Random bits of my so-called life.

Twitter play:

Setting: The Landfill (west side Planet Ann Arbor)

Characters: KW and TP

[TP rummages the refrigimatator.]

KW: WHAT are you doing?

TP: Looking for how much celery we have. I wanna make gumbo this weekend.

[Exit TP to walk to @PlumMarket to get gumbo ingredients.]

[KW peruses the refrigimatator and finds celery but she is not sure if there is enough celery for gumbo so she performs wild iPhone gyrations trying to contact TP to send him a pic of the celery, which was less than she thought and some of it a bit wilty. Of course, he has his earbuds in. Listening to Patriot Radio or 1960s acid rock or who knows what.]

TP: Luuuuuucy, I’m home (he really didn’t say that, just barged on in).

KW: Did you get celery?

TP: No, I didn’t need it.

KW: But aren’t you gonna make gumbo?

TP: I don’t need it for gumbo.

KW: [bangs head on quartz countertop]

Finis

I *was* gonna do the twitter play where FZ (over the wall from me) was apparently fighting with a bunch of papers and I *had* to ask him if he was ripping up a speech 🐽 but I think this play is a bit more politically correct, if that even matters any more. Make no mistake, I am NOT a Trump fan.

And yes, some of that celery looks a little I dunno, brownish? I think it won’t be long before the Landfill Chief Cook and Bottle Washer (meeee) will have to make an Executive Decision.

Who *is* the winner? I do not know. I spent the entire day doing the kinds of things the Iowa Democratic caucus shouldda been doing when they created that app. When I was driving home from Cubelandia, there was still no winner although a couple people were trying to claim victory.

So, if you are going to build an app, you need a few things. Here’s a high-level overview. 1) A good business analyst (like meeee) or two or three to gather requirements and design your app. And BAs are NOT lone rangers. They work with everyone on the team. 2) Crackerjack developers to build out the app according to carefully crafted specification from the BA. I’m betting developers were the party’s strong point. There are a gazillion code monkeys (said affectionately) out there who are good at what they do but they are not designers or… dun dun dun 3) QA folks!!! What do QA folks do? TEST TEST TEST TEST TEST TEST. And TEST and TEST some more. Good QA testers beat the heck out of an *unreleased* version of the app. They find holes in the app. They run tests for what happens if the app gets flooded with users or whatever, which is one of the things that apparently happened with the caucus app.

Speaking of users, one more IMPORTANT group of people is 4) the support team. Hire an adequate number of people, pay them WELL, train them well, and provide enough phone lines that users can get to a support person.

I still don’t know who won the Iowa caucus. The GG has satty-lite radio folk music on to keep me from talking to the radio…

I may or may not check news for the caucus results. I am trying to decide whether or not to watch the State of the Union. I am NOT a Trump supporter and have difficulty watching/listening to him and his spurios spurious claims of grandeur. I’m sorry to my Trump supporters but I don’t think he cares about anything but himself and I’d much rather watch re-runs of Gomer Pyle and Green Acres than listen to him blather about all the things he has done that are the greatest ever or so he says.

Love y’all and hope we can keep Trump from sorta-winning the next election. G’night. KW.

So, I wanted to blahg about bird song yesterday because yesterday morning was the first time I heard bird song since I dunno, the last time the neighborhood birds were thinking about making babies. But yesterday’s blahg got away from me big-time and ended up being not one of my better stream-of-consciousness blahgs. And that is one of the things that makes me miss my brother because he always loved when I did stream-of-consciousness stuff. Oh don’t worry, I’m good, not standing here collapsed in a puddle of tears. If he’s watching me at all from wherever I think he would be proud and happy about how I have gone forward with my life and how I have handled the moomicabin.

But I mean bird SONG, like hey let’s get together and have some fun, not just the squawking and grawking around they do in the winter. And yes, they do start singing in February around here, those that over-winter anyway. The Landfill bird “expert” differs with me a bit and he does know more about birds than I do but I do remember many February mornings waking up to hear bird song.

I had to inch my way through a flock of Cananananada Geese on my way outta the Cubelandia parking lot this afternoon. They all looked like adults and I’m gonna *guess* it’s probably a bunch of last year’s goslings and their parents. I can’t remember when they start strutting around the Cubelandia parkland in pairs looking for nesting sites. It’s probably farther away than I remember.

BTW, they say that Canada geese mate for life. I’m not gonna google that now but once at Cubelandia I encountered a dead goose in the water with his/her mate standing on the shore next to the body.

Oh and then there’s @ChunkGroundhog if you do twitter. Chunk raids a person’s garden and instead of stealthily absconding with his veggies like other aminals do (rabbits and things), he stands up right front and center and eats his food in front of the cam. It’s pretty hilarious.

