Random bits of my so-called life.

A wonderful evening featuring dinner at our fave Grizzly Peak, followed by a little walk up and down a couple blocks of Main Street. With cousins! npJane, Cap’n *Queen* Leila (newly arrived from a summer in Good Old Floriduh, red tide and all), and C*Q*L’s mom. Did I mention that C*Q*L’s brother is starting his freshman year at Umich tomorrow. If. He. Gets. Down here by noon, which is his move-in time. Currently he and his friends are up in the yooperland working on his automotive vee-hickle, which is in about a gazillion pieces. Did I mention that C*Q*L’s sisters have already been delivered to their colleges, where they are also beginning their freshman year? Yes, C*Q*L’s siblings are triplets. Can you imagine sending triplets off to college in three different locations? I cannot. Their mom (my 1st cuz once removed) is managing it all with aplomb.

Lemme see… Way more years ago than I am strong enough to count, we took our oldest beach urchin over to college for her freshman year. I remember cooking a bunch of breakfast type stuff the night before so we could simply heat things up in the morning. Guess what? In the morning? NO ONE COULD EAT ANYTHING!

Upon arriving at Kzoo College, we found that we had to schlep all of her stuff up something like four flights of stairs. We *could* have enlisted the help of various student athletes but nooooooo, we were tough, we could do it ourselves. Jeebus. For whatever reason, the GG was all roto that day (don’t you need to go get your ID and/or do this or that or this other thing). The beach urchin finally pulled me aside and stage whispered something like, “Can you get dad to settle down?” I’m not sure I did. He was acting like he does when he is under the stress of a major life change and I was kind of “underwater”, as I (usually) get under those same conditions. Yes, really.

At the end of that day, when we got back to the Landfill, I had to go and manage some YAG auditions. I left the GG sitting in the beach urchin’s old room with a ‘hattan. Shell-shocked? I dunno. In truth, I was also very nervous about leaving my child at college. I was somehow thinking she was still the shy(?) little *4-year-old* kid I left at kindergarten all those years ago. The 4-year-old kindergartner who did just fine despite her teacher’s initial “horror” at her young age and small size. The 17-year-old college freshman was absolutely fine at college and has grown into a wonderful well-adjusted adult and responsible citizen of our country and planet.

Oh yeah, we may not have been able to eat the wondrous breakfast I had pre-cooked that morning but we did end up eating a late breakfast in the college cafeteria with all of the other Planet Ann Arbor parents who were also dropping their kids off there, all friends of our kid. We were all pretty relaxed by that time.

I have been blissfully spacified since last Thursday. Today I came home and the blasted AIR CONDITIONING was on!!! Reason? The GG (who arrived home from Kneff Lake today, it’s near Grayling and there may have been a cougar there) was home and wanted me to “cool down”. Do I really need to remind him that I spent the day in an air-conditioned building and automotive vee-hickle? Me hot? Not. And it is not REALLY that hot outside. 89 degrees? Yeah, they’re telling us the heat index is closer to 100 but I don’t believe it. It’s too windy. Anyway, y’all know what’s just around the corner, roight? Here in the Great Lake State, we gotta soak up the heat while we can.

The quarters in the first pic represent one of my most important tasks before we travel to the moomincabin for our big summer trip. I can get by without doing laundry for a week (although I do wash out underwear by hand if I need to (TMI?)) but two or three usually requires a trip or two to the laundromat. I have been wanting to install laundry facilities at the cabin for a few years now but we don’t quiiiiite have plumbing or lucky-shuckial facilities available, so I schlep everything into town to the wondrous Up North laundry instead.

I don’t shovel much silver these days. I keep one dollar bills around for Farmer John or bus fare but when somebody gives me change, I don’t know what to do with it. Except for quarters! I save those for the laundromat. So, the Sunday before we last went north, I shoveled out the change basket (next to the key basket) and sorted everything out. Dimes, nickels, and pennies went to the Coinstar musheen at Meijer. Quarters went into a baggie for the Up North Laundry.

The second pic is a blast from the past. For whatever reason, the Beach Urchins always usually liked to help with the laundry even though I made them get up ultra early for teenagers. So here are Mouse, Lizard, and Pengie. Back in those days, I used to fill up three triple-loaders plus a small musheen for grandma’s undies, etc. I think we were folding at this point in the pic. This was a different laundromat, good for a very long time and then not-so-good so I switched to the Lockview Up North. But I miss those days so much.

