Random bits of my so-called life.

Do y’all think the bag and raincoat clash? I do not because they are worn exuberantly like, “I like these colors/patterns together and I don’t care what anyone thinks.” The raincoat is handmade by the wearer (this was in 2016), the bag was purchased, probably at the Plum Market. On another note, “colorific” is being flagged as a non-word but I’m pretty sure the Spelling Bee accepts it.

I felt like making chicken pot pie today. I use a recipe that I think came out of Parade Magazine, which came to us for years with the Sunday paper. Apparently it was still published in paper form until 2022 but I had long stopped reading a *paper* newspaper by then.

This recipe, which I tweaked (as I often do) became a family favorite. It has a biscuit crust instead of a traditional pie crust. I think the recipe said to use Jiffy Mix but I tweaked it to use Joy of Cooking drop biscuits. I am a sub-standard biscuit maker but it works well enough. The “filling”, what lies underneath the biscuit topping, is chicken, carrots, celery, and potatoes, with a chicken broth/onion sauce.

It isn’t hard to make but there are a lot of steps and I worked on it off and on throughout the day, keeping up with washing the bazillion bowls and cooking pots along the way. And then it was in the oven. I looked at facebook and someone had “shared” a demonstration of cooking a chicken “dish” that was similar. But. Not. They dumped some frozen pre-cooked chicken out of a bag into a baking dish, topped it with frozen carrots and peas out of a bag, then topped it all with a box of Red Lobster biscuit mix. Easy peasy, five minutes tops to put together.

Okay, this would never do for my fam. I KNOW that chicken pot pies often contain peas. My fam likes peas and would probably not complain at this stage of the game, but they might raise their eyebrows. Peas? In OUR chicken pot pie?

Disclaimer on cutting corners when cooking. My recipe calls for carrots and celery. I always buy diced carrots and celery in little grab-and-go plastic containers. I am beyond done with dicing carrots and celery, not to mention that the GG and I could never eat a whole celery bunch/stalk (it’s complicated) before it rots.

We’ll talk some other day (or not) about how I think people receiving SNAP or other welfare benefits should be able to use those benefits to enable less stressful ways to feed their families without being scorned by grocery clerks or patrons.

Subtitle: I am so dumb.

I didn’t blast outta here to get grocks at 8:00 AM, deciding to have a wee spot of coffee first. When I did get into Cygnus X-1, the first thing I noticed was that there were two bottles of water on the driver’s seat. The glove box was open and there were papers and things on the passenger seat. And more water bottles on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Probably the most annoying was I couldn’t find my car hairbrush. I guess the water bottles distracted me. I cannot abide more than one or two water bottles in my car. And these are OLD water bottles that have been refilled umpteen bazillion times so who knows how many people’s (peoples’?) germs are on them. Ugh.

Because I was distracted by the water bottles, it took me until I got to the Plum Market (a few blocks away) and was inside talking to mouse to come to the realization that somebody had come into the driveway in the middle of the night, opened the UNLOCKED (yeah, I know) car, and rifled its contents. So, still processing that, I sent the GG a “Did you ransack my car?” text.

No, OF COURSE he hadn’t ransacked Cygnus. In fact, it turned out that Moooon Yooonit had also been ransacked. One small item was taken and replaced by a pack of cigarettes with TWO cigarettes left.

The GG perused webcam photos and someone was in our driveway at, hmmm, was it 1:10 AM? We were sleeping in the Lyme Lounge and each of us have a vague memory of hearing something at some time during the night. Fortunately I didn’t go outside to drivewayP until 3:15 or so, so at least I wasn’t in caught in that act.

I am annoyed but not freaked out. Why? As long as we’ve had Next Door Neighbor (which I love to hate), almost EVERY DAY there are posts from people whose UNLOCKED cars were ransacked overnight. The perpetrators *almost* never take anything, just strew things around and make a mess. I dunno what they would do if they found a wad of cash (which I usually don’t have and wouldn’t leave in a car if I did) but they did not take the coins outta the rubber glove.

