Random bits of my so-called life.

The first pic does not include the GG. Why not? Because he was not on the bridge (over Cole’s Creek in the yooperland). Why was he not on the bridge? Because he FELL OFF! THREE TIMES! As you can probably detect, it was “winter”. Not technically winter. It was November but it was in the yooperland where there is often snow in November.

The water wasn’t over his head but it wasn’t ankle deep either so he was cold and wet. He made a quick exit and high-tailed it down the trail as fast as possible in order to stay warm. Cell service allowed his companions to call a rescue car and the rescuer arrived with some spare (dry) clothing from a thrift store, including a Blue Jacket. Blue isn’t a color he would choose for himself and the beach urchins and I were a bit perplexed when we saw pics of him in the Blue Jacket until we heard the whole story. I would note that he still has the Blue Jacket and even wears it from time to time.

Yesterday he sent the second pic, which is a successful crossing of the log bridge. September this time, no snow and warm weather.

P.S. I got my ballot today.

Can you see it? It’s blurry and blends in a bit. It’s more or less at the center bottom of the pic. Embiggen. I thought I had taken multiple pics of this birdie but somehow only this one showed up and the birdie had moved on. I was hoping it would come back later but if it did, I was inside telecommuting.

I came really close to taking the afternoon off. A meeeee afternoon if you will. I didn’t, mainly because I was too lazy to have the required Come to Jeebus meeting with my paid time off balance. I think there is plenty left in there for me to take an afternoon off but I wasn’t sure. I like to take the days before and after Turkey Day off and then around 10 days for the winter holidays. There were soooo many years that I had a stinky little two or three weeks of vacay a year. It’s not like that (for me) any more but I’m still PTSD about it… Corporate America? People need more time off.

The Commander used to hang hummingbird feeders on the deck at the moomincabin. It’s a little bit risky because sometimes bears approach them. My uncle Don who built the cabin/house to the east of the moomin caught one in the act. I don’t think he did anything about it, just waited patiently until it left. We don’t hang feeders out these days but we pot impatiens every year and the hummers visit those. But these impatiens are at The Landfill on The Planet Ann Arbor. Deer ate the ones at the moomincabin.

I don’t know what kind of interactions went on between my uncle/aunt and their hummingbirds but The Comm’s hummingbirds used to approach our picture windows, looking for her. Where’s my food?

The son of one of my cousins (grandchild of my uncle Don) once pranked my parents by whittling a hummingbird and positioning it on the feeder. The parents were gobsmacked that this hummingbird was completely still. Until they figgered it was a fake. That’s the kind of thing that sometimes passes for excitement at the moomincabin.

That kid was (and is) a force of nature although I’m not sure he was given credit for it at the time. I remember one kinda warm but gray day when he joined a bunch of us “old” folks (me, my parents, Radical Betty and I fergit who else) down on the beach in front of his grandparents’ cabin. One of his older sisters observed this and told his mom, “He’s hanging around with all of those *old* people.”

Old but good, young at heart, and often pretty dern funny. And to be clear, my uncle Don, my parents, and Radical Betty are all long dead. I miss when they were around. And that kid? Husband and father now and uber-talented at many things. What I see the most are his home reno projects, posted by his wife on Instagram. Super impressive work.

Just when I thought Trump couldn’t get any farther off the rails, blahggy friend Pam alerted me to the whole Giant Faucet stuff that was all over the internet today — at least in the PACNW and Canananada. Cue the Giant Faucet memes (this isn’t a meme, just the first pic I saw of such a thing with a nice codgerly op-ed piece to go with it).

Apparently this giant faucet if turned on (it takes a “day” to turn it on according to Trump) will divert water flowing “aimlessly” to the Pacific Ocean through Oregon down to California. I think the Giant Faucet is a metaphor for a complicated and EXPENSIVE design for re-directing huge amounts of water from where it naturally wants to go (the Pacific Ocean?) to somewhere else (California). Not that I think Trump knows what a metaphor is🐽🐽🐽 He went to “bidnis” school roight? Gimme a liberal arts major any day. I know there are folks who disagree with that but we’ll go there some other day.

Subject Matter Experts on “water” are, I’m sure, laughing their asses off. The scientist in this clip (YouTube from Canada News Today) is being very polite as she explains how full of shit Trump is. Water may look like it is moving “aimlessly” but it is not.

