Random bits of my so-called life.

In which two white Ford SUV-type vee-hickles are parked next to each other and nobody can figger out which one is a vee-hickle of porterization. *I* finally figgered it out because of the renewal month on the license plate. Don’t get me wrong. I think the vee-hickle owner knew which vee-hickle was which, he just didn’t manage to communicate that info to the rest of us. Compared to some of our other parking structure adventures, this one was a piece of cake. No stuck elevators or alley entrances. And nobody put their laundry in the wrong vee-hickle but the laundry adventure did not involve a parking structure or porterization.

Downtown was not all that busy tonight (although I bet the neighborhood Knight’s was). We did the Red Hawk tonight and the GG was able to get a window seat. The Red Hawk has somehow made it into our loose rotation of Friday night restaurants of porterization. For a number of years it was the Oscar Tango every Friday with an occasional jag to the Griz. Before all of this the Red Hawk was one of our regular faves and now we are going there again. Duck quesadillas for me please!

We bagged doing a nightcap tonight. The GG has business with FlaMan and others in the cFam tomorrow. The GG asked did I want to help with this endeavor? NO! He said something like, “You are too smart.” Yes. Yes I am. In truth, although I am not deathly ill, I am still hacking up a lung from Cold Number Two. Outdoor aerobic exercise feels good. Schlepping furniture and boxes of crapola around does not seem like the right thing.

I am so taaaared I’m about to fall over so g’night!

Parts of the Landfill got back to what passes for normal today. One BIG dishwasher load plus assorted hand-washables, two loads of laundry, and ran rooooomba. It feels soooooo good to wash a bunch of kitchen linens after a holiday.

I dunno if I made it sound as though I did ALL of the xmas cooking. I did not. I just did the easy do-ahead stuff. Mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce and cutting up veggies, etc.

But. Lemme see…

The GG is the grillmaster, which at xmas almost always means he cooks a duck on the gas grill. The last time I remember us NOT cooking a duck was 2011, the year we took xmas dinner up to cook at The Comm’s Dillon house in Sault Ste. Siberia. She was living in Freighter View assisted living at the time but she still owned her house and we were using it as a squatter’s paradise. It turned out to be her last xmas although we didn’t know that then. For various reasons, turkey was easier than duck.

Lizard Breath cut up and cooked these colorful carrots. She had wanted to cook carrots on Tday but there were two problems. 1) I couldn’t get “rainbow carrots” at the time. I bought plain old orangutan carrots but 2) she ended up on the couch with a Man Cold that whole day so we bagged cooking the carrots and I sliced them up for the GG and me the next weekend. This time she was hale and hearty and I was able to get rainbow carrots and I didn’t take a picture of the final product but it was gorgeous.

Mouse? Mouse? Mouse… Cranberry curd dessert. It was also gorgeous but I don’t have a pic of it (yet). I was toooo full to try more than a teensy-tinesy taste of it last night but it made for a good little brek this morning.

There is a wonderful light exhibition at MOCAD (in Detroit) going on complete with a terlet carousel and I reaaaaally want to go to it. Last weekend (and even a couple days ago), we were thinking it might be do-able *tonight*. Today? Nope. EVERYONE needed downtime today. The GG worked on one of his xmas gifts, I cleaned, Lizard went to work, and Mouse hiked with her buddy Lairi the Rake, friends since kindergarten. Love.

I am not [usually] much of a jigsaw puzzler but they are starting to become one of our xmas traditions (if you can call them traditions) and I like being in the room with the puzzlers.

It was actually a pretty darn blah day for me. I kicked the turkey day cold virus to the curb last week. Alas, yesterday I started getting congested *again*. I am not sick (i.e., feverish or whatever), just annoyed as all getout. At any rate, I hung out next to a Kleenex box most of the day. I bagged my 0-skunk-30 walk and a family walk to Miller Woods and I didn’t even put any eye makeup on until about five o’clock. Maybe I picked this thing up at the family party last weekend? At least it is not a vomiting bug. But I was a slug today. Good thing I did a whole bunch of cooking, etc., the last few days.

