Random bits of my so-called life.

I was awakened at 0-skunk-30 by the dreaded chirp of a smoke alarm running out of battery. Actually it didn’t wake me up. It wasn’t all that long before I was gonna *get* up so I was already awake but I was still pretty p*ssed off when I heard that damn chirp.

I notified the GG of the issue. I don’t actually think he *hears* those things chirp, at least not when he’s asleep. It ALMOST makes me wish it had done the SHRIEKING thing it did the last time this happened so he could experience it. Like a woodpecker pecking incessantly on a metal chimney, it WOULD have woken him up.

Anyway. I got into the shower and I could hear him fumbling around as the chirping continued. For one thing, FOUR of our smoke alarms are situated within a circle of about eight feet in diameter. In other words, it’s pretty hard to tell which one is chirping. This was mandated by city code after a tree fell on our house.

In the end it turns out it was the CO alarm that chirped, not a smoke alarm. The issue was complicated but it if does it again, I now know WHERE IT IS and HOW TO TURN IT OFF. I *did* know we had one. Not that I am cavalier about the protections a CO alarm offers. But this is an older house (1959 ticky-tacky). It is probably drafty as all get-out and at this time of year we start turning off the furnace and opening the windows. Like last night when “someone” (not moi) left the back slider open all night. He changed the batteries in ALL the smoke alarms today, which I greatly appreciated.

I have always been freaked out about smoke alarms. I know how important they are. When I had my baby girls, we had them in our house (not four within a small radius though) and I made a special effort to ensure they were in both Hoton Lake and the moomincabin, which were rustic northern cabins.

I continue to lust after smart smoke/CO alarms. They check themselves for battery strength something like 400 times a day. They notify you via a phone app when the battery is getting low instead of waking you up with chirps or shrieks. They can tell the difference between steam and smoke. And more. When Hurricane Ike dragged a finger across southeast Michigan, the moisture he generated set off our smoke alarms.

Brain Day? I had a very productive work day today but I’m sure Mr. Bear will find ways to poke holes in my temporarily inflated ego 🤣

So Himself returned from his eclipse junket this afternoon after a late breakfast of porterization in Wakaponeta. He spent the rest of the afternoon debugging the Lyme Lounge from its latest adventure and when I came in to the kitchen to get dinner in the hopper, I could not find my dishcloth!

This is not just ANY dishcloth. It’s one I KNITTED. Turns out I really like dishcloths made out of cotton yarn and I have a few now. But I do NOT want them used to clean whatever needed cleaning in the Lyme Lounge. Plus I don’t like wondering where the hell the one I hung over the faucet just a couple hours ago IS!

So. Things that are used in the kitchen are NOT to be removed from the kitchen. If you need something from the kitchen, ask! I don’t care if it’s a cloth or a pan or whatever. And please do NOT take one of my “10 bowls” set! Years ago, The Commander was down here one time and the GG had taken some sort of cloth or towel outta the kitchen and used it in an automotive fashion. NO NO NO NO! The Comm did NOT get involved in her children’s stupid marital arguments but she subsequently obtained some nice red cloths from an automotive store and quietly presented them to him. Maybe I need to take a note.

I finished “I Cheerfully Refuse” and I am still processing it but yes yes yes. Dystopian near-future novel set on Lake Superior. And yes, mostly ON Superior. The protagonist spends most of his time traveling ON the lake piloting an inherited sailboat. I won’t say enough to give away any spoilers but what intrigued me the most was that a lot of the action takes place on Michipicoten Island and the Slate Islands. These islands are Canadian. Michipicoten is seasonally inhabited by a *few* people with summer “camps”. I doubt they have electricity or cell service and since it isn’t all that close to the “mainland”, they would have to schlep a LOT of grocks (and beer) out there for whatever the planned duration. The Slate Islands are inhabited by animals, including caribou.

I did not travel to the path of totality. I weighed that option but for several reasons chose to stay put. 1) The GG took the Lyme Lounge. It has running water but no bathroom and bathroom facilities in Ohio parks are not yet open for the season. I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT go even one day without a shower. 2) I could easily have taken a vacation day but prefer to take those in the summer and I knew there would be some w-a-i-t-i-n-g around. Not my strong suit. 3) The Planet Ann Arbor was not all that far away from totality and I caught a decent show from my back yard plus it was a beautiful sunny 70 degree day. Our mouse and racc also traveled to Ohio but they were in a different location from the GG and theirs was a day trip.

