Random bits of my so-called life.

Okay, so the Michigan political primaries were a week ago tomorrow. Maybe you’ve heard about them, maybe not. I did not vote for El-Sayed for senate. I voted for the more centrist (or whatever) candidate. The more I read about El-Sayed, the more I support him. If only he can beat republican Mike Rodgers.

Here on The Planet Ann Arbor, there were two “progressive” democrats running for mayor and I’m not sure anyone was running on the republican side. I voted for the *more* progressive guy and newcomer to the mayoral position. The current mayor was the other candidate. He’s been in office for a long time and I am not all that crazy about what he and his sycophants seem to be hell bent on doing to our city, especially in the downtown area. In the cause of “affordable” housing, we have tall buildings sprouting up everywhere. I am all for affordable housing (who the hell isn’t). I would like to see carefully designed and planned housing. From my standpoint (not necessarily well informed), it seems like “we” are willy nilly handing our downtown area over to real estate developers and letting them do whatever they want aka whatever profits them the most.

Are units in these big towers affordable? Or is it just a percentage of the units that are affordable? And who the heck wants to live in a high-rise home anyway? Maybe some folks do but when I was a young kid starting a family, I wanted to be able to walk out into a back yard without taking an elevator. Also let’s define affordable. It’s a word that gets bandied about a LOT these days. What does it mean?

I’m not convinced that any elected official can solve these complicated problems. I am also not convinced that anyone who runs for an elected position is in it for anyone or anything except their own personal profit, not to mention ego.

In other words, voting is just a f*ckin’ crap shoot. I rolled the dice, so to speak, and we’ll “just have to see what happens” as a certain vile orange person says over and over and over, in between, “We’re about to have a deal to end the war with Iran.” Roight. BullSHIT. Just like he’s gonna lower the price of eggs and gasoline and “I’ll be so good for women” and THEY’RE EATING THE PETS! Not. And no I didn’t vote for Trump. I vote for anything BUT republicans these days. Youz guyz have done it to yourselves by your mean spirited nutso policies.

Yeah, I’m just an old Sun Bakery Hippie Momma and I’ve had kind of a bad day. Oh, nothing serious, just wanna be at the moomincabin and am not. P.S. I’m not really a hippie.

This sign has been in Mooon Yooonit’s right back-seat window since April. I’m not sure if the GG hadn’t seen it until yesterday or if it took him that long to ask about it. He is the main driver of Mooon Yooonit.

Yesterday he asked if I knew who had put it there. I said, “All I will say is that the person was NOT female.” Meaning it wasn’t me or your daughters. After some thinking, he (tentatively) asked if it was either of a couple of young male friends of the family. That took me a bit aback because I can’t believe either of those gallant young gentlemen would prank somebody like the GG in that way. Or anyone, for that matter. Nope.

I knew exactly who dunnit, of course. There is only one person who would have pulled this prank and it is his ugly brother aka The Uncliest Uncle aka his womb mate aka his ID twin. WHO ELSE??? I figgered it out as soon as I saw the sign on that April day as the cFam gathered for a group photo in front of FlaMan’s apartment.

This isn’t the first time we’ve been pranked by the UU. One memorable one was when I was still schlepping to Cubelandia to work most days. I got into the Ninja and staring me in the face was a Trump sign. On the back of the Lyme Lounge. This was before the 2016 election and I wasn’t sure exactly who the GG supported although I was pretty sure he didn’t like Hillary.

But Trump? I quietly freaked out all eight zen miles to Cubelandia but by the time I got there, I was thinking a bit more rationally. 1) The GG was outta town the preceding few days/week/whatever. 2) He was towing the Lyme Lounge. 3) He was at his ID twin’s house… In fact, when I pointed out the sign, he removed it immediately. He voted, as it turned out, for MAGA (alas) but “I’m gonna be traveling.” To his credit, he didn’t want to proclaim his political preferences to the world. Thank the gods for that at least. It’s one reason I can live with my own personal MAGAt.

As I said earlier, I don’t know when he noticed the poop sign. He has not removed it with the same speed as he removed the Trump sign. Or even at all. Then again, even though I knew about the sign from the getgo, I have been driving Mooon Yooonit a bit more this summer as we try to manage with one automotive vee-hickle at the moominbeach so I guess I am proclaiming to the world that I might have to poop…

P.S. Mooon Yooonit was in the body shop for two weeks with that sign in the window.

