Random bits of my so-called life.

Whitefish Point. Whitefish is usually an annual trip but I think the last time I ventured there was 2019 aka pre-pandemic. It was raining so hard that day (ALL day) that we barely got out of the car, which was The Mean Green Frog Hoppin’ Musheen (Subie Outback). We did go into the gift shops. We don’t really do the museums.

Today I don’t think there was a cloud in the sky ALL DAY, which meant the sun was BRUTAL but it was also not very warm so… We walked the beach to the tippety-tip of the point, where this pic was taken. We continued around the point and walked the nature trail back to the lighthouse area.

We drove the short distance to the Safe Harbor to eat lunch, which was turkey sandwiches, apples, chips, and beer. Except we didn’t drink the beer because there were a TON of law enforcement vee-hickles in the parking lot with us. We later figured out that there were also divers around and maybe the law vee-hickles were involved in some kind of training exercise and probably had no interest in us at all butcha nevah know.

We “nosed” west onto Vermillion Point Road but didn’t make it all the way out to the “point”. The road seemed good if sandy and Cygnus could probably have done it but we were getting a bit taaaared by that time. After a minor spy mission, we stopped again at the outhouse just above the Tahquamenon River mouth and that is where we drank our beers. BTW: that is the cleanest outhouse I think I have ever been in. It smelled wonderful, not even like they were using some kind of floral scent to MASK what is down the hole. And there was hand sanitizer in a dispenser. That said, do NOT look down the hole. I sorta glanced at it and you don’t wanna know.

Back on the road to home again, Liz was driving and as we were passing the Naomikong overlook, the GG yelled STOP. After a few confusing moments involving a deer looking to cross the road, we got turned around and headed back to the overlook. The deer was not why he wanted to stop. It was a North Country Trail friend’s vee-hickle. OMG. I soooo wanted to go home. I did NOT want to get hung up with whatever NCT maintenance was being staged for this weekend. Fortunately, although he found our friends, he was willing to continue on. Once home, two people (Liz and the GG) took naps. I felt nappish but that is never a good thing for me.

For once, Cygnus’s warning to “LOOK IN THE BACK SEAT” was arguably useful this evening (upon shutting her off when returning from a trip to get porterized with pizza). Our “baby” was in the back seat. Of course she has LONG been able to remove herself from an automotive vee-hickle under her own power, not to mention that she has owned her own vee-hickles for many years.

I was sitting outside the other night, under the kitchen window. There was a dragonfly flapping against the screen doing its best to get into the kitchen. This was driving my beach urchin (indoors) absolutely nutso. I’m not sure why it wasn’t really bothering me. It was obviously in distress of some sort.

Finally the beach urchin asked if she could turn out the kitchen light. YES! The dragonfly left for a bit after that but it returned. Why? Because the bright fluorescent light above the stove was still on. Once that got turned off, the dragonfly left for good. Later on I figgered maybe a solution would be to turn off the kitchen lights and turn ON the bathroom light. The bathroom is more or less an interior room. Although it does have a small window so maybe the dragonfly would be flapping against THAT window.

We don’t have that kind of problem with insects tonight because I don’t think the temperature got above 60 degrees all day. Am I complaining? I dunno. 90 degrees the other day was AWFUL except for swimming in Gitchee Gumee. Today’s 60 eventually prompted me to actually turn on the propane stove. Hot or not?

Other than that, laundromat, quick grock stop, recycle, and gasoline. Plus a drive by what we called “the oldest house in town” when I was a kid. No house there any more but the entire lot is ringed with heavy vegetation. I wonder what that house’s actual story is. My parents may have known but they never told us.

The GG took a bunch of stuff to Habitat and did a whole bunch of reorganizing out in the garage. I haven’t been out there to see it yet and there was no way I was gonna go out there at 9:00 tonight. It was time to call it a day. And yes this is all pretty much filler.

The woman in question was walking the beach and I had just decamped to Bill’s Birch Beach Bank Bench. The questioner was a life-long friend. I answered (with a bit of a giggle), “Yes, it’s my daughter!” I think my friend remembers my beach urchins as very small very cute tow-headed blonde baby girls. They are still blonde and they are still good-looking but they are 30-something adults and blonde hair is not usually as brilliant on adults unless they get it out of a bottle. Which my daughters (and me) are not interested in. For that and many other reasons I can understand why my adult children don’t look familiar to my friend on sight.

