Random bits of my so-called life.

An hour or so ago, the GG was looking for a box (or bag or whatever) of baseballs and associated gloves. Did I know where it was? I actually have a vague memory of what he was talking about but I was like, “WHY are you looking for that NOW?” Because I have no clue about where it is and there was no way I was gonna start jumping around looking for it NOW. Jeebus. Dooya think one of the kids took it? No I do not. I think the last time one of the kids played baseball (softball) was when they were in about 2nd grade and a (wonderful) neighborhood dad organized an informal team. Our kid liked it (I think) and she was pretty good at it but she (and we) quit when it migrated to a city-based organized league. Organized team sports for children is not our family style. Although if we’d had a kid who thrived on that, we’d have supported it with bells on.

Then. What version iPhone do we have? Is it the 15 Pro? I mean… As far as I know, yes. If there are different versions of the 15, I’m sure we bought whatever was the top dollar, which would be the Pro. Rummage rummage rummage… What are you looking for now? The iPhone boxes. I looked it up ON my phone. Yes, it is a 15 Pro. To be fair, he did not look it up himself because his phone was tied up in a backup, which I did not know. But why didn’t he *tell* me what was going on and ask me to look it up on *my* identical phone instead of rummaging for empty boxes? I do not know.

And. What ever happened about that police station that got shot up in Sault Ste. Siberia last year? (Or was it two years ago?) This question came out of nowhere and I have no clue. I don’t routinely follow local Siberian news (maybe I should?). The “droven ins” (my parents’ name for police blotter and that would be a blahg entry for another day) in the old paper version of the Sault newspaper used to be fun. People got arrested for P-ing in public and fighting and other stuff and were always “lodged” in the Chippewa County jail.

Other than that I replayed a work meeting from last week a couple times and, well, people were yammering away in accented English from different countries (including the American English of a couple of us!), plus technical jargon from various years throughout our product’s history. I get the overall arc of our project but the details remain elusive. I miss the Long Suffering Cat Herding Person and Amazon Woman in these moments as they could kinda “MAKE IT STOP!” (so we could slowly sort out the complexities) better than I can. But we’ll get there and now I think I can articulate some questions. Maybe.

I have a huge mishmash of other stuff in my brain but it’s mostly political crapola and I don’t trust myself to write about it tonight. Or maybe ever🤪

First pic is where he selected this year’s batch of pumpkins. It was a beautiful day if a bit (or more than a bit) past peak fall color and we were rattling around somewhere southwest of Saline (pronounced Suh-LEEN, not SAY-leen), a small satellite city south of The Planet Ann Arbor. A mini-mission on our excursion was to buy some pumpkins and this pretty little self-serve stand totally fit the bill. Glad Doc Pumpkinstein had cash ’cause KW certainly didn’t.

Here he is “performing zee cloning”. (Say it in the worst fake German accent you can muster.)

Four new pumpkinheads are born.

Out for delivery.

Delivery 1.

Delivery 2.

This photo would not win any awards but I like how it turned out. It was a quick-before-the-light-changes point-and-shoot out Cygnus’s passenger side window. The GG was driving and we were waiting to make a right turn and I couldn’t very well ask him to back up to get the sign outta the pic because (hello) there was a car or two or three behind us.

I like the colors, although they are not vivid. I like the bare tree. Most of the trees in my neighborhood, a couple blocks away, are still leafy. I don’t know much about trees but they are oaks and I believe they keep their leaves longer than other trees, although they are certainly coming down. I even like the sign. Sometimes I think pieces of, well, “infrastructure” enhance photos of natural phenomena. Not sure I can adequately ‘splain what’s in my head.

What to watch on the boob tube tonight? We’ve been watching Joe Pera but the last time we tried, it was a struggle to control which episode it would play. After much futzing, the GG thinks it may be an Amazon login issue. Don’t ask. It defies description. I actually think many of the streaming services need to hire “meeee”. I mean they need to hire a business systems analyst. Business analysts do all kinds of things. I have a young cousin who is a business analyst and her job does not look like mine one iota🤣 What I do is user experience design for a web application. For some of these streaming services the user experience totally sucks. I want to be able to start watching a series and have the interface automatically queue up the next episode for the next time I watch it. Unless I WANT to change it. Like last week I dozed off during an episode of Bad Monkey and wanted to re-watch it the next night.