I like the Up North laundromat. It was okay when it was the Lockview but I think the new owners do a better job. As much as I enjoy sorting out quarters and schlepping them around in a baggie, I yearn for a better payment system for the laundromat. I can pay for parking in Sault Ste. Siberia with an app, why not a laundromat? Or maybe just musheens that can read my debit card. I am sure that this technology exists in the world, just not at this laundromat. Don’t get me wrong, I am not dissing the laundromat at all. I am sure that it would be expensive to re-do their payment system, which might require them to replace their venerable old musheens.

Cheers to finagling another week (or most of one) at the moomincabin to end the summer. No laundromat needed on our next trip.

Flag at full or half mast? I dunno much about actual flag protocol but if you are putting it up and down willy-nilly, it just looks stoopid. Almost like there is a big tug of war going on inside the White House. Like people are trying to explain to Orangey that the flag should be kept at half-mast until the funeral is over and they think they have him convinced but then he puts it back up again. This isn’t about your petty little personal differences with McCain, prezzy. Appearances doooooo matter, at least in this kind of situation.

I am not going to go on and on lamenting McCain’s death. I am *not* lamenting it and don’t even have a well-formed opinion of him. People who actually knew him can lament (or not). I *am* annoyed that the stable genius occupying the White House would disrespect someone who spent five years in an enemy prison camp. What the heck would Trump have done if he were shot down and captured in the manner that McCain has described? I can only guess he might have been quite a different person than the prez I love to hate.

Was McCain a good or bad person? Like most of us, I believe he was both. A thing I like? There is a viral video going around from the 2008 Obama/McCain presidential race that I remember when it first occurred. You’ve probably seen it. A woman at a McCain campaign rally said that she didn’t trust Obama because he was an “Arab” and McCain countered that, no, Obama was a “decent family man” and they simply disagreed on various policies. As the video recently resurfaced, Twitter quickly pointed out that “decent family man” is not the opposite of “Arab”. I *totally* agree but I also think that in the early 21st century media climate, we can’t expect people to spontaneously respond to random questions with eloquently phrased well thought out answers. I would be going bdah bdah bdah if I were asked that question. Duh, where’s my spreadsheet, etc.

That is a long way of saying Mr. McCain has done and said some things I agree with. Twitter talks about other things he has done that I don’t like so much. What I do like is that he seemed to have at least some common sense and a willingness to speak up honestly about things he felt weren’t right.

I am sorry. I broke two of my blahgging “rules”. I talked about polly-ticks and a celebrity death. In one blasted post! It is much more interesting than what is going on around here at the Landfill (nothing much except it’s hot and the “cougar cat cam” is not following me any more) or Cubelandia (nothing you want to know about).

Updated to add this loverly hairy mushroom pic the GG sent from his campsite at Kneff Lake (which I am about to google because I have no clue where it is).

OK, sometime in the late morning, I figured out that the grumpy growler’s evo cam was pointed at my kitchen. I dunno what took me so long. I’ve been stumbling over that thing and its plug for a while now. Why is it pointed into my chitchen? I do not know! I am really kinda irritated that I am apparently being surveilled. Does he think I am entertaining a boyfriend here or what? Jeebus!

The pic is not what the evo cam took but it is similar. I “hacked” a bit into evo cam but did not pursue it to a great extent and I couldn’t figger out how to get the actual evo cam pic ported over to my MacBook or phone.

My mouse often cans tomatoes in my kitchen at the end of August. I love when she does that but it didn’t work out this summer and she knows she is welcome to use my chitchen whenever she wants, whether I am in town or not. We all struggle with when/how to arrange work schedules and paid time off. I was happy that the beach urchins were able to arrange some good time at the moominbeach this summer 🧡🧡🧡

Lizard Breath and I had a conversation a while back about the kinds of dishes broccoli is appropriate in. We pretty much agreed that it does not belong in things like enchiladas or lasagne.

I have to admit that I have never thought about putting broccoli in either of those dishes before and I doubt I will ever put it into either of them. I love broccoli. I liked it well enough as a teenage child but it was also then that I discovered that it was a cure for a garlic hangover. The Commander used to make garlic bread with minced garlic and it was good but once, I got a big enough chunk of garlic clove that it stayed with me throughout the whole next day, walking down Superior Street and on to the old high school and whatever. A dose of broccoli got rid of the garlic.

Back in those days broccoli mostly came in a rectangular frozen form so that’s what I cooked for myself in the shabby old Superior Street kitchen. Nowadays the only veggie I buy frozen is peas and every time I buy frozen peas, I lament the short period of time I can buy peas to shell at the farmers market.