We took a road trip today to meet up at the Hillsdale Brewing Company with the Baw Beese chapter of the North Country Trail Assocation. Baw Beese was an Indian chief if memory serves. It was a beautiful drive and I met my “next husband” at the event.

First, the signs. Our sister-in-law’s name is Gay and it has long been our habit to get photographic evidence of streets or whatever with that name. Once on a road trip to Crazy Old Florida, we visited a young cousin in Knoxville and as he was chauffeuring us through downtown Knoxville, a Gay Street sign suddenly appeared. Scrambling to get a pic, the GG DROPPED HIS IPHONE out the window onto the pavement of a busy street, which cracked the screen big time. We got it fixed at an Apple Store in Atlanta the next day, this time chauffeured by The Guru.

We passed Gay Road on the way to Hillsdale and made a note to get a pic on the way back. As it turned out, the view approaching the Gay Road intersection going back served up the barn with the Trump sign. These signs were maybe a quarter mile apart and I don’t really have a point in posting them, at least not a coherent point. Just weird slices of American life in 2026. DISCLAIMERS: 1) I totally support LGBTQ+ rights and 2) I hate Trump and MAGA.

My next husband? Oh, I was just kidding, y’all know that. But there was this guy there who knows a bit about my family’s yooperland land and its adjacent lighthouses, all of which have deteriorated into rubble. The GG met him at a similar event a couple years ago and I have communicated with him before and even sent him some pics of the Back Light. But I was still working at the time and our communications kind of fell by the way. My bad.

I was ecstatic to meet him (unexpectedly) in person today. “Oh, you’re THAT guy! I’m so sorry I drifted off” and we kind of clicked in a way I don’t often do with men. Like I got his sense of humor and he got mine. Right off the bat. Even when others were missing the joke/point/whatever. And he *listened* when I talked.

He knows a lot more about lighthouses than I do. I mean, the lighthouses on our beach and Round Island were just part of our playground as beach urchins. This man knows all kinds of details about the specifications and locations, etc. When he started to talk about the “spiral” staircase in the Back Light, I felt ecstatic that I knew exactly what he was talking about. It wasn’t anything like the tight metal spiral staircases you might be thinking about and, well, I just wish I’d had an iPhone in my pocket when I was a kid climbing up the inside of that lighthouse.

P.S. Moscow is a tiny village along US12. US12 runs more or less from Ypsilanti to Chicago and on many of the two-lane stretches of it in Michigan, there are flea markets everywhere. And BIG DINOSAURS in one place. Just ask Little Cat Z. But Moscow was where we had to turn to get back up to the damn I94 18-wheel Clogway. Sigh.

…in what we call G2 (aka the generation above me and my FinFam cousins), that is. That’s My Dear Uncle Harry (MDUH) a few years ago when he was still traveling to the moominbeach in the summer. He turned 99 today.

He married my dad’s youngest sister Bubs and even though their oldest daughter is my age, he is quite a bit younger than my parents. My parents married young (for my family) at 24 and 22 but various difficulties I am foggy on prevented them from having children for 11 years. MDUH and Bubs popped one out PDQ and family legend has it that, although they wanted children, they may have been a bit dismayed that it happened as quickly as it did. Nevertheless, they loved my cousin (and the two that followed) and I have cherished that baby my whole life (I’m a few months older than her).

I have to confess that there were likely times in my childhood that MDUH wanted to wallop me with whatever weapon was available. Why? Because I was a bratty little kid. I grew out of that eventually (well, mostly, don’t get me started on MAGA) and MDUH has always been a great friend of mine as an adult.

After Little Cat Z was born, the GG stopped at MDUH’s house on his way home from the hoosegow to announce her birth (MDUH and Bubs were the only relatives within an easy driving distance and the GG was very excited) and MDUH pointed out that he (the GG) was still wearing hospital booties. When he saw LCZ the first time, he proclaimed her The Epitome of Cutosity!

I could write forever about MDUH but I’ll leave most of it for another time. He is as funny as a crutch, as evidenced by a joke he told at the party held for August birthdays today at his apartment complex. Click over to Le Marquis’s blog for that.

It’s in quotes because even though I’m not sure it’s an accurate quote, I *think* it originally came from FlyLady. I like to promote her site when I get a chance because following her guidance for a while once got my house out of a pretty big mess. Not a hoarding situation, just a bit out of control. I always keep up with dishes and laundry and garbage and stuff and I could vacuum and dust, although I HATE doing the last two with a passion.