Anyway, if we can’t figure out where we are in Joe Pera, we have a couple other options. One is the Umich-MooU football game. If we can find it on TV. I probably won’t watch that, just bask in the ambience of football on TV. The other is Svengoolie, which I love but the last time we watched that, it was riddled with long strings of commercials every 10 minutes or so.

Actually it was pumpkin cake but it turned into banana cake but somehow I misheard pumpkin as Trumpkin. I wonder why…

My hearing is acute but I was struggling to hear anything at dinner at The Session Room (“Sessions”) tonight. “Process” is probably a better word than “hear”. People were interrupting each other and not always clearly enunciating words and at times it felt like I was listening to about a hundred Trumps reverberating about the room. That is NOT to DIS Sessions. It is one of my favorite restaurants on The Planet Ann Arbor. But it is Friday and tomorrow is the Umich/Moo-U game here on The Planet and the place was slammed, which I knew it would be. It is a pretty big place and so can accommodate the numbers but it was loud.

Tonight was a restart (of sorts) of our pre-covid Old Town Friday night dinners of porterization, just not at the Old Town (“Oscar Tango” or “OT” to locals). They texted to ask if we wanted to meet at Sessions. I have been wanting to dip back into dining out. I mean on a regular basis. I have been dining out throughout and “since” covid, just not frequently. (A reminder that covid is NOT over but it isn’t randomly killing people at anywhere near the rate it did before it mutated into a milder disease.) I thought about it for 10 minutes or so and then texted back, “That could work”. I was glad Sessions was the proposed choice because as much as I love the OT, it is a smaller restaurant and gets very crowded on a football weekend. I am not ready for that yet.

So how did I do? Fine. Except. When it was time to gooooo, it was time to go. And I don’t mean go to the water closet. I mean go HOME! I did need the water closet but Sessions is about a five minute drive from home and I had no problem getting to Eco-Terlet in time. Always an introvert, the covid years have made me discover how much alone time I need, particularly in the evening when I need to decompress for an hour or so before bed.

Sessions is interesting in that for many years, including my entire time on The Planet Ann Arbor up until maybe the last 10 years or so, the building was a nondescript brick machine shop. Since it’s on Jackson Road, I drove by it umpteen bazillion times, often noticing it but not thinking much about it. I’m not sure why the machine shop closed (or moved?) or who had the vision to buy the building and turn it into a brewpub but whoever it was did a beautiful renovation. The pic is the glass block window next to my seat. I’m trying but failing to remember if the old machine shop had glass blocks for windows.

In this case, “ping” is short for pee-ing. Outside. Something I have done my whole life, mostly but not always with aplomb. Embiggen to see what’s on the mug.

First off, I have also had access to indoor plumbing my whole life, just not in the summers of my childhood and early adulthood. I have blahgged about this before (a few times or more🐽) but I spent my very early childhood summers at the Old Cabin. The moomincabin aka the “other cabin” (I *love* my very young emerging talker first cousin twice removed’s name for the moomin) was not yet built. There was cold water in the kitchen sink via a garden hose and an outhouse.

It’s hard to describe this but there was a heavy wooden door between the kitchen and living room and when it was wide open, which it was most of the time, it hid a lot of things behind it. Clothing hanging on the back of the door and little kids pee-ing in a potty in there. The summer I was three and my brother was about to be born, The Commander was trying very hard to get me to go to the outhouse instead of using the potty. But moom, the outhouse is stinky.

Once she tried to shame me with “there are MEN in the living room so you can’t use the potty.” I looked around the room. There was my dad and my Dear Uncle Harry and my uncle Dcuk… And Lewie… My dad and uncles, “man’s men” that they were, were well accustomed to the potty (as long as they didn’t have to empty it) but Lewie was a bachelor friend of theirs and I’m sure Lewie was who The Comm was referring to when she said “MEN” are there…

Anyway, I can use outhouses and I can pee outdoors without a problem. Woods pee is almost always easy. Urban pee is a bit more difficult because you can be arrested for indecent exposure. But I have done it, usually in the the small woodsy parks that dot The Planet Ann Arbor and always looking carefully in every direction for interlopers and voyeurs. And sometimes, even if you are an experienced female outdoor pee-er, dribbling happens. TMI?

