign flapping around in the back. I only got a glimpse of what it said. I think it asked for money but the guy wasn’t actively soliciting so I dunno.

This wasn’t the only weird sidewalk entity I saw today. Moments before this, someone on a garishly decorated recumbent bike (was it recumbent or am I making that up?) rolled through the same intersection going a different direction. Then on the way home, there was a young man running down S. Maple carrying a big American flag. *I* was on S. Maple because the westbound I94 18-wheel Slogway was backed up. Again. Sigh. Traffic is weird in Sault Ste. Siberia but it is rarely heavy. I still don’t want to move there.

And then there was the whole robot vacuum cleaner/dog poop thing. A beloved and well-meaning relative tagged me on facebook with an article about some people who program their Roomba to run at a set time in the middle of each night. Problem. One night the dog pooped before Roomba took off and then, while the family slept, the Roomba dragged dog poop all over the house.

A few things…

1. My timeline is locked down (i.e., I have to approve adding things that I am tagged in to it). I approve VERY few things. I did not approve this one. Facebook seems to have turned into a free-for-all of re-posts from all sorts of sources, some of them not any where near reliable. I don’t mind when people share things (I do it occasionally too) but some folks almost exclusively “just hit share” and go on their merry way without fact-checking. Sometimes they do that 25 times in 20 minutes. Too much. Well, TC (childhood friend) gets a pass because the stuff he shares appeals to my warped sense of humor (and he shares waaaaay less than 25 times in 20 minutes).

2. I was curious because I am a card-carrying Rooooooomba owner and I wondered if this was true (I do not own a dog). I didn’t do in-depth research on this but if you do a quick google for, say, “roomba dog poop”, it seems as though this kind of thing is a legitimate problem.

3a. Okaaaaaayyy… I do not have a dog. I love dogs (when they don’t bite or jump up on me) and *they* *mostly* like me (except for the two who have tried to bite me in my life). In my adult life, there is no room for dogs in my house. I do not want to be letting a dog in and out of the house (and building a fence so it can’t get out of the yard). I do not want to be cleaning up after a dog. Dog poop, dog hair, dog vomit, spilled kibble, whatever. Do. Not. Want. To. Do. It. I love the occasional visiting dog and don’t mind the cleaning-up-after. Current dogz who occasionally visit are our beloved CFam dogs Chloe Belle and Daisy plus Mia-pet, an elegant black dog who Lizard Breath occasionally borrows and brings over.

3b. I would never program my Rooooomba to vacuum at some automatic time, especially in the middle of the night. She is pretty good at avoiding trouble but occasionally she does run into something that stops her. Well, not to mention that The Landfill is not all that big a house and having Rooooomba running around would probably disrupt the GG’s sleep… Which would disrupt mine…

3c. Finally. I LOVE Rooooomba. But she does not do it all and I have a whole arsenal of vacuum cleaners to do the things that Rooooomba can’t. Like the ancient Electrolux from my uncle’s doctor office in the 1950-60s that STILL WORKS. It does the stairs and dust and spider webs and things. And the shop vac for the icky stuff (but probably not dog poop). And the Hoover upright, which I hate (partly because it’s kind of broken) but the GG loves to use it to clean the Man Cave back living room. Alas, dog poop probably needs to be cleaned up by hand, not vacuum cleaner. The sooner, the better.

Love y’all, KW. And heading to Knight’s soon with npJane <3 Yes it'll be the second night in a row. That's okay :-)

Bertha Butt is Back

Wednesday, August 10th, 2016

I am earning my paycheck these days oh boy oh boy but feeling like a wrung-out dishcloth by the time I get home. I am not complaining. I think my work is going through an adjustment period and we are kind of going over a hump, so to speak, at the moment. Now that I am no longer on vacation, I have got my eye on that hump and am feeling strong enough to help push us over it, so I am up to my elbows in html/css/javascript, Visio, Word, Excel, Snagit, reading, writing, critical thinking, and all of the other tools of my trade. I think I have said (probably multiple times 💩) that this is the first time in my NINE YEARS at Cubelandia that I have taken an entire two weeks off. I felt a bit guilty about leaving for that long at that time but, when a “crisis” came up at the last minute, The Benevolent Despot said something like, “Git outta here and we’ll deal with it when you get back.” I felt so goooooood after that two weeks! Oh yeah, and it is hot here but I’m not complaining because January. Not to mention that it is not as hot as it is a lot of other places. We have yet to turn on our newfangled (2005) central A/C.