For many many many years we didn’t encounter too many unfamiliar people walking our beach. In recent years, now that the OTHER end of the beach is accessible, we see more although we are certainly not inundated. If I understand riparian rights law at all (and I think I am shaky on that) it is legal for people to walk along waterways even if the waterfront property is privately owned. Our beach is private but it is certainly walkable and I don’t usually question walkers about who they are.

Yesterday was interesting though. When Lizard Breath and I went down to the beach to cool off at the end of her work day (and my slug day), there were two women standing just off our shore with kayaks next to them. In earlier years I might’ve been a bit perturbed but times are changing and I just gave them a hello and followed my daughter out past the second sandbar to get dunked and COOLED OFF! They were just hanging out there gossiping (yeah, I’ve been coming up here with “Bill” since 2007). I kinda wish I had introduced myself and talked to them more but for many many many many many years, I would go down to the beach here and be the ONLY person on the beach. Being social to strangers on the beach is new to me.

My childhood friend and I are definitely in in agreement with keeping our families’ beach as private as we can for as long as we can. And I felt her relief knowing who “that woman” was. She knows any daughter of mine is an ally 🧡🧡🧡

These candle holders are from Crate and Barrel — I think but I could be wrong. I also think (but could be wrong) that I bought them for the moomincabin. Whatever the truth is, they are PERFECT for the moomincabin. For dark stormy evenings or even just parties that go on into the late evening although most of ours end pretty early.

The problem has been that they have never “lived” anywhere. And that’s not really true either. They lived in the drawer at the bottom of the barrister’s bookcase. That odd location meant that every time somebody wanted to get the candle holders out, they had to REMEMBER where they were. And the flip side of THAT is once somebody gets them out, they end up kinda scattered randomly all over the room. Like this summer.

THIS summer! The GG had a brilliant idea! He would build shelves between the studs in our un-insulated dwelling. We have shelves like this already in other places, The GG has put some up and I think my parents did too. But this was a REALLY GOOD IDEA. Not only would the candle holders be easy to grab when needed, they are a DECORATIVE element. Why hide them down in the drawer at the bottom of the barrister’s bookcase. So here they are. First pic is a close up, second shows (more or less) where they are situated.

Other than that, it was another EXTREMELY hot day here. 90, which is very hot for here. Once again, Gitchee Gumee saved the day by cooling us off.

Swimming on a hot summer day. Labor Day to be exact. It was hotter than Hadies today. I have to compare it to a Labor Day in my childhood when bitsy little snowflakes were spitting at us. Us kids HAD to swim. When we were kids, we swam EVERY day. Hot or cold, calm or windy as hell, rainy, whatever. Spitting snow. Yes we were gonna swim. Later that day we had to move to town and the next day was the first day of school. I remember The Commander down there life-guarding us in a winter jacket and Otto, my dad’s buddy and father of some of my beach friends.

It was so hot today I had to sit on the back deck next to the grill to read this afternoon. It was the only place not in the sun. I eventually swam after my older beach urchin arrived and we ate dinner with the neighbor-cousins. Dinner was kebabs and corn and potato salad and garlic bread and green salad. And blueberry crisp for dessert courtesy of my cousin. Preceded by a ‘hattan or two. We swam between dinner and dessert and I still feel wonderful and uber clean after our beautiful dip into the fresh water of Gitchee Gumee.

I was remembering a night long ago when I was up here alone with The Commander. It was hotter than hell (like today) and my aunt Radical Betty and I made a plan for an evening swim. I encountered my other aunt Bubs (she and Betty were my dad’s sisters) and I asked her if she wanted to join us. She said… Maybe… As it turned out, the three of us did swim. By that I mean we all walked out past the second sandbar until the water was up to our necks, hung out a bit and headed back in. I miss those two women and their brothers.

Love y’all, KW.

I missed the northern lights twice last night. Our Northern Correspondent texted me that there were faint lights so I went down to the beach to check them out. They were very faint at that time but I did see a “column”. But I bagged it after that. Back up at the moomin, another neighbor posted a pic of DECENT northern lights. A green strip along the horizon with a purple column above. By the time I saw the pic and got back down to the beach, they were gone again.

Oh well. We had made our own northern lights, I guess.