I think this is the first xmas since I have had two children that I didn’t spend the whole gift-unwrapping session worrying about whether I had gotten them an EQUAL amount of gifts. When they were small it always seemed like somebody ended up with more packages. Or maybe they just opened them at different rates? This year people were good about submitting wish lists and I randomly encountered a *few* unlisted things that seemed appropriate. As always, I have no problem with people re-gifting or donating items that aren’t perfect for them. We all have toooooo much stuff.

Me? Apparently various miscommunications occurred and I received a couple of duplicates. That was okay (not to mention hilarious). One was a Chico’s skirt from my wish list and as soon as I opened it I knew I would want two. If you wear a “uniform”, it is always good to have some duplicates. The other was smartwool leggings. I can always use more of those, not to mention baklava balaclavas 🐽.

I finished my 99th book of the year today. A magical book as far as I was concerned, The Ten Thousand Doors of January. Might not be everyone’s cup of tea but I loved it. Think portals.

I guess I am emulating my aunt Bubs in a way tonight. There’s an old story about her three daughters hiding in the closet and jumping out at her ONE AT A TIME and scaring the bejeebus out of her each time. If I have it right, that means ALL of them were in the closet at the same time and every time Bubs went to the closet, a different child jumped out at her.

This evening, my beach urchins are here and one of them has snuck up on me TWICE to quietly SNORT right next to my ear. Making me jump a MILE. The second time she did it, after I recovered, I said, “Well it is MEEEEE who has all of the lights out.” Except for the twinkle lights. I love the dark of the solstice but you can’t see if someone sneaky is sneaking up on you.

It’s okay. It was a fun day except for the part where the GG was driving over to Chez Harry and made an illegal turn ON PURPOSE, we were arguing about it (acting like Grandroobly). We were perfectly safe but I was soooo glad Mr. Policeman was not around. I drove us home. The GG needed a nap. Anyway, we met up with Chez Harry and Bubs and some of their branch of the fam at the Griz. My Dear Uncle Harry invited us to his house for eggnog (spiked or not) after lunch so we headed over there for a short while. Harry was nodding off (this is typical and we love him). The GG was not far behind him. Five or whatever deer were hanging out in Chez Harry’s wooded yard but I did not even try to get a pic with my iPhone. It has a decent camera but this particular scene required something a bit more high powered. Opening the door to go outside to take the pic would have undoubtedly spooked the deer.

This tray and glasses (there are six glasses) are really not my style but way back in the day I was at Kitchen Port with The Commander and somehow they spoke to me and The Comm *loved* them and was also *dying* to buy me something. So here they are and we are using them for the holidays. I’ll put them away after New Year’s Day or maybe in February.

It is xmas eve eve and here is our resident Gumbo Chef using one of the Houghton Lake Nesco ovens from I dunno when, maybe the 1950s, to cook gumbo. He’s basing his gumbo on a Bear Creek mix so it is not from scratch but it’s pretty dern good.

We porterized ourselves for tonight’s little adventure. Other than that, whew! I jumped around a lot this morning. Three (count ’em) grokkery stores ending with the Plum and I left a few items off my Plum list for tomorrow morning because I know I’ll be back there again. Then I wrapped a bunch of presents and prepared a bunch of xmas food ahead of time.

Yesterday the GG got into a big gift-wrapping mode. He asked, “Do you want me to wrap some presents?” No. “Don’t you have some gifts for the girls?” Yes. Um…. Okay… Yes, you can wrap all these gifts. For so many many years I wrapped umpteen bazillion gifts for the beach urchins and others. I was so happy to not have to use a vacation day to wrap presents. I still had to wrap presents for HIM and a few extras for the beach urchins but no big deal.

Once upon a time I swore to myself that I would never work for Corporate America again. Twelve years ago I sucked it up (took the drug test and everything) and returned to Cubelandia. Here I am today with a job I love and enough paid time off before xmas to be able to hang out shopping and cleaning and even entertaining a bit 🐸

P.S. It was warm enough today that I could sit in the back yard for a bit. It was in the 50s this afternoon but I still walked out there with my balaclava on. After about two minutes, I took my balaclava off and dredged around the bedroom for a sun hat.