I am not any kind of a water scientist but when I was a kid I spent many hours down at the “pond” on the moominbeach. It wasn’t really a pond. It was a “stream” that drained water from wherever into Lake Superior. Us kids would spend hours and hours damning up the stream with sand and driftwood and I’m sure we learned a lot about how water flows. None of that knowledge stuck with me exactly but it was a whole lot of fun.

I do remember the day my big teenage boy cousins Muck and Muck (a beach toddler called them that at the time, it was actually Mac and Mike) were playing “hydroplane” with flat pieces of driftwood and an errant piece accidentally sliced a teeny little corner of my little brother’s mouth. I usually teased my little brother terribly but when I saw the blood, I kicked into HIGH BIG SISTER GEAR, grabbed him and ran him down the beach to the moomincabin, screaming the whole way🤪, which probably scared him half to death. The Commander took us into town, my uncle/doc put a couple stitches in and he was right as rain.

So, MAGA friends? How can you vote for an idiot like Trump? This whole Giant Faucet stuff reminds me of when wildfires were raging in California during his presidency and he was telling people to clean the forests. Hence the title Make America Rake Again. It would be okay if he would actually listen to some Subject Matter Experts but naw, he’s smart (so he says) and he knows what to do. Our country deserves better and the GOP needs to Dump Trump. (Er, not that I would vote for *any* Republican in this day and age anyway.)

This was last week and I think we were driving out Huron toward home from downtown. Our visitor has gone back to her Pacific island and our own jet-setter is off to Cally-forny. I washed everything including my shoes today. They are washable (and were actually a wee bit odiferous) but they do not go in the dryer.

I don’t have much of ANYTHING today. It is a ho-hum regular work week except for the part where a software application I have been using ALL THE TIME (for 17 years, no less) somehow got removed from my laptop over the weekend. And I have been unable to file a ticket to try to get it fixed.

The stupidest thing I heard Trump say today was to brag that he could work [something, I didn’t catch what] at McDonald’s better than Kamala any day. Whut? Does he REALLY want to compete with Kamala for a McDonald’s job. What an ignoramus. MAGA friends, WHY are you supporting him? It isn’t because of his “policies” because he really doesn’t have them. He is now promising to do all the things he promised to do in his previous presidency AND DIDN’T! People have such short memories.

I think I will give it up for the night. I watched a few episodes of “Joe Pera Talks With You” last night and I will do a few more tonight. They are short, which works well for this show with its quirky characters. I’m enjoying it but I wonder if folks unfamiliar with the old yooper schtick would “get” it. Even though I grew up in the yooperland I wasn’t actually immersed in yooperism but I get the stereotypes. That said, I was not a fan of “Escanaba in da Moonlight”. My fam does not hunt although we spend a lot of time in the woods, just not in deer “camps”. It’s complicated…

Ratatatatat. Loud. Things have settled down a bit recently but for the first week or 10 days that I was back on the Planet Ann Arbor, it was NOISY around here. Why? Because acorns were hitting the roof like crazy. Also branches, according to the GG, which were being knocked down by squoils, who were trying to get at more acorns. A chipmunk was in the Landfill yesterday but I haven’t seen it since and don’t smell anything so it must’ve made its way out again.

We live under oak trees so there are always acorns but I don’t remember being under quite this much of a barrage EVER. And these are all over the yard! And that’s all I have to say tonight because Imma gonna watch a series about a teacher (I think) who lives with his mother (I think) in Marquette Michigan (which is three hours west of the moominbeach). My kids have suggested this and tonight one of them “poked” me to get a move on with this so I will do that.

I am certainly not but as the eldest of five FinFam women at dinner tonight, that word kept floating through my head. But nope. Actually I think my female cousins and I could compete to be “the” matriarch if we wanted that “title” but I don’t think any of us want it 🧡

Us five (me, cousin npJane, my kids and niece) ate at Miss Kim tonight, down in Kerrytown. I have a long history with Kerrytown. It is of course where our legendary farmers market resides, as well as Sparrow Meats and Monahan’s Seafood and once the now defunct Kitchen Port. I took my parents there ALL THE TIME when they visited us! It was probably one of The Commander’s favorite shops ever (except for John Leidy (which was not in Kerrytown)) and my old coot would happily hang around wherever. This courtyard is one of the places Lizard Breath practiced walking.

