Random bits of my so-called life.

Picking up somebody at Daytwa Metro involves a freeway drive, umpteen bazillion traffic lights, mega-traffic and whatever mayhem the airport decides to throw at you on any particular day.

Once, picking up the GG, there was some kind of “incident” and I had to circle on the terminal road for something like 10 times before I could actually get to the pick-up area. Another time, I was picking up Lizard Breath and there were about a zillion DayTwa po-leeese parked willy nilly in the pick-up area, standing outside their po-leeese cars blowing their whistles. Also the usual 3-4-5 lanes of cars there to pick up passengers. What were those whistles telling us to do? I do not know. No rhyme or reason to anything. Something like the Trump administration.

Today? I picked up UKW from the Chippewa County International Airport, formerly known as Kincheloe AFB, where B52s took off and landed when I was a kid. I could’ve taken a freeway, the I75 SUV Speedway, for a few miles. Instead, the three-way stop in the bustling burg of Brimley was the most difficult traffic of the trip and even that was nothing.

Heading south outta Brimley I located Bound Road and traversed that south a few more miles, then snaked my way over to Kinross, where the airport is located, on Thompson Road. I parked in the pick-up lane with three or four other vee-hickles, got out and leaned on Cygnus so UKW would see me, thinking she might not remember my car but she would certainly remember me. No po-leese anywhere to be seen.

She got in the car and I asked if she wanted to go straight to the moominbeach or have a late lunch at Pickle’s (on the way to the moomin) instead. After 30 hours of travel, Pickle’s won and that was a good choice because it gave the two of us a chance to do a bit of one-on-one “downloading” before we got to the beach. Family talk but also political (anti-Trump) talk.

So what’s wrong with this picture? If you guessed “you parked in a handicap spot”, you win the booby prize. Yes, I did. Neither of us saw that sign when we parked. I mean, there is a lot of vegetation around it but it IS visible. Fortunately the tribal po-leese were not inclined to patrol the Pickle’s parking lot this afternoon. Late afternoon beach and swimming, then a noodle dinner at the Old Cabin finished off the day.

I owe a few people some emails/texts🧡🧡🧡

It was a day I didn’t have to do anything or be anywhere except for going to the Adaawegamigowaa up on the res, where I made a great big haul but no shelling peas, alas.

I didn’t really interact with the neighbor cousins until the late afternoon but I’ll likely barge in on them in the evening. I *did* interact with BFF via text and email. My blahg was doing a really weird thing and I could’ve asked the Guru, since he runs the whole shebang, but BFF is his wife so I contacted her instead. I haven’t talked to her in a while and I didn’t know how much I NEEDED to talk to her, even just text messaging/emailing. And my problem is resolved (via the Guru). It was one of those things I feel like I should’ve been able to troubleshoot by myself but… 1) I do tech work for a living and I am on vacay and 2) I got to text with BFF. (And 3), I had no frickin’ clue🤣)

After that, I got a text from UKW to say they were in line for the ferry. The ferry is the first leg of a loooong trip across country. The last leg of the trip will be a short ride in Cygnus X-1 from the local airport to the moominbeach tomorrow. Or maybe to Pickles if UKW hasn’t had anything of substance to eat in a while. Whatever.

After that, of all the stupid things, I burst into tears. Jeebus. I hardly ever cry about anything. I didn’t cry when my brother, dad, and mom died (in that order). And it’s not like there was anything to cry about. Talking to people you love but hardly ever see is a GOOD THING. I think my emotional state just kind of boiled over for a minute and leaked out my eyes.

There was a wedding on the beach this afternoon. It was a few cabins down at our late friend Barb’s old place. This wedding joined a Piedy child (bride) to an MS child (groom). I’ll let you guess what “MS” stands for in this case. Your first guess might not be right. The Piedy family is lifelong friends with my fam but there are a lot more people in that fam. I know only the *grandparents* of the bride and I interact a lot more with a couple of their siblings. So no, we were not invited and that was just fine with me. After all, I was having a meeeee day and no way was I gonna share that with some bride. Joking and meaning no disrespect. I wish them all the best. My wedding was on this beach too.