When you are married to an identical twin, it can mess with your kids’ minds…

Waaaaay back in the day when Lizard Breath was I dunno maybe like 13 months maybe? We went over to help the UU and The Beautiful Gay (and their three kids) move house. Late in the evening, the UU and I went out somewhere to get a beer. The GG stayed behind with HIS/OUR DAUGHTER Lizard Breath. Was she a happy camper? NOOOOO she was NOT! She wasn’t quite yet able to use words to articulate her experience but she DEFINITELY thought that the GG and I (her parents) had left her behind with the UU (her uncle). “Are my parents ever coming back to get me?”

Years and years later… The UU and TBG had their first grandchild. At a family party when this young man was very young, the GG carried him around for a while and the kid was happy… Until… His Grandpa Bob walked up. Double-take and then complete shut down. There’s my granddad so who the heck is this character carrying me. I thought *he* was my grandpa!

Fast forward a few years. The UU and TBG now have six grandchildren. At the cFam partay last night, one of the younger ones said to her grandfather, “Are you Grandpa Bob or the other one?”. As a follow-up to this, apparently after the party she said, “I have two Grandpa Bobs.” Yes you do sweetheart.

Me? Married to an identical twin? I can always tell the difference if I am looking at the twin I’m talking to. If one of them is walking behind me and talking sometimes I’m not sure. Make no mistake, I quickly figure it out.

I am usually a bit of a wreck during the xmas holiday season. It’s partly the general stress level although that isn’t all that bad for me these days. It is the weather that bugs me. People are driving/flying all over the place and the weather can SUCK around here at this time of year.

Today was the annual cFam xmas party and guess what Mr. Golden Sun decided to do on the winter solstice? Look at him shining in all his glory! I went outside sometime around noon to take this pic of him at about his southernmost point. And guess what else he did. He warmed us up! He melted most of the residual snow from last Tuesday morning’s mini-storm and today the roads were dry as a bone for everyone driving wherever they had to drive. No snow. No ice storms.

Partay? Wow. I just opened up a spreadsheet and typed in all the names I could think of who were there and I came up with 41. I spent quite a bit of time at the introvert table but eventually I loosened up a bit. A wee bit of whine but not toooo much. I felt like I deserved a bit of whine after enduring a morning of frenetic OCD crapola via the GG. Where the heck is your fidget spinner, buddy?

Hats off to my s-i-l the Lady of Linden for hosting *again*. The fam outgrew my humble little landfill-style home many moons ago. It would be standing room only with porta-potties in the back yard. Not only does my s-i-l usually host the big extended family party, she hosts other holiday events for her own branch of the fam, which features the Lord of Linden plus their five adult children and 11 grandchildren.

This is not at the Landfill and I have no idea what exactly is in that box. Lifetime supply of underwear? Probably not.

The Commander used to send us stuff in all kinds of weird boxes so you never quiiiite knew what you were getting until you opened the box. And then there was the time I was at Campfire Girl camp in the yooperland and my dad sent me a letter. Hmmm… It was in a 1st National Bank envelope (he was the bank prez) on 1st National Bank stationery. A form letter to bank customers. I had a savings account there and I could NOT process it. Why am I getting a letter from the bank at my Campfire Girls camp? It wasn’t until I got home from camp that I figgered out that my dad had written me a nice handwritten letter on the back of a form letter. The original recycler…

Somehow I have enough paid time off to take next week off. I’m not exactly sure what to do with all that time at this time of year but I know I will use the next four days getting ready for our small xmas celebration. I have wrapping and pre-cooking to do. And tomorrow I need to HOP TO IT! It’s the cFam xmas party and I have accepted a mission to make veggie lasagna. I made the sauce last weekend and it is thawed now. I have to buy the other ingredients, assemble it, and bake it tomorrow.

It was very quiet at Cubelandia today with Amazon Woman and I the only members of our team in the office. She wanted to leave early (whatever that means) and kicked me out too. I’m trying to remember which one of us got out first. I think I waved at her from Mooon Yooonit. And then we porterized at the Griz. No nightcap though. Everyone has too much to do tomorrow.

