Random bits of my so-called life.

That’s the title but I’m not gonna write about our little buckthorn battle today except that it was a beautiful warm day and some progress got made on cleaning out some fugly invasive bushes or whatever they are.

I have certain hot-button political issues and read as much as I can get my hands on about them in an attempt to understand what people are thinking and why. The top one is probably abortion rights but I’ll spare you today [you’re welcome]. There’s the House Speaker melee, which I am NOT well informed about. Wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which I have no words for and don’t comprehensively understand the issues.

Then there’s the issue of remote work vs. return to office. I actually know something about that since I have been a permanent telecommuter since covid. Unlike many companies in the news lately, mine is not forcing people back into the office. Although we are a huge global company, our local (always underutilized) office closed for good in June 2021 as did many others. They don’t plan to open a new local office and if they tried to relocate me, I would say seeya and ride off into the sunset. (Disclaimer: I KNOW how fortunate I am to be able to do that and I KNOW there are many others who cannot.)

What I don’t get are some of the reasons a lot of the Lord High Muckity-Mucks in tech industries are giving for why returning to the office is a good thing. “Innovation?” “Collaboration?” How do you quantify things like innovation and collaboration? If you can’t quantify them, how do you know whether it’s better to work remotely or on-site? What are the metrics?

My employer has always allowed people to work remotely. When there was an office and no pandemic, I usually schlepped in. It was a zen-like eight mile commute and I loved it. Unless it snowed. When it snowed I telecommuted. I telecommuted from the mooomincabin when I wanted to be up there. I telecommuted in the Frog Hopper on an LSD trip to Florida to rescue our brother. Etc., etc.

When I was at the office, I was usually the most innovative the moment I drove out of the parking lot. Eureka! I know what to do with this conundrum. Collaboration? What do they mean by that? Ummm… I can’t remember how many umpteen bazillion meetings I went to that started with the LSCHP (beloved big boss) going on and on about some movie he had seen that weekend or his latest video game. Is that collaboration? At one meeting sparkling vampires came up (Twilight was it?). I shut down the room PDQ by cheerfully telling the team the vampires that hung out by my childhood outhouse at night dripped blood down their fangs. I will never forget the look on the development manager’s face.

But really. I can see how encountering people face-to-face at least occasionally could foster some connections but my team has always been good at getting things done, socializing being very secondary. Of course we have to meet sometimes to sort out complicated issues but we are able to do that on teams. No need to be in the same physical space. (Disclaimer: we meet in a “stand-up” meeting almost every morning. But we were doing that well pre-covid.)

My conclusion? I don’t have all the answers but I think some of these muckity-mucks just panic if they don’t have their thumb on wherever their employees are at any given time.

Well, nothing. Or consumables would be more accurate I guess. Concert tickets and some random cash maybe? How about a jack-o’-lantern? The GG was johnny on the spot with a jack and even dropped it off at the recipient’s house. It is a lot easier to do stuff like that when the recipient lives two miles away rather than 45 miles (or 2500 or whatever). If you are not part of the cFam, you might not notice that the jack has a cFam face 🤣

So another trip around the sun completed today but not for me. I get to do that in a few months.

Pics are of Jack when the Mad Scientist completed The Cloning and after he was delivered. Hopefully the squoils won’t gobble him up too quickly. Wait! What? You didn’t clone your newborn baby? Ours got cloned every time she took a bath!

When I took YESTERDAY’s pic, I was FOCUSED TOTALLY on the waxing gibbous moon and my shadow in the bottom left corner. It didn’t really turn out well at all probably in part because I still haven’t gotten around to figuring out my phone’s night mode.

What my kids noticed first was BUCKTHORN, BUCKTHORN, BUCKTHORN! And more BUCKTHORN! Our yard is a pretty big mess but we can (usually) tolerate it because there are so many trees and other green things. Including BUCKTHORN! Buckthorn is an invasive species and we have A SHIT-TON OF IT.