It’s been Saturday all day for me. But it is NOT Saturday because WCMU NPR is playing a talk show, not folk music. What it IS, is Wednesday, and the first day of my summer vacation, yay!

Uck, I am usually a good sleeper (unless the GG is thrashing around) but last night was one of THOSE nights (and the GG was not thrashing around, at least he wasn’t thrashing around with me👀). I’m kidding. He was at Hoton Lake with siblings and nieces and nephews and great nieces and great nephews and outlaws of all description. I was not with him because I have my own incoming family members here at the moominbeach. I love his family and miss being there with them. but I need to be with my fam too.

Anyway, just before I crashed out for the night, a text message came in to our family group from our “bonus daughter”, who was in a area that was under tsunami evacuation protocols. After some deliberation, she evacuated but then regretted it when the tsunami ended up being a nothing burger in her area.

I wasn’t really worried about the tsunami and I fell asleep quickly but woke up two hours later and did I ever get back to sleep? I dunno. Maybe. It was a bit windy all night and at one point, I realized I heard seagull cries mixed in with the wind. Okay, it’s morning then. Time to get up. I learned long ago to just ride with non-sleeping overnights. I don’t get them frequently.

So, okay. I got up and outta PDQ and early and… Kitchen and bathroom cleaning. I scrubbed the moomintub (an RV tub, yes really) but it needs attention from the MoominQueen of Bathroom Cleaning. I hung around for a bit waiting to see if new colleague would text that he wanted to meet. He didn’t and that is great although I still feel guilty about missing meeting with him yesterday.

A quick romp through Meijer for a few grocks, then a trip up to Brimley to mail the summer property tax check for the moomincabin and to get cash for the farmers market tomorrow from the ATM at the credit union.

I spent some time on the beach (chilly northwest wind today) and then on the moomindeck with our next door Old Cabin cousins as they waited for one of their sons to arrive with three women. His Significant Other and two other long-time friends. I think he had to meet two different planes at our local airport. which used to be Kincheloe AFB, which launched B52 bombers over our beach (on training missions).

And so after my own loverly leftover dinner I visited the Old Cabin and its guests just about forever. So much fun. G’night.

A volunteer squash is growing out of one of my impatiens pots. I actually think I pulled up a squash plant earlier in the summer. I had no clue what it was. I do recognize the flower on this one. The impatiens seem to be doing very well. Too bad I’m not there to enjoy them but being there would involve sitting in a closed up air-conditioned house. We never got around to potting any impatiens at the moomincabin this year. Very complicated summer with people traveling here, there, and everywhere.

I am technically off for the rest of this week and the next two weeks. Due to a series of snafus that are too complicated to describe, I may have to hop on line for a half hour or so tomorrow. It’s okay. I don’t really have anything much on the schedule for tomorrow except maybe a quick trip for grocks.

I am kinda done done done for the night. Hung out on the beach until almost 8:00 tonight. Will I have enough stamina to watch an episode of something or not. Maybe not. But I’m also kind of done with NPR for the night. Cheers.

The first pic is my old coot walking back from the Doelle end of the beach with his cane or whatever it was. I don’t know what I had done to inspire him to wave his cane at me. The dog’s head is my brother’s old dog Sam, a rescue mutt. I joke that Sam was protecting me from my old coot but he was just as good friends with my dad as he was with me and he is just coincidentally between my dad’s playful cane wielding and me.

And then there is The Commander, who may have had a more serious reason for aiming a cane at me.

The moominbeach is slowly filling in with extended family, with a young cousin arriving last night. More cousins and their friends to arrive later in the week.

How often do you pull your stove and refrigimatator out to clean behind them. That is, if you can pull them out. I pull out the Landfill refrigimatator all the time because it’s the only way I can get the crisper drawers out to wash them. Yes, bad design. I blame us, not Certified Kitchen Lady. Gertrude (the landfill stove), cannot be pulled out.

Today was apparently a cleaning day. Who knew? I had no plans to deep clean, even though this place needs it. The GG aka Suzy Q. Homemaker had other ideas and got into it bigtime. I long ago learned that when he(she?) is on a roll, I had best stay outta the fray and so I did. Windows and floors and sand magnets aka throw rugs and I dunno what else. I did word puzzles and read. I did clean the terlet and bathroom sink.