Today a bunch of us Cubelandians met up with the LSCHP (beloved old Cubelandia boss) for lunch! It was fun. It was also kinda funny. I said to Amazon Woman that this luncheon almost seemed more populated than our official company lunch (with seven attending, it was two fewer than the company lunch). But the LSCHP takes up a lot of space in more than one way and he was in Fine Form today. It was so fun to hear him telling his video gaming stories again (even though I usually don’t understand them 🐽). I’ll never forget being at a restaurant with him many moons ago. He was talking (loudly, as he does) about jumping over garbage cans and things. The visual of the LSCHP jumping over a garbage can is, well, interesting, and people at nearby tables were looking at him like “What?” Of course he was describing a video game. We’ve gone on without him but we miss him a lot. But he is doing very well, thank you very much! A professional day job, a fun side *teaching* gig, and rabbinical duties as always.

The lunch was fun but I couldda done without the near collision in the Notorious State Ellsworth roundabout on the way there. FZ was riding along with me. Partly to carpool but also he has the hybrid version of our Mooon Yooonit and was curious about the dashboard, etc. in mine. We agreed that the person who tried to kill us was in the wrong. I personally think the other driver was going too fast. 15 mph tops in those things and SLOWER if there is a lot of traffic like this roundabout usually has.

I dredged some xmas “necklaces” outta the Landfill Dungeon last weekend. They were all out of battery. I could not be bothered with figgering out what batteries work in them, let alone schlep around town looking for them. So… I left the dead ones on the Green Couch and ordered four more from Amazon. They arrived a couple days before but I didn’t open them. When I got home from Cubelandia yesterday, the GG was picking at the dead ones on the Green Couch, thinking we might want to take them over to Planet Ann Arbor Porterland. Oooooh noooo. Those don’t work. But… I gave him the new pkg to open and we took *those* over to Planet Ann Arbor Porterland. We all wore them for our partay but we had to Indian Give two of them because we also need them for partays this weekend. They are cheap and I shouldda just bought a couple for the Porters too.

It snowed a little bit overnight and although it had stopped snowing before I left for my 0-skunk-20 walk a little after six, the streets were still kind of messy when I left for coffee with MMCB₁. There is a button for “snow” in Mooon Yooonit so I pressed it. What the heck. Aren’t those dashboard snowflakes purty?

I didn’t notice any difference in the driving at all but there was only a small accumulation of snow (1/2 to one inch, maybe) and I’m not sure that the “snow mode” was made for that kind of snow. By the time I drove to Barry’s and then Cubelandia, the driving was okay although there was various crapola of unknown slippery-ness partially covering most of the roads. Nobody was in a hurry and for once I was thankful that for the last third of the drive I was stuck in a line of 4-wheelers behind a huge gravel truck that was taking its sweet old time.

We xmas porterized ourselves tonight and we were talking about the “snow mode”. The GG reminded me of our loverly old Dogha (Dirty Old Green Honda Accord), which had a “traction control system” light. We bought it new in 2001 and I think it is still my favorite automotive vee-hickle EVER. That thing absolutely kicked *ss in snow driving and I remember the traction control light coming on when it encountered slippery conditions. I miss that vee-hickle soooo much sometimes.

As we were driving home from xmas porterization, the [insert I-word here] votes were still being counted. As we are a house divided, we were pretty silent. A few minutes ago I got a news alert about the results. I have mixed feelings. I do not like Trump, not one little bit. I think he is a terrible person *and* president. In particular, I hate his way of trying to solve complex problems by sledgehammer. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

I did not like him when he was a sleazy real-estate developer (and donating money to “Democrat” candidates, yes). I did not like him when he was a smarmy reality show star (and probably *still* donating money to “Democrat” candidates). But I could ignore him or laugh at his ridiculous antics or whatever. I can’t do that when he is president of our country and I am particularly annoyed when people compare him to the symbol that Jesus Christ has become. C’mon… Better than impeachment would be for voters to come out against him in 2020 but maybe this will send him a message. We’ll see.

Subtitle: nothing like analyzing complicated functionality all day and coming home to have to analyze more complicated functionality.