Waaay before Next Door Neighbor (40 years ago), we had a rash of these kinds of incidents in our neighborhood. Our then thief took our Tickly Toddle cassette tape out of Daddy’s Little Blue Car*. I wonder what that might’ve been worth to them.

I ALWAYS lock the cars before going to bed. Except last night I apparently didn’t. (LOCK YOUR CAR DOORS!)¹⁰⁰

The pic is one the GG took of WWII planes flying over down by the Big House, where Umich beat Wisconsin today. I didn’t see this flyover. If it had been modern fighter jets, I’d have heard them.

*Daddy’s Little Blue Car was one of a trio of Ford Fiestas. The other members of the trio were Mama’s Little Gold Car and The Orange Car (an unknown neighbor down the street).

80 degrees, that is, not the 1980s. People keep saying this is way too warm for October and they are not wrong. October can be a mixed bag in the Great Lake State. I am not a climate change denier at all but this heat is not all that unusual for this time of year. On the other hand, we can also have snow in October

We discussed the possibility of eating outside tonight but about the time dinner was ready, the MOE-skee-TOES were coming out and even though they weren’t all that bad, we headed inside to eat. MOE-skee-TOES? Yeah, they come out at dusk at this time of year. They don’t exactly target me all that much but even one bite is enough.

Obviously I don’t have a lot to say tonight. There’s our shed with the lights on and some impatiens that got potted around Mother’s Day and are hanging on pretty much forever.

Sayonara, KW. Typos be damned.

From the Never a Dull Moment department… We slept in the Lyme Lounge again last night. I got up and took a shower and then gathered a humongous pile of laundry. I schlepped it down the stairs and then as I walked into the pitch black utility room, whaddya think happened next (the light string is in the middle of the room)? If you answered “SPLOOSH!”? Ding ding ding. You win the booby prize. Which is a guy with a roto-rooter.

I sloshed through the water (it was very shallow), set the laundry basket on top of the washing musheen, and went back upstairs to text the GG, who was still out in the Lyme Lounge. A flurry of activity (and some waiting around) ensued until “we” (aka the GG) got a call that “Tommy” could be there in 20 minutes. Okay, we were on a roll. Tommy arrived and apparently the clog was 70 feet from the landfill, out under the street. But it was fixed by 11:30 or so and the GG was able to make his scheduled trip to FlaMan’s with grocks and things, only to find that one of their sisters had already visited with the same grocks the GG took up there. And I have probably mangled some of this.

Like I apparently mangled some of yesterday’s details about gov’t shutdowns. The GG actually read my blahg and apparently he WAS an essential employee and was “holding down” the lab. I don’t really remember him being out of the house a whole lot but like I think I said yesterday, I’ve probably blocked a lot of what went on during that painful time. At least the schools were not shut down🤡

In today’s title, replace “the moon” with “Mars” and “Alice” with “The Orange Baboon and Musk”. Oh, add Hegseth to that and make it a trio. What horrible people. I have, of course, seen a few episodes of The Honeymooners but I almost definitely saw re-runs because when I looked up the show, it was on mostly before we had a television set in my childhood house. We got one when I was two and there was one channel, CBC (Canadian), and I have VERY fleeting memories of Howdy Doody and that is about it.

Finally, Little Cat Z rescued the guy in the pic from her work parking lot today. A proud moom moment for a moom who would be nervous about picking up a turtle.

I’ve come a long way since the Bill Clinton era gov’t shutdowns. If memory serves (and it may not), there were two, one very short, the other protracted. I did not do well during those. I was (by choice) not gainfully employed during that period. The GG was a federal employee. A non-essential one, as they say. And no, he did not keep airplanes from crashing into each other but those people are apparently non-essential also. go figger.