In the end it was a GORGEOUS day and I actually played hooky watching for pretty much the whole duration from my back yard. And no, I did not stare at the sun in my eclipse glasses the whole time. I donned them on and off for quick peeks. I have never seen totality but I’ve seen a few that were close, like this one was. Yes, it really does get colder when it starts getting darker.

I have experienced this a few times, notably in 2017 (where I watched at work – big party!) but also once when I was a kid skiing at Mission Hill. That also wasn’t totality but it was snowing all day and during the time the sun went into shadow, I was coming down Number 1 and I remember it got extra dark, colder, and was snowing a LOT harder for the duration. I THINK that’s a real memory but not sure. And I wanna say my backyard birds (today) shifted from daytime song to early morning or evening sound but I am no expert.

Actually I kinda played hooky from work for most of the afternoon. I couldn’t quite muster up the right energy to get back to work afterwards. It didn’t sound like anyone else had plans for major productivity either.

I did not take these pics. I didn’t really have the technology or the guzzinto to take pics. The GG sent me these from O-haaa-o. The first one COULD be an iPhone but more likely an SLR. In the second one, the telescope is involved and I’m not sure which camera. He also has solar filters so not sure how they fit in. I’ve lost track of what cameras we/he own/s. I’ve been using my iPhone exclusively for many years.

My daughter came to visit today for a utility beer (and to pick up some eclipse glasses). I had gotten ahead of the game and ordered a couple of eclipse “kits”, each of which had a few pairs of glasses. How did I figure out that these glasses were safe? They were made by Celestron and we have owned a Celestron telescope forever. We viewed Halley’s Comet through it in Florida in 1986. We (probably) have some leftover eclipse glasses from the 2017 eclipse. I’m sure Frooogy has a pair squirreled away somewhere. I ordered new ones anyway because I didn’t want the GG to turn the house upside down looking for the old ones. Two eclipse kits do not break the bank and the house needs to be turned upside down but I’d rather it happen in a more organized fashion.

It was fun to have my daughter over here for a while, just me and her. We had thought we might sit outside. Alas. I did that earlier in the afternoon and it was very warm and I had to wear a sun hat. But then, the wind picked up, clouds came in, and the temperature dropped so by the time she got here (she had pottery stuff to do this afternoon), we decided to sit inside. But still, without the GG, we can talk about polly-ticks and complain about all the stupid stuff people post on facebook, etc. Michelle Obama has said over and over that she does not WANT to be president so why do people think the “Democrats” will somehow “get rid” of Biden and “replace” him with Michelle Obama. Or whatever. I wish for a different set of candidates but that’s just CRAY-ZEE! Again, I will vote for Biden any day over the orange baboon.

In more mundane fun, this squoil was highly entertaining! It went through all kinds of gyrations to get from the roof to the bird feeder and was sometimes successful. Squirrels can do a lot of things that (most) humans can’t. I think one of the reasons they can is because they have such a significant TAIL. The tail (not to mention a lot of other anatomical differences) has to provide a different center of balance than most humans have but I don’t really know how all that works. I do know that I cannot jump from a flimsy tree branch up onto a roof and then down to a bird feeder.

What I do know is that the GG has been battling with squoils (and sometimes chipmunks) around here forever. On the Easter holiday, our daughters’ partners apparently had a wonderful time watching the GG battle the squoils. I knew there was a battle going on but I wasn’t really watching it because it’s been going on forever. He talks about Squirrel Electrification but I dunno… He’s tried that before and the squoils don’t seem to be deterred. I am glad he was entertaining.

Three books.

1) The Last Chairlift. I have read maybe five of this acclaimed author’s books and have an on-and-off relationship with him. I enjoyed a lot about this long family saga. Problem? It was too long? 1000 pages on my phone. Although I can mostly say I never got totally bored, I wished for more editing. This novel deals with a “non-traditional” family (and ghosts) and I loved the family (and most of the ghosts) but sometimes it just went on and on. I was intrigued to read it because I was a downhill skier as a kid (decent amateur). The skiing references rang true. Blue runs and black diamonds. I could manage black diamond runs albeit not elegantly but I was really more of a blue run skier. And the chairlifts… “Number 1” totally reminded me of the one and only 2-seater chairlift at Mission Hill. Clankity-clank. Stem Christie anyone?

2) Of Women and Salt. To contrast to The Last Chairlift, this family saga could be expanded into a much larger book. I’m not sure how to even describe this book. Cuba, El Salvador, immigration… 1800s through the Trumpian Bombasty although the Orange Baboon is never mentioned by name. I did like the book and think the author wrote sparingly for reasons. I just wanted more.