I am going to be vague here. It was a letter from the bank, or so “we” thought (I hadn’t seen it). Turns out that it was actually a letter from the *corporation* that owns the bank. The local bank folks had no clue.

Backing up a bit. When I married the GG, I did not change my [maiden] name. I went straight on this, no hyphenated names or whatever (not dissing those who have done that). I’m not sure the GG was all that happy about my choice but he didn’t complain, at least not that I remember. There are a LOT of cFam folks but the Finfam name is kind of dying out, at least in our once-strong branch of Finfams. This is kind of silly in a way because I happily let my children be named after my husband. Never any question about that. It just means that I did not produce any children with the Finfam name. Maybe if I had married very young, I would’ve taken my husband’s name. I love the cFam name. But not at 28. Not me, anyway.

I use the GG’s cFam last name informally and with great love. I have done that for YEARS. All the way through the beach urchins’ childhood. On the Planet Ann Arbor, it is very common for married partners to use different last names and sometimes *neither* of them match the children’s names. I just didn’t care what people called me, cFam, FinFam, Mouse’s Mom, whatever, as long as it was polite.

Alas, whenever The Commander gifted me with something, she used the cFam name. This was okay when she wrote me a personal check, like a couple hundred bucks for a birthday gift or whatever. The bank didn’t care. It was not okay with gifts of stock or transfers of property. At least not eventually. I won’t detail how difficult it was to live through my family’s annus horribilis year (or three) when I was besieged with fugly lawyer letters passive agressively accusing me of things I didn’t do. As a side issue, I had to get my name corrected in a whole bunch of places. Fortunately by that time, I had a persistent young lawyer who figured it out and very capably managed it for me.

That aside, there are a still a few places where my name needs to be corrected. So I am working on that.

Parents everywhere! Please please please please respect your children’s choice of surname when they marry and please *use* their *legal* name when making official transfers of funds and property. Love you *anyway* Mrs. Commander.

I seem to be on a hiatus from the xword puzzle. I’m not sure why. Two facts… 1) A while back I expanded my puzzles from the NYT to a couple others, New Yorker and maybe Atlantic but I’m not sure about that one. 2) My 2018 iPhone X started giving me problems. It didn’t always respond to my touch and also sometimes it kinda did its own thing. When I noticed that the battery started to swell, I knew it was time for a fix or a new one…

And a new one it was. We were at the moominbeach so there was no Apple Store anywhere near us. We headed into Sault Ste. Siberia to the AT&T store to buy me a new phone and after an interesting experience where the clerk didn’t quiiiite take me seriously about buying a new phone and PAYING for it right then, we walked out with the only iPhone XS (same as my X) they had in the store. Even though the GG was on the same page as me (I thought), he took a nice long nap that afternoon. My wife just spent $1000… We fixed my iPhone X and gave it to someone struggling with an older model.

So, I guess I will get back to the xword one of these days. When I do, it’ll be wonderful because there’ll be soooo many xwords I haven’t done. I am intermittent with xwords. I used to buy paperback New York Times xwords books. When I was a 20-something, I was terrible at xwords and if I didn’t hide them at the moomincabin, my uncles Don and Duke would come by and fill in answers that I didn’t know and sometimes make snarky comments in the page margins. I loved them and I miss them. Later, I remember taking xword books on looooonnnnng trips to Fla with the beach urchins.

I was still bad at the xword in those days. I am better now. I can even usually do the Saturday. Uncle Don and Uncle Duke might be proud?

And we have this thing. ’tis the season.

First, I hope this gal doesn’t mind having her pic posted. I did not ask permission from either her or the pitcher-taker. She went with the GG to the yooperland to snowshow snowshoe this weekend. She’s lookin’ a bit like grandroobly here. Or maybe even Radical Betty. She usually favors her Grandma Sally.

Second, shoeered = showered. Shooering/showering is a good thing although the GG has spent the last two nights in the UU’s house, where he can definitely take a modern shower. Whatever.

I finished the book “The Yellow House” today. It is not fiction but it is a beautiful book that almost reads like fiction.

The Yellow House is about a large black family (12 children) in New Orleans. These folks live in a horrible low income neighborhood as children but there were lots of good times, as the narrator remembers. Hurricane Katrina scatters them. They live through the hurricane but their house does not.