We’re listening to Herman’s Hermits now and NOW I am in a puddle of tears. It’s still okay. I’m just being silly. <3

Love y’all, KW

You can do the google all day to look up the origins of today’s date. It is a cross quarter day and that means that the winter season is halfway over! Yay! Except I am not all that excited because I know all too well that winter is not over up here until Old Man Winter stops throwing snowballs at us and I am here to tell you that he has thrown snowballs at me as late as *May*.

Today on this cross quarter day, Mr. Golden Sun FINALLY after I cannot count how many days of not showing his face SHOWED UP! BIG TIME! He even managed to heat us up to something like 50 degrees. When I went out for my 0-skunk-30 this morning, I had to use my Yaks. We had light snow ALL DAY yesterday but the temps were in the 30s so there was only a half inch or so on the sidewalks at the end of the day. Unfortunately that iced up like crazy over night so slippery crapola was everywhere. By the end of the day we had dry pavement. It won’t last… … …

It’s a couple times of year that Mr. Golden Sun is in the right position at the right time of day to light up my living room. I haven’t exactly kept track of when that is but I am wondering if the autumn cross quarter day is the other one except I think that is around Halloween and daylight savings time probably screws with it.

There’s that red guy we bought at a “farmers market” in Fla a couple years ago and there’s Ike the Fish. I bought him at the Sault Ste. Siberia art fair umpteen billion years ago. He won best of show so after I paid for him I agreed to let the artist keep him in her booth for the day and I made a rocket trip into Sault Ste. Siberia to pick him up at the end of the art fair. And then there’s that lamp… I am not crazy about that lamp but I won’t go into detail about that now. (I am not crazy about floor or table lamps in general.)

I reaalllly want to replace that brown dresser with something else. I’m not sure what and not going there today. It’s a cFam artifact and the cFam had 10 of these dressers if I have it right. One for each child? We still have this one. I think there are one or two at Hoton Lake. I dunno if any other folks have any of them. I feel like I need to hire Certified Kitchen Lady again to help me with the rest of my house.

For now, the Superbowl is on and I don’t have a dog in the race for either team. Okay, I guess we are for San Fran since our daughter lived there for a number of years, even though she didn’t care about sports.

Okay, Hot Dish sounds like kind of a hot mess to me. The ingredients include Campbell’s soup and un-named vegetables and “meat” and cheese. Meat? Hamburgler? Probably. I have probably eaten a version of Hot Dish umpteen million times in my life at church and other potlucks. I certainly didn’t die from it and I probably even liked it.

I suppose I am in the midwest. The Great Lake State is in the middle of the country so we are sort of a fly-over state. But we are a bit different than a lot of the other fly-over states in that we have our own huge convoluted coastline. I think some folks refer to us as the Third Coast and if you have seen the great lakes, that label fits.

Where the heck was I? Hot Dish. We never ate anything like Hot Dish when I was a kid on Superior Street. The Comm made “chop suey” when I was a little kid and hamburger helper when I was a teenager. I liked both of those things. At the hamburger helper time, The Comm was busy teaching high school students and hamburger helper was a new thing and why not? Looking back it seems like a quick way to make Hot Dish.

Nevertheless, I am not crazy about the idea of hot dish and I hope the Iowa caucuses focus on issues rather than regional food. Although I guess caucusers are *people* and have to eat and if Hot Dish is there, it needs to be eaten!

The pic? I was in the behemoth veehickle of porterization last night and I could not figger out how to get out! Does this look like a door handle to you? It looks like a juice box holder to me. Eventually I figgered it out.

When I walked outside Cubelandia this afternoon I did a double take at the wee wink of blue. There were a few of those but Mr. Golden Sun was hiding behind a big thick cloud. I cannot remember the last day I saw even a wee wink of blue. Of course by the time I was halfway home from Cubelandia, any evidence of blue was gone.

I left it up to others to decide the Friday dinner venue and they chose the Red Hawk and that was fine with me. But the GG had to wait in a long line and then it took a long time to get porterized because… Oh my god. It is the first night of the FOLK FESTIVAL. Why did I let him choose the Red Hawk? Of all people, we should know that the Red Hawk is a go-to restaurant for the folk festival. We have ATTENDED the folk festival many years and WEEEE have often eaten at the Red Hawk the first night of the festival.

We did not buy tickets for the festival this year. I am not sure why. It’s up to the GG. Actually, I usually DON’T go to the festival. We usually give my tickets to someone else. I cannot stand to sit for that many hours and not all the performers play music I’m interested in and it can be LOUD. The first time I heard Iris Dement[ed] was at the folk festival and I just about had to cover my ears. Of all things, I grew to love Iris and I have willingly gone to see her at the Ark since then. An acquired taste but nowadays a beloved one.

