Random bits of my so-called life.

When the weather is good, I always try to insist on a slow back road drive home from the Quiet [Water]Adventure Symposium. From East Lansing to The Planet Ann Arbor. The weather WAS good this weekend. 60-something today and sunny. I think last year around this time we had thundersnow followed by an ice storm.

Anyway, we were heading over to Meridian Road and I opened up the xword puzzle. Wouldn’t you know, I did not START the puzz when I opened it up. I was too busy looking at the scenery and Goomaps. The next time I looked down at my phone, the puzz was running at 9:13 minutes and I HAD NOT STARTED IT YET. Jeebus. I do the xword “with” my daughter. That is we both do it every day and report our times to each other (or DNFs…). This is NOT a competition between us. Sometimes one of us does better than the other. Not every puzz is in everyone’s “wheelhouse”. She SOMETIMES admits to looking at the xword write-up for clues. I don’t do that. If I DNF, I DNF. DNF = did not finish in case you were wondering. But the main “rule” we have for this little bit of morning connection is we make our own rules and respect each other’s rules.

I didn’t start the puzz until we got home and when I reported my time, I subtracted 9:13 from it. But I also had to report a few typo/stupid errors. I am like five down from queen bee on the spelling bee. There are two 11-letter answers that I am not getting even though I think we’ve had similar letters before and I DID get them then. Plus a couple others. And I’m missing one pangram. Sigh… It’s been a while since I haven’t gotten to queen bee. I make myself get to genius with looking at the “grid”. After that I open the grid. That’s my rule.

The pic is from a road we haven’t traveled before or at least not for a long time. We took Meridian down to [North?] Territorial. We took [North?] Territorial over to M52, then hung a louie onto Farnsworth Road (not paved) and snaked around until we got to NORTH Territorial. We aren’t sure if Territorial and North Territorial are the same road or not. Or maybe once were before M52 cut through. Anyway the pic is from somewhere on Farnsworth Road. I think. And this is all gobblety-gook if you don’t live around here. And probably even to most Planet Ann Arbor-ites.

Whew! I knew I wasn’t ready to spend a whole day plus at a symposium around a bazillion people. I told the GG that. He pressured me anyway. How did I do? I did my best which was okay. After lunch at the time when the event gets uber busy, I took myself out of the action. I went out to Mooon Yooonit, opened some windows (it was pretty warm today) and read a book for a couple hours. No one seemed to have a problem with that.

By the time I decided to head back in, it wasn’t long before it was time to break up camp, which is what’s happening here. I didn’t really get many other pics this year. It somehow wasn’t very photogenic this year, not sure why.

It feels like we are at a bit of a crossroads of a sort. The last time I went to the symposium, the same old beloved friends were there. They did not attend this year, except for Greg and Tom and Joan, who is actually a new friend since the last symposium. By the end of the evening, I was well on my way to making new friends, introvert that I am.

Oddly enough the person I spent the most time talking to today was a young college senior soon to graduate. She attends the college in my home town. I mean Sault Ste. Siberia, the town I grew up in. One of the places she lived during her college career turned out to be two blocks south of my grandparents’ house.

Boy did that bring back memories. I lived 7-8 blocks away from my grandparents depending on whether I took the “hypotenuse” through St. Joe’s parking lot. The whole neighborhood went to Stinkin’ Linkin’ elementary except for the kids who went to St. Joe’s. So I knew (and still do) that neighborhood like the back of my hand, walking and biking through all its twists and turns, nooks and crannies. The Gully? Yes. This young woman seemed totally okay hanging out with a baggy old bag, even seeking me out when I wasn’t hiding out in the car. I had a great time with her.

There was lots of discussion about whether our North Country Trail chapters should set up a fake campfire and a little tent in our booth. It didn’t happen but fake fires seemed to be *the* thing this year as a lot of booths had set them up.

Pizza House rounded out the evening and we are now chilling out in our hotel, ready for what I hope is a slow drive back to the planet tomorrow.

We ate at Beggar’s tonight but we ate at Dagwood’s for lunch. Dagwood’s is a “dive bar” but the food is good and it ALWAYS seems to be busy. Which bothered me a bit even though I knew what to expect.

It is bar food and I had an olive burger deluxe. It cost $4.00. I dunno if olive burgers are a Great Lake State thing or what but I have only discovered them in the last 10 years or so. If you had confronted me with an olive burger when I was a kid, I would have totally turned up my nose.