So, we’re going to Knights and here are some sunset pics from the end of last week. Those “kids” (average age 30) out there swimming? I was counting heads, like I have done since, well, likely since before I had my own children. That’s what you do when you grow up on a large body of water like Gitchee Gumee. Actually *any* body of water. Old habits die hard.

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Oh wait! You are wondering who Bertha Butt is, roight? Is it yer fav-o-rite blahgger? Or maybe some other entity… Who/what? I’ll let you guess. In the meantime, here is a link to Bertha Butt by the late Jimmy Castor from a short period during my college days when The Bump was a Hot Dance. Or something. Although I do remember being in bars bumping butts with people I didn’t really want to bump butts with. I’ll give you a hint. My butt is not big enough to hold car-sized boulders inside it 💩

Oh my, two smiley poops in one blahg entry.

UNFO

Tuesday, August 9th, 2016

kindergartenartWell, first, Someone just asked me if WE had an mLive account. Whaaaaa? He meant for making comments on mLive news stories. Well… 1) I do not EVER comment on news sites. 2) If I DID have an mLive commenting account, it would be MY PERSONAL ACCOUNT and I would not share it with anyone, Not Even the GG. Or maybe especially not the GG, since his polly-tickal opinions often vary a weeeeee bit from mine. We’re both complex polly-tickal aminals so don’t try to figger that one out. I’ll just say that I usually tell him who I’m voting for (often vociferously) but I don’t usually know who *he’s* voting for. It may or may not match who I am voting for. And that’s okay. I love that we have our own opinions about things and don’t try to control each other’s vote. (We’ll talk about joint couple email/social media accounts some other day although there are a couple couples who get a pass on that one from yer fav-o-rite blahgger.)

That would be an Unidentified Non-Flying Object in the pic. The GG was about to crash out for the night in the moomincabin downstairs bedroom the other night when he looked up and saw a Squirrel Tail hanging out of the eaves. I’ll spare y’all that particular pic. It’s on FB if you are friends with him. The squirrel has probably been dead for a couple years. We don’t get a lot of aminals in the moomincabin but we think the squirrel got down the chimney somehow and couldn’t get out.

But whatever. I’m not sure whether or not the squirrel tail caused the GG to look up into the eaves in general but he did do that and one of the things that he found was this artifact of my childhood. A bunch of us beach urchins created these things engineered by Frank Springer. He was a wonderful friend of our Regen-cousins and became a friend of my parents too and we were all buddies with the Springer kids back in the day. As an added bonus, he was also friendly with the mysterious Doelle family who owned the spooky old lighthouse-keeper’s house at the end of the beach and it was via him that we actually got to tour the old place. He also engineered a little plaster of paris (?) project on the beach a billion years ago and this was my effort. The Commander apparently saved it and I guess I will too…

Mr. Springer was a person who died way too young.

Code Brown

Monday, August 8th, 2016

pond1Welcome to The Planet Ann Arbor’s beautiful far west side where there have been six (count ’em) power outages/brownouts this summer. We have endured three (or was it four?) although we were out of town for one (two?) of them. Fortunately, our ice cubes were intact, meaning that our freezer kept things cold. Not that there is much in our freezer although I would hate to lose my stash of Uncle Peter’s pasties.