It was 20 years ago or so that one of my beach urchins alerted me to FlyLady. Oh, not because my house was a particular mess. Mainly because I was kvetching about needing to get rid of stuff. So I worked diligently for a while using some of the FlyLady techniques for bite-size flinging sessions: declutter 15 minutes a day, get rid of 10 pieces of mail a day, etc. I don’t hoard mail. Almost all of it goes into the recycle bin even before it even gets in the house. But I know people who *do* hoard mail — years and years of it. I wish I were kidding. Drywall buckets too but we’ll go there another time. Or not.

Today I was annoyed because the GG was in conversation (on speaker) with a relative about the trials and tribulations of flinging. In this case, some of it belonged to their parents, so talking about it to other (of the many) siblings occasionally brought up the “maybe so-and-so would want that” crapola. DISCLAIMER: I am not naming names or pointing fingers. ALL FAMILIES go through this shit, in this case (and in my case), exacerbated by an inherited jointly owned property. One of the (many) problems is that not everyone has the right psychological energy to “fling” things at the same time. I did a lot of my original flinging all by myself. The GG eventually joined me but by that time, I had lost my flinging energy.

A few years ago, the UU bought a camping trailer. Proud and excited, he posted a pic of it on FaceBook. His son was the first to reply with something like,” “Oh good. More shit for me to get rid of when you die.” Indeed. (Also sarcasm.)

Guess what? Somebody out there somewhere *does* want your stuff. Or bits and pieces of it. It is not your children or your nieces and nephews or third cousins twice removed or special friend from the planet Zephron Three. It is folks browsing the thrift shops (or even cruising past your curb) looking for just the right this-or-that thingy. Some of those folks are furnishing their first ever apartment or home. They might want (some of) your stuff and your parents would want them to have it. Trust me. They want it to be used, not covered with dust in an attic or molding in a Michigan basement. So donate all of it unless you are absolutely certain that you know someone who wants it. I could name a couple examples of that but this is too long already.

At any rate, this stuff makes me reeeeealllly tired because I figured it out (mostly) 20 years ago and have been preaching it ever since but nobody has (apparently) been listening, maybe because I am female? “I am speaking.” –Kamala. (If you are MAGA, just shaddup and listen.)

Since we moved FlaMan back to his home state of Michigan (in 2018), we have often visited him on our trips up and down the Great Lake State but our visits have always seemed optional or could be short ones. Now that his living situation has changed, at least temporarily, we visit whenever we can.

I dunno exactly what’s in FlaMan’s future but HEY, today we had a very pleasant visit with him, where he was sitting up watching TV and reported various escapades of increased mobility, not quiiite like The Commander’s Mad Midnight Hoosegow Underwear Washing Adventure but a bit heartening if probably also a bit dangerous.

What I REALLY liked about this visit was the discussions he and the GG were having. All about FlaMan’s long time (and long time ago) career as a machinist (a talented one) and discussions they had with their dad, an auto engineer whose career overlapped the early years of robotics. And then they got into Rubik’s Cube. When we arrived, FlaMan was dealing with an old Rubik’s Cube that was missing some parts. The GG got to looking around his room and there under his bed was one of the little yellow pieces. He found the rest of the missing parts in other places and, quick as a wink, FlaMan had his cube put back together. So they discussed Rubik’s Cube and its history for a while. (The GG is in the pic, not FlaMan and that is only part of the cube, which they were dissecting at that point.)

I have no real interest in either of these topics but it was fun to sit there and listen to them talk about something other than the usual stuff, which we won’t go into. If I have a role in these conversations, it is mainly to listen and occasionally translate as they both have a bit of hearing deficiency, which is not helped when there is a noisy oxygen musheen and a loud TV in the room. In FlaMan’s defense, he wanted the TV turned down but couldn’t get the remote control to work. I feel his pain and the GG managed to fix that problem.

At the end of all this, there was NOTHING in my refrigerator and I’m sure I left it that way on purpose. But what to do for dinner? Go out to eat? Naw. Order Chinese? Naw. In the end, I went to the Plum and got prepared chicken Milanese and pesto to make with noodles. I have frozen farmers market peas and salad from the eastern yooperland farm stand. Oh! And I had forgotten that my mouse usually works late at the Plum on Wednesdays. Or maybe I forgot it was Wednesday. Upon my arrival, I encountered one of her co-workers, who alerted mouse to my presence, so I got to hug my daughter too.