Oh but then there was the year Kebmo was the Friday headliner. Um, okay. He came on at something like 11 PM and spent an eternity walking around the stage apparently trying to decide which one of his geeeeee-tars to use for his first song. C’mon, just pick one up and start playing. This kind of stuff continued throughout his set and I was having a hard time staying awake and finally the GG actually decided he’d had enough and THANKFULLY we left. And then as we were heading back over to the west side, well, delete a bunch of crapola about texting with a former “relative” to support her about her failing laptop or whatever device it was. Yes at 11:30 PM or so. Jeebus.

Anyway, the GG somehow got a window seat at the Red Hawk and we were eventually porterized and we all ate and then rode the bus temporary Porter Behemoth home and the sky is clear enough now that I can see the setting crescent moon.

G’night, KW

Living over the wall from somebody equally as geaky (yes, I misspelled that, deal with it 🐸) as I am can get pretty hilarious sometimes.

We have spent the last two days beating our heads against a complex piece of functionality that our team ham-handedly moved over from our now defunct legacy system to our web app a couple years ago. “We” wrote the worst spec on earth — I had a hand in it so I can only beat myself up. Now faced with documenting what actually happens, I could not make heads or tails of it. It didn’t help that someone not paid for their writing skills wrote up the original problem, which means I was dealing with a word salad brain dump. It was a lot like trying to parse the Orange Baboon’s tweets except this person is intelligent and was actually trying to make sense.

Anyway, my work buddy bridges the gap between legacy and web (I am web only) and he was able to put together a document that *I* was able to understand and subsequently pretty up. The funny part was that he used the terms “Single Tweak” and “Double Tweak” to describe this crapola. I formalized these terms in the spec by defining and using them, which made my work buddy crack up when he reviewed my revised document. In this particular case, I couldn’t think of a better word than “tweak” so I guess it is now part of our lexicon.

This reminds me of a story my small-town yooperland banker dad used to tell about a trip he took (as a child) with *his* small-town yooperland banker dad. Their mission was to collect a cow. They parked at the Sugar Island ferry dock and walked onto the ferry. They disembarked on the other side of the St. Marys (no, there is no apostrophe) River, walked up the hill, collected the cow, and walked the cow back to the ferry. The punchline was, “When you are in the banking business you can get into all kinds of shit.”

I am the apple that didn’t fall all that far from the tree although I am a systems analyst, not a bank prez, and my biz is the *online* banking business. But after what I went through the last couple days, yes, when you are in the banking business you can get into all kinds of shit. At least I didn’t have to clean my shoes at the end of all that!

The pic? 🐭/🦝 are spending a couple days at this camp cabin somewhere in SW lower Michigan. It’s Mouse’s pic, posted with permission.

And that is all except that we are participating in a birthday of porterization over at Weber’s so we’ll have to get cracking soon.

Here are a couple photooooos I took about a gazillion years ago at the Moldy Old version of the Hoton Lake cabin. I don’t remember taking these photos because at that time of my life I did not generally take a lot of photoooos. I didn’t begin taking lots of photos until …dun dun dun… we bought our first digital camera, an early Sony Mavica that stored photos on a floppy disc. I took a lot of pics on that thing and then I upgraded to a few new digital cams that required a much smaller disc and THEN… dun dun dun… I got an iPhone. 2007. I kinda pooh-poohed the iPhone when they first announced it and then suddenly I became an early adopter. Why? I dunno, it’s complicated. And yes buying two of those “puppies” (as my now retaaaared colleague W1.5 called them) felt like committing financial suicide back in 2007. When I began working (as a student intern) at Cubelandia right after I bought an iPhone, I was one of the few people who owned one and people were kinda like, “Can I touch it?” (And prob’ly thinking something like, “How the heck does a STUDENT INTERN have enough money to own an iPhone?”)

So I guess I took these pics but I can’t remember what camera I was using. It certainly wasn’t a digital camera because those had not been invented yet.

First up, we have the GG using the telephone. Brrrrrring Brrrring Brrrrrring. Answer the phone. Yes that is a phone. It sits on the counter and when it rings, people jump to answer it. Who is calling? Who do they want to talk to? “Hello! Is Mr. Magoo there?” For quite a few years after I met the GG and went to Hoton Lake with him there was no phone in the cabin at all. But we’ll talk about old-skool telephonia some other day because here is the GG (on the phone) and his wonderful father The Gumper who is hanging out in his beloved kingdom. 10 children, 19 grandchildren…

And here is The Gumper talking with (apparent) great seriousness to his 12th grandchild. His 13th through 19th were not born yet. I don’t know what he was talking to his 12th granddaughter about but we miss this guy. He was a good dad and granddad and I always felt like he was my dad too (not to diminish the fact that I had my own beloved dad). She (and her baby sis, who was his 13th grandchild) were his “little chickies”.