3) I Cheerfully Refuse. Lake Superior. Yes yes yes. My home lake! Plus I love this author. Set in a semi-dystopian version of the shores of Gitchee-Gumee. I think. I’m not very far into the book and still figuring that out. That’s me and some friends frolicking in some big waves Gitchee-Gumee threw at us when we were kids. (Photo from the Sherman Archives.)

Music. It’s Saturday evening and I sooooo miss the locally produced Cuban Fantasy NPR show that used to run at this time. But they have replaced it with some decent jazz and folksy type stuff. Tonight something interesting came on that took me a bit of time to process. Disclaimer: YouTube links ahead that may come with ads. It turned out to be Neil Young and Crazy Horse playing Oh Susanna. At first I didn’t get that it was Neil Young even though I probably listened to the original Harvest album umpteen bazillion times when I was an angsty young college student. But. It also sounded like this Shocking Blue song. I’m not sure if Neil Young was “quoting” this song or not but they sound a lot alike to my ears. And yes, “quoting” other people’s music compositions is a *thing* although I don’t think I can begin to describe it.

Today was fraught with all kinds of frenetic activity around here. The good news was the GG took a whole bunch of crapola off to a donation center and they took it ALL! YIPPEE YI-OH KI-YAY!

Earthquake in New York and/or New Jersey today? We didn’t feel it here although we occasionally feel earthquakes. The one I remember the most is when my first beach urchin was a baby. Glass things in the Landfill were rattling/vibrating and at first I thought a big truck was going by on Maple. But the rattling/vibrating kept on going. Eventually I figured out it was an earthquake.

When I was 10, Radical Betty was living in Alaska with her family including my beloved cousins UKW and the Grinch. Their dad (Duke) was stationed there in the Air Force. I got up one Saturday morning and turned on the TV to watch the Saturday morning cartoons, like I did every Saturday morning at 8:00 AM. Instead of cartoons, the screen lit up with “Anchorage is a sea of fire!” I started screaming, which got my parents outta bed pretty dern quick.

Well of course Anchorage was not a “sea of fire” but that was a serious earthquake. My cousins and their parents survived the earthquake unscathed but if I have it right did not have running water, etc., for a while. The Grinch was in the horsepittle with a broken leg (skiing maybe?) when the earthquake happened and Duke (who was in his room at the time of the earthquake) recalled his bed “taxi-ing” around the room. Duke was a career Air Force pilot.

I am done for tonight. Love y’all. KW.

P.S. I am done but other people are still frenetic…

Look how much this man loves his granddaughters. He has four granddaughters in all but these are the ones I pushed out of my own personal uterus. Sorry if that’s TMI.

Can you believe this guy once gave his daughter (meeee) a roll of pennies to play poker on the band bus? Yes. He did.

I was in junior high (7th grade) when I joined the Sault Ste. Siberia high school band. Our only public junior high was joined to our only public high school by a long hall. There was a “manual arts” (think shop and automotive stuff) wing off the middle of that hallway. I was “invited” to join the high school band because I was too “good” for the rudimentary music lessons taught in the junior high “band”. Both bands were “directed” by the same person. Music teachers were scarce in my public school system in those days. I was actually *really* good but that is a whole ‘nother story (and I’m NOT bragging).

Being in the high school band meant that I got to travel to band festivals. On a bus! A school bus but whatever. We took two buses. One for us nutso junior high kiddos who were extremely excited about being on a bus WITHOUT parental supervision. And therefore CRAY-ZEE and NOISY. Later on when I was in high school and played first flute, I was happy to be on the high school bus where most folks were a bit more sane and some people even fell asleep. Senior year I would look forward to meeting up with my then boyfriend for a beer when I got home. The drinking age was 18 then and he was in college. (I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.)

The first time I went on the band bus to a festival, my dad gave me a roll of pennies so I could play poker. I knew how to play poker from playing it with cousins and friends at the moominbeach and I wasn’t all that bad at it although I sure can’t remember much about it now. My dad was in the band when he was a kid in Sault Ste. Siberia. He played the trombone and I guess he knew all about the penny poker games.

I don’t remember if I won or lost poker games on that bus but I had fun. The next year our long-time band director took a new job “downstate” and his replacement didn’t allow penny poker on the band bus. Or maybe it was the school district that didn’t. I dunno. I LOVED the band director’s replacement and it was under her encouragement that I challenged my way up to 3rd chair flute in the high school band when I was in 8th grade.

Well where we were? Mr. Bear totally whupped my *ss in a spec review this morning. As usual, he was right. I wasn’t exactly wrong but I had neglected to include some important context. Live and learn and I’m taking my licks.