As I sat in Miss Kim tonight, I was trying to remember what it was way back when Lizard was a baby and before. Was it Pastabilities? Yes, I think it was. There was a cafe there but what I most remember is buying a wonderful pasta salad there. I think I was eating Korean food in that old space tonight. We ordered a bunch of small orders to share.

Sitting in Miss Kim wishing I were better at using chopsticks (‘poons were also available and I mostly used one), I also remembered my first Chinese restaurant, as a teen or maybe a tween. The Pagoda was across the river in our sister city Sault Ste. Siberia, Ontario in Churchill Plaza and we went there pretty frequently. I ALWAYS ordered sweet and sour pork but what I remember the most (or maybe I was just told this) was that my Scot/Canadian/American grandmother was a master at using chopsticks, having never used them before.

My grandma was a matriarch. A lovely, kindly one. I am just a baggy old kayak woman and I like it that way.

Babblety babblety g’night.

We’ve had umpteen bajillion hot, dry days. Wouldn’t you know the day we planned a FinFam steak dinner, it would rain. I think the rain had settled down by the time our grill master got to work. It was dark inside the Landfill, hence the candles.

I only did two grock shops today. The first was at the Argus Farm Stop to get some local produce. They had some corn! Yay! Argus is an amazing place. They get goods from local farmers and sell it to the public. They also serve coffee and pastries and things. During the early, scary days of covid, back when people were dying (and YES, they were, do not forget), Argus set up an on-line ordering system where you could order stuff and they would deliver it to your door.

Garlic bread was part of today’s menu and wouldn’t you know I managed to get into a mess with that. We needed to make garlic bread with “regular” butter and also vegan butter. I made some with regular butter and then I got all set up to make a half loaf with vegan butter. I started to butter that half loaf with vegan butter and then… I was listening to my fave political podcast (Left Right and Center) and I went over to adjust the volume or whatever. When I got back to my buttering task… I finished that half loaf with REGULAR BUTTER. It didn’t help that I had both kinds of butter right next to each other on the counter.

Okay. I schlepped back over to the Plum for ANOTHER baguette. I buttered both halves of that one with vegan butter. One went into the freezer, the other got baked. I figger we aren’t gonna be able to tell the difference between the dairy and vegan butter so what the heck.

I dunno if that all made sense (probably not) but it was a good time. And ignore those remote control thingies. I did not even see those things until I downloaded the photo to my laptop and optimized it.

P.S. If Fox News et al and facebook “friends” who post inflammatory crapola are your main political information sources, the podcast Left Right and Center might be an alternative. There are always participants from both sides of the current political spectrum and they discuss issues respectfully and even with a sense of humor. I’m sure there are MANY other alternatives.

I guess it was a gorgeous day on the moominbeach, never mind that the GG has put the fugly coverings over the picture windows. I HATE those window coverings and if I were there, they would not be installed until the last nano-second. But I am not there and I don’t think they bother the GG as much as they bother meeeeee.

He sent me this pic from Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench, just above our beach. For a mini-sec I wished I was there but y’know what? I am glad to be back on The Planet Ann Arbor. Soooo hard to live in two places. Well plus the weather at the moominbeach is supposed to tank overnight. npJane was scheduled to join him on the bench and then they were gonna roast hot dogs in the Old Cabin faaaarplace. Good times.

So grock expotitions today? FOUR OF THEM! 1) Jackson Road Meijer for things I can’t really get at the upscale grock store (Plum) or farmers markets. Usually it’s because I can get a cheaper brand at Meijer. 2) Plum Market for filet mignon and a few other things I CAN get there but not necessarily at Meijer. 3) The corn trailer behind and up from the Plum. Alas, I was too late for corn but I got some apples and potatoes. 4) Pete’s Produce out on Joy Road where I *did* get some corn but maybe I’ll try Pete’s again tomorrow to see if he has more.

The GG and npJane were treated to a pretty good air show today by the Canadian Snowbirds. The Soo Cananada airport is across the St. Marys River from the moominbeach and the Snowbirds occasionally touch down there. A fighter jet of some sort passed over The Landfill this afternoon. It wasn’t screaming along, just flying over. I dunno what it was. The interwebs tell me that the UMich football flyover today was Warthogs and I’m not sure what those are (and not inclined to look it up). I did not see the actual flyover.

The GG *did* manage to remember to snag my tie dyed maxi skirt (and also a black one) from the “closet” in the back downstairs bedroom. I was relieved to hear that.