I really need to re-scan all of our old photoooos. I know there are now iPhone apps that do the work we once LABORIOUSLY did via putting photos into scanners one at a time in a twinkling (a bunch of photos at a time and they even get straightened out and cropped nicely). I feel like I still need to save the originals because new technology will continuously replace what we have now. Whatever, I have a mess of photos to sort out. Our nuclear family photos plus older Fin and Mac and cFam photos that we have inherited and have ended up in the Landfill Dungeon.

So this is the anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. I have an odd set of memories about that.

The background is that I occasionally have prescient dreams. I generally try to view the world via science and evidence. What are the facts? What are the requirements? So I am *not* generally a woo-woo type, er, not sure I totally understand that word/term/whatever either. But throughout my life, I have occasionally dreamed stuff that turns out to come true or just have bad feelings about something I can’t control and it ends up happening. I don’t know why this happens to me or how to explain it. Or even if it’s real but I think it is.

1986. Teacher in space! Teacher in space! Everybody was all hyped up about sending a teacher into space. It was a great idea and I didn’t actually have a prescient dream about it (I remember those quite clearly) but I had a reeeallly bad feeling about it. I thought she was going to die. What if she dies? How will her students/family/friends/colleagues feel about that? And then the shuttle exploded and the teacher (and everyone else) died. Yeesh.

I can’t actually remember much about what I was doing when Challenger blew up although I *do* remember seeing footage of the accident on TV after the fact and I remember thinking, “I knew this would happen”.

A very weird thing I *do* remember is sending the GG off to work the next morning. I was TERRIFIED that our new VW Jetta would blow up on his way to work. I knew how stoopid this was. He was driving a new vee-hickle across deserted Planet Ann Arbor surface streets to That Darn EPA. As he was leaving I gave him an extra emphatic BE CAREFUL. He replied with something like, “Don’t worry, the Jetta will not blow up”.

Peace to Krista, our first teacher in space wherever she is, and kudos to anyone who has the courage to venture outside our Earth’s atmosphere. Me? I am even afraid to get into a blasted helicopter.

P.S. That’s our VW Jetta (5-speed manual) in the pic. It was the first vee-hickle we bought as a married couple and I don’t think we named it. It was a cool vee-hickle but in the long run it kinda nickled and dimed us to death. The first vee-hickle we named was our first Chrysler mini-van and we named that “The Exxon Tanker Valdez”.

I am not a sports fan at all. I mean people who play sports are fine with me and I love the ambience of a feetsball Saturday here on The Planet Ann Arbor and I even like when the superbowl is on TV back in the background of my life. But I don’t seriously watch sports and only have a vague idea about what the rules are, etc.

But. Waaaay back in the day, Daytwa won the world series the same year my first child was born and and and… A Tiger wife (his first name was Marty, remember him?) was actually in the hoosegow at the same time I was having her first baby. We certainly didn’t get connect in any way shape or form. I’m gonna guess she had a nice private room and I remember a nurse in *my* room telling me and my roommate that he had rolled up in a limo with a huge number of roses he had sent his wife.

I was only mildly interested in all of that even though I had been uncharacteristically absorbed in the Tiger’s season that fall. But really? Roses? I didn’t get those from the GG for giving birth and I certainly didn’t want them. Roses? What? Help with diapers and baths, etc.? The GG had all of that stuff down. Being from a big family he knew what to do.

A couple of things I remember about that time include…

1) A work friend of ours was not connecting with the GG (who was his boss at the time) on the day I wanted to get outta the hoosegow. All of a sudden, our colleague showed up in my ROOM! Why? Because his wife had delivered her 4th baby that morning.

2) The GG rolled up in front of the hoosegow with one of our Ford Fiestas and a nurse did not allow us to put her in the back seat alone. She was right and I knew it and I got into the back seat next to our first newborn baby. I have no clue what ever happened to the baseball guy and his fam but I don’t think he lasted very long with the Tigers.

So there is Kobe Bryant. I don’t follow basketball at all but his name is a highly recognizable name and I am terribly sorry about his demise not to mention his daughter. Jeebus. I have been watching news stories about this mostly via Twitter and am waiting for things to settle out a bit. My boss’s boss lives in California and apparently a friend of his was mountain biking and was the first person to encounter the crash. Jeez.

I wanted to say (but forgot) yesterday that one of the things I enjoyed about reading “American Dirt” (on my phone with GooMaps a swipe or two away) had nothing to do with the story or subject or controversy or whatever. It was that it turns out I have only a vague map of Mexico in my head and I cannot tell you how many times I looked on GooMaps to figure out where this or that city was. Acapulco? Guadalajara? MEXICO CITY? See what I mean by vague?