I was blissfully space-i-fied this afternoon while others did a group hike. I did dinner prep stuff for tomorrow, began my slow decluttering journey, hung around on the beach and did some reading. Everyone reconvened on the moomindeck for ‘hattans this afternoon and after a minor kerfuffle about which door needed its screen replaced with a window FIRST, I think we are about done for the night. Always always always. The BACK door is the FIRST to have its window replaced with a screen and the LAST to have the window put back in. Many days we don’t even PUT the screen in the “FRONT” door. If you have ever spent more than five minutes in the moominkitchen on a warm day, you will know why this is the procedure.

G’night. KW.

Where are the neighbor-cousins? When are the porters coming back up? Yiiiiy! I do not know. Well maybe I do know (sorta) but I am not the Beach Google and I REFUSE to keep track of everybody else’s whereabouts or schedule. One of the problems is that I am kinda GOOD at keeping track of things like that…

Today? It was the first day of my last summer-type vacay and I wanted a MEEEE day. I mean. The biggest excitement I had today was taking a Green Bag up to the res to drop it off with the friendly garbage attendant. Unless you count that I dusted the ANCIENT barrister bookcase (or whatever it is). Odd that we have such an artifact given that my branch of the FinFam doesn’t seem to sprout lawyers. Honestly, I think we are too honest 😵‍💫 But the barrister bookcase pre-dates my birth…

Disclaimer: I have actually known a few DECENT lawyers not to mention competent. My overall experience, admittedly not terribly extensive, is Clown Car but we’ll go there some other time, or not. Uh, I’m talking PERSONAL experience, not the Orange Baboon’s “team”, which is total idiocracy and why are “we” letting these people talk on TV (etc.).

So, a commenter asked if the botes (freighters) “honk” as they go by. He should know better than to ask that kind of question [snort] but… No, they don’t honk. The GG honks when he drives the Motor Bote over to the commenter’s shore and takes his air horn with him. The freighters… Well it turns out to be kind of complicated. One of the funniest things I have ever heard from a 3-year-old was “the botes are horning”. It was a foggy morning and a young cousin was fascinated by the foghorns. As I was writing this my brain was wandering around (as it does) and I remembered my parents and probably grandparents saying the boats were blowing their horns. So. No they don’t really honk. They blow their horns and the then 3-year-old was not far off.

We are having beautiful weather and I’ve got dinner in the hopper (American “soccer mom” style chicken shawarma) and rice but I need to hop to it a bit because in remembering Jimmy Buffet and margaritaville, another blogger seems to think it’ll be manhattanville here at the moomin tonight. Yes, yes, it will🐸

The GG sat on Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench under a couple of umbrellas. I sat with my cousin in the hollow in front of the Old Cabin. He eventually joined us. It was too hot on the bench this afternoon.

Eventually I headed up to the moomin to make one of our fave versions of shrimp scampi. I got released from work a couple hours early today. It was always typical for us to get released early the day before a holiday. Since the pandemic I think that tradition has gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle. I knew that I would not be very productive today and I wasn’t afraid to say that to the folks I work with. Not only is Monday a holiday, I am off for the rest of that week and the following Monday. Vacation mode.

The cousin-neighbors to the west joined us on the moomindeck after dinner until darkness fell. And that is about all I have today except that after looking at some fly-ish insects that seem to be embedded in one of the living room curtains ALL SUMMER, I had an epiphany! Hey, I can WASH these curtains. So I have added the living room curtains to the end-of-summer laundry agenda for next week. I’m trying to think when the last time they’ve been washed. Certainly not since The Commander died. And I’m not sure when she might have laundered them before that… … … It’s time.

G’night, KW

Since the seas were calm tonight, we took an evening bote ride to look at the moon. The “intruders” at the end of the beach had a faaaar going and after our uber slow cruise out around the island, we headed straight for the faaaar and this is the fuzzy version my ancient iPhone got.

When we got close in, some other lights came on. Kinda looked like spotlights. The GG wondered what they were. I opined that they were trained on US to see what we were doing. Did they know that my grandfather and a couple of his friends bought this beach 100 years ago or so? No I’m sure they did not. And actually granddaddy did NOT own that end of the beach although he was able to keep people out of it for many many years and so were we. It’s a long story but the upshot is something like tough shit.

Anyway for whatever reason, the GG turned the motor bote and we moseyed back down along the beach to the moomincabin.