The entire day was not a work day. We introduced the current next door cousins to the Cozy Corners bar/restaurant in Barbeau, one of our new fave places to eat lunch. One of the Cozy’s features, besides the lake freighters that pass by, is that getting there from the moominbeach requires a beautiful drive on almost totally deserted country roads. No need to go near the bustling metropolis of Sault Ste. Siberia, not that it is all that bustling.

On the way back, we investigated a bitcoin mine that is in a conflict with a charter school across the street/highway because apparently bitcoin mining is noisy. We agreed after pulling up next to it and listening although a whole ton of hay bales were piled in front of it apparently to mitigate the noise. (Hay is a major crop in the eastern yooperland.) I don’t know jack-doodly about bitcoin mining so I didn’t know what to expect this operation to look like. Basically it was six small blocky looking structures lined up in a row. I’m not sure how else to describe it.

Anyway, it was a slodgy day for me but it is a whole lot cleaner around here, no thanks to me. I work tomorrow and Tuesday and then I am off for 2-1/2 weeks. Cheers!

This pic is probably a Piedy great-grandchild water skiing or whatever they are riding on.

When I was a kid, water skiing was a big thing on the beach. Chicken that I was, I did learn to water ski. I will never forget sitting back in the water with skis on and being pulled up by the motor bote. Was I good at it? Nope. Did I like it? Not really. I was pretty freaked out. There were older boyz on the beach who were so good they skied slalom. That means they skied on one ski with one foot behind the other.

My water skiing “career” ended early. I went to camp fire girl camp and was bitten by some kind of frickin’ spider. It was just a little itchy thing at camp. When I came home, I water skied with it and I fell. I was well taken care of but that spider bite got worse and worse and turned into a big fugly cyst-like thing on my inner thigh. I ended up having to go to the emergency department, where they “lanced” it. All kinds of fugly shitola came out and there was a huge rainstorm going on all that day and I was crying my eyes out the whole time.

It was a couple weeks before I could walk without a “stick” (that we found outside somewhere) and I never really tried to water ski again.

When the weather says that, it means the Great Lakes. We had an on-shore breeze going all day and even when it got to be 70 degrees, I was still wearing a Smartwool shirt and a polar fleece vest.

I don’t have much to talk about today. It was a work day and I shluffed off some kinda boring stuff to my new co-worker. Mostly I needed a second set of eyes on work that iDeep and I had already done but also because new co-worker will have to deal with this stuff without me sooner or later and I figgered at least he will know where it all is when when he has to deal with it without me.

After dinner we decamped to the Old Cabin to visit our next door cousins du jour. Lots of talk about flinging parental stuff (and our stuff) and that is about all I have the strength to say at this point.

Next to me at the farmers market🤣 I had to sneak to take this pic because the guy who owns this vee-hickle kept coming in and out of the farmers market in his neon green shirt. Also, he can’t be all bad because he has a stuffed rabbit(?) attached to his front right bumper (just noticed that now).

Not that you would never see a Trumpmobile down on the Planet Ann Arbor but you would be MUCH more likely to see peace signs and rainbows, and “coexist”, etc.

My haul today was whitefish right outta Gitchee Gumee, onions, lettuce, TOMATOES (this early in the summer?!?), cucumber, little potatoes, a few carrots, SHELLING PEAS (AGAIN!), and I fergit what else.

I texted this pic to FinFam (my daughters and bonus daughter/niece and the GG) and one of the beach urchins reminded me of the story that inspired today’s title.

I was up here with the POC. That was my bee-yoo-tiffle Island Teal Chrysler minivan that probably shouldda been lemon colored. It was acting up and I fergit why but it was at the dealer and I borrowed the Traf for the day. The Traf was my parents’ Geo Tracker and Traf is “fart” backwards if you didn’t already figure that out. This vee-hickle is not a Traf but it has a kinda similar form factor.