We were low on cash at that point. Not because we’d been living high on the hog, nope. I mean, we were probably spending more money than we needed to but in a poor man’s kind of way. What we were really doing was doggedly working on paying off our mortgage early. At 13 years. It was a 30-year adjustable rate mortgage and we had won that gamble just about every year we had that mortgage so I was able to make much larger payments than required.

I won’t detail that fugly period in our lives (actually, I think I have blocked the details of my then moodiness). When it finally ended, beaucoup bucks in back pay arrived and within a few months the Landfill mortgage was paid off as well as the POC, a beautiful but problematical vee-hickle. That was the last car we paid for with a traditional car loan.

By the next time a gov’t shutdown directly affected us, I mean in terms of our livelihood, I was working for Corporate America. My salary was plenty enough to keep us afloat, we had absolutely no debt, and the GG took the Lyme Lounge off somewhere. Of course I was ecstatic about our situation (compared to the last shut-down) but I always feel empathy for federal workers who are furloughed with no pay. Or in some cases WORKING with no pay. This is not how people should be treated.

This time around, he is retired and I am still employed (for now). If a social security check arrives late (and I always feel like I’m double dipping somehow although I know I am not), we’ll be fine. I’m not sure what else could affect us except maybe national parks/forests closing to the public.

I’ll rant (or not) another day (again) about how Trump runs over “little people’s” (like me) lives in his attempts to do, hmmm, what? Destabilize our country by creating chaos? Big Ugly Bill indeed. That’s why we are in this shutdown.

Disclaimers: 1) That is not my photo. A daughter sent it to me from her township fair last weekend. 2) I normally blur (or “rabbit peep”) out license plate alphanumeric characters when I post them but this is attached to an amphibious car and I bet this car is not normally on the road a whole lot. Throughout my life, I have on multiple occasions encountered amphibious cars at the mouth of the Tahquamenon River. Not sure if this one has ever been there or not.

Okay, at the end of Sunday night, I was really really cranky. There was no reason for this. I’d had a great day and was on a roll and people came for dinner and it was fun and then… I dunno… My moods can be mercurial although I have slowly and incrementally settled down throughout my adult life, watching my babies grow up into successful women and gaining success in a job I totally fell into. Alas, I still have my moments.

The GG and I were heading off to bed and I was still grumpy and then… Out of the blue he asked, “Have you slept in the Lyme Lounge at all this summer?” Well, no. I often sleep in the Lyme Lounge when we have an overflow of people bunking in the moomincabin. I would never put up a guest in a camping trailer unless they were really hot to sleep there. Also, a lot of people are way too tall to be comfortable sleeping in the Lyme Lounge. The GG and I are about at the upper end of comfort there.

But also, this summer, although we had lots of people around most of the time, they were not bunking at the moomin although we almost always ate dinner there together. Anyway. I was ensconced in the Little Bedroom next to the bathroom. It is my childhood bedroom although back then there was a bunk bed for me and my brother. And a dresser (or two?) plastered with monster stickers from the grocery store checkout aisle.

For whatever reason, the thought of sleeping in the Lyme Lounge IMMEDIATELY pulled me out of my stoopid funk. YES! We slept in the monster bedroom that night but yesterday morning I washed my sleeping bag and we had the best sleep out in the Lyme Lounge last night surrounded by crickets singing their song. I don’t normally have trouble sleeping in any case but this was extra good. Since the weather continues to be warm, I think we will continue to sleep out there until it, uh, isn’t warm.

It was a quiet day at the Landfill on The Planet Ann Arbor unless you count the GG gyrating in and out and around and about. Out one door and in the other, jumping between various work stations. I had a bazillion work meetings scheduled for today but a key person caught the latest bug (I didn’t ask which variety, just wished them well) and almost everything got canceled.