FlaMan is a brother of my heart if not my blood.

I never know what the GG is going to be doing next. Today he was gonna “work on prodjects”. So he said as he was putting shoes on. What prodjects? I wasn’t sure. It turned out that one of them was moving all the moomincabin furniture out of the way so as to sweep and wash the floors. It needed it and it smells like Pinesol in here now.

I always feel a bit guilty when he is heavy into this kind of prodject, like maybe I should be helping. But. 1) If he is on a roll, it’s best to stay outta the fray and 2) my favorite cleaning tools are currently dysfunctional. I prefer a cordless vac and the one up here (and maybe the one at the Landfill) are both dead in the water. I ABHOR big heavy vacuum cleaners with cords and things. And my current upright vac (at The Landfill) has been broken for years.

Where was I? Went over to the Old Cabin for a bit and now trying to figger out what my train of thought was. Maybe I didn’t have one.

A slightly chaotic cocktail hour in which Le Marquis came over and we were also porterized. The GG didn’t really participate except to clink his ice cubes once. He was on a zoom call with North Country Trail folks. He was supposed to receive an award for more than 4,000 hours of volunteer work but apparently it didn’t get totally processed in time for his name to be included in that list. Oh well.

I’m done done done. G’night. Typos be damned.

So my internet friend Pam commented about the little stack of books on the coffee table in yesterday’s pic. I’m not sure how that particular little stack of books was curated (randomly, I think) but we do have quite a lot of books around here at the moomincabin.

They go back to books my granddaddy collected somewhere after the turn of the century. I mean the 20th, not the 21st. Horatio Hornblower, Hervey Allen’s Sylvania series, and more. There are about a gazillion field guides/nature books, most of The Commander’s cookbook collection, and some lesser books. Like the Cully Gage series. Not to dis old Cully. His first book was a hoot (raunchily humorous tales about the yooperland) but by about his fourth book, I was like why do “we” keep buying these, “we” being my late brother who never seemed to tire of them. I love you old boy, they are still here, and they will stay here raunchy (and repetitive) as they are.

We have The Mighty Soo but probably need more copies (but they are hard to come by, all used). I have Paddle to the Sea down on the Planet Ann Arbor but we probably need a couple copies up here too.

Geology of Michigan… My parents originally bought a copy of this book (when it was new). This is one of the GG’s favorite books. I have never exactly interacted with it. I have an elementary school grasp of geology and that’s about where it ends. The GG has lent Geology of Michigan books out to other people multiple times. He forgets who he has lent the book to and we can’t find it in our house (which doesn’t mean it isn’t there) so I keep ordering new ones.

We’ll leave pollyticks alone for tonight because I’m waiting to hear what happens in The Great Lake State primaries tomorrow.

Last word to bloggy friend Margaret. My cousin the Mean Old Grunchie Old Grinchy will now be known as MOGOG. It’s a great acronym for him, like something out of Lord of the Rings. Why I didn’t think of that before, I dunno.

The 1-year-old at the Old Cabin says “uh-oh” a lot. I love hearing him through the woods. I guess the 3-year-old probably contributes some “uh-ohs” too but he is also developing a more sophisticated spoken vocabulary. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the 1-year-old is sponging it all up.

So when I spied the Mean Old Grunchie Old Grinchie in the driveway late this afternoon, I alerted the GG to our visitor with an “uh-oh” or two or three or five. Looking at the GG from the driveway through the picture window, the Grinch said, “He looks like Harry.” Yes indeed, he looks quite a bit like My Dear Uncle Harry even though they are not biologically related in any way, shape, or form. The GG has similar hair and wears similar hats but he is quite a lot shorter.

I fixed the Grinch up with a ‘hattan and as we were sitting in the moomincabin, another interloper, Le Marquis, appeared at the door. “Uh-oh!”, said I. I also fixed him a ‘hattan and we all discussed pollyticks (and land crapola) for a while. Don’t worry, no fights broke out. There was only one MAGA amongst us and you can bet it was not meeee. After a while, Le Marquis went back over to the Old Cabin and we shared leftover enchiladas with the Grinch. The Old Cabin folks had already eaten.

We have a diverse ecosystem here at the moominbeach, I guess most shoreline areas do, Great Lakes, ocean, or wherever. The GG spent the morning up on the escarpment (land my family used to own) clearing stuff off the JimFin trail.