Another gorgeous day but on this one I got to play hooky from work for a bit and drive out into the country north of town.

Kiddo: a package is coming to my house, can someone pick it up? Yes yes yes yes! It is Friday. Nothing much is going on at work that I need to be johnny-on-the-spot for. If something comes up I will deal with it. I would love love love love to drive the back (dirt) roads north of town to pick up your package. And so I did. And then (as expected) another package came to myyyy house.

I was given permission to open these packages. They were just fabric (just?) and so I did open them and sent this pic to the recipient, who is currently down in South Carolina but will be home soon. Opening packages that were not addressed to me was kind of an end-of-week mini-reward. And the beach urchin recipient does not have to deal with recycling the boxes because I have already done that. So I got to be useful today.

Reading? Count the Ways. So far? Yes but… A quick enough read though. Oh, maybe a few too many mix tapes… Watching? My Octopus Teacher. It is beautiful and I love it but oh man, the underwater scenes lull me to sleep when they don’t make me nervous (delete a bunch of blargle about my iffy relationship with water over my head). So I have paused it for the night. I AM FASCINATED by octopuses and will definitely finish it tomorrow.

This time to the Session Room, an old pre-covid fave of ours for occasional weekend afternoon decadence. We have been there a couple times since covid. They have wonderful outdoor seating for one thing. Tonight we took Pengo out there and braved the indoors. It was fine. I am working on getting more restaurant dining back into our rotation. Working on myself, mainly. The GG has been eating out pretty much throughout. One of the problems is that I actually like to cook at home but I do miss some of our old favorite restaurants. One thing I am noticing is much abbreviated menus. I do not think this is an entirely bad thing. Some of those old multi-page menus took a lot of stamina to get through. I do miss the shrimp/rice side dish thingy the Griz used to make. But they ended that well before covid. Maybe I could recreate it? If I could remember all the ingredients? Parmesan was involved.

Have not been back to Knight’s yet but soon. After dinner, we dropped Pengo off at Lizard Breath’s house where she can do some laundry before heading over to her (and my) old college town tomorrow for a wedding. Things have changed a lot over there since she went to school there and CERTAINLY since I went to school there a generation earlier. America’s Cup and Lizard’s Underground are long gone, Dooley’s is now Harper’s, Coral Gables focuses on food instead of rowdy partying, and the city has sprouted a skyline. Unfortunately the skyline has obliterated an old favorite surface parking lot of mine. A common theme these days. They’re not just paving paradise these days, they’re taking over the airspace.

Anyway I am taaared and babbling.

Sayonara, KW

The best pic of last night’s eclipse of the moon. As you can see, it isn’t exactly a huge eclipse. You might be able to tell that a little bitsy bit is skimmed off the top of Mr. Moon. If I get it right, that’s all we got.

Our globetrotter Pengo Janetto arrived on The Planet Ann Arbor tonight for a long weekend in the area and all the family we could muster met up with her at the Griz tonight for dinner. That amounted to me and the GG, Lizard Breath, and npJane.

Downtown was busy busy busy tonight and until we entered the Griz I was worried that it would be too crowded for my lingering covid cowardice. When we got out of Cygnus, I could hear the thrum of vee-hicular traffic thru town. I dunno if I can put this into words exactly but during the two whole months I spent at the moominbeach this summer, I frequently heard a very different thrum. It was the sound of big lake freighters traversing up and down the St. Marys (no, there’s no apostrophe) River shipping channel on their way to and from Lake Superior.

We miss our Pengie so much and we had such a good time tonight. I shoved my covid cowardice into the corner where it belongs. I had to use an actual purse/bag-type thingy tonight because it was too hot to wear my polar fleece vest (with zip pockets). When I dug it out of my still unpacked moomincabin luggage, there was something in it! Whut? It was a KN95 mask. I took the mask out of the purse/bag and did not take it downtown. As luck would have it, the Griz was not crowded at all.

Onward.

I app most of my Instagram photos, as I did this one. I was having “zoom” (actually facetime) coffee with MMCB. BOTH MMCBs. It’s the first time all three of us have been together in about six weeks. Busy summer.