Broccoli is pretty good plain or sometimes in noodle casseroles or the wonderful salad my aunt Katie used to make. It doesn’t work in lasagne or enchiladas.

I am reading a book, The Overstory, in which a an otherwise wonderful character creates a broccoli almond lasagne for his wife’s lunch. Um, not.

No broccoli was used in the pic. These are pizzas that our cousin’s SO engineered for dinner at the Moomincabin. They found eggplant at the Sault Ste. Siberia Meijer, so they made eggplant parm too. We ate so well that night!

P.S. After sleeping on it, maybe broccoli would go in lasagne, properly cut up. But not almonds. I like spinach, mushrooms, and pattypan squash (or carrots) in veggie lasagne.

The last weeks of August are often a “downtime” for me at Cubelandia and this year is no exception. I have a LOT to do but for the most part it doesn’t feel like very productive work. I’m mostly picking away at updating our high fidelity prototype to reflect a recent product facelift. That means a LOT of html/css/javascript coding. Some days it’s interesting, other days, it’s mind-numbingly boring. By the time Friday rolls around, it is usually mind-numbling boring, at least in the afternoon.

I have to add to that the recent death of Amazon Woman’s mom. AW is my [awesome] supervisor and her mom’s death was not unexpected. The last few weeks have been the horrible waiting game that comes with an expected end-of-life decline. I know about that because I have been there done that a couple times. To respect her recent bereavement, I won’t go into detail about it even though I highly doubt she knows of this blahg’s existence. At any rate, she has been out (appropriately) a lot the last couple weeks and will be out (appropriately) for the most part next week. We miss her but we can cover for her. Rest in peace and Godspeed to her mom.

So, I porterized myself over at Knight’s tonight. Reservations were booked up so we tried our luck as walk-ins. That seemed okay when I got there. I put my name in as “Curtis” (Courtois) and they said 25 minutes. After quite a bit more than 25 minutes, we still weren’t seated but then Mr. Porter went to ask how long the wait would be for the “Curtis” party and we almost immediately got a table and Porters this and that and whatever. How is this and how is that and is this table okay and yada yada. They didn’t seem to have “Curtis” on their list… I think the next time I go to meet the Porters over at Knight’s without a reservation, I should just give “Porter” as the name. On the other hand, Knight’s might not recognize meeeeee as one of the Porters. This is all okay. A good time was had by all.

Take what? Lemme see…

The Smartwool hoodie vest that I went thru holy hell to order yesterday arrived today! The site would NOT accept either paypal or my credit card. I tried multiple times from two devices. I’m sure it was user error but I couldn’t figger out what the error was. Finally I started from scratch and wallah voila (wallah is NOT A WORD!), it was on my porch when I got home today! Yes, I did do express shipping. It was freeeeeeee, which meant it was cheaper than the longer options 🐽 Go figger.

CheezeMouz. I bought her at the Sault Ste. Siberia summer art fair a couple years ago. That art fair used to be an event not to miss back when The Commander was still around. Everyone anywhere near the moominbeach made it a point to go there and I bought numerous Annie Hubbard prints there, and earrings, before my fave jewelry artists died. This year we were occupied with saying goodbye to various guests that day and I totally forgot about the art fair.

New shed? It always amazes me what people glom on to when I post stuff on any form of social media. When I posted pics of the treefall on our shed, I just figured it was a humorous post: “tree fell on crappy old shed, no one hurt, chainsaw guy does whatever, haha”. On facebook people kept saying I should bug our homeowner’s insurance company for money. We have had two trees fall on our house in history and we have bugged the insurance company both times (plus when the 1997 ice storm took out a bunch of appliances, etc.). They have always paid. This time, this incident, we are not going to bother. It’s just not worth it [delete long explanation – you’re welcome].

Oh yeah. YOU GO JEFFIE! And I do not mean Mrdeeds, my co-worker who is NOT in Washington. It’s about time that JBS (you know who he is) grew a blasted backbone (and a pair o’ you-know-what) and stood up to the Master of Word Salad Twitter Attacks. Thank you for remembering that the organization you are charged with running works for the people of the United States, not the president, and thank you for speaking up. Keep it up. Your descendants will be proud of you and if the Orange Baboon faaaars you, you can always “write” a book. Like Omarosa did…

Okay, an acquaintance via Sam (archaeologist, not dog) and the Guru is a professional writer with a personal blog and she wrote about something the other day that knocked me back a bit. I mean back in history. I will link to the entry that knocked me back but her blog is well worth a regular visit. I have been reading it for years (15 years?) and am an occasional commenter.