The GG? The phone crapola from hell continued ALL DAY. That included a 120-mile round trip drive and he is STILL working on it now. No resolution.

I’m not gonna talk about this situation online but it reminds me of a time The Commander had a twisted issue with her cable TV service. Someone had talked her into changing her service plan or whatever. Well fine. Except that after the change, whenever she changed the channel, it took something like SEVEN seconds for the channel to change. I’m not sure whether this bothered her all that much but when I was up there, IT DROVE ME CRAY-ZEE!!!

The GG tried to take care of it on a visit. He got along famously with my mom and was of great help to her – and me – in her last few years. So he went out to the cable company and asked them to change the service plan back to what it was before. Oh, no. We can’t do that. It isn’t under her name. It’s under Mr. FinFam’s name (aka my dad). After quite some back and forth, the GG said, “Well, Mr. FinFam has been DEAD for five(?) years!” That got them moving. Fortunately I don’t think they asked for a death certificate. I mean, we certainly had them but the GG did not have one in hand at that moment.

All of this stuff is in the name of security and protecting people from fraud. But we’re talking about phones and cable TV, not financial accounts. If The Comm was a fraud victim, it was the cable company itself that was the perpetrator because they talked her into changing her service. I know that there are plenty of ways to defraud people via phone and cable services but there has GOT to be a better way to handle these things especially when people are trying to help vulnerable friends and relatives navigate complicated tech “support” systems.

I love this pic of The Comm. I can’t remember what I had said but this knife was her response 🤣🤣🤣 I love you moom wherever you are.

P.S. On the radio… Cows and a couple people have come down with bird flu. Listening to the story, I am not terrified about this but in case it mutates into something disastrous, we do NOT need the orange baboon back in office. He did a TERRIBLE job with the last “plague”. Don’t bring him back.

Lemme see, what did the GG do today… 1) North Country Trail meeting. 2) Crazy gyrations involving phone service. Oh, not our phone service. Long story and not blahggable. And… 3) FLINGING! YAY! (He probably did more but I don’t remember and this is enough.)

You can see the pic but what is in front of it and behind it are some lucite(?) “blocks” that commemorate my five- and 10-year anniversaries at Cubelandia. I think. By year 15, I was a full time telecommuter (you know why) and I don’t remember getting any swag. Not that I wanted any. Just what I need. More stuff.

Today, when the GG got into his flinging phase, he dredged these thingies up from somewhere. What did I want to do with them? My first reaction was, “put ’em in the trash!” Then my alternate persona Garbage Woman stepped in and she almost never lets me just throw something in the trash. I doubt they are recyclable, so I suggested putting them in one of our Kiwanis collection boxes. Ya nevah know who will want what and these might be useful for some kind of prodject for somebody. I know not what.

Of course when I came in to the chitchen after work, there they were, framing a pic of the GG in MUCH earlier years. This is at Hoton Lake with The Indefatigable, with our canoe on top and pulling the Little Princess trailer. More on that trailer some other day.

I’m kinda wondering why the work swag ended up at home anyway. We left Cubelandia in kind of a hurry when covid hit and it was a while before we found out we weren’t returning to a bricks and mortar office and plans had been made to vacate. I kept almost nothing in my cube but there was some stuff, including some crystal pieces Broooosie had thrifted and gifted me. Mostly I think he had been “encouraged” to de-clutter his cube. The rabbit slippers definitely had to go. “Easter’s over.” I’m a mom and I try to be kind to unusual people like Broooosie so I allowed him to stash some stuff in my cube. (Other people did too.)

At the bitter end, we scheduled times to come and clean out our remaining belongings and anything we didn’t want went on the lunchroom tables for anyone to take. At the end of it all, Building Mom hired a service to come in and haul whatever was left over away. Brooosie was long laid off by then so I didn’t worry about him seeing his stuff on a lunchroom table.

But there may have been Cubelandia folks who actually collected that stuff and maybe they would’ve wanted it. Of course maybe a former employee will find it at Kiwanis. I think I am the ONLY teleCubelandia employee who lives ON the Planet Ann Arbor although there a few who live pretty close.

I am not and probably never will be a serious genealogist but yesterday I was fiddling around with Ancestry (for the first time in a couple years) and got struck by a small lightning bolt.

When I think of who/where I come from, I most often think of my dad’s father (my paternal grandfather), who was born in northern Saskatchewan. His father died on a fur trapping trip (this was the late 1800s) and subsequently his family ended up in Sault Ste. Siberia, on the Michigan side since his wife had relatives there.