In the afternoon, he suited up for a swamp walk. The cabins on our shorefront property are built upon sandy soil, which supports a forest of red and white pine trees along with some deciduous trees, birch and maple are what I can think of at the moment. On the other side of our 2-track cabin road is a swamp and then the escarpment, which is also forested.

The GG walked through the swamp today and he found the remains of the Back Light.

He has been trying to verify various property lines around here, which are not as straightforward as you might think. The last time he did this kind of a walk, he could not find the Back Light. Today he did. When I was a kid, it was easy to find the Back Light, via an established path that began with concrete blocks but quickly deteriorated into a mossy, spongy thing. That path disappeared when the current owners of that property (but not the Back Light, we don’t think) built a f*cking road that obliterated the ancient concrete blocks.

The second pic provides a reference to what the Back Light used to look like. That’s my dad in the pic and he and my brother and his dog Sam were out there on a winter day. We used to climb the Back Light as kids but by this time it was unsafe. I posted about the Back Light sometime in July but today’s excursion prompted an update.

The sweaty, grimy GG disrobed on the moomindeck before taking a shower. His undies were kind of tattered with loops hanging down but I refrained from taking a pic. You’re welcome. Then the neighbor cousins returned from their day trip to Whitefish Point and came over and spent the rest of the afternoon on and around the moomindeck. Excursions were made to the Lyme Lounge and even The Garage! Treasure trove of license plates and old toilet seats. So much fun.

That’s the report from The Planet Ann Arbor. If you’ve been following along (and I sure don’t expect anyone to be doing that), Mooon Yooonit has been in the body shop the last couple weeks. For the miniest of mini issues, parking lot hit-and-runs that no one who drives Mooon Yooonit (the GG, mostly) even noticed FOR MONTHS. So why the repairs got scheduled in the middle of the summer, I am still scratching my head about. Our mouse and the racc tag teamed to drop the vee-hickle off and pick it up. Meanwhile, the GG has been driving Cygnus X-1 so she is full of trail maintenance tools and other crapola.

Today? A circuit through Sault Ste. Siberia carefully orchestrated by yer fav-o-rite blahgger who knows all of the ins and outs of navigating that town because she grew up there:

— Recycling center (because I had the recycle in Meijer re-usable bags and needed them to be empty because…
— Up North Laundry
— Ace Hardware (the GG walked there while I was at the laundromat)
— A quick errand at the cabin’s insurance agency, one that I could’ve done a couple weeks ago but we were in and out of town and I didn’t have a car all week
— …Meijer, where we each made separate trips through the store. My shopping bags were empty because recycling dropoff
— Repairs to the gas grill and the kitchen sink “faucette” (the GG did those of course)
— New propane tank to go with the gas grill repair
— Green Bag garbage dropoff

Switching to Glide, we had lunch at Pickles (no Capn*Queen*Leila today) but all the servers are wonderful. Then home to the moominbeach. The GG left for a bit to help a friend up on the escarpment work on a string trimmer, then we were BLESSED by a nice long deck visit by some Old Cabin folks, my cousin’s son, his wife, their two toddlers, and their dog. I love the FinFam next generation kids. The older toddler in this branch of the family loves tools and boy oh boy does the GG have tools. They are all over my car! This kid was a little freaked when the GG faaaared up a chainsaw, which is probably a good thing. He does love the Lyme Lounge and has been introduced to the tick collection. We are fam-i-ly! I’ve got all my cousins and me.

Mark is the grandpa and “Billow” (or something like that) is what his grandson calls the GG aka Bill. The GG has been called a bunch of things by people’s grandchildren. “Ball” is what his identical twin’s first child called him as an emerging talker. That kid is entering high school in the fall and is an athlete, fisherman, and girl magnet (I’m guessing at the last).

The GG’s arrival this evening after running a gauntlet of traffic jams and family members means I actually have my car back! Yay. Now, where is my fob? I must have asked about my fob a bazillion times before it finally materialized. Fob? FOB? FOB??? You know what a fob is? It’s that thingy that I put in my pocketses to make my modern automotive vee-hickle start when I push the button. Right? Right.

After a week of kvetching about the propane stove pilot light being out, OF COURSE the GG walked in to the moomincabin, turned up the stove and voila, let there be heat. I am such a klutz. Not that we need heat today. It was in the upper 70s this afternoon.

Now to get the GG to settle down for a few days at least.