What I liked was that in the end, the siblings and their extended family all seem to get along no matter what had happened to them.

I am not from a black New Orleans family but this family reminds me of a couple of my families. There is my birth fam’s generation of cousins at the moominbeach. And there’s the cFam. My mother-in-law had 10 children. They all get along and I have been blessed to be a part of both families.

This is just the packages that arrived since Monday. There were others, boxed and unboxed. All are now unboxed, none are wrapped. I thought about wrapping them but decided to bag that for a bit. I really don’t want to wrap anything at all (wasteful) but somehow it feels funny to hand out unwrapped gifts on xmas morning.

I. Cleaned. Out. The. Freezer!!!! I’m trying to think how many times I’ve “cleaned out” the freezer since summer. Every single blasted other time, this ended up meaning I looked into the freezer, sifted through everything in there for maybe a total of 30 seconds, and proclaimed that I didn’t need to clean out the freezer. This weekend? I took EVERYTHING out.

I found… A frozen boneless chicken breast plus three baggies of cooked, chopped up boneless chicken breast. The next time I make enchiladas with chicken in them? I hope I remember that all that chicken is in there and not buy more. Like I did last Monday. Four(!) count’em baggies of frozen chicken bones. Why? Well, it’s complicated. We can put meat waste into our yard waste compost bins and I do. But. We don’t *put* the yard waste compost bins out every week so I freeze meat crapola until we *do* put them out. Except. I usually forget. And then the last day for yard waste pickup for the year was yesterday. The do-gooder in me wants to compost whatever I can but this time I put all four baggies of bones in the garbage and I am gonna move on.

I found a lot of other stuff too. I keep thinking we don’t have any food. Wrong. We could eat out of what’s in that freezer for a few weeks. Note that I am talking about the freezer in my side-by-side refrigimatator. We do not own (or need) a separate freezer.

Other bits of cleaning, shopping, and I got my Santa Claus collection out. Again, it is a static collection, mainly The Commander’s collection and some that she gave me. I am not actively collecting Santas.

Lemme see…

I telecommuted this afternoon.

I cleaned out the freezer (more on that later).

I opened about a billion packages received in the last week or so (more on that later).

I walked over to Knight’s to get porterized for dinner.

I got there first and somehow managed to snag a seat at the bar (see pic)!

I was sitting there humming the old song “The Age of Aquarius” out loud but it was so loud at Knight’s that I doubt anyone heard me.

I am home now. One ‘hattan at Knights and a small night cap here at home.

Lots to do this weekend. Glad to be spacified.

G’night. KW

But not mood 🐸 Oh, and not related to uMich Go Blue! 😬

I was gonna take a pic of my dining table, which is piled high with boxes and bags from Amazon Prime and other sellers. Some are xmas gifts, others are mundane household supplies that I can’t seem to reliably find without shopping at two or three stores. I struggle with the conundrum of whether I am contributing less to my carbon footprint by driving around to different stores to find basic supplies or getting them delivered and then having to recycle all the packaging.

I do not have the answer. I don’t think anyone does.

I was about to Go Orange but let’s keep it Blue today. This pic shows what my white quartz counters look like with all the lights out except for the LED string underneath the shelf. The one I can control the color with via my phone. I almost always make it as blue as I can.

Back when I was a teenage-type beach urchin, some of my more sophisticated cousins were into what we called acid rock. Even though I was a serious classical flute player at that time, I loved all kinds of rock music including acid rock. Two of my acid rock faves were Jimi Hendrix and Cream. I wish I could say I was a Lizzo prototype – a serious classical flute player who can meld genres.

But I can’t. I never got there. Oh, there was once, when I was an 8th grader demonstrating the flute to elementary students. I stood on the stage in the old (long gone) Sault High auditorium playing a riff I transcribed from the Amboy Dukes Journey to the Center of Your Mind. I sorta thought playing something from the acid rock genre might grab some attention from the younger kids and actually it did at least for a couple of kids. I am gonna guess the mini-skirt helped too. My band director did not say a word…

Oh where is my checkbook? I was positive that I had some checks around. The paper kind that you have to write using a pen. I usually take a few checks up to the yooperland in the summer in case I need to pay the moomincabin’s share of something, like road repairs, to people who do not use Venmo and probably won’t ever use Venmo. Which is okay! I have known about Venmo for a while now but have only recently acquired it, so send me money 🐽 (just kidding).