It’s an exotic story. I pull it out occasionally when people ask me weird, intrusive questions about my “heritage” and they look at me a bit differently, at least for a while. Of course we all have FOUR sets of great-grandparents. I was never lucky enough to meet ANY of mine. They were all dead before I was born and it is what it is.

I don’t really know much about my dad’s *mother’s* parents although they are on my very rudimentary “tree” in Ancestry. For reasons I couldn’t articulate if I tried, I got curious about them yesterday. So I got on to Ancestry and, yes, they are in my tree but I couldn’t find anything about *their* parents. My great-great-grandparents…

So I did the google. I didn’t find their parents but I did find a *blog* that talked about a Raeburn family. Naw, it couldn’t be the same family. But. A lot of the details added up. Like immigrating to Canada (Ontario) from Scotland and then *Sault Ste. Siberia* (Michigan). And then my grandmother’s *parents’* names matched the names I have on my tree. I know those are correct. Great-grandma’s name is especially distinctive when all four parts of it (including her maiden name) are strung together. And (hello), she was born in the USA, not Canada, but that is a story I don’t know well enough to tell.

I poked around on this blog for a while. It isn’t frequently updated, at least not in the last 10 years or so, although there is a February 2024 entry. One of the entries that I found showed pictures of a couple and boy oh boy, did I recognize my great-grandmother. Oh, not that I ever knew her but I have that picture somewhere in my archives. The blogger made the statement that, “These are my great-grandparents.”

That’s when the lightning bolt hit. Those are MY great-grandparents too! Jeebus! I did not act on this. For one thing, people started arriving for Easter dinner. For another thing, I am always a bit hesitant to just barge in on a person’s life that I don’t know, even though this woman seems to be my second cousin. Who knows, she might (mistakenly) think I am looking for money?

So. Maybe this is a time to pull my little DNA kit off the shelf, spit, and see what happens. And dust off Ancestry. This is actually a systems analyst kind of thing and that means it’s right up my alley. It’s one of the things I’ve done all my life, whether or not I have gotten paid for doing it. I am currently getting paid for it, thank you very much Corporate America. But I can’t let this become a rabbit hole because I have enough to do.

The pic is a little forsythia bush by the Landfill compost bin. Just so you know that spring is progressing around here.

How about a little lighter-weight fare today?

Here is Jesus in St. Joe’s church parking lot up in Sault Ste. Siberia. I took this in 2013 when we traveled up there to close out my parents’ safe deposit box (mom had died the year before). The bank was closing that branch and in addition to all the stuff in the box, the bank manager (also mom’s next door neighbor) dredged up a bunch of photos of my dad and granddaddy from the basement. I still don’t have all that stuff sorted out. I need to get at it.

After that, while the GG took a catnap, I walked south to my shabby little childhood bungalow on Superior Street, across from good old Stinkin’ Linkin’ elementary school. I used to Red Queen over there from my house every morning. I turned around at that point and took my old walking/biking route to my grandparents’ house on John Street, which went through St. Joe’s parking lot. The snow banks surrounding Jesus were higher than my head but he must have “risen” that morning because he was above them. (It was March but not Easter.)

We stayed at the Hotel Ojibway that weekend because the moomincabin was closed for the season and Command Central (The Comm’s house on Dillon) was not sold yet but it was completely empty. At one point the ever frugal (except when he’s not) GG asked me if I wanted to open the house up again so we could “camp” there. No no no no no! I do not. We’re DONE with that house and the Hotel Ojibway is not gonna break the bank. (It was a good house, I just wanted that chapter to be over.)

There wasn’t as much “he is risen” on Facebook today as there usually is. But an in-law shared an old pic with the caption, “He is risen and he has poop in his pants.” The pic was of one of our great-nephews when he was a baby, standing up in his crib not looking all that happy. How old is that kid now? 12 maybe? Talented skier and footballer and probably a bunch of stuff I don’t even know about. Time flies and I enjoyed the humor.

We aren’t exactly observing Easter but any excuse to get together and “party”, right? Beach urchins and friends are here, a faaaar is in the faaarplace, and sliced honey-baked ham is heating along with some friends. I soooo wish local asparagus was available here in March. One year (2012) people were able to harvest asparagus in March. This year, I’m serving asparagus from Chile or somewhere. I dunno why but asparagus seems like an Easter veggie to me.

Whether you observe/celebrate Easter or not, cheers!

This entry will probably come out as rambling gibberish but I have to try. A lot of people seem to be babbling about putting God and Jesus “back” into our government. First, last I looked, one of our country’s founding principles is something called separation of church and state. Roight? So how can we put something “back” that isn’t there in the first place?