My uber-smart daughter (they are both smart but this is the older one) gifted me with a pee cloth. If I have it right (and I may not), it absorbs “liquid” in such a way that if you can’t hide in a copse to woods-pee, you can just, um, go in the pee cloth. I haven’t used it yet but I will.

Update: The pee cloth is Kula Cloth and you don’t pee *into* it!

The first pic is one of my all-time faves. It wasn’t taken on my first-born’s birthday. That was today and I won’t tell you how old she is but when I turned her age, my parents sent me a card in which my father wrote “Unhappy Birthday”. He was not actually wishing me an unhappy birthday just wishing himself younger.

An alternate title for this photo might be “Mooooo”. It is meeee (in the striped bikini), Radical Betty, Baby Liz, and The Commander walking out into the water at the moominbeach. Note that the wee one was hanging on to me by one finger. That’s how much she trusted me, I guess. Once, a relative did not recognize me upon seeing this pic. Whose finger is Liz hanging on to? It wasn’t because of the bikini although I haven’t worn one for umpteen bazillion years (back in the day I probably owned five or six bikinis at a time, all hanging on the clothesline strung across the back of the partition between the living room and bedrooms at the moomincabin). It was because they couldn’t figger out who that “dark” skinned person was. Well. It was meeee. I used to use what limited time the SUN shone down on our beautiful yooperland beach to get tan and my purportedly fair northern European skin does in fact tan nicely. I don’t do that any more mainly because I stopped caring a long time ago.

My birthday girl started out today by taking her coffee over to the neighboring park. After a run and a shower, she and her partner walked downtown where they met up with the GG for lunch at the Oscar Tango and then toured some of the local museums, including the newest incarnation of the “dinosaur museum”, which opened shortly before covid hit. I haven’t been there yet but I am not a huge museum fan plus I fear I might miss the “old” dinosaur museum, the one I visited throughout my and my children’s childhoods.

We took gifts (Dyson vacuum cleaner and a couple other things) and ‘hattan makings over to their house, then headed down to The Earle for dinner. She has never been to the Earle before!!! In response to that statement, I told her that we couldn’t afford the Earle when she was young 🤣

I didn’t include a recent picture of the birthday girl today except for the coffee in the park pic that she sent me. She is beautiful and looks a lot younger than her age.

I was hanging around in the back room watching a TV show. I think it was Hill Street Blues. Oops, I think that was a contraction. A meaningful one. I won’t report all the gory details but by morning, our family had grown from two to three. It was an easy journey.

If you know me or have been of my reglear nucular taggers (aka blahg readers) you might know that I am rabidly against Trump but I live with a pro-Trump (or at least pro-MAGA) person.

I have lived with this person for umpteen bazillion years. He is a wonderful person. He was (and is) a fantastic father. I love his family. He gets along with all of my relatives and takes care of the moomincabin and when The Commander was in her later years, he took care of her better than I did.

Anyway, I’m not sure the GG and I were *ever* totally aligned in terms of politics, but we never really argued about it much until Trump.

I’ve been listening to a show that NPR airs on WCMU (which I get at the moomincabin on Sunday mornings). It’s called “Left Right and Center” and participants from different points of view cover political issues politely. I’ve been streaming it since we returned to the Landfill and yesterday they talked about (among other things) a couple who were totally opposed (like the GG and I are) about Trump and Harris. This couple somehow found a news/commentary source called Tangle that looks at things from both sides and in between. You get opinions from the left, right, and center and then you get the website’s owner’s own point of view, which is clearly labeled as his own opinion and seems balanced. When the site happens to post mis/dis-information or errors, they disclaim it right at the top of the page.

Tangle did not dissuade either of these people from their political positions but it did dissuade the husband from his mistaken belief that the 2020 election was stolen. I do not think the GG will try to follow Tangle or, if he does, it might not change his opinions on anything.