Nowadays I write checks something like 2-5 times a year and two of those are to pay property taxes to Bay Mills Township in the yooperland. They have a decent informational website but they do not have an online payment system. If I were a rich, snooty “southerner” (I mean southern Michigander), I suppose I might put my snooty little nose up in the air and sniff about that. But, lemme see… I am a southern Michigander, albeit not a rich one. I am also a yooper! I *get* why Bay Mills does not have an online payment system and it is fine with me. It is a very small township, at least when you compare it to the entity that I pay my property taxes to down here on The Planet Ann Arbor. When you email the Bay Mills treasurer*, you *get* the Bay Mills treasurer, not some bot or whatever.

So I am happy to mail in my tax check a couple times a year. But. Where is my checkbook? The GG found one but I was really surprised there weren’t more around. Do I really have to order more checks? Maybe there is some high-tech way of issuing a check (from me, not via my bank) these days? (If there is, it could well be my company that provides the technology…)

Anyway, I have a check. I will write a check. And mail it. And I guess I will order more checks.

*I had to email the Bay Mills treasurer a couple years after The Commander left the building because, after a couple years of receiving tax bills here at my Planet Ann Arbor address, I did not receive one. Because I am meeeee, I knew when to expect the tax bills, so I knew I had missed one. I emailed the treasurer to try to figger out why I didn’t receive it. She didn’t know but she told me what we owed and of course I PAID IT ON TIME because we sure wouldn’t want “the state” to take property that my grandfather bought back in the early 1920s away from us, would we? 🐸 It turned out that the township treasurer may be responsible for getting the bills in the mail but it is a county office that manages the address list. I paid that county office a friendly personal visit the next summer. After a transfer of the moomincabin property within the family they, for reasons I cannot fathom, changed the address on our property tax bill to my mother’s house in *town*. The house that I had sold a couple years before. After she died. Since I am not exactly sure how the address got changed from The Landfill to the Dillon House in the first place, I asked that they not change it again without contacting me.

G’night. KW

My cube features a loverly view of the lunchroom, which means I can see outside just by looking to the left. So about 4:20 this afternoon, I looked to the left aaaannnndddd… It was snowing to beat the band. Only a few minutes before that, DYKD was leaving for the day and as I looked to the left and said good night to her, the weather was the same fugly gray it has been for most of the last month.

Here is a pic from on my way home on S. State. I was at a dead stop for a few minutes as my northbound lane crawled toward the Notorious State-Ellsworth Roundabout and southbound crawled down to Textile where there was apparently an accident. I dunno how long it took me to get home but it was a longer slodge than usual. And then I got up to this side of town and THERE WAS NO SNOW! (But now there is.) And so it begins.

Back in the day both beach urchins were in the same high school for a year and the senior drove the freshman to school every day in The Indefatigable. One morning there was a fairly significant amount of snow for this area, 3-4 inches or so. Enough to snarl traffic pretty dern well but not enough to close the schools. I was being a Moom that morning, which meant that I was *very* nervous about them driving although I knew it was important that they did. I did ask them to call me as soon as they got to school.

They didn’t call and they didn’t call and they didn’t call. I was imagining all kinds of horrible scenarios. Slammed into a school bus, wrapped around a telephone pole, you name it. I finally got into the POC or whatever and drove over to “follow” them. As I started to turn from Maple to Miller, it became immediately evident WHY I hadn’t heard from the beach urchins. Traffic was backed up ALL THE WAY FROM DOWNTOWN (where school was) TO N. MAPLE (the street I was turning off of). Ain’t nobody going nowhere, at least not fast enough to get into anything more than a minor fender bender, which they DIDN’T. Jeebus, Moom.