As I have said before, I am not religious although I had something of a religious upbringing. Sunday School and sometimes church, which I struggled to sit through. My parents were not religious either but for various reasons we participated. And there were lots of good things! Kind Sunday School teachers. Singing hymns with gorgeous pipe organ accompaniment. Stained glass windows. The xmas eve candlelight service with all its pageantry. I even played Mary one year. Long boring sermons were not my fave.

I am not an atheist. I simply have no idea how the universe (as we call it) works. I don’t think anybody does. Is there one omniscient entity who runs all this stuff? Who knows?

I’m thinking about this partly because I know that tomorrow my facebook feed will be filled with “He is risen!” If people need to believe in a god, that’s okay. It’s pretty scary sometimes thinking (like I do) about how alone we are in an unfathomably large universe. Why are we here? Seeking comfort in a religious belief system is a pretty natural way for earthlings to try and find meaning in the unknown.

But. When I was going to Sunday School and learning about Jesus (who in my opinion may or may not have been a real person but I highly doubt was a *divine* entity), we learned about his kindness, especially toward people who were among the less fortunate members of society.

What I am feeling in US politics is a lot of hatred. Powerful people are name-calling and making fun of others: appearance, poverty, disabilities, you name it. And they are invoking God and Jesus. This is not a new phenomenon but I believe it escalated in the mid-2010s (you know when). I don’t think the Jesus I was taught about would approve. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You don’t have to participate in an organized religion to live by the golden rule. I am far from perfect but I constantly try to improve.

I believe organized religion and those who participate in it can be of great good and many people treat others with kindness and compassion. But there are some evil influences afoot. In my opinion, the loudest voices belong to those *least* likely to care anything about Jesus. I’m sure I’m largely “preaching to the choir” but resist them resist them resist them! They are invoking Jesus to amass money and power for themselves, not to help others. Unfortunately, their “church” has a lot of followers.

The title is a real song (insert desired bank name). I learned it from the same person who taught me another loverly little ditty: “Seven old ladies were locked in a lavatory. They were in there from Monday through Saturday.” That’s all I know of it although I bet it’s google-able. We’ll just call these little ditties “Pooh songs” 😉

Because I am (once again) unable to put a sentence together to save my life (10:00 PM isn’t past my bedtime but I NEEEEEEED to be chilling out by this time), you get this pic the GG took “up north” a few weeks ago. Orion, or “The Rion” as he was once called by a beach urchin. Embiggen embiggen.

Just touching in so the beach urchins don’t wonder “where is the blahg?” We have been “arguing” about hams tonight. I thought the GG was all excited about getting a ham from Honey Baked Hams over in Ypsi or wherever, meaning I thought I didn’t have to worry about it. Not necessarily although I think we have it sorted out. I just want a small amount of spiral sliced ham. Why is that so hard to obtain? I am not feeding an army.

Now I’m remembering Easter brunches with The Commander and Radical Betty at the Hotel Ojibway. The restaurant there can be a bit iffy depending upon who is running it (management changes pretty frequently) but when those gals were still alive, it put on some decent holiday brunches with fancy omelet bars and all kinds of stuff. We always took Frooogy with us. Radical Betty LOVED Frooogy. The Commander was a little less entranced.

A while back when I worked at Cubelandia, Cube Neighbor used to travel around to watch Umich hockey games. Once when they were in Sault Ste. Siberia, they stayed in the Hotel Ojibway. There were pics of local folks in the hotel lobby and when she returned she asked about this FinFam guy in one of the pics. I said, “Yes, that was my uncle.”

G’night, KW.

I have recently learned the word “Timmie”, meaning a person who is afraid of bridges. I know such people exist. I worked with a woman who even avoided short foot bridges like in urban parks. I mean STURDY ones with high thick railings, not flimsy-looking ones like the photo MMCB₂ sent from her trip to an African country. It looked like it might sway and whatever was below seemed like a long way down. I said, “Tell me you didn’t cross that.” Yes. She did. I didn’t press her but next time we meet for zoom coffee, I’ll get the story.

The Big Mac (and a lot of other large bridges) offers a driving service for “Timmies”. Someone will drive you across the bridge in your car. You can sit there and white knuckle it with your eyes wide open or you can hide under a blanket or lie down on the floor in the back seat. No judgment. We all have our phobias and I live with a PARTICULARLY STUPID one so I take other people’s phobias seriously and don’t tease or poke at them.

I am not a Timmie (with one big-time exception). The Big Mac has always been exciting for me. And I have driven it in all kinds of conditions. High winds. Snowstorms. In a crappy old Ford Pinto wagon no less. Oh, not that a snowstorm in a Pinto is exciting. Actually it was pretty darn nerve-racking but I always managed.