There are a lot of married couples out there who are totally opposed about Trump and Harris. I don’t really understand why Trump appeals to anyone but I am resigned to the fact that I have to live with one of those people. And some of his relatives. The married couple listening to Tangle that Left Right and Center interviewed seemed to be kind of coming together a bit although I bet he will still vote for Trump. Not sure there’ll be any coming together here but I think I like Tangle and its approach so I’m giving it a try. If anything it may give me some insight into where the “right” is coming from. Er, not that I am on the “left” exactly…. I prefer to call myself a pragmatist.

Yes, there is a new Matlock series! It stars Kathy Bates. I love Kathy Bates. I heard about this on the radio (National Petroleum Radio, (don’t ask)).

So when I started writing this, I thought the new Matlock was a “reboot” of the old series from the 1980s-1990s? Apparently it’s not (but?) What I heard on NPR the other day seemed to make it sound like that. But I was probably working and not listening closely.

I didn’t watch the old Matlock at all. Looking at the years it was on, I was in the throes of raising young children. Our TV was more often tuned in to things like Mr. Raj (Rogers) and Sesame Street, although one kid was NOT entranced by “those silly guys” aka Bert and Ernie. This was waaaay before they came out so it didn’t have anything to do with that. And then they were getting to be tweens and there was Clarissa Explains It All (which I greatly enjoyed) and then, I dunno, Nick at Nite and I’m probably forgetting a whole bunch of stuff. Then again I was watching things like 30-something, Dallas, and Dynasty. Yes, really.

A thing I don’t remember about the old Matlock? That Andy Griffith played Matlock.

A thing I do remember about the old Matlock? There was a Detroit Free Press columnist back in the day that I enjoyed reading. He was an older guy named Jim(?) Fitzgerald. The name is interesting because he was somehow related to the person the Edmund Fitzgerald freighter was named after. You know, the one that sunk and Gordon Lightfoot wrote a song about it?

His column was not usually *serious* in that it was mostly slices of his life as a retired reporter. What I remember is when he wrote about walking (in Detroit) past a man sitting next to the sidewalk drinking out of a bottle in a paper bag. The paper bag bottle drinker looked up at him and said, “Lookin’ like Matlock.” I dunno why this cracked me up so much but I still remember it all these years later and it still cracks me up🤪 Sorry.

Doing some googling, I feel like the “jury” is out on whether the Kathy Bates series is a reboot of the Andy Griffith series. I dunno but I think I might have to watch both of them (the Andy Griffith Matlock is available on Netflix or somewhere) and try to come to my own conclusion.

Love y’all, KW.

So COVID kicked my natural introvert tendencies into high gear and I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with having a lot of Alone Time. Which I do this weekend as the GG is outta dodge.

I will always be introverted but I was happy to receive a text from a beach urchin this morning wondering if I wanted company. And yes. Yes, I did. I always love to be with my adult daughters but they are both VERY busy and the last thing I would ever want to do is to take away any of their down time to hang out with me.

But okay! C’mon over and have a beer. And yes she did. We are having an extended bit of bonus summer here so we sat in the back yard. Did we talk about MAGA? Of course we did. How could we not? But we are on the same side of that issue and don’t understand what the f*ck people see in Trump. “The economy”? Whut? People who talk about how well he does with “the economy” are not remembering the havoc the covid virus wreaked upon “the economy”. Trump totally mishandled the covid pandemic and doesn’t have a clue about “the economy”. To be fair, I don’t think anyone could have handled that crisis. But Trump was probably the worst president to be in “power” at that time.

What else did we talk about? TV and books for one thing. There is a second season of Silo out (sci-fi stuff)! I am watching Bad Monkey (Florida crime stuff based on a book by Carl Hiaasen) by myself and Joe Pera (again) with the GG. Joe is a quirky yooperland guy explaining life, the universe and everything. I will be watching season 2 of Silo. I don’t think the GG would be all that interested in Silo. He might like Bad Monkey. We’ll talk about books another day but Jane Smiley was an author of interest in my backyard today.

A prism in our front window made the rainbow colors on one of our dining chairs when I walked into the front living room tonight. I figure there was about a 10 second interval for those colors to show up and I caught it and somehow managed to fumble my phone camera open to capture the pic.