I wish for a nicer yard but we have challenges. For one thing, neither the GG or I could be said to have anything near a Green Thumb. About the only thing I have ever done successfully in the “garden” is to put impatiens in pots. And even that can be iffy, like last summer at the moomincabin when Heinrich (snowshoe hare) or maybe deer ate them. Miraculously they had quite recovered by the end of the summer.

I like the IDEA of gardening but over and over my admittedly meager attempts to DO it have been unsuccessful. Weeding was always fun for about a day if I didn’t encounter poison ivy but it never seemed to end and I don’t really know anything about planting. What to plant? Where to plant it? The GG pondered what the point of having a nice garden was if all you did with it was look at it. Um, that is EXACTLY the point!

Other challenges are our horrible clay-ey “soil”, our uber-shady yard (which can also be a good thing), and that we are out of town so much of the summer now that the GG is retaaaarred and I am a full-time telecommuter.

I want to consult with someone who can be creative with sustainable landscape design that fits OUR environment. I mean both in a micro and macro way, our yard and our planet. What do we need to get rid of? BUCKTHORN, for a start, right? What kinds of plants would do well here? Are there things we could plant (or whatever) that would not need a lot of maintenance since we are outta town so often? Well, we have a pretty solid lead on an environmentally friendly landscaper. We’ll see what we get around to doing…

HB to my older daughter ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

Today was a long but fun day. I cooked a whole bunch of stuff for a family dinner tonight. Cooking every day for one or two people is mostly a thankless chore so I reveled in the chance to cook for five or six. Filet mignon, mashed potatoes, yellow wax beans, and lentil squash salad. And chocolate chip cookies that I made yesterday.

At the other end of the day (which began before six AM), I am just plain taaaared out. I am tired in a good way but still tired. Will I have enough stamina to watch an episode of Foundation tonight? We’ll see. For now I guess I am done done done. Love y’all, KW

Aren’t they cute? They are not in my house, they are over in Vermont.

Mouskets? What the heck? So, I have a kiddo who insisted from a very early age that her name was Mouse and forcefully denied her “government” name. I’m not gonna go in to all of the whys and whatfors. I embraced her choice. I don’t really like my “government” name either but I can deal with it as long as people spell it correctly. Anne with an “E”, if you please. And I have accepted the nickname “Annie” only from a very few people. John Denver is NOT one of them (and no I have never met him).

I understand that I misnamed my daughter. My parents misnamed me. We named our daughter after a beloved family member and an old friend of mine. In my case, there was an eccentric elderly relative with the non-E version of my name. I loved her but I did not want to emulate her life and although my parents didn’t name me after her, in the back of my mind I was always kinda wondering if I was gonna end up like her, living with relatives and believing in God/Jesus to an extent that I couldn’t even do at three years old.

The Comm eventually told me I was named after Anne (with an e) of Green Gables. I felt better about my name after that, not to mention that Anne of Green Gables didn’t like her name either. But she wanted to be called Cordelia, a name I also don’t like 😵‍💫

Okay, so my mouse child was not necessarily an early reader (but I don’t really know). I do know that she knew how to spell “mouse” by the time she was about two-and-a-half. I know this because when we were at the library, she would read the titles on the spines of the books and pick out all of the ones with “Mouse” in the title. And plus, she wrote it on the wall in the Landfill Chitchen. When we renovated our chitchen, Jerry the Genius (carpenter) somehow shaved it off the wall and it is framed now.

And then she changed the spelling of “mouse” to be “mousc”. Okay. That’s fine. I remember being about the same age and insisting that my name was spelled “Anno”. Yes, “o” at the end. I think I wrote it in chalk on the sidewalk.

Somehow the version of spelling “mouse” as “mousc” morphed into calling mice mouskets and the mouse beach urchin at least tolerated that version of her chosen name when her older sister and friends called her that.

Throughout her school years she alternated between her government name and her chosen name depending on the situation. As an adult she uses her chosen name exclusively.