The one big-time exception? The Sunshine Skyway Bridge, St. Petersburg to Bradenton, where my parents-in-law lived. We drove down there in 1986, us and our toddler and The Beautiful Suzie, my sister-in-law (miss her so much). The Sunshine Skyway had been two bridges with one-way traffic on each. One of them was hit by a freighter in 1980 (I just looked that up) and collapsed. Multiple cars and a Greyhound bus fell off the bridge and 35 people died. They kept the other bridge open, routing two-way traffic onto it as they began building a new bridge.

I hadn’t been worried about crossing that bridge. Heck it’ll be like the Mackinac. Roight? So I thought. Not all bridges are alike. We were up top at a near standstill with cars everywhere. Traffic jam both directions. I was terrified (the GG was driving). It seemed so flimsy. They were building the new bridge at the time and on subsequent trips to Fla, we drove it and I was fine. Interestingly, they have left parts of the old bridge’s approaches as fishing piers.

Frooog photo credit to mouse.

I dunno where to even start. Bridge collapses are one of the scariest ways I can think of to die. There are others, make no mistake. This morning when I was talking to MMCB₂ I knew nothing about the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse. I actually think this is the first time I have even known about the Francis Scott Key bridge. It sounds like the incident happened in the wee hours when most of the 35,000(?) people who cross the bridge daily were not crossing it but still. Some people have lost their lives and, well, I have no words and “thoughts and “prayers” will not help anyone. Ugh.

I cross the Mackinac Bridge so often that I have a commuter “transponder” (or whatever it is) embedded in my windshield. The first time I crossed the Mac was the night it opened. You can be sure that my parents took me and my three-month-old brother across the bridge. I have a little card that “certifies” me as a first time crosser. Since it is written in The Commander’s handwriting, I know that the toll booth worker handed it to my mom and my mom filled it out. It’s still valuable, to me at least.

I have to add that I also have vague memories of traveling on the ferries before the Big Mac was built. I remember being dressed in cute little tartan skirt outfits and I remember saying “We go to ‘Detrite’ in the middle of the night.” That’s because in order to get to my Detroit grandparents’ house, we had to get up at something like 3:00 AM in order to catch the first ferry across the Straits of Mackinac.

The Mackinac Bridge made our trip a whole lot shorter although it was a while before the I75 SUV Speedway took our trip off the old two-lane highways and made it more like five hours instead of eleven or whatever. But that might be another story.

So people on the internet are wondering if the Big Mac Bridge could collapse like the Francis Scott Key. Well yes, any bridge could collapse if the right ship hit it in the right place. When I cross the Big Mac and there is a freighter passing below, I don’t ever freak out. There are not all that many freighters that pass through at any given time. As someone said on facebook, if you see a freighter coming along, go get a cup of coffee. If not, cross. I will never stop for coffee.

There have been two incidents of vee-hickles going over the side of the Mackinac Bridge. Instead of trying to write about this in my own words, I’m gonna link to some FAQs from the Mackinac Bridge Authority.

My dad called me from the moominbeach the night of the Yugo incident so I could hear how loud the winds were. We were laughing at the time but we so regret the Yugo incident.

In my mind, the lyrics to an “alternate” version of Jingle Bells is something like: Jingle Bells, Santa Smells, Easter’s on the way. I can’t find that on the internet, not that I have tried very hard. I mean it’s kinda like googling if Soupy Sales is dead, which I have done and yes he is. And I didn’t ever see him on TV because we didn’t have TV until I was two and when we did get TV, we didn’t have a channel with Soupy Sales on it. Not that we knew who Soupy Sales was. I only remember watching Howdy Doody at that age and that is a pretty vague memory. And Don Ramsey and his family country-style band on Sault Ste. Siberia Ontario channel 2, CJIC.

Anyway, I get search results with “Batman smells” and some other variations and I’m not gonna go any farther than that tonight. I remember making this bunny Halloween costume (she’s only wearing the head here). I made a lot of Halloween costumes in my day, some of them quite elaborate. And then. I just kinda quit. I mean how many sequins can you sew around a fairy’s wings. The kindergargen teacher said, “Those wings will fall apart. Nope they didn’t but still. Sigh.

The rabbit in the pic was home from school “sick” with something very mild but contagious so I kept her home and let her ride her bike up and down the sidewalk. It’s okay. She did not feel “like sand”, i.e., it wasn’t strep or whatever. So I was NOT a Bad Mom. At least not that time.