It had started out not exactly chilly but a little hazy and I was wearing my polar fleece JACKET instead of my vest to “take the edge off” as the GG would say. And then the haze cleared and the sun blasted down and WOW! I wondered if I could take a photo and not lose my chat session. It turned out YES I could although MMCB lost my picture temporarily. That was okay. As managers at work always say at our daily stand-up meetings, I don’t want anybody looking at me this morning. But I allow MMCB to see me as I am.

My “show-and-tell” for the morning was my latest facebook debacle. You do not want to know and all I will say is “a priest, an outlaw, and a baggy old kayak woman walk into a bar” and also “I could not make this up if I tried”. It had nothing to do with Bad Boyfriend. BBF still shows up as “people you may know” and I have figured out that he is in fact Bad Boyfriend and not BBF’s son. I have not sent or received a friend request and do not intend to send one although I might accept one if I ever get one. But I probably won’t.

I do occasionally interact with an “old flame” on facebook. Our brief relationship was never intended to continue for various (good) reasons. He married a lovely woman and I married, uh, MAGA😵‍💫🤣🤣🤣 Don’t worry, my MAGA guy has a lot of good qualities (he can fix terlets and just about anything else) and in those days who the heck could’ve predicted MAGA and the grip it would have over otherwise intelligent people (and a whole lot of incredibly dumb ones). Anyway, the old flame and I are wonderful platonic friends nowadays. We don’t connect all that often but I suspect he was entertained by my debacle yesterday and we had some good back and forth fun via comments on OTHER stuff I had posted (benign moomincabin pics). He – wisely – didn’t join the debacle.

When I took this pic this morning, I inexplicably chose an Instagram filter that gave it a greenish tint. Somehow it seemed like a good idea at the time? Now I’m looking at it like, um, what was I thinking?

A friend came over for dinner last weekend. Traversing from his car (in the street), up the driveway, through the Landfill, and into the back yard (where we had a loverly faaaar going), he encountered at least three non-human beings.

The first one was this guy, who has resided in Mooon Yoonit (Toyota RAV4) for at least five years. I don’t drive Mooon Yoonit very often, not because I don’t like to drive her but she is often filled with crapola and I prefer my own Cygnus (Subie Crosstrek). To be clear, both of our vee-hickles are jointly owned. There isn’t really a his/hers thing going on.

Anyway, I’m not sure when this character began residing in Mooon Yoonit but I will never forget JUMPING the first time I walked by Mooon Yoonit and saw a PERSON with a blue face in the passenger seat! I pretty quickly figgered out that it was NOT a person. The problem is that five years later or so I STILL jump every time I see him. Whenever I do actually drive Mooon Yoonit, I definitely remove the mask. That’s Bucky Beaver on his t-shirt BTW and that’s a whole ‘nother story.

So that’s likely the first person our friend saw on his journey. Then there was the person sitting in my Z chair in the back room. It is a rather large bear dressed in clothing. A gift for Lizard Breath when she was a newborn baby and probably about eight times her size at that time. Yay for healthy six pound babies! I had also been fooled by this “person” as I walked up the stairs with laundry a couple days before. Is that the GG sitting there? I think it’s too short to be him. But it has a hat like he frequently wears. But it wasn’t the GG. It was Bear.

Finally our friend walked outside and encountered MAGA Skeletor. (A pic of him is a few posts back.)

That’s kinda how it rolls around here.

We are having a string of really really good weather here on the Planet Ann Arbor. The last two (weekend) mornings, Coffee Boy has served me my coffee in the Landfill Backyard. Here is the sun coming up. Yesterday was a Football Saturday and I could hear the UMich marching band practicing as I drank my coffee. It was sooooo loverly. Hail hail Michigan, the champions of the west. And I am not even a football fan.

But I do pay minimal attention to the “home” teams and football was a mixed bag this weekend. UMich won their game but the GG was unable to find it on TV so he could not watch it although he did walk downtown to mix with the 110,000 fans. The Li-ons lost today (although it ended up being quite close). He found that on TV but spent a lot of time sitting outside reading The Last of the Mohicans instead, bouncing in and out when it sounded like there might be some action.

I am frustrated about people that try to tie what they are calling “socialism” to Kamala’s “policies”. Does she have policies? I dunno but I also dunno why people keep trying to compare her “policies” to Trump’s “policies”. Trump? Policies? Whut? Infrastructure week? We never got to that during 45’s presidency (or whatever you want to call it). Over and over and over again he promised to replace Obamacare with something BETTER and we would know what it was in a couple weeks. Did that ever happen? NO IT DID NOT! And yet his “base” is still hanging on to his “policies”. Again, what policies?