The parents left to do octogenarian-type errands and when I came up from the beach, there was a post-it note on the table. It was from my dad. It was *written* by my mother. And SIGNED “Jack” by my mother. It said something like, “Don’t drive it over 50 or the engine will blow up!” Ooooookaaaay…

I emailed my brother the automotive engineer and he got back to me PRONTO with, “WHO THE HELL SAID THAT!?!” Of course he knew FULL WELL who the hell said that. The funny thing is that once I got out on 6-mile Road, it didn’t feel all that comfortable going much faster than 50.

I like to be friendly (but not overly chatty) to grocery u-Scan clerks. At the Soo Meijer, I have run into one particular woman a few times and she usually asks me if she can scan one of my items in order to “get her quota”.

I’ve got the routine down now so the last time I shopped and she was there, I asked her if she wanted to scan something and also why she needed to get a “quota”. Her explanation wasn’t unclear but I didn’t totally understand it. After all, I am not a Meijer employee (but just wait🤪). When she said something about “corporate”, I definitely got it. I said, “Oh, somebody somewhere is counting something.” Yep.

Before she left my u-Scan, I tried to scan a bag of coffee beans. No love. I looked at the UPC and it was destroyed. So I asked for help. She couldn’t get it to scan either and she ALSO couldn’t enter the numbers below the UPC. Mainly because they were teensy tinesy and she couldn’t see them well. I decided to try to help her beat the musheen since I see teensy tinesy print very well. So I focused on the numbers and slowly recited them while she entered them. Oops. There was one number that was almost totally obliterated. (The second pic is what we were dealing with.) I squinted at it and totally GUESSED that it was an “8”. DING DING DING! It worked and I won the booby prize. She was so amazed that I got it that she told me on the spot, “YOU’RE HIRED👏

I refrained from telling her that my very first job was cashier in a discount department store. One in which I had to run one of those old fashioned mechanical cash registers with rows and rows of buttons. I refrained from telling her how much I liked that job, which I was very good at. Except for the pay ($1.75/hour). But I was a college student and my parents were paying for the bulk of my lifestyle.

This u-Scan gal is obviously very intelligent and good at her job. All the Meijer folks are wonderful but I feel like this gal is a bit more of a kindred spirit somehow. Grocery jobs may not be brain surgery or rocket science (neither is my job) but they do require a high level of intelligence and creativity. Grocery workers also deal with a lot of crap from rude customers and sometimes incompetent managers and they deserve a LOT more pay. I refrained from telling her that too.

Warm, gentle rain and a light breeze this afternoon and evening. Doors and windows open. Temperatures in the lower peninsula are going to sky-rocket so I will take this. Photo taken from the moomindeck. The GG was in the Lyme Lounge at the time.

Make no mistake. This wasn’t some kind of secret tryst. I’ve been married to the GG for over 40 years and we were heading off to do some mowing on the North Country Trail. He had taken Moooon Yooonit out there to hook the trash trailer up to it and I was just joining him there.

So I went out to the garage, I was greeted by this scene. Expect the unexpected is often the name of the game in our long-time marriage so I wasn’t really all that surprised. Just another moment of WTF?

When I was a kiddo, we didn’t have a garage at the moomincabin. My brother talked my parents into building one. At the time I was advocating for a “bunkhouse”, with a bathroom, and laundry facilities somewhere. I was pooh-poohed. Like always. You’re just a girl. You can’t drive late at night (Cyndi Lauper), yada yada yada. The male members of my birth family prevailed and we got a garage. To be honest, building a bunkhouse with water and laundry would have been a pretty huge endeavor what with putting utilities in and would probably have involved a chainsaw massacre.

So there was some grumping and grousing about the garage (including from yer fav-o-rite blahgger) but in the long run it turned out to be a good thing. It holds a whole bunch of small botes, some of which used to over-winter INSIDE the blasted moomincabin and other places. It was a really handy place to stage stuff from The Comm’s house after she died and we were getting rid of things. And it provides a Man Freakout Chamber for the GG and a place for him to hold court with whoever is walking or driving down the road while he is out there. And the trees between the cabin and the garage have grown up so much I can’t even really see the garage from the deck. I don’t think the “artwork” on the wall is anything my parents owned.