So we were at Beggar’s tonight with some other North Country Trail folks and our young waiter overheard us talking about Dagwood’s and he opined that you walk out of there feeling like you need to take a shower. This is definitely true but since we only eat there about once a year (or four given covid), I think we’re fine. And our waitress (at Dagwood’s) was proactive about asking if I wanted a second glass of whine. I said, “You’ve got *my* number!” The waiter (Beggar’s) also told us that his mom used to live *above* Dagwood’s and it was a horrible place to live. I can believe this. Oh don’t get me wrong, he was a wonderful waiter and we had a good time with him.

Beggar’s was not crowded, which I also expected because it gets more of a college crowd and Moo-U is just finishing up spring break. Sunday night it’ll be jam-packed but I’ll be back on The Planet Ann Arbor in my own little hidey hole of a house by then. In keeping with the theme of ordering something I HATED as a child, I got one of their mac-‘n’-cheese entrees. I got “Bob’s” and I got a “Betty” sized order rather than a “Bob” sized order. You might guess that ‘splaining this to the GG took some doing. It was word salad to him but in the end, he ordered the same thing, we both ate approximately half, and the rest of it is in the full-sized refrigimatator in our hotel room. We didn’t manage to get the ice maker going for tonight but after Beggar’s, I figured out that it had an ON switch. Who knew? Anyway, it is going now.

As you might have figured out, my brain is mush. G’night!

The GG aka Trail Guy was hot into it when I brought the mail in this afternoon. Yes there was something for him but it was NOT my For Days take back bags.

The “something” for him was his 100 mile North Country Trail award. He began his 100 miles on New Year’s Day and finished the next weekend. It was a *loverly* week for me, one in which I was space-i-fied for days on end. It was also a dry week, which was a good thing because precipitation here in early January usually arrives in a slippery form and that would have made it difficult to *get* to the North Country Trail, which, at its closest to the Planet Ann Arbor, is maybe 50 miles.

I am gearing myself up to attend the Quiet Adventures Symposium event for the first time since 2020. The last time I attended it covid was on the horizon and none of us were adequately prepared or even informed. I remember attending a symposium presentation and having a weird guy sit next to me in my preferred front row. He was overly friendly and scooched his chair RIGHT UP NEXT TO ME and talked right into my face. Um, don’t you realize there is a global pandemic about to smack us upside the head? It’s probably already here so get outta my face. I didn’t say that though. I just endured him until the presentation began at which time he and his (silent) wife LEFT 🤷‍♀️. I basked in my alone-ness.

I did not get covid that weekend. I hope I don’t get it this weekend. I will have mask*S*. The GG thinks I will be the only masked bandit. I do not agree.

Struggling to come up with something for my xmas list this year, I got to looking at the rusty old mailbox and thought… Hmmm… Also the porch light. I bet those artifacts are original to the house. 1959.

It’s winter and this is Michigan and no one was in a hurry to actually swap out the old fixtures for the new. Yesterday our temps got up to 70. That’s unusual but not THAT unusual for February and it’s back down to 25 as I write this. Anyway, the GG took advantage of the warm weather to install the new mailbox and porch light. The light is LED and we can change the color a bit. It is still hooked up to the motion sensor and timer.

In the first pic, he has already removed the old light but not the mailbox. In the second pic, he has installed both the new light and mailbox and is holding the old rusty ones.

Of course then I realized that we needed new house numbers too. I had actually thought about that back in December but it dropped off my radar screen. But those numbers don’t match the style of the new fixtures and we need a different font! The GG was a weeeee bit I dunno grumbly(?) about this until 1) I pointed out that new numbers would not break the bank and 2) he figured out that the old ones were plastic.

Alas, these fixtures don’t really “go with” the old shingle (or whatever it is) siding on the Landfill… To my eye anyway. I’ve been thinking about engaging Certified Kitchen Lady for some more work but I don’t think she does exteriors as a general rule.

I kinda wonder if the mail carrier noticed they were delivering to a brand new box today but probably not. We seem to have multiple mail carriers these days. At most, it will be multiple mail carriers who notice. If they notice at all.

So, I was walking past my polling place this morning, which for all practical purposes is in my back yard aka my children’s elementary school. It was maybe 10 minutes after the polls opened at seven. I took this pic (wondering if I was violating some kind of rule or something).

As I continued on my walk a poll worker opened the door… Oh no… What did I do wrong? Well, nothing of course. He called out a cheery “Good morning!” I returned his greeting and, realizing he thought I might be a voter, explained that I had voted a few weeks ago. I then asked him how many customers he’d had so far. He formed a zero with his thumb and index finger and said he thought maybe I would be his first.