I dunno if it was the power outage or not but for whatever reason, our first night home was a restless one. It was ultra dark and I was hot and the bed linens were totally disheveled and someone (we won’t say who) was jumping up and down like a jack-in-the-box most of the night. No particular issue that I know of, just one of those nights. When I left for Cubelandia this morning, that person was so comatose I didn’t even try to talk to him (yes he was breathing). When I got to work I texted him “Text me when you are sentient”. He did and I texted back a short but detailed grokkery list. I knew I would not have time for the grokkery store today and I didn’t. Why a detailed grokkery list? Because man. Like, orange juice with *some* pulp but not so much pulp that you can’t pour it out of the container and please don’t get anything with added calcium because that stuff tastes nasty. I cannot be too critical because I have made my own label-reading mistakes, like mistakenly grabbing “Mexican flavored” tomato paste instead of plain (just yuck) or gluten-free tortillas or (recently at the park store) some sort of gloopy teriyaki “marinade” instead of regular old soy sauce. Hey the bottle looked the same…

Cubelandia? Me, Cube Nayber, Tall Boss, and probably a few others have been outta town for a while and my normally cozy little job kind of went nutso today as we all crash landed. You wouldn’t understand my job even if I tried to describe it to you but my team is down a person (because she retired). My work load looms but I was ready for it because the two weeks I had at the moominbeach made me ready for it as much as I wished I could stay there longer.

So here is the “pond” down at the Miller/Attie end of the beach and that is where Mouse re-homed a frog who was struggling in the waters of Lake Superior.

I am taarrred tonight and I hope we don’t lose power again. I am kind of missing my sleeping bag up there at the moomincabin. I am so comfortable in that thing and I slept so well there…

Bumpity clunk

Sunday, August 7th, 2016

And so sooner or later, I find myself schlepping down the street with my backpack slung over my shoulders, heading to the Plum Market again. It wasn’t the worst drive ever but there were a few slowdowns and we took a couple of strategic detours to avoid other slowdowns that looked problematical. What the heck did we ever do without google maps?

We have driven tandem with family members many times before but today we were a train of three vee-hickles. I liked it best when I was in the middle where I pretty easily keep track of both beach urchins, one in front, one behind. I suspect that one beach urchin kind of liked keeping track of us too. The other I suspect could take it or leave it and may have been humoring us a bit. We were glad to have her company (so to speak) before we lost track after a nasty left turn out of Frank’s outfitters (or whatever it is, it was mainly a bathroom stop for us although we did buy a kayak there once) onto M13 in heavy traffic a bit north of Bay City. I’ll leave it to y’all to guess who was who. Both are pretty darn independent not to mention road warriors, both of which are good things.

I could’ve done without the garbage mishap I suffered after I got home. In which I dumped all of the recycling from the cabin and some newspapers, etc., that had accumulated in the house into the “recycle” bin, the one I keep directly around the corner from the front door. Problem. I didn’t look at the bins or read the labels on them. I had dumped it all into the GARBAGE bin! Garbage Woman that I am, I did not enjoy the task of dredging everything out of both bins and switching it. I squelched myself from yelling at the GG for putting the wrong bin next to the door. The truth is that I think it was my neighbor MofPNet making an innocent mistake. A few of us have given permission to each other to use each others bins if necessary. I am always on the receiving end of extra garbage given that we USUALLY don’t have a lot (there are exceptions). But we all pay the same tax rate for the same bins so what the heck. And so I am guessing MofPNet used my bins while I was gone and put them back cattywampus.

I was kind of roto about leaving the moomincabin this morning. Cleaning every last dish and schlepping every last dirty linen into garbage bags to take south to wash. This is all tricky and it drives the OCD part of my personality that I try to shove back into the shadows too far up into a front and center batshit place that I have to work hard to squelch. So, there is always that last towel or dish cloth that you use after you think you have packed up the laundry. Or that piece of trash that needs to go into the garbage after you have packed up the garbage. So we left a few teensy-tinesy loose ends this time but it’s okay because the ones we left are not stinky (aka a couple of skirts that I left on hangers upstairs, what was I thinking?) and the GG is going back up there later this week to pick up the Lyme Lounge and head out to work on North Country Trail maintenance and he can get them.

My Mouse finally said something like “let’s make a *plan* instead of trying to time things. When she included a beach walk in that plan, I was on board (although I think I was still doing stoopid OCD stuff).

So we did walk. The four of us. The pic is the “pond” at the Miller/Attie end of the beach. (Forget the pic, we are now in a lovely brownout.) And then we all headed out through Brimley and down Tilson Road to Rudyard where we picked up the I75 SUV Speedway. Across the Big Mac and down down down. And here we are on the Planet Ann Arbor, work tomorrow hi ho.