Robin in the Rain? I didn’t quite realize it was a Raffi tune until now but here it is. I think it was the GG who first started singing it to our beach urchin when she was a very small child. She liked it at first but very quickly soured on it. I’m not sure it was so much the song itself. I think it was more like we sang it a bit too often and she felt it as a form of teasing. I am sorry 🐽.

Er, I am not a songwriter so I don’t have the rest of the lyrics to Drivin’ in the Snow but that might be a fun writing prodject for me one o’ these days.

So asked boss woman today. This is not the best pic but it does show him in his natural element looking over the balcony at Our Neighborhood Steakhouse looking for, um, cleavage among the arriving customers below. That night (last Wednesday) was a bust (hee hee) because it is cold and dark here at this time of year and everyone is bundled up so this pic is actually staged. I kinda wanted to show the pic of him posing with a huuuge chainsaw p*n*s but that one is a while back.

Anyway, her reaction was that he didn’t look like she expected him to look. I’ll have to delve into that one a bit more. As it was, this was at the annual company holiday lunch and conversations were wide-ranging and ever-changing. I didn’t even manage to get a chance to say that he has a duplicate. But what got the conversation de-railed was the hat. “What does the hat say?” My friends, it says “Black Flies Matter”. *I* think the black flies matter hat is funny but I also understand what a knife edge we all deal with every day when it comes to language. I don’t have the answer to our current culture’s political/language issue but fortunately, my colleagues thought it was funny too. It’s Yooper humor.

This lunch followed one of the worst spec reviews I have ever experienced (but not the worst). Oh, don’t worry, I was not in trouble. It was just nutsy as all getout. The people who wanted the new functionality did not clearly explain what they wanted (and it isn’t their job exactly) and (of course) none of us could remember what the existing functionality was… And then… Our development guys got into a back and forth that none of us could understand. It was friendly but they were both dialing in and one of them was (I think) on a plane to India. I bet he was wishing he was watching a movie and I hope he gets his vacation.

I will sleep on this stuff and make some diagrams tomorrow and maybe we can move forward from there.

In the meantime, enchiladas (the Moosewood kind 🐸) are in the oven and we are listening to folk / Celtic fusion music, including the Cranberries. I miss the Cranberries so much 🧡. We used to rattle around the Great White North with teenagers in the POC, listening to the Cranberries…

My dish pan frustration struck a nerve. I dunno why companies make the decisions they do to discontinue tried and true product form factors in favor of new-fangled stuff. It’s not like you can’t *get* good old Rubbermaid dish pans anywhere, it’s just that you can’t count on going to a full-service grokkery store and pick one up. I LOVE Ace Hardware but it isn’t on my beat. Well, actually it is, since I drive past it every evening commute. But at that time of day the last thing I want to do is hang a louie into a crowded shopping plaza and then try to hang ANOTHER louie back out on to Stadium. For a dish pan? Nope. I just wanna get home!

Anyway, I’m sure there are folks out there who want collapsible dish pans. I actually know one of them but it’s for a speshul purpose, not for a regular chitchen sink (aka MY SINK). I think it’s fine for a retailer to experiment with stocking “new technology” but I think comprehensive grocery stores should be careful about getting rid of “old technology”. Like Rubbermaid dish pans. Jeebus!

Productive day in a slow way. I slow-prepped enchilada stuff for tomorrow night (beach urchin and friend coming for dinner). I went to the Plum early in the day and hand-chopped/Cuisinarted/sauteed/etc. ingredients as I got them out of the bags. And cleaned up dishes as I went (in my new Rubbermaid dish pan), leaving them to dry. Reading Dead Astronauts in between…

The pic is a short tour of the Landfill Chitchen Sink with its new old-skool “sink solution”. The dish soap is from the Lyme Lounge. I normally buy bigger bottles of dish soap. To the right is my compost container. You are lucky that I dumped it and cleaned it this morning. To the left, next to the white sponge and just out of sight, is my melamime foam sponge, aka Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.

In between all of this I let my fingers do the walking as I continued to purchase a few meaningful xmas gifts for the people in my life who have more than they need. I wanted to link to the old “let your fingers do the walking through the yellow pages” ad but I cannot find it…

Oh and there is this, which I am posting without comment.

G’night. KW.