Since I got my driver’s license at 16, I can count on fewer than five fingers the number of days I have been without an automotive vee-hickle at hand. Actually that’s not quiiiite true because my first couple years of college, I didn’t have one there. It was a pain in the you-know-what ass but those years have blurred a bit so I’m just gonna skip over them.

During the first year or so of covid, one of the beach urchins was driving one of our old cars and it could be pretty dern persnickety with 150-plus miles on it. So there were some times I lent her my Ninja while the Mean Green Frog Hoppin’ Musheen was in the shop. If the GG was outta town, that meant I had no car. It was okay. I was not out shopping a lot in those days and since she works a few blocks away, she would often park the Ninja in my driveway and voila, I had a car.

But I have basically always had my own car in my adult life and I made sure I married a guy who understood that I needed a car, like we have two adults in our household so we need two cars. There have been times when I have wished (and argued) for NEWER cars but (knock on wood) those wishes ebbed when we started buying Japanese cars. Long story short, blame my late General Motors automotive engineer’s advice for that switch.

Here at the moominbeach, I have not had a car all week. We’ve been trying to drive one car up here this summer since I am not telecommuting any more. I wasn’t a fan of the GG going down for a “rocket trip” that turned into 4-5 days. But I am doing pretty damn fine without a car. I know that I can ask the Neighbor Cousins at the Old Cabin to get stuff for me from the grocery store but I don’t need anything. In fact, last night I was asked by the sweet cousins in the generation down from me if I needed anything from town. No. I have food. I have bourbon (giggle). I am doing okay.

Here at the cabin, the pilot light is broken, the northwest wind is screaming, I don’t have a car to drive, and one’s on the way. Apologies to the late Loretta Lynn for my HORRIBLE paraphrasing of her song lyrics One’s On The Way. This is a really good song and even if you are not a country music fan, you should listen to it.

And no, of course one’s not on the way here. I birthed two beautiful baby girls but that train left the station a loooong time ago.

We heat the moomincabin via a propane stove and a couple of space heaters if and when we need them. Before I went to bed last night, I made sure the propane stove was set at “pilot”. Waking up throughout the night as I often do, I kept hearing an irregular ticky noise which I attributed to the stove but it didn’t alarm me and I always went back to sleep. At 4:00 AM, I woke up and was sentient enough to actually get OUT of bed to go to the water closet and check the stove. It was set just a tad above “Pilot”. I turned it to *exactly* pilot. When I got up in the actual morning, I turned the gas up to low but nothing happened. No pilot light. I’m enough of a wimp that I don’t know how to light the pilot light.

It was okay. It’s midsummer and I was not cold at all, even with a strong northwest wind.

When I was a little kid and my parents first built this teensy tinesy wee little cabin in the woods on the shores of Gitchee Gumme, we had a wood stove here. We had to order wood and collect kindling and that was a pain in the butt. The biggest pain was that when it was cold in the morning, my parents would faaaar up the stove and then later in the day, when the beach temperature warmed up to 80 or whatever, our wood stove would still be kicking out heat. This one heats up and cools down quickly. When it’s working…

And I didn’t beat him up although I threatened to throw him in the lake a couple times yesterday if he didn’t find some other way to chill out. Jeebus.

It is purple paint! He had just returned from a trail blazing trip up on the ridge on the JimFin trail, named after my late brother.

I was berating him about chilling out because he was FUSSING about grilling the chicken. Hey, just put it on the grill and cook it. If it’s done a little bit before the other stuff, put it in the oven on warm. How hard can it be? It’s a deck evening and we are not in some kind of huge rush to eat.

As it turned out, the chicken didn’t exactly cook as planned, at least not on the grill. Reason? Our ANCIENT gas grill had a broken part and was not getting gas as needed. Also it may have been almost out of gas? I’m not sure. In the end, the chicken was transferred to the oven in a special grill pan that belonged to The Commander and it was just fine, even a bit charred, just like I like it.

Now I am Mom Alone, hopefully only for a few days. The GG skedaddled pretty early today with multiple stops to make on his trip down to The Planet Ann Arbor. Little Cat Z took her time. In the late morning, she discovered that there were a bazillion blueberries down on the bank. This kind of bounty has been unusual in the last few years so she took advantage of it and picked blueberries for an unplanned couple hours. I did not join her. I did not inherit any Butts Up (in the blueberry patch) DNA. 15 minutes (a cup or so?) is about my limit.