I mean, I can play clips of Trump rambling aimlessly too but when I am hearing them from another room and know that the person/people playing the clip are all rah rah about him and his likely second idiocracy? I could NOT focus this morning. The GG? “She’s supposed to be working but she’s doing the xword.” Yeah, that’s because I can’t tune you MAGAts out. Plus you are jumping around in a frenetic way and I can NEVER concentrate when that is going on. At least the UU dragged the empty garbage cart up before he left. Thanks!!!

So are identical twins rare? I’m not sure “rare” is the word I would use but they are certainly rarer than singletons. I have always been fascinated by multiple births. I think I first encountered this topic reading about the Dionne quintuplets (identical) as a kid. I’m not sure what the highest number of multiple children have been born from a single pregnancy is. Was it “octo mom’s” eight? Or have there been women who’ve birthed more? I’m too lazy to look it up. (Nonuplets. I looked it up. Or is it decuplets…)

Recently I realized that my Instagram feed was getting filled with moms of triplets, etc. This was getting annoying. I mean, I have probably clicked on a few of these posts over the years. Like I said above, multiple births *are* interesting to me. (There is a set of triplets in my extended family and I have been married to an ID twin for umpteen bazillion years.) But it was getting to the point where multiple births were like every other post and they were all people I do NOT follow. I idly complained about this to a beach urchin and she showed me how I could mute all of that stuff. On social media, I really only want to see posts from people/entities I have made a conscious choice to follow.

So, how well do I get along with the UU’s wife (my sister-in-law via my husband’s twin)? We are friends and kindred spirits. We are not alike in a lot of ways but we *are* alike in other ways. Some of the ways we are alike are very subtle and when we first knew each other I would never have guessed we had those traits in common. I’m not gonna list any of those things because 1) it’s nobody’s business and 2) she may not agree with all of it, which is okay. We all look at things through different lenses. But I love and admire her and love having her in my life.

Can I tell the twins apart? Oh yes. When I occasionally have difficulty, it’s when I’m not LOOKING at a twin. And even then, at least after all these years, there are subtle differences in their voices and choice of words, etc.

Babies born to a parent with an ID twin? Hmmm, once we helped the UU move house. In the late evening after a long day, the UU and I went out for a beer at a bar. We left my daughter (a year old or thereabouts) with the GG (her DAD!). She didn’t have fluent words yet but complained BITTERLY the entire time we were out at the bar. Over and over the GG tried to explain that he was her DAD. She wasn’t having it😵‍💫

The Twinz of Terror and I dined at The Grizzly Peak tonight. I made sure to tell anyone I interacted with that in no way shape or form did I agree with the Trump hat. I do agree with the Dee-troit Li-ons hat (even though I am not really a football fan) but I didn’t feel as though I needed to point that out. As it turned out, the only person I disclaimed that to was our server. She was a young Black woman and I have no clue what her politics are but it is the Planet Ann Arbor, a Blue Bubble, so I can only guess she is NOT a Trumper.

She was a good server and I tipped well but I almost always do. As the GG will sometimes say, “Give her [meaning meeee] the check, she’s a better tipper.” And I am. I always support service workers. They do not make anywhere near as much money as they are worth.

When we left The Landfill to head down to the Griz, our young neighbor was outside doing some yard work. It turns out HE IS AN IDENTICAL TWIN?!?? So identical twins (the Twinz of Terror) meet another identical twin? Except the neighbor’s twin brother was not there. How weird (and cool) is it that two houses in a row on our street are owned by families in which the husbands both have identical twins.

What a day. It was a regular work day but at the end of the day I provided dinner for the Uncly Uncle, aka the GG’s identical twin.

I usually give the Twinz some time to get MAGA outta their systems but they didn’t have time to even talk about that tonight because by the time the UU got here, the GG was already on a North Country Trail zoom meeting. The UU joined up pretty dern quick. Me? I was cooking coq au vin, aka chicken (boneless thighs) plus onion, mushrooms, kalamata olives and white whine.

I provided a freezer ‘hattan for the UU. He drove down from Gaylord today and he spent a good amount of time at FlaMan’s pad where he installed a table (or something) for FlaMan’s new TV.

I am in the front living room and the twinz are in the back living room. They seem to be getting escalated about the upcoming presidential election. I am terrified about the upcoming election. That is all I will say tonight. How can anyone listen to anything Trump says and think he is a reasonable presidential candidate? I do not know. Cognitive dissonance maybe?