This particular lack of geographical knowledge became hilariously apparent (and almost bit us in the you-know-what) back in October 2018 when we made a rocket trip to Florida, bumpity-clunking our way into Bradenton with our back wheel bearings on their last legs. Something like that. We were standing in our brother Mr. Ed’s house and he said, “I don’t know if you guys have been watching the weather but there’s something going on in the Yucatan.” Yucatan? Say what? Where the heck is the Yucatan and what does it have to do with us?

Well, I am here to tell you that I quickly figgered out that the Yucatan Peninsula is right across the Gulf of Mexico, pretty much south of good old crazy old Fla and the “something” he was talking about was none other than Hurricane Michael. We had planned to spend the better part of a week down there taking care of bizness. Instead it was a wild scramble getting the Frog Hopper fixed, everybody packed, and various forms of oxygen obtained and set up. We did get outta dodge before Michael made landfall. Although Bradenton was not directly in its path, we were concerned about bad weather in Georgia. I was very relieved to post a pic of blue skies as we crossed the Tennessee River. Made it!

When I was a little kid, I was pretty good at geography, although my knowledge was limited to the United Snakes. This was thanks to a colorful wooden puzzle of the states that I had as a kid and put together about a gazillion times. Below each state’s shape was the state capital so I learned those too. That puzzle now resides somewhere in the Landfill Dungeon and I think it is actually intact except for maybe Connecticut or Rhode Island.

My other memory of learning geography was fifth grade when uber-teacher Mrs. Ward led us through a long prodject of making our own maps of each state (by region with New England first). We drew in major cities/towns, rivers, and maybe some roads and did a little write-up detailing natural resources, industries, and other points of interest. I loved that prodject and sure wish I had it now. It is long gone and I’m sure it was meeeee who deep-sixed it.

Anyway, I am nowhere near an expert on Mexican or Central American geography but I am a bit more educated than I was before reading the book.

That is The Commander and Canananada is in be background (to the right of the island) and she is waving her cane at meeee, not Canadian invaders. Canadians have occasionally ended up upon our beach because they were lost or their motor bote was outta gas or broken. The Canadians that typically end up on our beach are NOT migrants. They typically have their own homes/careers across the border. I don’t think most Canucks have any interest in crossing over into our Trumpian Bombasty. Not to mention that The Comm crossed the Canuckian border all the time to have lunch or watch films with her friends.

I finished the book “American Dirt” today. It is about an upper middle class woman born and raised in Acapulco who instantaneously becomes a migrant along with her son.

I loved the book. There is a lot of controversy surrounding it. I *think* most of it has to do with the fact that the author is not an immigrant and did not make the journey of the characters in her book.

Well so what? This is a work of fiction. There is the story of the main character trying to escape a drug cartel “king” that is possibly after her and her young son. And there are the stories of all the people she meets on her journey to el norte aka my own very imperfect country. In some ways, this book could be read as a series of short stories.

At any rate, our loverly country needs to deal with our immigrants as *people*.

I wore my Yaks for my early morning walk. The temperature was above freezing but the sidewalks are still iffy where people have not adequately cleared and de-iced them. When the temperatures rise and fall, snow melts onto the sidewalks and re-freezes. Intermittently.

All the way to Cubelandia Mooon Yooonit proclaimed a 36 degree temperature and it was raining cats and dogs but it was NOT SLIPPERY! Our parking lot has been salted within an inch of its life and it looked like it was all wet. But as I walked around the back of my car to get my laptop out of the other side, I encountered a slippery spot. Oops. Okay. I picked my way through the lot. It was mostly not slippery but there were bits of black ice here and there and I could not for the life of me determine where the pavement was just plain wet or slippery.

I am loving the fog that materialized after the rain stopped this evening. When I was a kid we called this kind of weather a January Thaw. So far this winter I am more inclined to call this a mild winter. We’ll see what happens in February and March. I can remember a very mild January and February one long ago winter and then the first day of March, the temperature flipped down to about zero and hovered there for a few weeks. I had to report for jury duty that morning and I was not a happy camper. I don’t think I could get the POC’s window open to take the parking ticket.

That’s our sidewalk there and it is NOT slippery because The Pensioner blew the snow and then salted the heck out of it.

G’night, KW

Once upon a time, My Old Coot was still alive and The Commander was bopping around like nobody’s business, gossiping with her friends (and me) about other people’s business and critiquing their clothing and, uh, appearance, etc. The Engineer (my bro) once referred to her as the Birch Point Telegraph. That was about right.

One of the things I miss about The Comm is getting on the phone with her and gabbing away. I am not a Phone Person in general but we had some good times back in the day. That was before talking to her on the phone emulated scenes from Fellini movies (to borrow from Uber Kayak Woman talking about phone calls with her own moom, my aunt Radical Betty). We’ll talk about the blood phone call some other day.