I had the radio on but I kept the volume down because, well, I dunno. I didn’t really want to listen to the news today and I knew the GG probably didn’t want to listen to National Petroleum Radio. I think that nickname may have run its course. If NPR is so “woke” (not my opinion), how does that square with the petroleum industry? Doesn’t that industry evoke more of a right-wing “flavor” or whatever? (Disclaimer: I drive a gasoline powered vee-hickle and won’t change over until the EV infrastructure fully supports me and my long drives to and from the yooperland. I don’t think we’re there yet.)

Anyway at around 3-something, I detected a certain droning voice coming from the radio. On and on and on and on ad nauseam. What I did was probably counterintuitive but the GG was outside with noise canceling equipment on his ears so I turned the radio up. What the hell was Trump talking about? Oh, the grandest peace plan the earth has ever seen. In the middle east no less. Grandiosity was king, Bibi was fawning, and details were scanty. From what I could tell. Look elsewhere for more comprehensive, intelligent commentary. I kept asking myself something like, “Where is the part where they turn Gaza into a tropical paradise for all the billionaires and ship its current residents somewhere they aren’t wanted and don’t want to go?” That wasn’t discussed as near as I could figure.

If this Trump administration wasn’t so frickin’ disgusting, I would be snoring. Or maybe laughing. But instead, it is scary, and I can’t look away.

I dunno, that was one of a long string of things the GG was talking to the UU about this afternoon out in the backyard as we were cooking kebabs on the grill. There has been a problem with the lucky-shucky in the Lyme Lounge all summer. I know it’s technically autumn now but it doesn’t really feel like autumn, not that I am complaining. Nevertheless, the Lyme Lounge followed the Twinz of Terror all the way to North Dakota and back and returned yesterday from yet another trip, this time mostly to the yooperland.

The yooperland trip began with closing the moomincabin but as it turns out, that job did not get totally completed. The GG was photo-documenting the procedure, including how to put antifreeze down the terlet, etc. Problem? He was so busy photo-documenting the terlet that he thinks he forgot to put antifreeze into the other drains. That would be the shower, bathroom sink, and kitchen sink, if I have it right. It is an EXTREMELY simple plumbing system albeit a bit more complicated than the one my dad grew up with, which was, “grab a bucket, run down to the lake, fill the bucket, and run back up.” With an outhouse for sewage disposal.

A cousin of mine (on the non-Fin side of the fam) is a lawyer whose specialty is insurance and I can tell he thinks our cabin is a total liability, although he understands why we love it there. But. For one thing, although it’s true that it’s closed nine months out of the year, it isn’t like it’s totally abandoned. Three of the dwellings on the beach are occupied year-round by cousins of mine and another by good friends. Cousins are driving by every day and some of them watch who drives down our road. Like I do when I am up there. Sure, a thief or vandal could sneak in and do damage but something like a fire would be noticed immediately.

And then there is the plumbing. The one time we had a burst pipe, it was our fault for not turning the right valve on or off or whatever. The moomincabin is built a few feet off the ground up on cement blocks. Because the burst pipe, like most of the pipes, was under the cabin, the water drained out into the sand below, meaning there was no water damage. The GG went to town and got some plumbing supplies and the whole issue was fixed in a matter of a couple hours. The biggest problem with that little repair job was that it was cold out that day (40s?) and a northwest wind was SCREAMING in off Gitchee Gumee and right through the crawl space under the cabin, where he was working. Needless to say, he has since blocked off the front of the crawl space, where the cabin faces Gitchee Gumee and her wicked winds.

That moooooon is a waxing crescent, not quite the “has-moon”, that’s tomorrow. That’s what my daughter called the “half moon” when she was an emerging talker.

The GG estimated his arrival time at about 5:15 PM today. I got dinner into the hopper and then I sat out in the back yard. I eventually heard the telltale squeak of the Lyme Lounge backing into the Landfill Driveway.

We arrived back here at the Landfill a few weeks ago and it wasn’t until today that I got things somewhat organized again. Thursday I woke up and felt like I was in the biggest mess ever. What the heck? Today I got going. I got Roooomba going again and I ran her TWICE. And I cleaned the kitchen counters. I can’t say that I voomed them but it is better than it was.