First of all, long enough ago that I am not strong enough to count the years, King Tut made a visit to Chicago, the field museum if I have it right. I haven’t been in Chicago for quite a number of years, probably since we dropped Mouse off at O’Hare for her flight to Senegal*. This was an opportunity that could NOT be missed according to highly cultured people like Radical Betty and The Commander and so a little convoy of vee-hickles made its way down from the yooperland to Chicago. I *think* I was driving my crappy old Pinto Wagon but maybe I was driving something my parents owned that might’ve been a bit more reliable. My brother would remember, alas.

As luck would have it, one of my cousins and her family owned a loverly home in Michigan City, Indiana, which is along the shore to the east of Chicago. No one would be at her home that weekend, so we descended upon it as our base of operations (oh, of course we had permission!). I fergit all of the details of that weekend. The exhibit was crowded as all getout and I envied my tall skinny old coot for his ability to stand behind shorter people and look down at whatever it was and therefore move through the exhibit more quickly than I could. Oh yeah, there was the time the toddler ran up to me and GRABBED ME AROUND THE LEGS, mistaking me for her mother. That is she mistook my legs for her mother’s legs. Beyond legs we didn’t look ANYTHING alike.

Like my old coot, I am not a very good museum person. Well he did like airplane museums… I take things in very quickly and shallowly (is that a word?) and then I want to get outta there. Still, after all these years, I am glad I took the opportunity to go to that exhibit.

So then, after the exhibit, we got back to Michigan City. It was dinner time and we wanted something more than fast food, like a good steak. We were driving around in the downtown and things seemed absolutely dead around there. My good old Uncle Duke spotted a bored looking cop walking around and flagged him down, figuring he would know where to get a decent meal. I’m sure the cop sized up the baggy old gray haired folks in the car and he directed us to what had to have been the Maxine and Heinie’s restaurant mentioned in Nancy’s blog.

I remember good food, cocktails, and service. I do not remember any singing dog videos. What I do remember is a TV set (or maybe multiple sets) broadcasting Lawrence Welk at top volume. The folks in our older generation (at the time) were *not* Lawrence Welk fans at all but after an initial moment of aghastness (I know that’s not a word 🐽), they laughed uproariously and a good time was had by all. “That cop had us pegged as baggy old Lawrence Welk fans!” said Radical Betty or whoever. Actually, I think he did have us pegged but not necessarily as LW fans.

*If you have read this far, click here to read about our September 2007 journey from The Planet Ann Arbor to Chicago O’Hare to (ulp) send our Mouse off to Senegal for a six-month study abroad. Her iPod had died in the middle of the night before… The iPhones I talk about in the post are our FIRST iPhones! How many have we owned since then? I cannot count. We have Xs now.

This sandhill crane hung out on the planters outside the Cubelandia lunchroom for probably 20 minutes or so. Its partner is there too but stayed on the ground. You can see it if you look carefully and/or embiggen the pic.

This event of course brought every iPhone in the building out. These are only a few of the folks (not including yers trooly) that took pics of the crane. We do not think the crane could see us inside the window but who knows.

I’ve been blahgging for a long time and there are days when I am not sure what the heck to write about. And then something like this happens. I can’t say I have a lot of words about it but I think the pics suffice.

Love y’all, g’night, KW.

And that would mainly be the GG this afternoon when a tree fell outta the woods onto our loverly crappy old shed. There was no wind anywhere. As trees sometimes do in our Weird Woods, it fell down all by itself. It’s okay, we have been wanting to replace this shed for a while anyway, meaning we have been arguing about it. I want a folly, albeit a rustic one. I do NOT want a Home Depot type metal or even wood shed. We’ll see what we end up with.

This is the third tree that has fallen in our yard. The two previous trees also hit our house, causing us to hire roofers and whatever to fix the damage. Today’s tree fell out of the woods behind the house and so wasn’t close enough to hit the house.

I grew up in a forest on the shores of Gitchee Gumee and although trees occasionally fall down there, none have ever fallen on the moomincabin (hope I am not jinxing myself here) and I have only personally witnessed one tree fall. It was a birch tree. It fell on a beautiful warm windless October day. It didn’t fall *over*. It simply imploded into itself. The Commander and Radical Betty and I had just finished closing the moomincabin for the year and we were enjoying fancy take-out food and whine from Karl’s Cuisine on the deck when it happened.