The day after Kamala beat the pants off Trump in their one and only debate (because he is afraid to “debate” her again), I changed my facebook profile pic to one of me standing tall looking a weeeee bit like my dad/granddaddy and saying, “I stand with Kamala but live in a divided house”. My point was that I do not agree with my husband on the candidates but we somehow live together peacefully (well except for the usual marital crapola). Comments were respectful until today when, well, I won’t go there. Mostly. But…

Socialism was mentioned as an evil. Yes, socialism (not to mention communism and capitalism and WHAT ABOUT FASCISM?) can be evil. What other isms am I missing? But I think most of us have lost track of any precise definitions of these terms. If you want to define Kamala as a socialist, you must first define “socialism”. Then you have to connect “socialism” to anything Kamala has said or done. In a MEANINGFUL WAY. I don’t think most people can do that. I certainly can’t although I am a Kamala supporter so I am unlikely to.

Folks, you are unlikely to sway me from voting for Kamala so don’t even try. I do NOT want another term of Trump. I didn’t think he had a decent grip on reality back in 2016 and I do not think he has one now. My issue with him is not that I think he’s senile despite the word salad that he has been spouting SINCE 2016 (and probably before but I didn’t have to pay attention to him then). I think he is a narcissist who does not care about anyone but himself and therefore is not fit to lead our country.

My mouse took the pic omewhere in the Carolinas, I know not where. I have walked a bit of the Atlantic coast though. When the beach urchins were seven and almost-five, we loaded up the Exxon Tanker Valdez and took them and an older cousin to Crazy Old Florida to visit the kids’ grandparents. All three girls are beautiful blondes and when people thought they were all mine, I didn’t always correct them.

We took a slow route down, through Washington, DC, then down through Virginia but NOT on the freeway. Because we visited Asateague Island. I walked that beach a bit wearing my 1980s long puffy down coat and listening to Celtic music. Somehow. Must have been via a Walkman? I can’t remember how I accomplished it. It was cold but beautiful.

On down through the Carolinas and Georgia but on the freeway at that point. We had a day when 🐭 could not stay seated. We flaunted flouted all laws and let her out of her seat belt and she flip-flopped between the middle and back seats for quite some time. Just like I used to do before my family had cars with seat belts. I remember seeing signs for “car-train to Florida” and I so wanted that.

A penultimate stop at Disney World before landing at the grandparents. I was fantasizing about breakfasting on the lanai the next morning having a loverly breakfast. Reality? I was woken up by an almost five-year-old standing next to my face asking, “Mom? Have I ever been here before?” Well… No… (Except for last night when we arrived.) And then there was rat poison on the lanai table and a damp towel draped over one of the chairs. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my in-laws. I have never had a desire to return to Disney World. It was fine but once was enough. I don’t like carnival rides or fake stuff.

A bit of an addendum to yesterday’s book banning post. In the heat of the original VOT discussion, I failed to remind people that Moms for Liberty (or any recent book banning groups) are not likely to be interested in banning books by old dead white men like the authors I mentioned yesterday.

The VOT discussion tonight veered toward early 20th century historical writers Kenneth Roberts and Hervey Allen. I have read books by both of these authors and enjoyed them greatly although they are rather dense books if you know what I mean.

One of the folks on the VOT call thought that these authors’ books have been banned because they are apparently not available at the local public library. I am skeptical that they have been banned. I think it’s more likely that they may have been weeded out because people are not checking them out. I don’t really know.

From what little I know about public librarians, if they are working in a library that does not currently store a book, they are pretty dern good at finding it from some other source. Public librarians serve to bring literature to ALL OF US, no matter what our political or cultural opinions might be.

The books I’m talking about portray early settlers’ views of the northeastern area of what we now call the USA and Canada. They do not portray a Native American’s view of the same era although many Native American folks are an integral part of these stories and were friends (or not) with the settlers.

A beloved young relative of mine was once looking for Native American stories told from their own viewpoint. I pointed him to Hervey Allen and Kenneth Roberts with the caveat that these were white men writing about their experiences. Most Native Americans were not able to write their stories in English in those days. That is a problem but it isn’t one I can solve…

My family is fortunate enough to still own a number of my grandfather’s OLD hardcover books by these and other authors. They reside in the moomincabin and we will not be getting rid of them.