That’s kind of it for today, I’m gonna watch Svengoolie with the GG.

This is one of the more interesting butt texts the GG has sent. I do not know what it says and neither does he. When he is doing trail/chainsawing work on the North Country Trail and it is hot out, which it *sometimes* is, and his phone is in his pocket, it sometimes calls or texts people or 911 (once) 👀 

When The Commander learned to text (on the iPhone we helped her obtain at the age of 88), we were going to a destination wedding in Asheville, NC. The Comm send a weird text, something like “plow Illinois, boyyyyy”. Traveling to North Carolina from The Planet Ann Arbor doesn’t usually involve Illinois. Ohaaao, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

As an aside, I remember being annoyed about having to travel to a “destination wedding”. I had to take time off work yada yada. Friends, I had the best time. I loved Asheville and our beautiful rental place there (with relatives) and was so happy to attend my beautiful niece’s wedding. Lizard Breath flew in from San Francisco where she was living at the time and the bride (her cousin) was like, “You came to my wedding from San Francisco?” Yes. That’s what family is about.

The scariest butt texting I [n]ever did was one morning when I was a new employee at Corporate America (18 years ago). I was walking in the early morning dark and I realized my phone was about to dial my boss. Jeebus kee-reist. In truth, that boss, the LSCHP, probably would have laughed the whole thing off. What a mensch.

So there’s the butt texting and then there’s the whole big dead frog in the grille thing…

What is GNO, you are asking? It is Girls Night Out. My daughters and I went to The Session Room for dinner. The Racc was definitely invited and would have been very welcome even though he is not a girl but he is recovering from a crappy old cold virus and didn’t feel like joining us and that is A-okay,

After Sessions, we decamped to The Landfill for a wee nightcap and here I am trying to figger out what to blahg about for about the umpteen bazillionth time.

How many times can I say that I love having both my daughters living on and very near The Planet Ann Arbor, one of their childhood homes, the other being the moomincabin.

I spent an hour or so at a work meeting listening to a tower of babel type discussion where people were using different words to describe the same things. And then I checked facebook for the first time today and immediately got sucked in to the same kind of thing via a few relatives and their friends. I did not engage (I know better) except to “love” one nephew’s very thoughtful comment.

Critical thinking skills anyone? I’m not sure, even from some of those folks who are very well educated. I am disheartened by what’s going on in our country and why so many sheeple are blindly following idiots like Trump and RFKjr and I just dunno.

Oh yeah, What is Antifa short for? Anti-fascist. Are you Antifa? I am. And so was my dad (WWII pilot), uncle Don (WWII destroyer medic), uncle Duke (WWII pilot) and so many others. We are NOT radical leftists no matter what wikipee says.

G’night, KW

I didn’t test so I don’t know if it was covid. It’s been a couple weeks and I am long over the worst of the symptoms, like I don’t wake up at night coughing. I do still have a couple coughing fits most days. That is annoying but it’s okay. What I was worried about today was that I had to run a 1.5 hour training session for our next release. I “preach” to a very friendly crowd but I still prefaced my presentation with something like, “Just so you know, if I start coughing, I am not sick. I had a cold/covid virus a few weeks ago. I still have a coughing fit once or twice a day. *Talking* often exacerbates that. And I have to talk to do this training presentation. Just know that if I start coughing, I am okay.”

Wouldn’t you know, I did not cough once throughout the 1.5 hour presentation and my voice was totally clear of hoarseness the whole damn time.

And the pic shows that the moomincabin is closed for the season. No running water. Water heater drained. Antifreeze in pipes. Limited lucky-shucky. Those are the main utilities at the place. Heat is provided via a propane heater when we need it. No insulation. So. Closed down. Sad but necessary for a seasonal cabin.

In the pic, Moooon Yooonit and the Lyme Lounge are primed for their next adventure, which involves chainsawing.