Yeah, that was me. BFF and her husband came over from their yooperland cabin an hour and a half or so away for dinner tonight. BBQ chicken and friends were on the menu. I kinda had noooo clue how many people we’d have so planning was not all that easy. That kind of thing has been a theme for this summer and I have just kinda been rolling with it. On the other hand, I did not wanta drive into Meijer today. I knew BFF et al were going there to get supplies for their cabin so I asked them to pick up a lemon and more chicken thighs. Since they were going there anyway, they were happy to oblige.

In the end, we needed a lot less chicken than I feared we might. The folks at the Old Cabin have contracted whatever daycare bug their grandchildren have and, in the end, it was only us, Little Cat Z, and our visiting friends. Others visited us but only on the deck, thank you very much. So some of the (uncooked) chicken is now in the freezer.

The pic is of Chainsaw Man working on a tree over at Naomikong. Little Cat Z swamped for him for safety.

The generation down from mine (millennials or maybe Y, I am lost in these generational designations) went out on the town tonight to celebrate the birthday of one of them. They went to Sault Ste. Siberia. I know not where they will end up but I asked Little Cat Z to take a pic if they went to the Alphaaaa. It is an old hangout of mine. I wonder if they’ve upgraded the bathrooms there since those days. Sitting there with the Mean Old Grunchy Old Grinchy and Ozone Bob (dead) and Ozone Jim (current status unknown) and others listening to drunks make loud trilling noises (“it’s like being in a terrarium”). Conversing with some of the stupidest men on earth. “DNA? Oh, I haven’t done any of that lately.” Driving a Canuckian guy I knew (*not* a boyfriend!) home across the International Bridge one night. The bridge was pretty much empty of traffic and the US customs guys laughed their asses off at me on the way back. I wonder how many other women they’d seen drive him home. Times have sure changed…

I might have to visit the Alpha some day to check the bathrooms out. I would go at lunchtime though. I don’t do late nights these days.

That when hard-working people got up here to the moomincabin, they spent the first day crashing. She enjoyed that. The GG used to do it (before he turned into the goddamn energizer bunny) and that’s *most* of what Little Cat Z did today. She is a very hard working woman and her life and the planet Mercury have been tangled up in retrograde lately. Mercury is not in retrograde any more and things are settling down.

I got a taste of this (not the retrograde part) earlier this summer when mouse and Pengo came up to run a trail race up near Tahq. Pengo spent the first day she was here vegging out. She NEEDED it. She has an intense job that involves worldwide travel and hardly ever gets back here to her homeland. I was LOVING it! The young female first cousins slept upstairs and after the GG and mouse left to do some sort of trail work, Pengo headed upstairs and I could sense her sort of *basking* in her childhood summertime sleeping loft. On the phone a bit (I can’t hear the words in conversations happening upstairs so they are private) and otherwise just *being* in her childhood summer loft bedroom without an aunt (meeee) yelling, “If you guys don’t shaddup, I’m gonna fling a muskellunge at you.” It only took a day. She perked up for the trail run and by the end of her short time here, she and mouse had engineered dinner for eight! I did not have to lift a finger!

I went out to get grocks this morning, then put together eggplant P. and hung out on the deck for a while. It was a perfect day to do that. It was not very sunny but warm enough for a tank top with a polarfleece vest over it. I could hear the folks and dog outside the Old Cabin. The toddler was fussier than yesterday and eventually it was divulged that he had a double ear infection and was ferried to urgent care for whatever meds they give out for that these days. LET IT BE KNOWN I WAS NOT BOTHERED BY HIS CRYING! This is life and I was enjoying all of the sounds pinging around through the woods. Birds, squirrels, humans, and the Piedy’s screen door slamming. I do feel for the pain a child that age cannot express in words but am also glad I was not responsible for rectifying the situation in any way. Been there, done that and empathize with both the parents and child.

Eventually Little Cat Z rallied a bit for lunch, a run, a swim, and a trip to the park store and the Jere farm stand out on M-28 with her baggy old moom and then hunkered down a bit again. She deserves every bit of downtime she can get.

When the weather is warm and there’s no wind and there aren’t too many MOE-skee-TOES the moomindeck is the perfect place. And it was tonight. Some of us (over 21) had ‘hattans and one of us (age three) had fake ‘hattans (water, ice, and maraschino cherries). This freaked out their grandma (my long-suffering cousin) for a minute but I reassured her I would never make a ‘hattan for a three-year-old. I *have* been known to sneak a wee bit of whine to an older teenager. That then teenager’s mother approved though.