I think this was an outcome of absentee voting for everyone for any reason. I almost told him the GG would be over a little later (and he was). In truth, I was wavering a bit about reminding the GG it was an election day because the GG and I live in a house divided. In the end, my conscious conscience got the better of me and I reminded him, although I doubt he actually needed a reminder from me. He was voter 29 at I dunno, nine-something.

I also told the poll worker that pre-you-know-what, I used to always try to be the first voter, at least in the little elections. I was in a silent contest with Mr. Mxyzptlk, a guy who always arrived on his bicycle and usually beat me out for number one voter. In fact, whenever I was first, I would kinda wonder where he was…

I never tried to be first for presidential elections or primaries. Too many people. The last time I voted in person was the 2020 Michigan primary. It was March 10 and covid was looming. I got there before the polls opened and was something like six or eight in line. I remember talking to my line neighbors all the while wondering if we were three feet apart (a few days later it was six, both numbers arbitrary and meaningless in my opinion). Two days later I was sent home to telecommute for what has turned out to be forever.

At this point, I am not afraid to vote in person because of covid. It’s just so easy to fill out a ballot at leisure and drop it into the box at like 7:00 AM when there’s no traffic. I will vote in person again though. Friends of mine worked the polls today and I miss them.

Blahgging, that is. Yesterday’s six o’clock disturbance was a garden variety baggy old married couple dispute. It was minor but it rather discombobulated yer fav-o-rite blahgger from doing her blahg.

It involved locating quit claim deeds for multiple FinFam generations of property transfers (yes really). Was this something good to get a handle on? Yes. Did it need to become a Hot Issue at 6:00 PM on Sunday? Nope. Where are Liii-yuns football games when I need them? Quit claim deeds, etc. are online these days and after a WHOLE DAY (today) of searches, my marital partner found what he needed. Okay great! Why does this stuff have to be so stressful? I mean it FELT stressful. Mostly because what angst there was got directed at me. Or at least it FELT that way. I actually find looking around for internet records kinda zen. Usually. But some of this stuff dredges up unpleasant memories from 10-ish years ago after The Commander died and an in-law decided to attack me and my family with unscrupulous lawyers.

That’s all I will say about that. Except that although it is good to have copies of legal records in your home, I can’t help thinking, “What if the house explodes?” Two houses in our area have exploded in two months. Even the GG had to laugh… Of course this is totally black humor and pretty inappropriate given that in one explosion, four people died.

Anyway, dinner got an even later start than usual. That along with TWO series episodes made it impossible for me to concentrate on a blahg entry. Uh, not that y’all care. Two series? Station Eleven. I’ve watched it already, the GG has not so I’m watching it with him. And The Crown (I’m closing out the 4th season). The GG isn’t watching this. I think the early episodes with Churchill, etc., may have been somewhat interesting to him but I don’t think he is that much interested in Princess Di and the various dramas of QEII’s adult children. I have mixed feelings about that era and how it is portrayed in the series but I am not a palace insider so I don’t know what the hell really went on. Mostly I don’t know what to believe. I will say that this series, although I am enjoying it, is not going to turn me into a royalist or whatever you call it.

I finished the last two pages of The Covenant of Water this morning before work. Overall I liked the book a lot. It dragged a bit in places. I am not “afraid” of long books (700-plus pages depending on how it’s measured) but I felt this one could have been edited down a bit. Not all that much, maybe 100 pages or so? Disclaimer: I am not qualified to be an editor, not to mention a book critic. Today I started a re-read of The Color Purple, which I read when I was very young. I’m wondering what I will think of it 40-50 years after I first read it. I have not forgotten the phrase “Shug Avery pee”.

The pic is another steal from my mouse, lightly apped to increase contrast.

This is just to report that I am alive and well but I was unable to finish the last two pages of my current book (The Covenant of Water). I was interrupted from that, not to mention cooking dinner, at around 6:00 PM. That is all. It was nothing urgent. But I am totally unable to write a coherent blahg entry…

Crappy photo of our southward Saturday Drive today. We were mostly on small back roads like this one and out of frame to the left are the (distant) Monroe nuclear cooling towers.