In happier memories… Back when there were no SODding idjits at the end of the beach, a whole bunch of us FinFam folks loaded up into a big old canoe and headed out into the lake to watch a full moon rise. Kinda like tonight. We were way out past the second sandbar when we noticed a SWIMMER coming along, trying to catch up with us. It was my dog Tigger. The water was WAAAAAY over her head. At 12-13 feet, it was way over everyone’s head. She was a good swimmer (part retriever) but this was a little scary. There was no way we could get her into the canoe so we turned around back into shore and of course she followed.

I mean the guy on the right of course.

This is another pic from our stay at Steinhatchee. We walked over to a nearby restaurant and sat at the bar to eat shrimp. Alas (but we knew), it wasn’t the in-season shrimp people along the gulf coast can sometimes get but the food was fine and sitting at the bar allows one to strike up temporary friendships with locals or at least the bartender. Of course that is also potentially dangereuse, especially if you are, well, if you are anybody, really. But it was all okay.

After dinner we were out in the lobby and there was this, uh, portrait. I went to the water closet and when I came back, the GG reported that a woman traversing the lobby had said, “We’ve got to get rid of that Trump.” Something like that. I had been guessing that in that neck of the woods there might be a lot of MAGAts (probably even MORE after all these years) so I was heartened to hear of a Florida woman saying something like that. I just wish I had been out of the water closet in time to high five her or wink or whatever. Did she have a southern accent? I dunno. Not everyone in Fla does.

I looked up pics of Steinhatchee today and they did get hit pretty hard. I do not know about deaths or injuries and pray in my own godless way for the folks who live in the Big Bend. Steinhatchee was a home for us if only for one night. That area of Florida is not as populous as many others so in terms of that, it may not have been as destructive a hurricane as some others. But I don’t wish hurricane destruction on anyone no matter who they are or where they live.

Here on the moominbeach it was frickin’ cold all day. The wind has been outta the NORTH all day. I had the propane stove on all day and I was dressed in a turtleneck sweater, polar fleece jacket, Smartwool socks, and Smartwool leggings. ALL DAY. It was okay. I was warm enough and I had a LOT of work to do.

Where is Idalia gonna land? I do not know. But a word leaped out at us from the radio today. Steinhatchee. It’s in the Big Bend area of Florida. We spent a night in Steinhatchee. In 2017. Way before the pandemic. I had no clue we were in the Big Bend area at the time. I had never heard of the Big Bend until today although when you look at a map of Florida, it’s pretty obvious that there is a Big Bend.

On that trip we kinda wanted to do a bit of mosey-ing down to and through Fla to get to our cool retro motel on the gulf coast. We asked friends of ours who are better moseyers than us for Fla gulf coast recommendations. In the end, we didn’t really do very well with the moseying. Before we even started the trip the GG was like dooya wanna go visit your cousin in Arkansas? Um. I love my cousin but isn’t that a few states over to the west from where we are going? And then the first day we drove something like 600 miles before we landed in northern Alabama.

That was fine and pretty much planned but… Not without stuff like “Hey, there’s a sign for a distillery. Wanna stop?” Um no. This was in Tennessee and we had no clue how far off the freeway the distillery was or if it was even OPEN. If you are in southern Tennessee and you have been on the road since Michigan, it is probably time to skip the distillery and make a HARD stop. So we did. In northern Alabama on a strip mall type highway. The hotel was pretty okay but it was NOT a pleasant walk the mile to the wings place. I was actually the one with a craving for wings. Go figger.

Anyway, after spending the next night in Panama City Beach where our first attempt to get to the BEACH was blocked by police who were investigating a shooting, we landed in Steinhatchee, which WAS a recommendation from our friends and we enjoyed it. But so much for the moseying. Some people just can’t settle down. After that we pretty much bee-lined down the road, over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge into Bradenton and out to Long Boat Key. Can I siddown now?

This is one way botes are stored in Steinhatchee and probably other places in Fla. I dunno if Idalia will actually hit Steinhatchee but hopefully those botes are currently stowed somewhere a little bit safer. BTW: stein is pronounced steen and hatchee means river.

During our touchpoint meeting this morning, my two Indian-American co-workers were talking about their daughters who I *think* are both sophomores at Moo-U. One of them has moved into an apartment and I’m not sure where the other is living but the apartment kid has been giving her LOVERLY dad some crapola. Like last week, Dad you need to help me move NOW. If you cannot help me move NOW, I will be gone. In other words, be there or be square. So he left for the afternoon. He was laughing today that his daughter couldn’t wait for him to GO HOME after he dropped her off (despite the fact that she wanted his help)!