Anyway, during that period of time, she once told me that she changed the way she did “things” about every three years. I had young children then and often had to change the way I did “things” EVERY GODFORSAKEN DAY, sometimes multiple times. But somehow I grokked that she meant cooking/housekeeping routines.

I’m certainly not a carbon copy of The Comm (heaven forbid) but I do go through these kinds of changes in routine and my new thing is to make casseroles, etc. on the weekend that can be heated up as leftovers and keep various pieces of frozen protein at the ready if the leftovers run out by Thursday. I do NOT want leftovers after Thursday. We typically go out to eat Friday night and I want an empty refrigimatator so I can start again for the next week.

I am still getting the kinks out of this routine. Last night I asked the GG to buy some salmon down at Monahan’s in Kerrytown. He was all into it but he fergot. We have some leftover-y type dregs but no frozen pieces of protein. Edible but not all that much fun. It would be STOOPID to say we are anywhere near starving. The Planet Ann Arbor provides a cornucopia as do most US municipalities, even those in the yooperland. But we did not have enough food in our own refrigimatator to make a decent evening meal that *we* wanted to eat.

So… While I was doing my after-work chores, the GG happily schlepped over to the Plum to get a small piece of salmon and (surprise) a little beef filet. Surf and turf! And he is gonna grill it all. Yay!

And yes, I guess I sound a bit OCD and I am (but I try to keep that over in the corner where it belongs) but I am also not freaked out about throwing food away if it is old enough that I need to. And I am okay about somebody else helping cook dinner!

New brain-twisting game today. “Guess what’s in the dropdown?” You do not wanna know the details. I am not all that good at games in general but this one is one that I can play, although I was temporarily stymied at the end of this afternoon.

I was looking forward to a nice quiet evening at home. I got home and the front door was NOT LOCKED! Yesterday I had to use my phone to open disco lock. Or at least I tried to. About the third try “someone” opened the door from the inside. KW: Why (the fook) is the door locked? GG: I dunno. What? Okaaaaayyyy. No place on earth is 100% safe all the time but we have lived in this neighborhood more years than I am strong enough to count and I can count on one hand the number of times I have felt unsafe and one of those was the time Comcast sent out a Serial Killer. But we don’t usually lock the door when we are home except when we are asleep.

Okay then, satty-lite music was on when I got home (which I like). Except it was classic rock-and-roll and it was kinda *loud*. I needed folk music (without talk) and a lower volume. That situation got mitigated and then the BIG LED LIGHTS got turned on in the chitchen. The ceiling lights. Noooooo! I much prefer as low lighting as possible, which means under-cabinet LED strings. Except that when I reminded the BIG LIGHT turner-on-er to TURN THE DERN LIGHTS OFF, that person started flicking them on and off AT SEIZURE SPEED and I finally had to yell something like “Just turn them off goddammit!”

I have a hilarious video of the GG flicking a fluorescent light at the moomincabin on and off a few years ago after a “relative” had made complaints about it malfunctioning. “We” (I mean the GG) fixed it. Tonight’s episode was not very funny but at least I didn’t feel the heavy breathing of incompetent lawyers in the background. 🐽🐽🐽

Finally, here is The Pensioner climbing out of a refrigerator. I do not know who the kid is.

The bad news is that I did the google and found out that the Marsh King’s Daughter was filmed in… drum roll… Georgia? Say what?

This is disappointing but I suppose the Upper Tahquamenon Falls is not the only spectacular waterfall in the country (I mean there’s Niagara for one, for Pete’s sake). Probably they can find one somewhere in Georgia with 94 steps or thereabouts down to a wooden platform. The surrounding flora will be different and I wonder if there’ll be tannin in the water. People who don’t know better sometimes think the Tahquamenon River is hopelessly polluted because of it’s its brown color. Not. It’s tannin that makes it that color and it is a natural, organic substance. Anyway, to be fair, the upper Tahq falls only plays a cameo role in the book although the family lives close enough to it to walk there.

I’m more curious about how they will deal with the winter scenes. Most winters the yooperland basically freezes solid. A marsh is not easy to navigate in warmer seasons because it is *water*. In the book the family uses a canoe a lot of the time. In the winter? All that water freezes and you can walk all over the place. If the snow is deep, you strap some snowshoes on. We have marshes swamps behind the moomincabin and across the road from the Group Home at Hoton Lake. Neither of them have enough water to be able to navigate them by canoe but I have walked/skied/snowshoe-d in them many a time when they were frozen. No skiis skis for the Marsh King family but the king had some old Iverson snowshoes and he made his daughter a home-made pair.