Anyway, the second photo is the finished product. The green amphibian thingy is Froggette, not Froggy. The hat proclaims “Black Flies Matter”. I get the stoopid yooper humor but am not all that amused by it given how divided our country is with such a nut case at the helm. And yes he *is* a nut case and yes our country *is* divided.

We hosted my next door neighbor-cousins for dinner tonight. They are leaving tomorrow for further journeys before they head into the sunset back to Seattle. I love to have people over for dinner the night before they are leaving. Even though I am working this week, it is easy for me to cook and clean up and saves them a couple more tasks in the midst of packing.

We made the dinner party plan yesterday afternoon and so it was the GG who ended up doing what shopping needed to be done. It was BBQ chicken thighs, pre-packaged potato salads from Meijer (they have some good ones), green salad because I have tons of lettuce, etc., from last Thursday’s farmers market over on the res, and peas that I shelled myself on Saturday, also from the farmers market.

It all worked out very well. We spent hours on the moomindeck eating, drinking a wee bit, gabblety-gabbling and watching the sun go down. Fun fun fun and I will miss them when they leave. More family will be coming over the next few weeks. I don’t necessarily believe in “heaven” or that people who have passed St. Peter’s gate can see what’s going on here on the planet Earth but on the off chance that my grandparents could see us here this summer, I think they might be happy.

Not to get maudlin or anything. And g’night!

The eastern yooperland is pretty much trumperland although I have a bunch of friends in the area who, like me, are not and have NEVER been fans of Trump, MAGA, or DOGE.

I am living in a “mixed” marriage. I totally don’t understand how anyone in their right mind could support Trump (and MAGA and DOGE) but I know I am not alone in my mixed marriage. And yet, we somehow get along. Today the GG hooked up the North Country Trail (NCT) utility trailer with the DR mowing musheen and we took off up the shore to Bark Dock, where the GG mowed for about an hour.

After that we headed south to M28, a main artery across the northern yooperland. We needed to turn east at that point and somehow I looked back and saw the DOGE sign. Double-take? Yes. We were looking for a Chippewa County Road facility where the NCT tool trailer was situated and after some fumbling (like going west first instead of east), we found it. I made the GG drive back (a tenth of a mile) to the DOGE sign so I could get a pic. We do not agree “politicallee” but this was too much fun for for him to deny me a photo op, even though he knew I would probably use it to disparate Trump/MAGA/DOGE.

After that, we headed east on M28 and he suggested getting lunch at the Strongs Tavern. Yes yes yes. My BLT and mini bottle of merlot were fantabulous. Home to the moomincabin and eventually the beach. A northwest wind made it ultra cold down there today but my smartwool leggings, shirt, and socks along with a polarfleece jacket kept me cozy.

I was up early and left the moominbeach at 7:13. Dumped off a load of load of recycle, did the laundry, and got a few grocks at Pat’s.

When I was a kid, Pat’s was the A&P. It was probably the grocery store we went to most frequently although we also went to the Red Owl and less frequently the Piggly Wiggly. The A&P was only a few blocks away from my Grandma’s house on John Street but I’m pretty sure she also shopped at the Red Owl and the Piggly Wiggly sometimes. Those stores were all well within the inner perimeter of the small city of Sault Ste. Siberia.

Nowadays the major grocery stores in town are Meijer and Walmart and they are on the outer perimeter of the city, 3-Mile Road. I don’t shop at Walmart (it makes me “dizzy”) but I am a regular Meijer shopper both here and on the Planet Ann Arbor. I didn’t feel like dealing with Meijer today for the few items on my list so I hit up Pat’s instead. It’s much smaller and an easy in-and-out. They always play music from my childhood there. Today it was the Raspberry’s “Please Baby Go All the Way” (I knooww) and I fergit what else.

I did end up at Meijer, sort of. I realized that Cygnus was a bit under a half tank so I gassed up at Meijer. I wasn’t really worried about running out of gas but with the Bay Mart gas station in Brimley being rebuilt I thought I would just get ahead of things.

Back out to the moomincabin to put the laundry and the grocks away and hose out the scummy recycle bin and clean the toilet and wash the lettuce I bought at the farmers market a couple days ago. And… I was about to take my pea shelling operation down to the beach when it started RAINING. Okay. I will never complain about rain and shelling peas on the deck during the rain was loverly.