Since we were heading south and into the area between The Planet Ann Arbor and one of its satellite burgs (Saline), I directed the GG to take my old Zen Commute Route to check out what might be happening down at Cubelandia. Turns out our part of the building seems to be totally deserted. There wasn’t even a “for rent” sign that I could see. I am sad/not sad about this. I usually went into the office unless there was a snowstorm (why muck up the roads with one more vee-hickle when I can work from home) or working from the moomincabin or somewhere. On the other hand, if people can work productively from home, why the heck not? We do. So does my boss by the way. He is in Virginia and I have never met him in person. I get really cranky when I read about corporate lord high muckity mucks trying to drag their employees back to the office. Especially tech companies. Delete long rant about how people don’t really come up with brilliant ideas when they are talking around the proverbial water cooler. Usually they’re just gossiping about movies or video games or other people. Which is okay. But…

From there we had an annoying errand at our nephew’s empty house (he and his family moved outta town so they’re getting ready to sell). The GG is missing a “tool” of some sort and the last time he saw it was there a few days ago when he was helping his brother empty the house. He didn’t find it but I bet he will eventually. Like the other day when, after much fiddly-doodling around and quite some marital stress, he found the *changed* password to one of my financial accounts. The one that I TEXTED to him after I was *forced* to change it.

Nevertheless, we had a nice drive in brilliant sunshine with temps in the 20s. We are in a very flat part of SE Michigan here but we turned right (west) and within a mile we were in glacial moraine meaning ups and downs and twists and turns. Back up through Tecumseh where we were not able to locate the building of the long-defunct Chilean House, a restaurant we frequented in our “childhood” years. A Chilean co-worker’s family owned it and it was REALLY GOOD! Then off through Macon to Saline, BACK to the nephew’s house to look AGAIN for the dang tool (still not found) and finally home.

Boring but orange-ya glad I didn’t talk about polly-ticks again today? I’ll be back…

I am about at the end of my rope. I am and always have been a pro-choice feminist. This isn’t really something I “inherited” from my once republican-voting parents. But they were, guess what, pro-choice too. Maybe not completely feminist at the beginning but my moom worked most of her life. Buyer at the downtown Detroit Hudson’s store after college, then a job at the Sault Ste. Siberia Monkey Wards store before I was born.

She took a bit of a break when she had me and Jim but eased back into work as a part-time teacher when I was ten. She was not (yet) trained as a teacher but had a once a week teaching job that year and I guess she decided I was capable of tending my 7-year-old brother and the dog for an hour or so once a week before she got home from work.

Not long after that she got a teaching certificate in order to begin teaching “home-ec” at our high school and after a few years of that. Dun dun dun. She went back to school to obtain her masters degree in teaching. We had the occasional difficulties a spirited teenage girl has with her mother but she was a good, well liked teacher and I was very proud of her. I will never forget when a nurse at Freighter View assisted living pulled me aside to tell me she had my mom as a teacher and how much she loved her.

Mom and I both worked to support ourselves and our families most of our lives. We were both fortunate to be able to take a few years off to take care of our children. It wasn’t easy for either of us but we managed. And we followed similar trajectories. After a few years off, we got antsy, wanting to DO something and hopefully earn some money in the process.

We worked (I still work) both to help support our families and because it was important to us to contribute to something more, not to mention it’s always nice for anyone to have their own money. That’s about as feministic as it gets, I think.

Except. My parents always supported a woman’s right to choose, among other things. They would not recognize The Orange Baboon’s takeover of the GOP, turning it into the mean, xenophobic bunch of MAGAts it seems to have become. Republican voices of reason need to turn up the volume and remove the MAGAts.

Something is landing (or not) on the moon right now. I am not watching. I have seen various moon landings in my life including manned landings. This one is not manned, which may be a good thing because from what I can hear from the next room, things don’t seem to be going all that well. The real reason I am not watching (besides kinda boring) is that I am FRIED after a very long day that included a performance evaluation prep discussion. Which was fine, just that I don’t think *anyone* views these as a fun thing. Including managers, who have to both lead them and go through their own. Such is life in Corporate America. After I left my “childhood” tech job (my choice and on good terms), I “swore” I would never work for a big corporation again. But here I am, drug test and all. (A story for another day but yes I passed. Of course.)

My mouse sent some loverly skunk cabbage photooos. There were some others: kayaking, a muskrat, hepatica (a spring wildflower). We are concerned about the appearance of hepatica this early in the season. Well before the vernal equinox aka first day of spring. This flower was in a particular micro-climate but still.

My thoughts went back to March 2012, which was just after The Commander died. Down here on the Planet Ann Arbor (and other parts of the state), temperatures were in the 90s for *days* and flowering trees, some of them fruit-bearing, all did their thing IN MARCH. May is more normal for that. Of course, many of the March 2012 trees froze in April, wreaking havoc on fruit crops.