I remember when he took a half day off to accompany his daughter to kindergarten. I was a new employee at that time and my older kid was living and working in San Francisco while my younger kid was doing study abroad in Dakar.

Been there done that, in other words. I remember the days when I drove to Kalamazoo to do whatever with my kids. Drop them off at college. Pick them up. Take them out to eat. The Crow’s Nest was a fave. Watch them in plays. Drop off gifts and other stuff. I dunno. I told these Indian dads how much I missed driving over to Kalamazoo College to visit my kids there. Our co-worker Dana chimed in about visiting her children in college. She said to enjoy these times and I so agree.

See that empty bottom shelf? Man oh man. After The Commander died, I moved her cookbooks to that bottom shelf. I can’t remember exactly why. They had been in the living room for many years. I can only think it had something to do with combining the cookbooks at the Dillon house (which we were selling) with the moomincabin cookbooks. And we certainly weren’t selling the moomincabin.

This “solution” didn’t really work out all that well because it left very little space to store non-perishable grocks. I won’t go too much into all of this. When it’s the beginning of the summer and just the GG and I are around, we don’t need a lot of storage space but when daughters and nieces and cousins and partners and friends arrive, it gets a little crowded in the kitchen.

Yesterday and today, I moved all of the cookbooks BACK into the living room where they belong. They are easily accessible there and now there is more space on the kitchen shelves although it is still a mess there.

Some of the Old Cabin cousin-neighbors returned today so we made FinFam Steak Dinner for them. They drove from the American east coast through Canananada and stayed in North Bay last night. When I was three years old, I stayed in North Bay when my fam took what we called The Long Trip. I was ENTRANCED by the fact that the bathroom in our little roadside motel had PINK fixtures. Many years later, I learned that The Commander was LESS THAN ENTRANCED by the SPIDER in the bathtub. She was not a spider fan.

That was a fun trip. We had tea with the Halliday sisters (FinFam relatives) in Toronto, visited Niagara Falls, and then our Sherman friends in that vicinity. I have been told that when I spied the Sherman kids, I got all excited and yelled “kids”! Doesn’t exactly sound like shy me but photooos show me having a good time and we later became good friends when their family visited us at the moominbeach, parking their VW bus and camper in our yard during various summers.

Nowadays we don’t depend upon local TV or radio stations at the moomincabin. For radio we normally listen to an NPR station that originates from Central Michigan University but has satellite stations all over the place including Sault Ste Siberia. Television? We have not had a television here for many years.

We had no TV at the moomincabin until I was a teenager when we had a teensy tinesy little Zenith black and white model. Like other TVs around that era around here it picked up two channels, TV 9 and 10 and channel 2, which was Canuckian.

Many in my family watched the moon landing back in 1969 on our little TV. I was a teenager then and watched it at the Piedy cabin with other beach teenagers. I was sick with a fever and sore throat that night and that is mostly what I remember about that. It wasn’t COVID…

CKLW was a Windsor Ontario radio station that all the cool kids like the GG listened to when they were teenagers in the Detroit area. Once in a blue moon, when the weather was just right, us teenagers here on the moominbeach could pick it up.

When we finally got cable TV, I came home from junior high one day and my brother said LOOK AT THE TV. Yes. We had more than two channels! I spent my high school years doing homework to Lost in Space reruns.

And then there was Bill Kennedy at the Movies. That was on the Detroit channel WKBD and I used to watch it with my dad sometimes.

Nowadays we have gone back to no TV here at the moomincabin. But we certainly use screens. We use iPhones constantly and when I am working here I am on my work laptop and right now I am blahgging on my personal laptop. I watch TV series on my phone (apparently series is plural for series…). And there is the GG using his big old Mac.

The moomincabin is pretty much a disaster these days. It might not look like that to visitors. It probably looks like a CABIN. To me it looks like a super cluttered up cabin. I cannot CLEAN when I have to move umpteen bazillion things.

The GG aka Suzy Homemaker did a lot of cleaning today. He scrubbed the gas grill within an inch of its life and refilled the propane tank. Hey we are having Fin Fam Steak Dinner on Sunday so we need to be ready. And then he washed windows! Yay! He was angling to use dish cloths until I pointed him toward the micro fiber cloths in the bedroom. Yes yes yes.