The GG arrived as scheduled at around six and we ate filet and asparagus and little potatoes and salad and then went over to the Old Cabin to visit those next door cousins for a bit.

The pic is inside the Old Cabin. I spent the first six summers of my life there and many many many more times, us cousins running back and forth constantly from the moomincabin to the Old Cabin. We had so much fun.

G’night, KW

The GG is coming back tomorrow (he’s lonely👀). I don’t have anywhere near the amount of laundry shown in the pic. That is from a long-ago year when the beach urchins were at the moomincabin and every blasted beach towel in the place had been used. Tomorrow I am mainly going because I have no clean underwear left. I even washed one pair out today. TMI?

Going into town from the moomincabin to the laundromat has always been a fun thing to do in my life. When we were little kids, we would go with The Commander to the laundromat and then various shopping expotitions and I fergit what else. Food (homemade PBJ probably) and soda pop were usually involved. We could have just done the laundry at our winter home, a shabby little bungalow down on Superior Street, but there were multiple loads so The Comm wanted to do them in parallel, not serial.

Fast forward to when the beach urchins were little. We went to a different laundromat then and LUNCH at a RESTAURANT was usually in the mix by then, paid for by The Comm. Kids are kids and I vaguely remember one time when the lady who ran the laundromat stepped in to settle a little tiff between my beach urchins. Was I embarrassed? Yes.

By the time the beach urchins were teenagers, The Comm backed off from these excursions. She washed her own lingerie at her winter home, Dillon Street by then. TMI? I wouldn’t want anyone else to wash my “lingerie” either, although mine is basically black smartwool bikini underwear, which is neither sexy nor old lady style. Again, TMI?

Nowadays I do mine and the GG’s laundry and any linens that we use, mainly towels, bathmat, and dish cloths, etc. So usually one laundry basket and tomorrow’s will be a lightweight one.

The second pic is our teenage beach urchins minus one who didn’t really want to do laundry with her baggy old aunt at 0-skunk-30 in the morning, preferring to sleep instead. I certainly don’t blame her for choosing sleep but it was fun to have the other urchins with me.

I switched laundromats *again* a number of years ago, to the fantabulous Up North Laundry, first laundromat in town to install free WiFi (long ago). It also has benches outside so I can do my word puzzles out there while waiting for laundry. And an app to pay for the washers, which are $6.50 a load. A lot of quarters. I am happy enough doing the laundry alone but I miss the days when I had kiddos with me.

It began last night when I texted my next door cousin Jay (I have more than a few next door cousins) that if she texted me in the morning, I would freeload some coffee at the Old Cabin. And so I did.

After that it was a work day in which the dev team once again went rogue on me and did some design work that I wasn’t crazy about. It’s okay. I love the dev team and our application is SPRAWLING and inconsistent in so many ways I can totally understand when things like this happen.

I worked through all of that and then it was 3:30 or so and the Brimley Bay Mills farmers market started at 4:00 and I sorta had to drag myself out to go there. Afternoon is not my time of day to go out, probably because on The Planet Ann Arbor, the roads are clogged with traffic. Not so much here so off I went. And. Score. The two bags on the left are filled with SHELLING PEAS!

It turned out that a facebook friend was there but I missed her. I did encounter a couple of beach neighbors but I am such a focused shopper (asparagus in this case) that they had to just about knock me over to get my attention😵‍💫

The pic also provides a glimpse of the kitchen The Commander designed when we built the moomincabin in 1960. I think it has stood the test of time. I showed a pic of this kitchen to Certified Kitchen Lady when we gutted the Landfill kitchen and she raved about the yellow counters. I chose white and teal for the Landfill but these yellow counters work and Magic Eraser helps keep them clean, especially when somebody spills Angostura bitters on them.

It wasn’t really a beach day today. Windy and chilly but I had a lot of work to do and the moomincabin was a great place to do it. The work “synergy” of everyone being in the same room be damned. Working in the office I worked in was fine but our meetings often started with 15-20 minutes of discussion about vampire movies or video games. Work synergy?