This was not what was planned for today. I’m not sure what was planned for today. Well, for me it was work and I am proud to say that I deconstructed a document I was unsatisfied with, reorganized it, and knocked it back together pretty successfully. So yay for me although I am not finished with it because I am already brainstorming tweaks to it. Also, pride goeth before a fall.

Anyway it was around midday and somebody was knocking on the door. I reluctantly got up to see who was there, figuring it was a solicitor. It was a tree service. So yes a solicitor. I think I was politely turning him down but then the GG bounded up behind me and took over the conversation and the next thing I knew, we had hired a tree service solicitor to trim a couple of our oak trees. This was a surprise.

But… What I didn’t know was that the GG has been trying WITHOUT success to hire a tree service to trim the oaks for the last year or so. Nobody wanted the job. These folks were ready, willing, and able and had just finished up with a neighbor around the corner. I know, I know, that’s what they all say but this time it seemed to be true. And we did need our trees trimmed because it’s a dern jungle around here on the west side of Tree City aka The Planet Ann Arbor. I think we are happy? I’m not sure I can tell the difference between before and after but by the time they finished, it was raining cats and dogs and I didn’t go outside. But they did take a lot of stuff down and haul it away. In the end, our next door neighbor also hired them.

Of course I wanted pictures but I didn’t really feel comfortable going out hanging around potentially getting in their way. So this is one the GG got and it’ll have to do.

If it had been a window replacement company, we’d’ve booted them.

This is Radical Betty. We were at the moomincabin with The Commander. It was October 2006 and although The Comm had moved back to The Dillon House for the winter, she had not shut off the water for the year. This was the first year she was faced with doing that without my dad as he had died in March of that year.

She was very nervous about having to do it alone, even though I am gonna guess doing it with my dad was probably just as stressful. Heck, just getting the garbage up to the top of the road on garbage day always got my parents into an argument 🤣. Where were the Green Bags when we needed them? I mean nowadays I fill up a Green Bag and drop it off on the res. That would’ve been wonderful for my parents. Anyway. the GG was off on a California boondoggle with the UU so I scooted up to the yooperland to “help” The Commander shut off the water.

Radical Betty didn’t help (we didn’t expect her to) but somehow we managed to shut off the water successfully. I don’t think I was much help either since I am NOT mechanically inclined in that way.

The point is that it was a beautiful warm day and I got prepared food and a bottle of whine from Karl’s Cuisine, a loverly restaurant that has now closed forever to be replaced by a big hotel. Assuming that comes to pass… So here we are on the deck eating lunch. We had to sit on the steps because the fugly plastic deck furniture was already put away and there was NO WAY I was gonna get it back out again.

As we were eating, a birch tree next to the path down to the beach collapsed into itself. One of the weirdest noises I’ve ever heard and I wish I could’ve gotten a pic but it all happened too fast. On a dead calm day, I might add.

The cautionary tale? The weather on this day was beautiful. Warm and sunny. I went back to The Planet Ann Arbor the next day and the GG returned the day after that. A couple days later? The Comm and Radical Betty drove down to Petoskey, or tried to. At some point it started snowing and somewhere below the bridge, the snow was getting so deep on the road that The Comm implored RB to turn around and head back up to the yooperland. Which they did and all was well.

Beginning the year after that the GG became the master of the moomincabin universe, at least in terms of engineering stuff. We made sure The Comm was moved back and forth from the moomin to the Dillon House when she wanted to be and he has always dealt with the water and lucky-shucky and whatever. And still does.

Radical Betty died in 2009 and the Comm in 2012. Miss them so much.

Disclaimer: I am NOT a 1-percenter. But my problem today pales in the face of what many other people are facing in the world, today and every day.