So will they do some sort of CGI thing to make things look wintery? Or will they eliminate the winter scenes? Or just use the kind of “wimpy” (apologies to my Georgian friends 🐽) snow that Georgia gets? I know that Georgia *gets* snow from time to time. I also know that it doesn’t stay around long or pile up into big drifts and, well, I won’t say anything more because well, possible spoiler alert. I don’t think anything else in this post is close to being a spoiler. If they do try to do some winter scenes and choose a wimpy venue for snow, I don’t suppose it’ll matter much to the umpteen-gazillion folks who have never experienced a yooperland winter because they won’t have a clue.

And with that, I need to get cracking because we are going to porterize ourselves at Knight’s tonight. Yes I know it is a Tuesday. Hit Publish, KW! Typos and malapropisms be damned!

I’m always up for a booooook that is set in the yooperland and “The Marsh King’s Daughter” did not disappoint. This is not my *usual* genre. I guess you might call it a “thriller”? So if it had been set somewhere else, it may not have attracted my attention. But. Tahquamenon Falls, Newberry, and Grand Marais with an occasional mention of Sault Ste. Siberia? I know that terrain.

This book contains quite a bit of violence. There is kidnapping and lots of killing, animals for food mostly but people also lose their lives. I was reading Goodreads reader questions after I finished the book and I kind of shook my head at one person who asked about the level of violence. I suppose it was a fair question. I am (usually) able to separate myself from horrific events that happen in fiction, not everyone can. I struggle with rating books but I rated it a 5 (out of 5) and since I am still thinking about it days after I finished it, I guess that’s about right.

I mentioned this book to BFF who also has roots/property in the yooperland and she informed me that there will be (or is?) a mooooovie. Hmmmm… I will be interested in watching that mooooovie. I wonder if they will set it in the actual yooperland. I hope so. The terrain descriptions in the book were beautiful and they totally hit home. But not sure how a mooooovie crew would film in a location where cell service can be spotty at best. And you may have to woodsP.

I was disappointed when the mooooovie version of the book “Bird Box” (dystopian thriller, author from Ferndale) was not set in the Detroit area (like the book was). Where did they get those rapids with all the big boulders? I know of no rivers in the Daytwa area that have rapids like that. So we’ll see what they do with “The Marsh King’s Daughter” (or maybe already have since I do not generally keep track of mooooovies). I have no clue how they might be able to impersonate Tahquamenon Falls without being there.

I am also thinking I might supply the moomincabin “library” with more yooperland books like this one. Cully Gage is okay up to a point but *eight* of his books? Phlegm-cutter please. And no I would never get rid of any of the Cully Gage books. What were *you* thinking? My brother loved those books…

I’ve been wrestling with divergent cooking challenges lately. I love to cook. I want to return to the days when I was more creative about cooking than recently when throwing a hunk of protein into the oven or on the grill and cooking something white (rice/potatoes/pasta) to go with it plus a salad is my go-to route. But… I do not love to muck around with complicated cooking when I get home from Cubelandia. This *usually* means cooking enough for weekend meals that I can reheat leftovers during the week.

I am making “tamale pie” tonight. Oh don’t get all excited. I googled recipes and the one I chose involves a little box of Jiffy* corn muffin mix and ground beef, etc. It is not some kind of authentic Tex-Mex/whatever thing, more like the kind of thing a WASP-y type person like me can manage. We’ll see how it turns out.

I managed to let the cat outta the bag about the tamale pie this morning during a visit to the Plum Market. The grapevine got going (“moom is making tamale pie”) and the other beach urchin started texting me (“rumor has it…”). We were talking about food and menu planning and before we were finished, she had sent me several links to fantastic looking soups! Making soup is also on my brain. My issue with soup is that a lot of recipes yield a lot more than two light eaters can eat in a couple days. But I’m gonna try to figger that out.

It never fails to crack me up at how creative/savvy my adult children are about food and cooking. I was one of *those* parents who decided my children would learn to eat what was in front of them and not fuss about food. They would eat vegetables, roight? Do all inexperienced parents think that? What the bloody hell?

Lemme see… Fluorescent orange macaroni and cheese by the wheelbarrow? Cheese-it! Cheese-it! Cheese-it! PIZZA ROLLS (getting stuck in the Glen’s Groceries freezer trying to get at them). Then there was the time they cooked spaghettios *by themselves* (they pulled a big stool over to the stove so they could reach it). I was in an adjacent room and had no clue what was going on because I was totally engrossed in balancing the PTO checkbook I had just “inherited” (yes, I am a nerd). Zapping pepperoni on paper towels in the micro – ugh, the smell! Ramen ramen ramen couscous parmesan up the wazoo. Breakfast for dinner. White, orange, and yellow food ruled.