In the lower right are little buggy flies. They are outside not inside and I don’t think they are biters.

This is about all I have tonight. I have lots of thoughts swirling through my very little brain but they are either about family (oh, no problems there) or polly-ticks (plenty of problems there). But let’s just pause a moment and look at that beautiful waxing gibbous behind The Landfill. I actually feel like the power lines add to the pic somehow.

Love y’all, KW

I was working from TeleCublandia and somebody yelled at me from outside. It was the GG. He made a particular gesture that means (in our household) “Make me a drink!” Meaning a Manhattan. I couldn’t describe the gesture if I tried. I don’t even think I could replicate it. My brother did get it🤣

Except I somehow misinterpreted the gesture. He was actually alerting me to the fact that he had the snowblower running and thought I might want to take a picture. I did take a pic because that’s what I do and then I made him a freezer ‘hattan. Which he appreciated. BTW, a freezer ‘hattan is when I put the ingredients into a glass and stick it into the freezer and he retrieves it when he’s ready and puts ice and cherries in it to taste.

So when he came in, after he retrieved his freezer ‘hattan, he began enumerating the small engines we own. Um, let’s see… Lawnmower, snowblower, leaf blower, I’m probably forgetting some and I’m not even counting bote motors because we don’t use them here. But then. Three chainsaws. WAIT! THREE chainsaws? Whut? We have THREE chainsaws.

There’s the first one we owned (I think) that I bought for him from Sears at Briarwood Mall umpteen bazillion years ago because he asked for it for xmas. He probably doesn’t remember that I’m the one who bought it. I wouldn’t have been ABLE to do it if he hadn’t provided me with the exact model number. And then there’s one The Gumper (his dad) left behind. The GG seems to be the only sibling who can start it? And a third one is on long-term loan from a moominbeach neighbor-cousin. And oh there’s a fourth one in the moomingarage that my parents or brother bought There are probably one or two or four in the garage at Hoton Lake but I dunno.

BTW: Sears at Briarwood has been demolished and is being replaced by an amalgam of apartments/condos/whatever and shop(pes). I think.

I have mixed feelings about this. I know we need “affordable” housing on The Planet Ann Arbor but I’m not sure this will end up being “affordable” and I KNOW I would not want to live on the Briarwood Mall footprint. I mean, it’s a big frickin’ parking lot! On the other hand, I admit that I do not know what it will end up looking like. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised?

There was a time when I LOVED Briarwood Mall and shopped there a LOT. As a baby, Lizard Breath practiced walking there and although she wasn’t quiiiite in the “Mom drive me to mall crowd” as a tween, I remember “Papa” next door driving Liz and his twin grandchildren over there to “hang out” (that’s my phrase, not the kids’). I miss Papa and I hope they had fun.

At least it wasn’t “Limberder” cheese. Stupid MAGA joke 🐽🐽🐽

This is a wee glimpse into our MESSY back room Aaaa-dition during a football game. Go Li-ons. The Kindle belongs to a beach urchin who is happily ensconced in The Reading Chair. I did not show her face but you can see the GG over there watching the football game. It’s a cozy evening at the Landfill but it is not cold enough for a faaar in the faaarplace.

I had so much fun today! I went to the fabric store! Joann’s to be specific. The only one open on Sunday but I needed the kind of stuff Joann’s sells anyway. I have to phrase the next bit carefully so the beach urchins don’t think Old Baggy (their moom) is losing her marbles. I didn’t exactly get lost on the way there but the left turn into the back way to the Tarjay shopping plaza came up a lot earlier than I expected so I had to do a quick maneuver to turn on time. The problem is that there are umpteen bazillion more condos (I hate condos) there than there used to be. I drive by those all the time but haven’t made that left turn in a bazillion years.

Okay. I don’t think I have been in Joann’s since well before covid. I used to go there ALL THE TIME. I stopped buying fabric for a while (sorta). I even donated a bunch of my fabric but then I kinda regretted it.