Here at the Landfill, we have a Weird Woods behind us. Tree incidents that I can think of offhand? The time a tree got waterlogged and kind of imploded upon itself (like the moomincabin birch tree, I guess), taking down power lines with it, which caused a huge bunch of lucky-shuckial sparking behind a neighbor’s house and small faaaaaars in backyards a couple blocks away. Then there was the time lightning hit a tree in the woods and SPLINTERED it, sending sharp slivers of wood shrapnel throughout a block radius. One of those sticks shattered the Frog Hopper’s sun roof. There are more weird stories about our woods but I’ll stop there.

After a day and a half of hard weekend label labor (label?), The Pensioner decreed that we were heading out to The Session Room for a wee bit of Sunday afternoon decadence. I had been thinking of doing a similar thing but was kind of waiting for him to make the call. Although Sessions was not crowded overall and we easily got a seat at the bar, the front section was overflowing with women. Shower, I thought. I didn’t really try to ascertain whether it was a wedding or baby shower. I didn’t really care. People were having fun and that’s all that mattered🧡

The GG wasn’t sure what the heck was going on. I explained that it was a shower and he was kind of dumbfounded that there were so many people. Well. Okay. He is one of 10 siblings. His family gives huge, lovely showers for weddings and first babies (after one child, people have enough crapola). cFam showers are usually (but not always) held at restaurants and I can imagine that other customers walking into the restaurant might wonder what the heck is going on and why so many people are there.

But as I sat there marveling that the GG had no clue what was going on, I was thunderstruck by the realization that IIIIIIII am the person who attends cFam showers, not the GG. So how *would* he know anything about wedding/baby showers. We eventually ascertained via spying the mom-to-be holding up a onesie, that it was a baby shower. I mean an infant-sized onesie, not an adult-sized onesie. Yes, I believe adult onesies are a thing. I’m sorry. (Actually I never knew what a onesie was until the last couple years. We had them for our kids and my mouse had a particularly cute fishie onesie but I’m not sure what we called them back then.)

I’m not exactly sure what all the GG has done in the last few days but this photo represents the result of one of his efforts. The “sidewalk” you see there was previously *completely* covered by overgrown plant life. This is but a teeny tinesy area of the northern Landfill side yard but it is pretty darn beauteous!

We also took a River Ride this morning, one that meandered out past Dexter and down to Swan Corners and slowly back on the smallest roads we could find. The Ninja has six gears but it does not have a creeper gear. We emulated creeper gear the best we could, purring along through the beautiful uber-green terrain of the dog days of summer.

I spent much of the morning busily occupied in the Landfill back yard “processing” fresh veggies I bought from Farmer John at work and the farmers market this morning. Lemme see… Basil for two batches of pesto, one to eat tonight, the other to freeze, and green beans and chopped green pepper to freeze. We also have eggplant and corn and lettuce and fancy heirloom tomatoes and patty-pan squash and the cutest li’l red cabbage on earth (said Helen from Lake Divide) and I fergit what else but we’ll be eating all of that stuff within the next couple days.

The Landfill Refrigimatator’s freezer was virtually empty this week (so was the fridge, actually). That was by design and I am starting to fill up the freezer for the hardland of the winter. I don’t freeze a lot of stuff, just what I think we might use. In general, the grocery stores around here do a pretty good job in the winter and the farmers market has lettuce pretty much year-round. Lettuce is the main thing I am picky about. I prefer it fresh outta the ground from local farmers, I don’t mind washing it, and I do *not* want whatever was in that packaged romaine last spring. E. Coli, I think.

The GG wants me to blahg about the neighbors and, after some consideration, I think I will. I am pretty sure they don’t read my blahg or even know it exists. In fact, I’m not sure they read much of *anything* (channeling The Commander a bit here, from my childhood in the rugged yooperland outpost where I was raised). I’ll formulate it as a Twitter play.

[Shrieking is heard across the street]
@gg Like mother, like daughter.
@kw Which mother and which daughter? There are four generations of females living in that house.

I have to note that the great grandmother is maybe pushing 60. At any rate, these [long time] neighbors are apparently driving the GG nuts. I am more inclined to put it all down to a bit of neighborhood diversity. I’ll let y’all guess in what way they are diverse. It is probably not what you might be thinking 🐸

Oh, that loverly veggie in the pic? That is a tomatillo husk! Nothing much inside it yet but we are optimistic. Also, a lot of our tomatoes are reddening up!

So, I am not ready for the “R” word quite yet but a few ideas for What To Do Next have been noodling around through the back of my mind nevertheless. I know a lot of people who have known me since forever might think I will pick up my flute again and I may indeed do just that. There is a lot of interesting music out there that wasn’t around when I was studying music all those years ago and I may want to try some of it out. I think Titanium Pinky will do just fine.