All the while this was going on I was dumbing down my once at least sorta-semi creative cooking skills and now that I can cook whatever the heck I want, I am often sitting around spinning my wheels unable to think of anything beyond the limited go-to repertoire of dishes I can make without engaging my brain. Not that there’s anything wrong with eating a hunk of protein/white side/salad (I’m thinking salmon some day this week) but it’s time to get organized and ramp up the creativity again. And nowadays I have my former fussy eaters to help me.

*Fun fact: Jiffy mix is made in Chelsea, MI, 15-20 miles west of here.

Photo credit: Well, *I* took the photoooo but it is a detail from the Robolights installation we visited Friday night. There were a number of tall cone shaped (hmm, what to call them) “pieces” made of discarded “artifacts”, mostly but not limited to old electronic stuff. Each cone was spray-painted a single color, this one blue. I wish I had gotten a pic of the whole cone so you had some context but I am a haphazard iPhoneographer and all I have is this detail. I dunno if this artist needs any drywall buckets but if he does, I know where he can get some [wink].

Where are we with this? I went out to walk well before sunrise and it was so horrible that I bagged it. No one had shoveled yet and that was fine given that it was early on a Saturday morning and the storm was not over yet. But the snow was wet and heavy and *needles* were coming outta the sky. Okay, I am done.

The GG and others went out and ran their snowblowers mid-morning and I slodged over to the Plum Market to get a few ingredients for tonight’s chicken divan. There has been a bunch of cut up frozen chicken breast in the freezer for a while now and I’m working on getting rid of it.

We don’t usually expect the city to plow our street until after about five days or whatever and usually when they do, they leave a whole bunch of crapola in the middle of the Carbeck/Walter intersection. Today a very small truck with a plow on the front of it made multiple passes up and down the street. We think it was a city truck but not sure. The GG was not impressed and dragged out his blower *again* to clear the street, etc.

We’ve been playing lots of old music tonight. Earlier in the evening it was Fleetwood Mac. That made me remember a time the beach urchins were teenagers and we were driving up to the yooperland in two separate vee-hickles. I was driving the POC and the beach urchins were driving the Indefatigable or maybe the Dogha. We stopped for gas at Indian River. A young couple parked next to my POC were changing their newborn girl’s diaper in their car. My brain did a crazy time warp thing. Here I was tandem driving with a new driver and I was thinking about how these new parents would maybe be doing a similar thing 16 years later. For I dunno what reason I had Fleetwood Mac on repeat that summer.

The terlet carousel is part of an outdoor exhibit at MOCAD, the contemporary art museum in Detroit where one of the beach urchins works. The exhibit is called Robolights and the terlet carousel is supposed to revolve but it was broken again tonight. You can look up the artist. I loved the exhibit and it sounds like he is a force of nature although I’m not sure I want to know what his living space looks like. I don’t think I’ve seen so many old terlets in one place since the time we dropped mattresses off at the Sault Ste. Siberia habitat facility. At a glance the terlets in the carousel looked pretty clean and that is a good thing given my gag reflex.

I have been wanting to visit this exhibit since it opened back in October or whenever. One of the issues is that the best time to see it is after dark. That’s not all that hard to do in the winter in the Great Lakes State. It is just now beginning to not be dark when yer fav-o-rite blahgger gets home from Cubelandia in the afternoon. The flip side of that issue is that yer fav-o-rite blahgger pretty much turns into a pumpkin when she gets home from Cubelandia and doesn’t usually like to go, you know, OUT again. She is an introvert and is NOT a night owl. Not to mention the Man Cold and generally higher level of hustle bustle that accompanied this solstice holiday season.

So we’ve postponed and postponed and postponed. We had yet another tentative plan to visit Robolights this afternoon/evening and we almost postponed AGAIN! Why? Because a big fugly winter storm is scheduled to begin tonight and yer fav-o-rite blahgger got all freaked out about that even though the storm is not scheduled until after 10 PM and we were reasonably sure we would be safely back home on The Planet Ann Arbor well before it arrived. But! She sucked it up and so we picked up 🐭/🦝 at the Ypsi park-and-ride and schlepped on downtown.

So glad we did. Fun time at the exhibit with Lizard accompanying us, a drink at the lovely MOCAD bar to sort out where to eat, dinner at the Cass Cafe a couple blocks away, then home again with DRY ROADS all the way. Whew!

We ran into someone at MOCAD who tried to give me praise for raising my daughter well. I said a version of what her granddaddy said years ago when someone at MY old job said something like that to him: “I didn’t raise her. She raised herself.” And she did but she was also raised by that proverbial “village” that everyone is always trying to shove down our throats. Except that her “village” was real and consisted of large extended families. Grandparents, aunts/uncles, and cousins of all degrees. The GG and I did not do it alone. Not one little bit.

Now? Sittin’ on the Green Couch watchin’ for the snow to fly.