I have been alone here at the moomincabin for a week or so now and nobody has been in the Old Cabin. This is okay with me but there isn’t a lot of traffic around so when somebody drives into our parking area I take notice. Especially if it’s 11:00 PM and a party van drives in but we’ll go there some other time (or not🤪). So when this vee-hickle “droven” in last night (it was still light as you can see), I was like whoooooo?

And then a woman got out of the car. It was my cousin! One of the family of cousins who own the Old Cabin. Also a great big mouse (her husband). OMG! I was out the door! They drove cross-country from their home in Seattle, stopping at Pickles for a late dinner and baseball on TV before they got here. I knew they would be here at some point this summer but I had lost track of when, if I ever knew.

It’s all okay. As they own it they are free to “access” it (crappy lawyer speak) whenever they want and don’t need to tell me when they are coming. I was just ecstatically gobsmacked that someone was next door. I was not exactly lonely (I am working and talking to India and Amazon Woman and my new colleague* all day, after all) but it always feels good when others are here at our homeland. When we were kids we were all running around all over the place all summer.

So here’s a twitter play from another time when someone had “droven” in. Characters are Mouse and Kayak Woman and my dad, a supporting character. Scene is the moomincabin main parking space (where Cygnus X-1 is backed into in the lower right corner of the pic.)

[Mouse runs out the door and across the moomindeck on her way to the beach. But. A car drives in and she stops dead and runs back in to the moomincabin.]

Mouse: Moom, someone has droven in!

Kayak Woman (peering out the window and seeing her parents’ car): Come here and LOOK at who has droven in.

Mouse (after looking out the window and seeing HER GRANDDADDY get out of the car): Oh, it’s just a great big mouse.

The End.

My cousin’s husband is his own person but he has some characteristics that remind me of my dad, that great big mouse. I couldn’t put this into words if I tried but he is a wonderful person and all I could think of when they got out of the car was, “Oh, it’s just a great big mouse.” (And my cousin, of course.) Welcome home youz guyz. We won’t talk about the doors🤪

*I will have to come up with a blahg name for my not-so-new colleague. Florida Man is not the right thing even though that’s where he lives but also I already have a Florida Man (FlaMan).

A Duke Nose Beetle that is, at least that’s what I think it was. I wish I had gotten a photooo but every time it climbed up into my chair, I got freaked out just enough to swish it away.

So, my uncle Duke (my aunt Radical Betty’s husband) was about as fearless as they get. WWII pilot for one. Not sure what all he did in that war but I believe he was involved in the Berlin airlift. He became career Air Force and when Viet Nam rolled around he spent a year over there, flying helicopters in and out of Da Nang, if I have it right. Don’t quote me on any of this! I am not a war historian. I remember hearing about Da Nang ftom the TV but didn’t know my uncle was involved. Probably nobody in the fam knew. I don’t remember WWII at all. I wasn’t born until *years* later.

Duke and Betty met a few years after WWII in a bar somewhere. California maybe? I dunno. “Can we buy you ladies a drink?”. Radical would always slur the words while telling the story.

They married and he fit in well with the FinFam, especially my old coot, who was also a WWII pilot. I can remember them talking about left-wing “something or other” after a plane taking off from O’Hare took a tragic dive. Ugh. After Duke’s service ended, they moved to the moominbeach and built a beautiful ski chalet. My cousins and I were young adults by then and we all had too many good times to tell about in this blahg entry.

Anyway, Duke was not a man who got discomfited easily. But one day a bunch of us were sitting on the beach with Muksaslooie probably slinking around hunting grass snakes or whatever. Suddenly the never discomfited man was totally freaking out! Why? There was a big black beetle climbing into his NOSE! (Dukie was a handsome man but he had quite a large schnozz.) Sand was flying everywhere as he clawed at his nose to get the beetle out of it.

What inspired this post was fighter jets from the Canadian airport flying around our bay this afternoon. I was in a meeting so couldn’t run down to the beach to watch. Like my dad and Duke would have done.

I don’t have a pic of Duke at hand, so that’s Muksaslooie in the pic. Another fearless soul and great friend of Duke, his own personal cat doorman.