At the end of the afternoon a potentially scary storm bore down on us. Bow echo or comma or whatever. We sat on Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bench to watch it for a while. It was beautiful but when it started to rain we decamped to the moomindeck. We never got any severe weather here. There was heavy rain for about ten minutes and then it all moved east. Not exactly a plassover.

We have missed a lot of severe weather down on the Planet Ann Arbor. Tornadoes and other crazy winds Apparently our house is okay and since our neighbors don’t seem to have lost power, I’m guessing we haven’t either. We’re kinda sorry we missed all of that but we also kinda happy we did.

It felt a bit late to head out to the island (a half mile away) but I decided I would join the GG for a wee bote trip. The seagulls seem to be gone. There are some cormorants around. Not sure if/when they migrate.

Late July/early August can be difficult to walk the beach because many young (and sometimes old) seagulls for whatever reason are not able to fly their migration and die on the beach or maybe die elsewhere and wash up on the beach. The worst is when a seagull is sick or injured and we have to watch it slowly die on our shore. One year there was a particularly awful situation where a young seagull was initially able to fly a bit but couldn’t get very far. It deteriorated until it could barely move and eventually there was just a wee bit of ragged breathing whenever I walked by.

My brother was coming up and when he arrived, I asked him to take a walk with me down the beach. With his gun. I am not anti-gun but I do not shoot them but I wanted to put this seagull out of its misery. Wouldn’t you know by the time we got down there, it was already dead. Such is life…

So our evening bote trip was loverly but I am hitting a wall so I think I will shut this thing down for the night. Maybe I’ll watch an ep of my latest series (The Last Empire) or maybe I’ll just hit the hay.

G’night, KW.

They’re back. Sorta. I potted these flowers Memorial Day weekend. We were here about 10 days, then the GG went west and I took a dive down below the bridge to Trollandia. The GG did a moomincabin drive by sometime before 4th of July weekend on his own way to Trollandia. The flowers were thriving then. By the time we arrived here FOR 4th of July weekend, they were decimated. Heinrich (snowshoe hare) or deer? I do not know. I don’t *think* they are on the pine marten’s menu.

Oh, there were a few flowers in one pot but I wrote them off and didn’t bother to try watering them or anything. It is now something like six weeks later and all of a sudden they seem to be reviving a bit. I’m still not going to try any heroics here. I’m kinda done with flowers for the year. My Planet Ann Arbor impatiens didn’t do quiiiite as well as they usually do but they were okay the last I looked. But we’re heading toward the end of August and I kinda give up bothering with them at this time of year. A gardener I am not.

It was a chilly day but I am glad I hightailed it back up here when I did because the SE Great Lake State is heating up big-time. I don’t think we’ll quite beat Arizona but I saw heat indexes of 105 predicted. No thanks. I woke up somewhere around 1:00 AM to thunder and lightning but nothing severe and it only served to send me back into blissful slumber. Stormed again when it was time to get up for the day and then again when I met with MMCB₂ for virtual coffee. I was on the moomindeck and it was so wet I had to decamp to my childhood moomincabin bedroom.

Although I think MMCB will continue to meet virtually for the foreseeable future, I am hopeful for a warm enough day in September that we can meet in person AT Barry’s. There is outdoor seating. I know that Barry’s has undergone a MUCH needed renovation and I’d love to see it. Of course, I could always go over there and get takeout coffee. And a tuna bagel. I miss those.

The title? Meaningless🤣

A couple of my young male cousins (1st cousins twice removed) wandered into the “parking lot” between the Old Cabin and the moomincabin early this afternoon. I think they were looking to borrow kayaks and we are happy to oblige. Before we could finish our conversation they spied the GG walking up the path through the woods from the beach. They yelled, “Don’t shoot!”

This was hilarious! I think these young men have encountered the GG at The Garage, sometimes shooting, sometimes not. When people drive by and the garage door is open, they often stop to talk. The Busybody of Birch Point Beach.

So I am cracking up. And reminiscing. First, remembering when I was a kid and these young folks’ parents were babies younger than me or not born yet. And then I was having my own babies and their parents were just beginning to have their own children. I am trying to figger out how the GG and I went from being the “cool” aunt and uncle (if we ever actually did get to that, probably not) to wherever we are now. I think we are verging upon being the kinda cray-zee old fogie aunt and uncle kind of folks. The ones who might like to have toooo much fun. Make no mistake, we are careful to keep from providing the too much fun kinda stuff to our young adult cousins. We are also well aware that they know how to provide their own fun. Been there done that.