So when the GG first alerted me about the moon landing, I was watching Tommy Tuberville make an absolute ass of himself by demonstrating that he knows NOTHING about IVF or probably much of anything else except maybe football? I mean, “We need more kids?” 8-celled embryos (is it 8?) are NOT children. They don’t become children until and unless 1) they get successfully implanted in a uterus and 2) they manage to gestate long enough to be born successfully. Not to mention that most of those embryos have been created by people who WANT to make more children (Tommy?) but now the IVF system has been thrown into chaos, potentially keeping people from accessing it to CREATE more children (Tommy?). This makes my head explode! Who the hell are these people and who the hell is voting for them? Jesus certainly isn’t.

This is not what the Back Room looks like right now. The boxes are in the Landfill Dungeon. I will be ecstatic when they go OUT the door but at this point it isn’t really my prodject.

The GG spent the morning wrangling FlaMan and the afternoon helping the UU and his young grandson remove unwanted items from his son’s house (not the father of this particular grandson). I’m sure they had a grand old time loading up yet another trailer and it was GREAT for the GG to spend some time with his great-nephew. But the whole thing made me a bit taaared just thinking about it. At this point in time, if I had my druthers I would hire somebody to move or dispose of whatever.

My preference at the moment would be Schlepper’s Haulaway. He’s a local guy who went to high school with MMCB₂‘s son and she has also hired him and given him great kudos, which he also gets on good old next door neighbor. What I particularly like is that he tries to dispose of things thoughtfully. Instead of just dumping everything off at the landfill, he tries to find new homes for valuable/useful things. I’m gonna guess he makes a little cash selling stuff and that would be okay with me. This is not a commercial. Just my own thought processes.

Yer gonna hear about embryos anyway because I somehow got revved up. I don’t understand all of the science behind IVF but I am kinda standing here agog about the Alabama supreme court’s decision. Do any of these people understand anything about “science” and did they think this through? Probably not.

I mean “science” is a BIG TOPIC and I sure don’t understand it all but if I were an elected official of any sort, when faced with an issue like this, I would definitely consult people who have dedicated their careers studying the related branches of science before I cast my vote or even express an opinion. Alas I don’t think any of these folks give a crap about science even though it SHOULD drive decisions like this one. Not to mention the excruciatingly difficult individual decisions so many families make when they aren’t capable of easily conceiving and/or birthing healthy children. This is scary for our country not to mention mankind.

Disclaimer: I was not a person who had trouble conceiving or giving birth. Ready, aim, faaar, baby. Was I ready? Ha ha ha. I had to be. But I have empathy for others. My mother included, although that was way earlier than IVF technology. I was her first-born 11 years after she was married (at 22, WWII bride) and my [late, alas] brother a few years later.

Braving covid again, I met up with the rest of the local fam down at the Griz. They went on to a concert at The Ark. I came home. I almost always fade in the mid-to-late afternoon and I did so today. I perked up for dinner (salmon BLT, half of which is now in the landfill refrigimatator) but I knew I wouldn’t last through a concert. I am not a big fan of concerts anyway. I have always been much happier being involved in the works of staged performances than watching them. A player when I was an active musician. A jill-of-all-trades as a play production manager. I would sneak into the back of the auditorium to watch my kids on stage then get moving again. On to whatever I needed to attend to next.

I haven’t driven *to* downtown a whole lot since before covid, except the farmers market. There are weird bike lanes where there didn’t used to be and many of the long-time one-way streets are now two-way. It’s okay. I managed. They’ve also changed the parking lots and the one by the Griz is now plastic card only. Which I am ecstatic about. But. For whatever reason, if I can’t just tap my card, I am forever putting my card in backwards or sometimes upside down. This is not really an issue at Meijer but I think they need to install some sort of little LED light above the credit card slot because leaving in the dark, for the life of me, I could not see the graphic that showed which way to put the card in. And couldn’t remember how I did it when I entered the parking lot. (You put your card in when you enter and then the same card upon exit.)

But I did it. The GG had walked down and he actually offered to MEET me outside the restaurant to “help” me park. I actually thought about that for a split second and then decided to hell with it. I can handle this. And I did. And then ALMOST turned into the goddamn bike lane that didn’t used to be there…

I do think about all the years I used to shop downtown ALL THE TIME. I had my fave parking lots. The lot by the Griz. The Library Lot. Palio’s lot. Sometimes Kline’s. I knew the funky pattern of one-way streets like the back of my hand. I will learn this new stuff too. I am a fan of parking apps, etc. Except when they don’t work and they sometimes don’t and when they don’t I don’t have quarters hanging around in my console any more. Assuming the parking meters even take quarters these days.