But then there are visual arts like drawing and painting. I spent hours doing those things as a small child and I don’t think I was all that bad at them but then music (and boyz (and even mathematics)) took over my life in a huuuuuuuge way and drawing, etc., got left by the way.

This summer Lizard Breath bought starter watercolor kits for some of us cabin gals (me, her, Mouse, and C*Q*L). In true form, we were all so busy connecting with friends and relatives, not to mention Cabin Life, that we didn’t get around to using our kits until the last couple days if at all. On the last day, I hung at the moomincabin while the GG and the beach urchins did a north country trail hike. I needed some alone time and after I was done with shopping and a garbage run out to the res and I dunno what else, I broke out my water color kit and this is one of my 10-minute wonders. If you are at all familiar with the moominbeach, you may recognize a shrunk-down version of our waterfront view out toward Whitefish Point, from Iroquois Point to Round Island to Gros Cap (Cananananada).

This is probably the first time I have done anything with watercolor paints since I was about 10 so there was a learning curve associated with brushes and water and whatever. Just opening the package was a challenge 🐽. As the title suggests, I will not be quitting my day job any time soon but this was just so much FUN!!! I left my paint kit in my beach basket for the next time I am up there, which will be the last for this year. Alas.

I guess this guy is the antithesis of the one non-poisonous insect that I am phobic about (if you know, sshhh, don’t tell🐗). He is so, I dunno, thin. I was schlepping the compost out this morning when he caught my eye. For a split second I thought he was just a little stick but something made me go back inside for my phone for a pic and information. I do think he is a walking stick.

I am a little concerned that he is still in roughly the same place this evening. I hope he is alive. I’m not sure an exterior Landfill wall is his natural habitat. And then there was The Pensioner, who landed today Lyme Lounge in tow. When I said, “The walking stick is still here”, he came out to see what I was talking about and thought it was the broom that hangs a few feet away. Nope. I always thought brooms were flying aids🐽

That’s about enough I think. G’night.

It actually isn’t all that parched around here, at least not in the Landfill yard. Other folks in the area have different opinions. My impatiens are voluptuous and we have tomatoes up the wazoo although I have found only a few ripe ones yet. (Of course, it’s possible that our plants were watered a bit while we were away. TX if that is so. If not, our plants did well on their own 🐸) But rain? The forecast earlier today was for rain to begin at something like 3:00 AM. But then I got a weather alert a while ago that was talking about popup tstorms well south of us. Not gonna hit us, I thought. Now the wind has come up a bit and the skies are looking darker. We’ll see what develops.

I got to meet MMCB for COOOOOOFFFFFEEEEE this morning for the first time in a month. It’s not about the coffee although I look forward to my mid-week coffee fix. Just that these are friends that I have known for a bazillion years that I can kvetch to about stuff that my fam is taaaarrred of hearing me kvetch about. They do reciprocal kvetching and we all laugh uproariously (or tsk if that is more appropriate).

Okay, I just heard a bunch of nuts or whatever landing on the metal roof of the shed in the back of the yard. I yelled, “What the f*ck?” And then… Because I thought I could hear 3-year-old Becquet in the next yard, I yelled something like, “What are you squirrels doing?” It is up to her parents to introduce the F-word to her, not me. (I’m guessing they already have because life, even 1st world life…) I remember once when one of the beach urchins was still using a bottle from time to time. She was able to find her own bottle by that time and once she encountered one that had been forgotten somewhere in the moomincabin and went stale and rotten. She told her grandmother (The Commander) that she didn’t want that “shitty old bottle”. You might be able to guess that The Comm, who was [arguably] careful not to use any swear words in front of her own children, gnoffed and gnoffed and gnoffed.

Followups? 1) I keep my passwords in an iPhone app. I know that if the apocalypse happens, I won’t be able to dredge them out but if the apocalypse happens, it won’t matter because we won’t have the internet anyway. 2) Long skirts (or even skirts in general) are not for everyone. I love them but I am careful about not tripping over them.