We hosted our friends of porterization for dinner tonight. I was reluctant at first. I had a loooong work day and it is a school night. It started out as a happy hour but turned into dinner on the moomindeck. Cheers!

Okay, I guess that’s a bit of a stretch. Botes and automotive vee-hickles are inanimate objects and do not make friends with each other except maybe in cartoons.

I was heading out to the moomin after a laundry run and a few grocks. I went to Pat’s for grocks because I can put my laundry in the warshing musheen, drive the eight blocks or whatever to Pat’s, and get back before the warshing musheen is done. I am direct about grocks, not to mention laundry. That is not really pandemic driven but probably more so since the pandemic. In. And. Out. I have a daily standup meeting at work and I didn’t want to miss that.

But then. I was done with laundry and the few grocks I needed in a short enough time that I could slow-drive along the locks. The American Spirit was s-l-o-w-l-y leaving the Poe Lock upbound but what was that in front of it? Was it a cruise ship? Yes it was! It was the Viking Octantis waiting for the American Spirit to finish its exit so the Octantis could go through the lock downbound. I couldn’t really get a good pic but I joined all the other rubberneckers *anyway*.

Oh yeah, one afternoon last week when it was too cold (windy) to sit on Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench, I had my after-work cocktail in the little hollow in front of the Old Cabin. Suddenly a small mammal with a very cute face and ears came along. It looked a bit weasel-y? It was NOT a squirrel. I know what a squirrel looks like. We figured out today that it was probably a pine marten. I have never seen one in real life before. The weekend of my dad’s memorial celebration, one of my brother’s dogs encountered a pine marten and all I can say is there was a big, if brief, hullabaloo.

Apparently pine martens eat all kinds of rodents. All the way up to rabbit. Hmmm. I haven’t seen Heinrich around the yard lately. I hope he’s okay.

Well, that weekend went FAST!!!

I have scoped out (sorta) what to do with the bazillion books here. Oh NO, I am not getting rid of them. This is really not blahggable but here goes anyway ’cause it sticks in my dern craw, so possible lurker(s) be damned. After The Commander died, a relative kept throwing hissy fits about getting rid of the books in the moomincabin. This was odd to me because I had NEVER SAID I intended to get rid of any books and had made no move to do so. In fact my memory is of *encouraging* that person to identify books they thought were important.

After a while it clicked in that it MAY have been the old “Red Books” — little Great Lakes shipping annuals. Well… It was THE COMMANDER who got rid of those, not me. She donated them to the local historical society. She did not consult me. If she had, I might’ve discouraged her (not because of that person). But she did not NEED to consult me. She OWNED them. And was of sound mind! And our local historical society is WONDERFUL. I once commented on pics they posted of the old bank my dad and granddad worked at. I was a very young child when the pics were taken but I remember that old bank building and also remember when they moved the bank up the street. I got a VERY KIND response about my dad’s help when the director was applying for a mortgage. Dad (and his dad) were well respected local bankers and I miss them.

Okay, rant over. I don’t think people care that much about bedsheets but I have been reluctant to get rid of ANYTHING for the last however many years it’s been. I worked on sorting those out today and I think I have a tentative strategy for getting rid of some of them. I focused on the double bed sheets. It’s the biggest bed we have here. We have 4-5 matching sets (top and fitted sheet) and many miscellaneous sheets without matches. (We won’t talk about the mile-high stack of mostly random pillow cases.) I’m inclined to get rid of the singletons and keep the others for now. Eventually they will all go BECAUSE… The double bed has the worst mattress on earth and we are on the verge of replacing it. When we do, we will need new sheets because the ancient fitted sheets will not fit on the new mattress. Don’t ask me how I know this 🤣

I envision buying three sheet sets. That should allow people to take used sheets home to the Planet while leaving clean sheets here at the moomin. Me? I will continue to sleep in my uber comfy sleeping bag.

I should clarify that I actually don’t have trouble sleeping on the awful mattress. But that’s me. I can sleep just about anywhere as long as there isn’t bright light, loud music, or dog poop in the vicinity (or radio noise but that’d be a whole ‘nother story). But the beach urchins think it’s awful and I know they are right so I am MORE THAN HAPPY to let them drive this. Not to mention that they have friends who are MUCH taller than me and the GG so it must be a horrible place for them to sleep.

Anyway, I am back to moominCubelandia tomorrow. Plus laundry and a few grocks.