This was the result of various conversations about my childhood tech job boss Byron being bossed around by who? I can’t exactly remember. Probably his wife. I certainly didn’t boss him around. I “worked around him”. It was okay. He allowed me to do that. We had a silent “arrangement.” I would “run” the office and handle all the problems while he hung out in his car in the parking lot.

That only went on for a while, when he was going through some sort of difficult period. I know not what. But I always handled most of the problems anyway, at least the technical stuff. Like, what does that error message mean? It means you left this column in this row blank when you filled out your input data sheet. Or whatever. Garbage in, garbage out. BOMB! When I first worked there, I didn’t get a lot of respect, being a blonde woman with no tech experience. I had to earn respect and I did. My paycheck there never quite measured up…

It took a while for my beach urchin to process what little discussion the GG and I had about this “boss” discussion. The GG worked at the same place I did but did not have the same boss as me. But she is a smart cookie and she got it PDQ.

So, this is one of a series of pics of my parents taking the garbage up to the top of the two-track road the night before garbage pickup. It was a Procedure and everything had to be packaged into Blue Bags into the parents’ can. Even though they did it every week, the air turned blue every darn time. I posted a series of pics (including this one) on my blahg and my brother guest blahgged this:

Since the majority of readers of this here blog are at least semi-centurians or well beyond, I thought a young whipper-snapper’s perspective might be worth it. It isn’t so bad being less than 50 (or 80 for that matter). You learn to live with it. Perhaps the best thing about being on the tail-end of a generation is that you can at least see what is coming your way. I can hardly wait to argue about blue garbage bags in the year 2037!! Maybe they will be yellow by then and we can turn the air yellow instead of blue to match the bags (go ahead, expand that thought in your imagination).

Alas, my brother didn’t live long enough to reach the GREEN BAG era (and we never had the yellow bag era). Instead of bagging up garbage and driving it up to the top of the cabin road on a designated day, we now buy Green Bags at various tribal businesses. When we fill up a green bag (or two), we drive up to the res and a friendly attendant comes out, takes our bag(s) out of the trunk, and puts them in the hopper.

Uhhhh, what holes? For one thing, there are always squoils and chickmunks hanging around at this time of year. I don’t think they are big and strong enough to make holes of that size in a matter of days. For another thing, the GG was doing a lot of things before he left for his latest chainsawing junket. Did I hear him making holes in the house? I couldn’t remember.

Little Cat Z sent him a pic and apparently he WAS doing something. I can’t remember what he said he was doing. It’s hard to get in touch with him in general right now because he is camping in a yooperland area where the internet is sketchy. LCZ did get in touch with him as he was driving to Rudyard because the Lyme Lounge didn’t have any decent food in it. I will let that statement lie…

LCZ came over and cooked dinner for me. A beautiful chicken, broccoli, orzo, feta, etc., casserole. I’m gonna have to do that one again. And then she surveyed my kitchen expressing the opinion that she might have to come back and voom it soon. And yes, it is kind of a mess. We have vacuum cleaner issues around here for one thing. Gotta git to that.

That is about it. G’night, KW

I follow (and support) Tangle.com, an independent news source. I like the format, which presents well researched information on multiple sides of a topic, including quotes from people writing on both sides of our polarized political landscape and often other viewpoints, then opinions from the Tangle founder or other editorial staff. Also comments from readers, including those who disagree with whatever Tangle said about a topic. Yes, this is a plug for Tangle. It can be a LOT of information. I usually don’t read the whole thing and I don’t read it every day.

Wednesday’s topic was school phone bans. There is no way I can write comprehensively and/or coherently about my thoughts about this. There were no cell phones at any time I was in the public schools or college… Until I went to community college… I had a “dumb” cell phone at first and then, VOILA! An iPhone. In the 20 seconds I spent in an Apple store back in the fall of 2007, I went from “I may want a phone/camera/GPS/I-fergit-what-else device someday” to gimme gimme and the GG and I plunked down $1200 or whatever for two of them.