Hokay… After two mornings without orange juice, I had to make a grokkery run after work. And then. I folded the (clean!) moomincabin laundry. That was not a problem (for any little pitchers with big ears who might be listening in). Laundry is a no-brainer. Well, except that it was hot enough that my legs started to sweat under the long skirt I like to wear after work. Hot here today although I doubt it’s 93 like Mr. Faaaaarwood told the GG on the phone today. More like 88, maybe. Anyway. The problem with the moomincabin laundry is that I have almost completely lost track of what sheets we have (The Commander is NOT smiling down on me at this moment), except for some single bed sheets the beach urchins bought at Tarjay a few eight(!) years ago. I will not go into detail. A part of me wants to re-a-start the whole sheets thing at the moomincabin and buy a couple sets of sheets for each bed. But we have also kinda been re-thinking what kind of beds we have there and what kind of beds we neeeeeed. And then there’s the water-heater-in-bedroom situation… Complicated issues that need “requirements” and “prioritizing” sessions. Do I sound like a prodject manager? (Don’t answer that!)

Anyway, when I got home, do you think I could open my Disco Lock? Nooooooo. I got home on Sunday after being away for three weeks and my phone opened Disco Lock like a charm then and since then, it has been locking and unlocking like nobody’s business, including this morning. This afternoon? It wanted me to LOG IN! Do you have any idea how hard it is to log in to an app on an iPhone X when you are standing outside your [locked] front door juggling, lemme see: work laptop, purse, lunchbag, mail, grokkery bag? Without dropping the [expensive] iPhone X? Not happening. I used the physical key to get in, put all of my cosmic debris down, looked up the password for Disco Lock, and re-opened the app. Problem? They had apparently done an update!!!!!!!! WHY DID YOU GUYS NOT TEXT ME about the blasted update? I could’ve looked up the blasted password and logged on to the app from work or at least I’d’ve known I would need to put my blasted pw in (or use the physical key). First world problems, I know.

Skirts are warm! We were sitting on the moomincabin deck last Saturday night and npJane was chilly. She said something about going home to get long pants on and I countered with something like, “You can borrow one of my long skirts!” and she took me up on it. npJane has been known to wear dresses and skirts but I think she is mainly a pants person. She wears them well and I doubt she would ever wear my long blue skirt out in public but she ROCKED it that night. It even matches her flip-flops. Is there a beer in the pic? Move along folks, nothing to see here.

I hope this fish-fly wing/carcass pic doesn’t creep anyone out. I am afraid of VERY few non-poisonous insects (I help spiders to safety frequently) but there are a couple of surprising insect species that I am horribly phobic about and when some of y’all post pics of them, I recoil in horror. I think this creature was smashed onto the side of the moomincabin refrigerator for probably a few weeks before I finally saw it. The tape (or whatever it is) is almost more gross. Nevertheless, I did not “clean it up”. I’m not sure if Suzy Homemaker took care of it after I left or not. Once we were at Hoton Lake in March and I decided I was DONE with skiing for the year, so I cleaned out the refrigerator and there in one of the crisper drawers was a fish fly from nine months before. I have no clue how that guy managed to hide from The Beautiful Gay for all those months.

On the flora side of things, it seems like we might get a few homegrown tomatoes and peppers here this year! No pics today but our yard is challenging for growing veggies but nevertheless, HE persisted, so this is a win!

What else? Oh yeah, butt in seat… My work BF and I both landed from a few weeks outta town today. Apparently I wasn’t expected until tomorrow. I must’ve given the wrong date. Oh well. Not only was he outta town, he was outta country. His out-laws have a place in Cananada. You drive up to Sault Ste. Siberia, go across the International Bridge, hang a right, and head down Highway 17 East a way and then In Country to beautiful glacial lakes. They do not have lucky-shucky or indoor plumbing and have to open and close the place during the couple weeks they spend there each summer. This is a multi-generational family property like the moomincabin and therefore priceless and my friend seems to appreciate that 🧡

I have FINALLY put a load of laundry in. I was gonna do that this morning but I didn’t get up until 7:00 AM! I was “late” to work as it was, albeit not as late as the CRD thought I was when he encountered me returning from a lunchtime errand and apparently thought I had just arrived for the day.

Sorting the mail? I had the mail held for three weeks. It came today. I opened up the recycle cart and placed the pile of mail on the top of the adjacent garbage cart and started flinging. I cannot tell you how many pieces of mail were in that pile but I think I flung about 98% of what was in there, mostly catalogs and polly-tickle flyers and other random pieces of spam. I think I saved maybe seven pieces of mail and I even recycled the envelopes for the three (?) pieces of mail out of that seven that were addressed to me. How not to be a hoarder, #1! Go me!

This photo is a bit more boring than some of the other ones I’ve posted recently but at least it is colorful, right?