Enough gibberish. G’night!

It woke me up just after 6:00 AM. Actually it didn’t wake me up. I was already awake and trying to jump-start myself outta bed. I thought it was thunder. But I had visited the water closet not a half hour earlier and there is an indoor/outdoor thermometer in there and it proclaimed 22 degrees. A little too cold for thundersnow. Plus, it wasn’t snowing. Starry skies.

After I got up and started looking around on the intertubes… Well, crap. It was (another) house explosion. A mile and some away down on S. Seventh St. I lived on N. Seventh a bazillion years ago.

The good news is NO ONE DIED this time. The sole occupant of the house (an “elderly” man) was taken to the horspittal with non-life-threatening injuries. I heard “burn unit” on the radio at one point but your mileage may vary with news stories and random social media scuttlebutt.

What seems to be pretty clear is that his natural gas connection had been shut off a while back (maybe water too) and he was heating his house with propane. I think *most* people on The Planet Ann Arbor heat with natural gas through DTE Energy. Propane is more likely to be used in the rural areas where DTE doesn’t have infrastructure butcha never know. The details about what actually happened are unclear but it doesn’t sound like a meth cooking incident (which came up on next-door-neighbor right away). My totally uneducated guess based on other folks’ social media speculation is his gas got turned off and he couldn’t pay and was too proud to reach out for help. I think DTE and other organizations have programs to help people who can’t pay their utility bills. But he did a DIY fix.

We “heat” with propane at the moomincabin but we do not have central heat there. It’s just a little stove that takes the edge off in the yooperland shoulder seasons or on cold summer days. It is turned off throughout the winter. Our propane tank is well away from the moomin and Amerigas (our cabin propane provider) is proactive about checking the tank and the stove and all the connections and replaces the tank periodically.

Breaking news: this morning’s victim apparently had *two* propane tanks INDOORS!

There hasn’t been much follow-up news (that I’ve seen) on the house explosion to the north of us back on December 30. It was much farther away but also MUCH louder, although loud isn’t quite the right word. In the end, the house belonged to a grandfather. He was hosting his daughter, son-in-law and their three young adult children from out of town for the holidays. The owner/grandfather is alive and recovering. The mom, dad, and two of their children died. Their youngest child survived. I haven’t heard the exact cause but I believe it was propane related. That’s an area that is likely not within DTE’s natural gas line infrastructure. Sad sad sad.

Today was a gorgeous day and the GG walked downtown via the explosion area and got these pics. He also hit up Kerrytown and brought home lamb stew meat, hanger steaks, and smoked mackerel.

Take care and be careful handling propane gas and any flammables!

A day of picky little chores. Yesterday the GG alerted me to something going on in the water closet, namely tattered bath towels. Yes, I’m aware of that. I think they are even too tattered to take to the Humane Society.

His idea was to go out and physically SHOP for them. And that would’ve been okay albeit stultifyingly boring. But I got to thinking… I do that sometimes. Where on earth would I go to buy towels? The only local bricks and mortar store I could think of that would have high quality cotton towels was Macy’s. Problem? I did NOT want to go to the mall.

My next thought was either LL Bean or Land’s End. Hmmm… I have never been in a bricks and mortar version of either of those stores. I was vaguely aware that we had a Land’s End in town for a while. All Land’s End stores in the SE Great Lake State are permanently closed according to goomaps. There is an LL Bean way on the other side of megalopolis. I was not feeling inclined to head over there today. In other words, I did not really want to go shopping at all.

So let your fingers do the walking. I looked at what Macy’s had. Didn’t have my preferred color. Looked at LL Bean and a couple other mainly on-line shops. Didn’t have my preferred color. Land’s End had teal and bingo, that is my preferred color. The Landfill water closet has white tile, countertop, and walls with a black cabinet and beige floor tile. The main nod to color is the accent tile in the pic, which shows up in a couple locations.

The GG expressed a desire to interact with the towels in person before buying them but I think Land’s End’s cotton towels will be fine and I managed to convince him of that. He actually admitted that he hadn’t thought of looking for towels at LL Bean or Land’s End.

Our shopping landscape has changed since covid. The last time I bought new towels I *did* go to Macy’s and if the clerk hadn’t noticed I was buying a *lot* of towels, I would have bought *12* towels instead of the six I wanted. She was kind of snarky actually but in my defense, the towels were folded together in a kind of a weird way.