I enrolled in community college classes at around the age of 50. I can still remember my then college daughter telling me (a straight-A student in “childhood” college), “Moom, you do not know how to go to college,” and handing me three Kalamazoo College (her college) folders to keep my papers in. That is absolutely one of my favorite memories of her as a college student. I happily accepted the folders (and used them) and thought something like, “she’s turning into her mother🐽“

I got off on a tangent there. I think that constant phone use by students should not be tolerated in classrooms but I am not really comfortable about outright bans. On one hand, I think that letting kids use their phones unleashed in the classroom (even when silenced) would be bedlam. But I am thinking that limited communications with parents, like changes in after school plans, would be helpful to students, parents, teachers, and office staff. Of course, parents can definitely be ridiculous about not establishing appropriate communication boundaries with their kids. Don’t even get me going about that…

I’ll be thinking about this for a while but I’ll leave you with a time I was in a community college class and I knew there was a possibility that I would need to connect with my college junior that evening. She was scheduled to fly to Dakar for a six month study abroad that coming weekend and our household was kind of on high alert. Not for anything in particular, just, if you are launching one of your children on a study abroad stint, you might know what I mean.

That night, she was driving to her college (100 miles away) to meet up with friends. When I went to class that night, I told Jason (the prof, the one who hooked me up with my Corporate America job) that I needed to keep my phone on but silenced in case my kid needed to call me for anything. I assured him that I would go outside the classroom if I needed to answer my phone. I don’t think I did get a call but I think she did text that there was a big traffic backup. She certainly didn’t need to talk to me on the phone about that.

Of course it was okay with my prof (whose kids have probably done their own study abroad stints by now). But I was an old bag even then and most high school kids now have grown up with smart phones and that train has left the station and I dunno what the answer is to handling cell phone use in schools. I do know that it’s complicated. Like everything else. Hopefully a goddamn dictator will not use a sledgehammer to try to solve it.

I finally got a sunset pic from last night. It is of the GG. He is waving. Hello.

I dunno. I don’t think he called me tonight. That’s okay. I don’t like to talk on the phone every night. I mean sometimes he calls me when I am in the bathroom? Also I think he is in a low cell phone service area. So…

There a lot of footprints in the sand in this pic. That’s because (I think) there are a lot more people walking on the beach over on the west side of Birch Point. We have a lot fewer footprints on our beach but that’s because our population density is a lot lower. I remember when the beach urchins were in college and after and on many days, I was the only person on the beach. It has changed a bit now that we have people at the east end of the beach. I am not all that happy about that. But. I sure hope it stays low density. Most relatives and some neighbors agree with me.

Ima gonna watch another episode of the Foundation trilogy. And tomorrow is a clean-up day.

So the GG and the Porters were having a happy hour on birch point beach. To the west of Birch Point, not the east where the moomincabin is.

I fergit why I called the GG but probably because I had texted him something that he didn’t reply to. Probably today’s pic, which is a lawnmower part. Okay. So we’re on the phone of porterization and they are all talking about the sunset so I asked them to take pictures of the sunset and send some (some, not all) to me. At least 15 minutes of posing and picture taking ensued. WTF was I thinking? I finally managed to redirect the whole crew to something else (not sure what, hopefully not financial crapola). Did I ever get any sunset pics? No I did not. Not one person sent me one.

So you get this lawnmower part instead. This is the second part we have received and it is the correct one. The first part arrived the day before the GG left for the yooperland. He needed it because the lawnmower was broken and he couldn’t mow the lawn before he left for 10 days or whatever. Okay. It was the wrong part.

It’s mid-late September and it’s been dry and I told him not to worry about mowing the lawn because it seemed to me we weren’t in a super growing mode anyway.

He ordered a new part and it arrived today and it was the correct part and I had to send a pic to him so he could verify. That’s how exciting my life was today. You’re welcome.