Slave Driver

Saturday, August 6th, 2016

Apparently my weak little daily sweeping / vacuuming efforts to clean this place up were not enough. The GG mobilized the beach urchins this morning. He engineered a massive cabin cleaning prodject today. All floor surfaces (except for the back bedroom that C*Q*L and I cleaned last summer), windows and I dunno what else were cleaned. So, the GG decreed, “EVERYTHING OUT ON THE DECK!” At that point, I schlepped up to the park store for a few items. When I returned, this was what I encountered.

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And this was going on inside. It’s been a while since that table (which belonged to my grandmother and I do not really want it and neither did The Comm) has been moved out and back in so we could clean thoroughly under it. It was time.

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And then there was this, where my Mouse emulates her grandmother by going outside the back upshares window to sweep pine needles off the overhang and wash the upshares window.

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I want to talk about the dead squirrel the GG found as he was going to bed last night but I am kinda done. This place feels very clean today. I am grateful for all the help.

In which taking a few Green Bags of municipal solid waste to dump it turns into a 4-hour excursion

Friday, August 5th, 2016

The garbage dilemma continues. When my parents were still around, they paid for a weekly garbage pickup while they were here at the moomincabin. I do NOT mind paying for a garbage pickup one iota but even the spendthrift in me cannot rise to the occasion of paying Waste Management (or anyone) a monthly fee for a garbage pickup that I will likely need ONCE a summer. We can haul garbage back to our garbage cart on The Planet Ann Arbor and we will haul some there but two weeks worth can be difficult. Fortunately, our friend Hamlet, who suffers a similar situation, has discovered Green Bags. You purchase them at the gas station and after you fill them, you can drop them off in the maintenance center of the Bay Mills Indian Community, directly across from the Kings Club Casino.

So began an odyssey albeit a fun odyssey! When we got to the Green Bag dropoff place, it wasn’t open yet. It opened at 10. Okay, that’s fine, we’ll have a cappuccino at the Dancing Crane. We were planning on that anyway. Here we have the GG checking out the usual kind of stuff that he checks out and then Mouse posing under the sign.

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Since we were at the Dancing Crane, we figured we should go to the Iroquois lighthouse and a few of us took a variation of this pic.

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And so if you go to the lighthouse, you *have* to go up to the Spectacle Lake overlook.

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We walked across the road from the overlook into the Mission Hill cemetery. A lot of these graves are decorated, at least at this time of year. Not all of the graves are Native Americans but seeing the names on the stones, I think a lot are. I wanted to take pics all over the place but I didn’t want to be disrespectful and post gravestone names in my photos. I did like this little waterer and I don’t think that she minds being on my baggy old blahg and I did NOT leave my purse in the graveyard!

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After all of this, it was lunchtime and so we went to Pickles for lunch and beer/whine.

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After that I swung around in the chitchen for a bit and then I kicked myself into taking a beach walk. We have big waves today and not a whole lot of beach and so when I returned from Doelle’s I helped The Beautiful Jan pull stuff up onto the bank just in case. The Beach Urchins were heading down to Our Northern Correspondent’s house to learn how to pick and cure sweetgrass. I took a bit of a break and then I headed down the road to meet up with them.

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So here is Mouse with feathers in her sunhat.

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Here is the sweet grass that they picked. (I was just hanging out, not focused enough to learn anything.)

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Grilling.

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And yes, processing sweet grass includes whine and pie. We had some whine but we declined the pie. That was for Ray.

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Yes we did drop off our green bags. Thanks to our friends of porterization for letting us know about this method of disposing of municipal solid waste aka garbage. It is amazingly easy and pretty doggamn cheap to boot.

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Good night. We have one more day here until it’s time to come back and close the place up. The night before we drove up here I basked in the back room at the Landfill. Tomorrow night I will bask here. It’s wonderful to live in two places but so hard sometimes. Love The Planet Ann Arbor. Love the Moominbeach. Love y’all.