That’s what tonight is all about. I just now (at 9 PM) got around to rolling the carts down to the curb. We ate Karl’s Cuisine stromboli tonight (traditional Italian) and then we watched either the first episode of Gomer Pyle or it might’ve been an episode of Andy Griffith in which Gomer left for the Marines. We weren’t sure. And then we watched an Andy Griffith episode in which Opie decided he had a crush on his teacher Helen Crump and with the help of a lady’s store proprietor (who had no clue) selected nylon stockings as a gift for her. An inappropriate gift for your teacher to be sure. That was all of the vintage TV re-runs I could handle because they all come with several minute commercial breaks and I cannot handle those.

Remember nylon stockings? I sure do. They were AWFUL! Wearing a garter belt with a mini-skirt? And they were forever getting runs. I remember when I was young enough to be on the cusp of wearing nylon stockings. I was at my aunt’s house one day (in what I remember as a HUGE kitchen) and she was instructing her youngest daughter (older cousin of mine) about buying nylon stockings. Every time you buy stockings, you need to buy two pairs. Or even three, four, or five. Little pitchers have big ears and overhearing this conversation I was wondering how the heck I would ever have enough money to go into a store and buy five pairs of nylon stockings.

This was well before women were allowed to have their own plastic cards. When I got one at about the age of 21, I couldn’t have passed a credit check (no income) so my dad told his bank employees that he guaranteed it would get paid (by him if necessary) and my mom forged my signature. There really aren’t a whole lot of perks to being a small-town banker’s daughter but that turned out to be one of them for me. I still have that card and it is still only in my name although I think the GG has managed to use it a few times without difficulty even though he has a different surname. It was originally a MasterCard but for many years it has been a VISA. Nowadays I pay the balance weekly. I have an alert set up to remind me bright and early every Monday morning.

Of course we ALL stopped wearing nylon stockings many years ago when panty hose arrived on the scene. I do NOT wear pantyhose any more either but I do wear tights in every color and then some. Nowadays there are tights that are made to FIT so you aren’t constantly tugging them up to your waist 🐽 I order them on the internet and Snag tights (google it) is my favorite vendor. They definitely make them to fit because they fit all sizes of women and proudly display them on models of all sizes. Nowadays I buy in quantity if they have something I know I will want more than a few pairs of.

So yeah babbling. G’night!

Boy did it ever feel good to watch a debate where Trump got put in his rightful place. Over and over and over again.

Talk about off the rails? When he started talking about “aborting” babies after birth? A MODERATOR shut that whole thing down with something like, “There is no state in which killing babies after they are born is legal.” THANK YOU!!!! And can we just end the crazy talk?

But apparently not, because what else did we have to endure? Immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio? Really? This almost tops the post-birth abortion and public school gender change surgeries except it is even more ludicrous. Memes about this are sprouting up all over. Dogs driving cars out of Springfield, you name it. Also, “Springfield Ohio Pet Rescue has reported a ten fold increase in donations” but I don’t know if that is a meme or TRUE. I hope it’s true because even though the pet-eating thing is total BS, pet rescues can always use money. I don’t know how all the MAGA folks can process the cognitive dissonance of their prospective “leader of the free world” spouting all of this crapola. What an ignoramus.

I thought Kamala met all of Trump’s bullcrap with poise. She didn’t let him get away with any blasted BS. She countered all of his lies with facts and threw things back at him left and right. I had intended to listen to the debates on the radio but for complicated reasons, I ended up streaming it (quietly) instead on my laptop. That turned out to be a good choice because I could see their (hilarious) facial expressions, etc.

I realize last night’s debate will not decide the election but it was a breath of fresh air to see that Kamala (and the moderators) did not let Trump get away with his usual lies, intimidation, and other crapola.

Pet-eating immigrants. What next? [Shakes head.]

I am just kidding but I want to clarify a couple things I said yesterday. Blahggy friend Margaret pointed out one of them, which was when I said that Hillary wasn’t the best candidate (in the 2016 election). Actually I believe that Hillary WAS the best candidate in that election. I hated Trump and still do (y’all know that though). I actually do think she had/has everything it takes to be our president.