The party was basically over by the time this pic was taken. Small children had been put to bed in the Old Cabin and some of the rest of us retaaaared to Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench and its environs. The beach urchin in the pic went swimming for the second time since she arrived this afternoon. A couple other beach urchins went sailing and the GG took a motor bote out for a bit.

In other news, I took the laundry into the Up North Laundry today, dropped off the recycle, hit up Meijer, and cooked a filet mignon dinner. Or at least prepped it. The GG grilled the meat. I did everything else. The beach urchin washed the disheoshios and she is washing the windows there in the pic.

Quick and dirty blahg post and so g’night.

This is my paternal granddaddy on the beach he bought in 1922 with his friends Doc Read and Ott McNott senior. Doc was a dentist and Ott (if memory serves me) worked with Granddaddy at the 1st National Bank. Granddaddy started out as a “messenger boy” (if memory serves) and ended up as president. I don’t really remember Ott although I vaguely remember his wife so not sure where he ended up in the bank hierarchy. I’m pretty sure granddaddy didn’t graduate from high school but he managed to send all of his kids to college.

Those once “young punks” lived in Sault Ste. Siberia and they would walk and canoe out to this area. If I get it right, the land I now call the moominbeach was clear cut (big pine trees) in the late 1800s and came up for sale while these youngsters were roaming it. So they bought it! I’m pretty sure that back in those days, they didn’t have to be billionaires to get a hold of this land.

Each one of these guys had a log cabin built and they brought their families out for summers. And then the grandchildren came along. One of my earliest memories is when I was five months old. I was lying down in the back seat of the Black Ford (no car seats then) and when we turned onto what is now Birch Point Loop, I could hear the wind susurrating through the pine trees. I was a baby but I somehow knew I was going to a good place.

How’s it going? For my fam and the McNotts it’s going fantastically well. The Read fam did not reproduce beyond their son Lewie. Even though most of us are not “Warren Buffet”, we have still managed to own this gorgeous property 100 plus years later. Not everyone in the area has been able to do that and I grew up with people whose parents or grandparents had to sell their lakefront property. Very sad.

A couple things about the pic. The trees on the moominbeach were much shorter than they are now. And my granddaddy had a beard, which makes me think this was taken in 1955, because that’s the year of the Soo Locks centennial and everyone grew beards that year.

Thank you Granddaddy, Doc, and Otto for buying this land. Thank you for keeping our two-track road private via a court case back in the day.

I have upper St. Marys (no apostrophe) lighthouses on my brain but I am not synthesizing all the bits and pieces into anything coherent, so a bit about “our” lighthouses.

This lighthouse was decommissioned in 1921 if my memory (from yesterday) is accurate. My granddaddy and two of his friends bought our beach property the next year. This might be my favorite lighthouse because we could walk to it from the moomincabin. It was waaaaay back in the woods/swamp. We would walk the two-track down to Doley’s (when they weren’t there and they usually weren’t). We would hang a right just to the west of the Doley house (aka old lighthouse keeper’s house) and walk back into the woods/swamp along the path that started out with bricks(?) but quickly degenerated into moss and a bit of muck.

It felt like we were walking miles but it really wasn’t that far. When we got there, we entered the building and ascended a staircase that “spiraled” along the walls to the top. I wish I had a pic of that but I don’t. I wasn’t exactly traveling with a computer/camera in my pocket in those days. We would emerge at the top and voila! We could see the Doley end of the beach on the upper St. Marys River!

The back light was a “range light”. It had a twin light, the “front light”. Back in the day, the ships would make a particular turn when the lights from the front and back lights lined up. That was well before my time. By the time I was a teenager, the back light was deemed (by our parents) to be unsafe to enter. Around the same time, some hoodlums from my high school were staying in the area on a family “vacation”. One night, while their parents were sitting around drinking gin and tonics (and slapping MOE-skee-TOES), these teens were trashing the front range light. One of the MANY reasons I never became a true juvenile delinquent, despite some of my more wild moments.

The firast pix is my dad in front of the back light. He and my brother were out there in the winter. By that time, the back light was not a viable place to climb, let alone enter. A few years later than this, it tipped over. Radical Betty thought she heard that happen but who knows. Here is npJane perching upon the remains of the lighthouse.