Long lost treasures

Thursday, August 4th, 2016

westernsongsOur “plan” for emptying The Commander’s house after her death in 2012 involved the moomincabin garage. I put “plan” in quotes because we didn’t really make a detailed plan. We did get rid of some things almost immediately (clothing) and furniture, etc., went various places although some of that still remains (most of which was my grandmother’s). But we kind of made it up as we went along and we used the moomincabin garage as an intermediate processing station. It is largely cleaned out nowadays except for garage-y type stuff. To my eyes, there is toooooo much garage-y stuff but I try to put blinders on about that stuff.

Anyway, I found some treasures today. Ones I had been missing. There was The Commander’s gold sequined baseball cap. After Grandroobly died, The Comm and I were walking into the Soo post office one time and a woman who was walking out was wearing a gold sequined baseball cap. The Comm didn’t say anything but I could see her jaw drop. Oh yes, she needs one of those. And so I ordered one off the internet and she had one and I found it again today.

I found a lot of stuff including a bunch of pairs of white glubs. Not the warm kind, the kind you wore to church and formal dances, etc., when I was a kid. My Mouse will end up with those because theatre. I remember having my own pair of very short white glubs when I was a little kid and maaayybe even aspiring to wear longer white glubs. I actually did wear a version of those glubs to my first high school formal dance. I was a sophomore and I went to the Military Ball with Bad Boyfriend. I still have the dress. Not because I am nostalgic about the dance. I am more nostalgic about buying the fabric at the Textile Shop over in Sault, Ontario, and that The Commander made my beautiful dress. Bad Boyfriend told his mom that I looked like a doll that night. That was nice and they were good people but I was much better off that he dumped me and I ended up married to the GG 💜

Anyway, the pic shows one of the things that I have been missing for a while now. It is the record album of western songs that my parents played frequently when I was a young child. It is not country-western stuff. The Comm HATED that stuff (even though some of her ancestors who landed in Kentucky, etc., probably sang/played it). The Comm? Much more “cultured”. College educated with a good job at the J.L. Hudson’s store down in Detroit back in the day. And yet, the parents spent WWII out in the southwest and developed a taste for western swing or whatever you want to call it.

I’ve been wondering where this record album was for a while now. I have a bunch of their records down at the Landfill but this one wasn’t there. I stumbled upon it today. There was a whole big box of records in the garage and I saw that red tape and I knew what record that was. I hope it still plays…

Painter of light

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2016

The light is ever-changing at the moominbeach. Actually, the light is ever-changing everywhere but it is easier to see the ever-changing light at the moominbeach. Last evening, we walked the beach at sunset. After a long almost insufferably hot sunny day (but we try not to complain about that around here because January), we had somewhat overcast skies. Until. We got down to BJ’s end of the beach and this entity made a rather dramatic appearance.

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As we turned back toward the moomincabin, we were greeted by this rather unearthly scene.

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Not all that much later, Mr. Golden Sun provided us with this beautiful sunset, albeit not the most spectacular sunset we have ever seen here. Silhouettes of Finfam cuzzints and outlaws are in the foreground. It got kind of moe-skee-toey just a bit after this. It is an uncharacteristically bug-free summer here and we decided we were dun dun dun at that point. I think most of us were ready to crash anyway, even our token 20-something.

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And then there was this morning, taken from about the same place I took the alien photooo above.

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Lots of opportunities for photos of light throughout the rest of today, as big black clouds to the west seemed to portend thunderstorms but the weather map painted a different pitcher with all of the storms passing to the south of us. I didn’t take pics. If you are connected to Lizard Breath on Instagram, you may have seen her pic of that storm system as she was approaching it. She made it through with nothing more than rain. We could’ve used some of that here but only got a few drops.

Veering off to a different topic, according to facebook/timehop, one year ago today Mouse and I put our wool socks and whatever else and declared it to be a Beach Day *anyway*. I don’t have a specific memory of the weather that particular day and the photoooo below doesn’t show it. I couldn’t have been warm if we were wearing socks. I packed two pairs? of smart wool socks this summer. I have not worn either of them yet.

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I thought I had more to say but I guess I don’t. You’re welcome.