Today? I didn’t get lost in the store but I kinda felt like a stone age person. I did buy some stuff and I easily found the cutting table. Okay. Zzzzzzip. Fancy lucky-shuckial scissor-type thing to cut the fabric. Cutting the fabric took the longest time of anything because it is still a MANUAL task and the woman who cut my fabric was careful to line it up properly. (The Commander would have approved.) And then, when she was all done cutting, she used a phone-looking device (but I don’t think it was a phone) to zippity-zip scan whatever information was on the ends of the bolts. She printed out a paper slip of what I bought and I handed it to the cashier at the front and paid. I told the cashier I didn’t need a bag or a receipt. She tried to force the receipt on me anyway and I told her if I didn’t end up using the fabric, I would donate it.

I somehow ended up with the receipt anyway and that was a good thing because it gave me most of the information on the end of the fabric bolt so I could look around online and see if I could get alternative colors, etc. Note to self.

He did buy guacamole.

I’m riffing off a meme somebody posted on Facebook today. Like, are you still an artist if you work a day job and don’t have time to create “art” or haven’t created art in a while? It’s a question I have wrestled with from time to time.

I was an uber good musician as a kid/young woman. I could probably have made some kind of career out of that albeit probably not a Jean Pierre Rampal or Lizzo type of career. But I didn’t. I took an entry level tech job because it paid better (actually my first tech job paid like crap but we won’t go there today). I also love to create colorful fiber art stuff but I haven’t done that in a while either. Because I don’t have a lot of time because I have a highly paid (for me) tech job now.

But what defines “art”? I have spent more of my adult life messing around with spreadsheets, programming computers, and writing documents of various sorts than performing music or creating visual art. I’m not sure if I have the bandwidth to articulate what I’m trying to say but there is “art” in almost everything we do. Engineers (one of my lots in life) often drive me crazy but they are also artists.

Communicating information via an elegant spreadsheet is every bit as artistic as painting a landscape or performing a Bach flute sonata. In my current job, among other things, I write functional specifications to clearly describe what our online banking application does. This involves writing but also calls for fitting in flowcharts and other diagrams, tables, and detailed annotated screenshots from the high fidelity html prototype of our application that I code. Is that not artistic? I certainly would like to think it is although it may not be appreciated by a wide audience. But who cares?

Of course, not all jobs offer opportunities to be creative and many people have to deal with toxic job situations. This is a complicated topic and I don’t have all the answers or even all the questions. This is just a rudimentary attempt to put my life experiences into words. We are ALL artists in our own way. I do get that someone who loves to paint (for example) feels frustrated at not having enough time to PAINT because they have to pay rent and put food on the table.

P.S. The photo is from October 2012 at the moomincabin. There is no snow here or there this October. Here on The Planet t-storms are rolling through. We need them.

We always welcome people to use our bench even when we aren’t at the moominbeach. I dunno if very many people actually use the bench but today our friends of porterization visited.

They are on their way downstate to The Planet Ann Arbor and of all things, they are staying at the Hotel Ojibway overnight. Growing up in Sault Ste. Siberia, the Ojibway has always been a fixture in town, not to mention one of the tallest buildings. Six stories.

I have dined at the restaurant at the Ojibway many times throughout my life. Sometimes good times, other times really really bad service. I think our friends went to the Lockview restaurant tonight though.

Way back in the day, Cube Neighbor was following the Umich hockey team and she encountered a pic of my doc-uncle in the Ojibway. Yup, I knew that guy. He’s the one who brought flu shots out to the beach. The Commander: “Get outta the water. It’s time to get your flu shot.” Yeah, right mom…

The Twinz of Terror took The Comm out to dinner at the Ojibway for her 90th birthday and she was treated like a queen. Her take on the whole evening? “Those boys spend money left and right.” Yeah mom, they were spending it on *you* and they can definitely afford to buy you dinner.

After The Commander died, we stayed at the Hotel Ojibway on quite a few occasions for the next couple years when we were in town and the moomincabin was closed for the season. And we were selling Command Central, The Comm’s house up on Dillon Street. Some day we’ll talk about the day I managed to end up in Sault Ste. Siberia with two cars and one driver (meee). Both cars were in the Ojibway Hotel parking lot and we (I) did figger it out.

We dredged ‘lectric Jack up from the Landfill Dungeon today. Here he is a couple years ago projecting his face onto the ceiling.