I cannot count how many times today I said [to myself and Frooggy, who was riding shotgun but was NOT much help] things like, “What the HELL is going on now?” or “G-D-it!” or “Holy Crap!” or simply “*sshole!”. Can you guess where I spent my afternoon? If you guessed Southbound I75 SUV Speedway on a SUNDAY, you win the booby prize. The absolute worst was when we were in a s-l-o-w-d-o-w-n and I glanced in my driver’s side mirror and was horrified to see some yahooooooo coming within inches of sideswiping (or worse) my Ninja as he wildly wove in and out of the S-L-O-W traffic. I watched with bated breath as he nipped back into the lane to the left and then back into my lane, which was also the lane that both of the beach urchins were traveling in, directly in front of me. PLEASE don’t hit my children. He didn’t. Whew!

I dunno. It wasn’t the worst trip down. Mainly a few short slowdowns. Until. Dun dun dun. Mouse and I were a few miles north of The Planet Ann Arbor (Liz parted ways with us in Flint). In fact, if I had exited onto North Territorial and taken Whitmore Lake down to Joy and cut over to N. Maple, I’d’ve missed it all. My Mouse was still ahead of me and there is enough Mother Bear stuff still in my soul that I couldn’t “abandon” my (30-plus) child to ride out a traffic jam while I took the beautiful back roads. I know that sounds stupid. I bet Mouse thinks it’s stupid. Still. A long time ago, someone said, “Once you are born from a mama, you are STUCK to her.” It works the other way ’round too. (Disclaimer: it was NOT Mouse who said that. She was more likely to say something like, “I’m going to go find aNOTHER mother!”)

Anyway, the map looks worse than it was in a way. The red-and-white stuff down below The Planet represents a part of the I94 18-Wheel Slogway that is actually CLOSED. We did not have to deal with that AT ALL! But what the map does NOT show is that it was raining cats and dogs the whole time we were navigating the mess. The accident? Looked like a fender bender, probably caused by people going tooooo fast, tailgating, weaving wildly in/out of traffic, and maybe inclement weather.

So, all three of us are FINALLY home and I have not done ANYTHING to unpack except to get everything into the house. Well, okay, I did throw a bunch of moomincabin leftovers into the refrigerator. Other than that, it can all wait. I am sitting out in the back yard listening to insects and motorcycles and missing the grokking of the ravens and the foghorns that blew all morning. Decompressing.

…Man oh man, I could not type ANYTHING into this thing for a while and WP was making me LOG IN *AGAIN* and I couldn’t type my dad-blasted password in… … …(this is not the guru’s fault, it is wordpress and my laptop)

Today is my last day in the yooperland until we come back to close the place up. We all went swimming this afternoon but these pics are from last night. First, the GG kayaking into the Sun Bridge, the one I used to dream of walking when I was a small child here.

And then here are the beach urchins swimming and I have to quit after this. Back to The Planet tomorrow today (because I never got this posted last night🐽). Alas.

Okay. Was yesterday a punt? Yes, it was… I could blame the *beloved* last-minute dinner/overnight guests but I won’t. I would much rather have spent time with them than doing another day’s worth of paint-drying blather. Actually, the last couple of days, I have been dealing with a crippled keyboard. The A, S, L, and I dunno what other keys (G for one) did not work all that well. Just try logging into your laptop with a password that contains three As. I suspect moisture (and NOOOOOO it was NOT a whine issue). I am still having intermittent issues but hoping that this thing’ll dry out over time. But still, typing was painful, as was using my iPhone to blahg, as was using the GG’s laptop, since my photos are on MYYYYY laptop. I won’t go into the details except that it was complicated.

But I am back today, the penultimate day of my vacay and you may think that my post title has something to do with the Orange Baboon but I am trying to take an Orange Baboon holiday. Some would argue that I haven’t actually taken much of a holiday but what are you gonna do when the OB twitters and twatters his bizarre theories about the faaaars in California among other things. I want to look away but it can be hard for a person who deals in facts and data and requirements and routinely (but ever so politely) cross-examines people who use Word Salad to make Vague Statements. I am corn-fused. What *are* you talking about?

The Orange Doodly I am talking about relates to our own Mayor / Road Commissioner, who is currently driving up and down the Cabin Road in his Orange Doodly, grading it. We greatly appreciate his steadfast diligence in keeping our two-track beach community road up to snuff.

Finally, the beastie in the pic is not a hummingbird. It is a hummingbird MOTH. This is the GG’s photoooo, which I asked him to text me a while back. I saw the moth but didn’t take the time to determine if it was a moth or an actual hummingbird (we had them here when The Commander used to put out food), not to mention the patience to get a pic.