That was kinda like this morning was like. The GG was rather chaotically launching on a road trip to the yooperland. He’ll close the moomincabin over the next couple days, then decamp to a North Country Trail location for trail work over the next week or so. Rev up those chainsaws, folks.

I don’t think the GG thought his packing process was chaotic but I… I… I… I dunno. How many bags can one man have. The tools and the chainsaw crapola and then there is the clean laundry that needs to go back to the moomin in its new canvas “hamper”. I am done done done with plastic laundry baskets. [Delete long explanation about how unwieldy they are and how the handles break.]

Anyway, the last couple days have been various versions of in and out and around and about with trips to the hardware store and the auto parts store and lunch with all the retaaaaared EPA folks yesterday. At least that space-i-fied me for a couple hours.

So he left and a morning of meetings ensued and I finally made a Plum dash for a few grocks at around 1:00 PM and I ran into a neighbor there and I struggled to figure out how to talk to him. I stammered out something about going home to work and, uh, was I still working? Yes I am but… And I struggled to talk about retaaaaring to this perfectly nice neighbor. It’s my business to sort it out and I am still sorting it out so I think I will return to my usual early morning grock trips to the plum when nobody else is there. Sigh.

How can I miss you when you won’t go away? The first time I ever heard this song was when UKW (my cousin) was cleaning her mother’s (Radical Betty’s) stove and Radical Betty wouldn’t just let her doooooo it. I am not as elderly as Radical Betty was at that time but I definitely allow Little Cat Z to voom the moomincabin bathroom!

Also, the GG stopped at Narnia (John Arthur Woollam Preserve) on the way to Pickford for a monthly NCT meeting and the moomincabin for the next couple nights. Ths pic is from Narnia. I read all of the Narnia books to the beach urchins when they were young, even when they were independent readers and could read those books by themselves. I love to read aloud.

First world problems but I’m sorta at my wit’s end for the night. That is all😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

In the last five days or so, I had to scramble to make sure the family cabin was insured. It’s a long boring story about the agency we’ve been using FOREVER no longer carrying the insurance company we’ve been using FOREVER. The agency could offer a replacement at FIVE TIMES THE PRICE. Yes, you read that right. And, nope.

This kind of stuff is waaaay beyond my introvert comfort level so okay, whaddo I do. On the internet, I located an agency in the area that carried the same insurance company that we’d had before. Nervous as an introvert gets when having to talk to a PERSON THEY DON’T KNOW, I clicked the “Request a quote” button. Yikes! What have I done? But then. Whoosh! K and I had our first conversation last Wednesday and TODAY we have a new insurance policy and I was able to pay it online.

Early in our conversations, she recognized my last name and asked if Doctor Finlayson was my dad. Nope. My dad was a [small-town] banker. But I have been answering this question most of my adult life. My doctor-uncle, during the active years of his career, delivered just about every baby in town, or so it would seem. He did other stuff. Like sew someone’s nose back onto their face after a snowmobile accident and deal with the aftermath of two snowmobilers who were beheaded by a wire. But most people remember him because he delivered them or their children and I think that was the part of his job he liked the most. He did not like making house calls (he did make them early in his career) and finding no food in the refrigerator…

There are people who remember my dad as a banker but mostly it is my uncle they remember. That is okay with me and it would be okay with my dad. “Don” (dad’s brother) can do whatever the hell Don wants to do is the kind of thing my dad would say. (They *were* friendly and loved each other.)

When I deal with local Sault Ste. Siberia business people who remember my name, I NEVER want any kind of special treatment because I am a Finlayson. That isn’t what my family would want. We stand on our own personal reputations. I don’t think the woman who helped me with the insurance gave me special treatment. She was a total professional and would have done what she did for my family for anyone. But knowing that we had something in common, mainly that I grew up in Sault Ste. Siberia, may have helped us find things to talk about if that makes any sense.