I did a few other chores that don’t merit a mention and the GG replaced Cygnus’s veeeendsheeeeld vipers. She still feels new to me but she’s going on three years so surely there is some wear and tear but I also think our January ice storm may have accelerated the damage.

Making chicken shawarma, the Baggy Old American Moom kind (on a sheet pan), and reading The Covenant of Water, which I am enjoying a lot. I also really liked West With Giraffes, which I finished last week or whenever. And Family Family, which may not be everyone’s cup of tea but I liked it.

Here is Mr. Golden Sun setting after 6:00 PM. Today was one of those days when Ma Nature supersedes Old Man Winter to give us a glimpse of the summer to come. Brilliant blue skies under a northbound sun.

We have a long way to go before summer or even spring happens but both of those WILL happen.

Our older beach urchin hiked with the GG and the Chief Noonday chapter of the North Country Trail Association today. I was blissfully alone here at the Landfill and I needed that. This beach urchin came back over for dinner, which was beef stew, garlic bread, and leftover broccoli.

G’night. I am gonna start on season 4 of the Crown.

That’s what today was. I spent a lot of the afternoon listening to LAWYERS streaming from the GG’s lair. I am not sure what the hell they were talking about. Over and over and over and over again I heard, “I don’t remember”. If you are a lawyer it seems you should be able to remember things, right? I am not a lawyer and I remember a LOT of things, sometimes annoyingly so. So you are probably lying.

I am remembering senate hearings about whatever from waaaay long ago. White southern senators kept saying, “Ah don’t recollect”. I was annoyed as all getout. Whaddya mean y’all don’t recollect?

Out of the FIVE (count ’em) lawyers that tried to dig their fingers into The Commander’s stuff, one was a decent lawyer. Two were incompetent (mom hired them but I am guilty of keeping them on). Two were carpetbaggers hired by a former in-law. They lost, as they deserved to. The fifth cleaned the whole mess up. So one out of five was competent and honorable.

The GG FINALLY turned off the non-remember-ers and took a walk. I gave him a mission to get some broccoli. From the Plum. Well. He went to Kroger. It was a MESS over there. The produce was totally picked over and there were long lines at the checkout. He did come home with broccoli and I had to ask, where did you get it? Thankfully, he got it at the Plum, as he was INSTRUCTED to do in the first place. Whew!

The excitement of the day once again involved online banking confuddlement. It involved a new account we set up at the same financial instution that holds my 401K. Of course my 401K is completely separate from any other accounts at that institution. Except not…

There was some name confusion but I won’t go there in order to protect the innocent (not). The thing is that when the GG tried to log in to the account, it didn’t accept his password. In the process of changing it he had to do 2-factor auth (2-factor auth is a GOOD thing albeit annoying). But. The only phone number he was presented with (he thought) was not one he knew. He called out, “hey do you know anything about this phone number ending in [insert 4 digits here]?”

Yes. Yes I do. I started working for [big-fintech-company] in 2007. I was issued a landline. I NEVER used it. Actually that’s not totally true. In the early days I occasionally used it to contact company tech support. Other than that it was used for TWO purposes:

1) Our telephone numbers were very close to the numbers used by the local court system so we would fairly frequently get calls from people asking about their court dates or other issues. I was always politely but quickly dismissive. Sorry, I can’t help you [terse explanation]. W1.5 (over the wall from me) was uber polite and once or twice people tried to make THEIR problem (wrong number) HIS problem.

2) Cubelandia denizens would call each other if we detected that Brooosie was haaaanging around in someone’s cube taaaaallllking in order to rescue the “victim”. I try to be kind to weird people so I tried to politely listen to Brooooosie’s “stuff” when he cornered me. He is a weird guy but a lot of that is because he has a genetic disorder that wasn’t discovered until he was in his late 20s. He was nice, kind, and not creepy, at least not to me, as an old mother by the time I hired on. A younger, more naive woman may have been freaked out but I’ve known lots of weird harmless people in my life and I don’t think I have EVER been naive except maybe about boyfriends. Still. I was always happy when someone “rescued” me from Broooosie’s little rants.

So somehow my company probably ported my work phone number that I never really used over into my 401K account. And somehow it got attached to our other account(s) there.

Problem? I have been a permanent telecommuter since you-know-when. i dunno what’s going on at our old building now but all of our old landline phones are definitely long gone.

In the end, faced with 2-factor auth choices again, we discovered a small link under the “bad” phone number. “more options” or something. Clicking on that, voila, there were our iPhone numbers. All is well now.