What I was skeptical about at the time was running another Clinton. And that only because I am skeptical about too many people in one family as president. Of course, that was early in the race before (I think) we knew Trump would actually run or, Unknown Deities forbid, actually WIN. Once she committed to running and became the nominee, I fully supported her, even giving a small donation to her campaign (and am still getting spam from that but that’s a whole ‘nother story). Like many others, I was devastated (and surprised) when Trump WON. I think we’d be much better off if he had lost and Hillary had been 45. [Delete long boring disjointed thoughts about that.]

As I was re-reading, I noticed I also disparaged “under-educated” folks. I regret referring to the MAGA followers and anyone else as under-educated. The level of education a person has reached doesn’t have anything to do with intelligence or critical thinking skills or creativity or whatever. Nevertheless, when you see a clip of an insurrection participant sitting in Nancy Pelosi’s (or whoever’s) office saying something like, “Well we’re here, so let’s form a government”, you have to wonder WHAT they are thinking or if they are even CAPABLE of thinking.

Two more things. 1) It is soooo hard to edit your own writing, especially if you blather on a daily basis. I’m probably preaching to the choir on that. 2) I like to be disagreed with (respectfully) and appreciate being called out when someone does disagree. We may or may not continue to disagree and it doesn’t matter (people disagree) but I wrote particularly clumsily yesterday and this is my attempt at some clarification.

Contemplating whether to brave watching (actually listening to) tonight’s debate or hide under a rock.

If you do click over to Margaret, check out her cat’s new cousin or whatever 🤣

The pic has nothing to do with anything I wrote today. It’s a pic of the moldy old cFam Hoton Lake cabin before the cFam sibs bulldozed it and built a new modern dwelling. I posted it to the cFam FB group last night as a comment to a niece’s BEAUTIFUL sketch of the modern cabin. As many times as I have posted and/or looked at this photo, I never noticed my shadow until someone commented about it last night. Jeebus.

A while back MMCB₂ and I were talking and she (a former school board member) had been asked what a good quality for an elected official might be. I almost immediately came back with HONESTY! Wnich she agreed with (she is a MENSCH). I know that’s a little, I dunno, idealistic and maybe naive? I know that many many politicians are in it for themselves. Still, I would like to believe that they also care about their constituents. Like MMCB₂ did. But not all do.

I was busy busy busy at work today but in the mid-afternoon, I heard one of the NPR talk shows talking about Trump and the outright lies he spews and how the news media SHOULD deal with them but usually doesn’t. Two of the most egregious lies Trump spews that I can think of are 1) “Democrats” support “aborting” babies after they are born (alive) and 2) Public schools are performing surgeries on children to change their gender. The second was what the program was talking about today. Whut?

Um neither of these things are true in any way, shape, or form. Do babies die after being born alive? Yes, they do. When that kind of thing happens, it almost always means the baby was born with a medical condition incompatible with life and the parents decided to carry to term and spend a few minutes/hours/days with their child before saying good-bye. Do people (their parents) kill their own newborn babies? Alas, sometimes they do. When this happens, it almost always means mental illness or maybe a freak accident. None of this is anything that “Democrats” or anyone else supports.

Surgeries on children to change their gender? Whut? Have schools somewhere and sometime in history operated on children without their parents’ consent? Probably. Horrible things have happened (and still do) to children in schools. Surgeries? Nope. Not now. At least not in the USA. THAT DOES NOT HAPPEN! It just doesn’t. What public school nurse is prepared not to mention ALLOWED to do much more than clean a small wound and bandage it? I don’t even think it’s okay for them to provide “aspirin” any more but who knows.

Where does Trump get this stoopid crapola and why does the news media let him get away with spewing it? Some of his “followers” are gonna say something like, “It’s just Trump being Trump.” Sorry, but if you think that you are stupid. I’m just gonna say it, since I have been called stupid by various family members for being anti-Trump/MAGA since the beginning. Nope. He is just a nutcase and not fit to run for president. He only won in 2016 because Hillary was not the best candidate. And I actually like Hillary but that is a true statement. And then his lies (yes, lies) took root in the under-educated MAGA folks and are we ever gonna get rid of the god damn orange idiot?

I don’t wanna let this go on too long so KAMALA, YOU GO GIRL! Beat the shit out of Trump in the debate. Don’t let him Gish Gallop you. I’M SPEAKING! Loud and clear. People are standing behind you. I am not a person of color. I am a WASPy-type Scottish-Canadian-American woman who stands in support of Kamala.