So if we can figger out how to get a SLICED ham that isn’t umpteen bazillion pounds (I’m thinking a quarter ham), we will have Easter dinner here. In a SECULAR way, mind you. I don’t believe in resurrection of dead people although I do welcome the spring “rebirth” of living things. Metaphors matter.

Asparagus? Bring it on. But it’s too early for local asparagus here so I’ll have to buy some from Californy or Chile or wherever. I think the GG will venture over to Honey Baked Hams for the ham. We don’t eat ham often except for Easter and the occasional Canadian Bacon for Eggs Benny.

The most mundane things sometimes provide photo ops. The Lyme Lounge hangs at the top of the Landfill Driveway when it is not somewhere else. It blocks my view of the neighbors’ back yard but the current neighbor doesn’t engage in Burke behavior, i.e., hanging out in the back yard sans clothing. (Burke was a good neighbor and we miss him.)

Anyway, I was getting dinner ready last night and I glanced out the chitchen window and WOW! What was the Lyme Lounge up to? YELLOW! and ICE! Snow on top of the LL had apparently “dribbled”, then when the temps dropped, the dribbles froze.

Light can do interesting things to our house at this time of the year when the trees don’t have leaves yet and Mr. Golden Sun deigns to make an appearance. So, maybe TMI but a beach urchin was over here and the skirt I was wearing (thin black cotton) went see-through when MGS shone brightly through the front door and silhouetted my bare legs beneath it. Fortunately I was not in, uh, commando mode at the time.

Moving right along, that got me motivated to do some dusting today. I don’t do a lot of dusting. I would do more dusting if I didn’t have to move all kinds of crapola outta the way. But this is ALSO the time of year when MGS’s rays highlight every blasted mote of dust anywhere. As we will be hosting a SMALL SECULAR observance of Easter next weekend, I knew my OTHER beach urchin would notice dust.

So that was my day. I actually had the idea to get lunch at the Griz or Conor O’Neill’s or somewhere but somehow I never got around to making it happen. But NOTE! It was MY idea and that means I am finally coming out of my state of covid cowardice. (But not enough to go to Ireland.) Oh, make no mistake, I have been to restaurants, etc. Even a Big Fat Greek Wedding and a crowded symposium. But this would’ve been on MY initiative, not just me timidly but bravely going with the flow.

And YES, life is better for me as it was four years ago (except for the loss of people’s reproductive rights – I’ll go there another day though). What are people thinking? I have to add that it was not “bad” exactly four years ago. Weird and scary might be better words at least for those of us who could afford to avoid covid. But people *were* dying from a virus “we” didn’t understand and the Meanie in Chief was promoting quack remedies like hydroxychloroquine and putting lights inside human bodies. Or whatever. I never did understand exactly what the Crackpot in Chief was talking about with the lights and I have seen the video clip multiple times. How can anyone want the Orange Baboon back as president?

The GG space-i-fied me today by driving down to O-haaa-o to meet with some folks down there for a mini-hike and I dunno what else. North Country Trail and Wabash Cannonball Trail folks. It’s complicated so don’t ask.

Apparently the group SANG the Wabash Cannonball song! This cracked me up to no end. Whenever I hear anything about the Wabash Cannonball, it makes me think about my childhood career over at the EPA. At one point in time we were getting big boxes of paper from a company called Wabash. I’m not sure if it still makes/sells paper or not. My boss Byron would walk (seemingly endlessly) through the “computer room” hauling Wabash boxes in and out. (We used to use soooo much paper.) Byron was quite bald and one of my co-workers once said, “Here comes the Wabash Cannonball”. We were very young and we totally cracked up. The crazy things that stick in your head.

I really liked working for Byron and I have all kinds of stories about him but I’ll spare you for now.

The little line of snow in the sorta foreground of the pic heading out to the She-Shed is where the power line shaded the ground from Mr. Golden Sun. When he was on that side of the house. It was good that the GG ran his snowblower yesterday but as I always say, in March, especially LATE March, when Mr. Golden shines brightly after a snowstorm, he melts Old Man Winter. Even though we only got into the mid 30s today, all paved surfaces are DRY now. Snow only lingers in grassy spots that Mr. Golden Sun didn’t shine down on for whatever reason.

I guess that’s just about all for today. The “garbage” cart lids were white at 0-skunk-30 and then it really started coming down. All told we got a few inches or thereabouts. Looking at Goomaps, the freeway system ringing our little city was red red red. PEOPLE, SLOW DOWN! That white stuff is slippery. None of “us” had to be anywhere that required an automotive vee-hickle and it wasn’t really all that slippery walking. Sayonara, KW.