Other than that, it has been a fugly day featuring a couple hours of snow (that more or less melted) and high enough winds that “stuff” was falling on the roof. Nothing worrying. In other words, a fairly typical winter day.

P.S. I didn’t steal the pic from the internet. It was an actual (hacked) sign on The Planet Ann Arbor back in 2011.

This year’s “Valentimes” Day card features robots. Aren’t they cute? I also received an exquisite “Be mine” necklace 🤣, a fancy dark chocolate bar, and a dollar bill. I’m rich! I reciprocated with a box of Kilwin’s chocolates and a special limited edition bag of Roos Roast (local coffee brewer) *Bourbon* Butter Love coffee beans. Utility coffee for me is Roos Roast *Lobster* Butter Love but the GG buys good old 8-o’clock Coffee when he is over at Kroger supplying himself and FlaMan with provisions.

I mostly don’t have bad memories of grade school Valentine parties. I don’t remember not getting a full box of Valentine cards. I don’t remember (or even know) if other kids were shorted or not. I *definitely* put one in every other kid’s box. The Commander would have killed me otherwise. I do remember being very careful about which card I gave to who. Will Nancy be offended if I give her a card with a bubble bath on it? I hope Steve doesn’t misinterpret my card to mean I like him like him. (’cause I don’t, even though Steve likes me likes me. (And my moom was not one of his fans, cue up Leader of the Pack… (But I was in FIRST GRADE…)))

In first grade, I somehow missed that I was supposed to decorate a shoebox for collecting cards until the 11th hour. I was my parents’ first child and maybe The Comm didn’t know either. I was totally freaked out and had a big tantrum but my moom came to the rescue with some fancy white tissue paper with purple flowers on it and doilies and I fergit what else. I was terrified that my box wasn’t RED, which for some reason I thought was one of the “rules” for Valentine boxes. My mom was quite artistic and she made a beautiful box for me and wouldn’t you know, the teacher GUSHED over the white/purple box and even called over some other nearby teachers to look at it. (Thank you mom)

Last but definitely not least, today is my lovely (late) mother-in-law’s birthday. She would be 99. Here she is on a bote in the Detroit River. That’s a Royal Canadian Mounted Police vee-hickle parked behind so they must have been hanging out on the Canadian side. Best mother-in-law ever. Well, only mother-in-law for me but honestly why would I have wanted to divorce the GG when I’d already won the mother-in-law roulette. Ten children, nineteen grandchildren and I’m not gonna count great-grandchildren tonight 🐸

Today’s “excitement” involved a knock-down drag-out fight with my 401K login. Why? Because someone (not me) muffed the password. The GG does have login credentials for my 401K, which is okay except for the time he muffed the 2-factor auth number enough times that they locked “us” out and I had to CALL them to straighten it all out. I was STRONGLY LECTURED about letting “someone else” have access to my account. Um, it is the guy I’ve been married to for umpteen bazillion years and YES HE CAN HAVE ACCESS TO MY DAMN ACCOUNT! Jeebus.

Woodpeckers are much more interesting. Comments to yesterday’s bird blahg mentioned woodpeckers pecking on chimneys, etc. Well. I know about that, oh boy oh boy oh boy. Back in the day when the beach urchins were munchkins, for a couple of years (in season) a flicker decided it would be a good idea to peck on our METAL fireplace chimney. Every day. At 6:00 AM.

This sound reverberated throughout the entire Landfill, startling the heck out of anyone who wasn’t familiar with it and some of us who were. It scared the beejeezus outta the beach urchins until the GG trained a spotting scope on it and was able to convince them that the horrible metallic drilling sound was coming from a BIRD.

That was in an era when The Commander and Grandroobly would fairly frequently drive down to visit and shop, etc. They slept on a fold-out couch in the same room as the fireplace. The first time they visited during the Woodpecker Era, I warned them that they would be awakened by the bird at 6:00 the next morning. “Oh it won’t wake us up,” said The Comm. “Oh yes, moom, the woodpecker WILL WAKE YOU UP!” And it did.

I think there’s a (crappy) pic of that flicker somewhere but it is down in the dungeon in the mess of old film photographs and I’m not gonna knock myself out today. Instead you get this LOVERLY photo of seagulls taking off from the beach on Long Boat Key. I got this by sneaking up with my iPhone cam in burst mode. This was 2017 and burst mode was simply holding down the button (I think). Nowadays you have to slide right or left or whatever and I am not impressed.

P.S. Peckerwood was one of my old coot’s “pet” names for The Commander late in their lives. I can only guess how he came up with that one and why she tolerated it 🤣