Acquiring objets d’art for the Kiwanis Thrift Shop

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2016

I didn’t acquire all of these objects so Kiwanis will not get them all from me. Some of them I already own or someone else already owns or they are ephemeral creations. First up is this fascinating tin over at the Old Cabin.

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Here is Big *ss. My dad began a mug collection after he retired from his small town banking career. That was not necessarily a good thing as it became difficult for The Commander to find places to put the mugs. Many of his mugs have made their way to various places (but I don’t *think* to the Kiwanis Thrift Shop). Big *ss is one that remains. It was one of dad’s faves and I note that every time the GG makes coffee in the morning, he serves mine in this cup.

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We were over at the Old Cabin this morning talking to our cousins about the next battle with the powderpost beetles. Jay Judas will not be there to engineer returning various pieces of furniture to their regular places. Some Finfam gals have been recruited to make that happen and we will rise to the occasion!

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We had five errands in town today. Recycle center, ART FAIR, hardware store (for MM vac bags), lunch (Kenny’s Pitchen), and SuperValu for a few grokkeries. Mouse drove us in our Frog Hopper and we made it in and out and did all of those things in a little more than two hours.

We bought some “sh*t on a stick” at the art fair and I was looking for the guy who makes these buggies. We also bought a mouse with a Swiss cheese dress but I didn’t photograph her because she’s going down to the Planet Ann Arbor to live in the Landfill backyard and I will post her pic from there. But here’s the buggie we bought.

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I mentioned Ann Arbor when I bought the buggie and the artist asked (as artists often do) if I went to the Ann Arbor Art Fair(s). I do but not. I used to LOVE to go to the art fair and walked all over it but couldn’t afford anything much. Then ror a long time, there was a jeweler whose work I LOVED (I *found* them at the Sault art fair) and I would seek them out. Alas, they are long dead. This year, I worked Thursday and Friday and we drove up here on Saturday. This year, we walked from the Oscar Tango to the bus station so I guess I could say I went to the art fair(s) but really not so much since I was so focused on catching the bus that I didn’t look at anything.

At today’s art fair we passed the ceramics booth where The Comm would always buy a few little vases. We’re calling these Grandma Vases.

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Hot Day

Monday, August 1st, 2016

And it was hot and that is certainly not unheard of here but so many summers it is not all that hot here. I began my day with a catastrophe of sorts. I walked to the end of the beach and took a picture of something and then, dun dun dun, I was halfway back to the moomincabin and I wanted to take another pic and… My. Iphone. Would. Not. Power. Up. I walked to the other end of the beach and then back to the cabin and I waited until the GG had gotten up and taken his shower and then… My iPhone is dead. By that time, I had googled where I could obtain a new iPhone in Sault Ste. Siberia (AT&T store where we once got The Commander one and Woldemort). Of course, the GG commandeered my phone and within 10 minutes or so, got it going again.

He left me with this loverly pic, which I didn’t notice until hours later. When I saw it, I was wondering who took the pic and then, hmmm, who was coming in or out the back door. Well, duh, it’s me in my little blue skirt.

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This is from my second beach walk. My first is very early in the morning. My second is After Chores and before the sun hits the beach although it is lighting up the water but good.

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We decided on a simple quesadilla dinner for tonight so I schlepped up to the park store to get some ingredients. It’s three miles from the moomincabin so I can’t quite backpack my way there, alas, but it’s a good store and has some interesting little perks.

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This what HOT looks like in the late afternoon on the Moominbeach. Mouse and I took a memorial Commander and Radical Betty Water Walk to Doelles at this time of day.

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Those aminals are hiding a politically incorrect t-shirt that, at this point in history, can probably only be worn within the confines of the owner’s home. Trust me, it’s worse than the Shaky Jake tank top that he tried to wear the day we transferred umpteen thousand dollars in cash from one Planet Ann Arbor bank to another when we were buying our loverly Landfill.

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And here is that same person making a small dent into the prodject of re-painting the moomincabin deck. It was a small dent and then he ate dinner and we walked the beach.

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And I am about dun dun dun. Love y’all!