My thoughts have been a bit a-swirl today. Besides doing an archaeological dig through SWIFT financial file formatting and translating it to BAI data. Don’t ask😵‍💫 I love doing archaeological digs through online banking functionality so it was actually fun. I sometimes wonder if my banker dad has a clue about what I do for a living? Probably not.

The mis/dis info stuff? I cannot believe this. People? Please don’t just throw out anything any yay-hoo puts on social media for the rest of us unwashed masses. I am NEVER unwashed BTW. I am one of the cleanest people you know. But just sayin’.

Winning the prize for most egregious lie (or was it just the most cray-zee) is Marjorie Taylor Greene for accusing the “democrats” of creating hurricanes. Say what? This is miles above Trump using a sharpie to add Alabama to a hurricane that was projected to hit Florida but NOT Alabama. I also haven’t fact checked MTG’s claim but knowing MTG’s particular brand of nuttiness…

The whole Trump Party’s take on the recent hurricanes? Okay, FEMA screwed some things up with Hurricane Katrina. FEMA is undoubtedly not perfect with more recent hurricanes. Who’s perfect? It sounds like FEMA has improved a LOT though. That’s called learning from your mistakes. But despite Trump’s statements about how horrible the “democrats” response to recent hurricanes were, state governors (many GOP) denied his statements. And hurricanes? Every hurricane is different. For one thing? Helene did not spawn tornadoes. Milton? Tornadoes caused many of the casualties although casualties were far fewer than those of Helene. Hurricanes cannot be easily predicted. Who knew North Carolina would be one of the areas most affected by a hurricane that initially made landfall in Florida? North Carolina is not known for hurricanes.

The US government is far from perfect but it was created to serve The People (you and me), NOT the president. Changing our government does not happen quickly and I think that is by design. Although I find myself wishing we could jettison the electoral college.

The Republican Party is NOT what it used to be when I was a kid and my parents voted for its candidates. It is now the Trump Cray-zee Party. The Commander became an Obama supporter in her later years (before Trump of course) and her ashes have certainly been churning throughout Trump’s presidency and subsequent candidacies. Unfortunately I believe the Trump Party is pulling in young people who do not understand what World War II was all about and why otherwise carefree young men like my dad joined the service. A main mission (there were others) was helping to destroy authoritarianism in Europe. Do not vote for Trump. He does not care about anyone except himself. Dangerous person.

G’night, Cassandra

We are watching the latest hurricane with horrified fascination. Our (late) sister The Beautiful Suzie’s (and she WAS beautiful, a gorgeous redhead) husband Mr. Ed lives in their house in Bradenton, just blocks away from the gulf coast and only a few feet above sea level. He is a native Floridian and by that I mean not just that he was born in Fla (although he was) but that at least a couple generations of his ancestors were born there before him. In other words he knows how to deal with hurricanes. I doubt he is evacuating but I don’t know. I’m pretty sure he isn’t mired with the masses on the freeways.

We ate dinner in front of a video of a young female pianist playing a Mendelssohn piece accompanied by an orchestra. This was something the GG found. I was pretty fascinated although in general I don’t really like to watch/listen to classical music in an active way. Back in the day I used to like to PLAY it. I am (was) not a bad pianist but my hands are a wee bit too small to allow me to do the finger gymnastics required for pianistic brilliance. Flute I could do and I may have had a future in that but somehow computers snatched me away.

I heard an interview with Yo Yo Ma (did I spell that correctly?) a while back during which one of the many things he was asked about was an incident when he was 15 or so. He obtained an illegal ID and skipped out of orchestra rehearsal to get drunk and landed in the ER. He giggled yes yes yes to every question he was asked but also expressed regret at how ashamed his father was. In other words, I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. Yo Yo Ma is a joyful person and I love him. I am not as good a musician as Yo Yo Ma. Not by a long shot.

The beach urchins were urging me to get the GG to watch Joe Pera Talks With You. I wasn’t sure it would fly even though in some ways the GG is more of a yooper than I am. I grew up there but he didn’t. Turns out he seems to be kinda digging Joe Pera.

The pic is the GG’s camp setup on the shores of Ruth Lake in the western UP a few weeks ago.