This morning, almost six AM. All kinds of crazy bird noise out in the back of somewhere. I couldn’t figger exactly where. It wasn’t crows. It wasn’t seagulls. It wasn’t song birds (a weeeee bit too early for those but they came out a little later). It was not The Raven (GROK GROK). I was thinking it might be our neighborhood turkeys but nobody was gobbling. Just making noise. I opened up the Merlin Bird app on my phone and held it up to the open window. Wild Turkey. Yes. That’s what I thought it was.

After I got up, I glimpsed somebody walking down the beach out the front picture window. I didn’t catch who it was but it had a weird head shape for a human. A few minutes later, I realized that it was NOT a human, it was a TURKEY and it was walking across our front yard. Not a human on the beach. I wanted to get a picture of it but that was not in the cards. I love having turkeys in the neighborhood even if they sometimes gobble at me at five AM.

So here I am on the beach at the end of my work day. The sun is over the yardarm and it is visibly starting to move south again. At the moment there is the thrum of a lake freighter passing by out in the channel.

We’ll talk about air quality alerts and E. Jean Carroll vs. Donald J. Trump some other time. I don’t have the bandwidth for that tonight and neither do you. If the scummy Epstein list is what takes scummy old Trump down, I will be happy but I doubt that it will. He seems to slip out of all kinds of crapola. Not E. Jean though. Badass woman.

Love y’all, KW.

Made another mini-grock run today, this time to Meijer. I didn’t have lima beans on my list because I had kinda given up on them. But when I was done and heading up to the u-Scan, my path took me by the end of the freezer cases that had frozen veggies so what the heck, I’ll check? Lo and behold, the top shelf was stuffed with bags of frozen lima beans. Chicken with succotash is in my future, although they are also good to just pull out of the freezer and boil if you need a quick veggie.

On the radio was a discussion about audio books and whether they counted as “reading” or not. As a “new” consumer of audio books, that caught my ear. I say yes, but. I largely agreed with the consensus. The caveat is when young children are learning to read they need to focus on oh, I dunno, phonics or whatever the kids are being taught these days. I am a phonics fan but I am also not an expert on teaching kids to read. Old bags like me don’t really need practice deciphering the written word so read or listen, whatever floats your bote. I plan to do both going forward.

Although I agree that kids should learn to read words, etc., I don’t think it’s terrible for them to listen to audio books occasionally. Heck there were times when I let my kids park themselves in front of the boob tube. But I am a particularly huge fan of people reading to kids – parents, teachers, older siblings, etc. I’m thinking that kind of listening to books is even better. If you are sitting in you mom’s lap while she is reading to you, you might get the idea that the words on the page are connected to the words you are hearing among other things.

I love to read aloud and loved to read to my kiddos. And anyone else who happened to be around, thinking of reading Indian in the Cupboard to multiple generations on the beach long ago.

There were a lot of people around then but there aren’t this summer, at least not yet, so I am experimenting with audio books. What am I reading right now? Glad you asked🐽 “Not My Type”. It’s a memoir by E. Jean Carroll about a certain businessman politician ugly old asshole who raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid 1990s. In my opinion, E. Jean is a badass. She also reads/narrates her book.

I first heard about her… When did I first hear about her? I don’t remember the year (I think it was pre-covid) but I was driving home from the Jackson Rd. Meijer and NPR was rolling along and this woman was talking about being raped by Trump. I think she was saying at the time that she was coming forward about the incident to let the public know about it but not suing because she puts things like that behind her and moves on (I tend to do that too). Later on she was convinced by various people (George Conway for one) to sue and she did and won.

I am not some kind of E. Jean super-fan but she caught my attention for various reasons too long and complicated to write about. For one thing, she seems totally sharp and articulate (and FUNNY), much more so than her idiot attacker, who can’t open his mouth or keyboard without vomiting a bunch of angry word salad. I VERY loosely followed her trial and I occasionally stumbled upon her long-time advice column, which I loved but never “subscribed” to or whatever. I am greatly enjoying this audio book. I’m sure it would not be everyone’s cuppa, especially Trump sycophants.