First and foremost. When we bought our new couch last winter. It replaced The Green Couch, an at least 90-year-old couch from our Early In-law Decor Period, which we are still in, at least minorly. I hate to shop for furniture (delete long rant) so the Twinz of Terror did my shopping for me via facetime or whatever. I have had the couch since last March or whenever and it is a wonderful success. The Twinz also scoped out a table that I could use as a small desk. This isn’t a great picture but It has USB ports and luckyshuckial outlets. It wasn’t available when we bought the couch but it is now a wonderful gift from my husband’s identical twin and his wife. Those are my co-workers there, Turnstyle, Softy, Froggy and Frogette, Grinchie, and maybe Bucky Beaver.

So the first world problem was that a Windows upgrade has been looming for my work laptop. Today was a pretty gorgeous day and I was hoping to hang outside in the back yard at the end of my work day. I’m not exactly sure how this all happened but I accepted the upgrade at the end of my work day today. It took an HOUR. Instead of hanging out in the back yard, I spent an hour baby-sitting my windows upgrade. Couldn’t even unplug it to move it. The good news is that it finished without a problem. I think… We’ll see what happens when I open it up tomorrow.

Gratuitous shots of the web app I design for my living (foreground, on the laptop) and the blue and only bathroom (background).

Quick and dirty photo of the sun going down, also heading southward in its annual journey. Pretty soon we’ll be at Halloween (a cross-quarter day). Gratuitous shot of Cygnus X-1. She is dirty but she is happy.

Cygnus is in the street because the GG was expected home (and he did arrive) and he needed to back Mooon Yooonit and the Lyme Lounge into the driveway.

I don’t have a whole lot today… I was disappointed last night when I figured out that Lessons in Chemistry is a weekly series that had just started and I couldn’t watch the next episode until Friday. So, whaddoo I wanna watch? Hmmm. OHHH. There is a second season of Foundation. Yes yes yes yes.

The Foundation series (maybe you already know) is based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. It is almost NOTHING like the Asimov books. I read Asimov’s books way back when. This show does not follow his books at all although it touches on many of the themes and events. His early books compiled a sorta connected series of short stories he published in magazines or wherever. That stuff was totally edited out of the TV series as near as I can figger.

At any rate, if you are a sci-fi fan and love Asimov, I recommend this. With the caveat that it is often VERY violent.

We were such horrible children. My dad got two weeks of vacation per year. AS A BANKER! He would spend his entire vacation at the moomincabin. Us kids would tease him unmercifully the day before he had to go back to work. I can still remember him walking down the path to the beach as we sang “One more day of vacation”. I don’t remember all the lyrics but it was the same tune as “The bear went over the mountain”. We were such talented children 🐽🐽🐽

A couple disclaimers. 1) As kids, we fairly frequently went on road trips (a few of them long ones) so he must have been able to finagle a bit more time some years or maybe I’m misremembering the two week limit. 2) The moomin is an easy 20 minutes away from the BANK [now defunct], so he was able to live at the moomin for the entire summer even though he went to town to work every day (except vacation).

I miss our childhood rhythm of badgering The Commander to move us out to the moomin the day after school got out. She would give us each a bushel basket and we would pack our clothes and whatever. We didn’t move back to town until Labor Day. I get six weeks of PTO nowadays plus I am a post-covid full time telecommuter. But although I spent a good amount of time at the moomin this summer, I also like The Planet Ann Arbor in the summer so I don’t do the whole season up there.

Anyway, the GG’s travel plans are frequently fraught with indecision for various reasons. He left on Thursday and I wasn’t sure when he would be back. Sunday? Today? Next weekend? As it turns out, his plans morphed such that he would return today. But then. He and the UU went to the Hoton Lake Group Home today and did some yard work and it was a GORGEOUS day there (not so much here) so he is gonna spend tonight there and return to the Planet tomorrow.

Although I have been knitting and purling a bit lately, today was more like: read a chapter, knit/purl a row, do a chore.

I was knit/purling (which involves COUNTING) this afternoon when someone burst through the front door. Was the GG back from the yooperland already? Nope. It was a beach urchin paying a surprise drop-in visit. I did NOT see her drive into the driveway and it dern near scared me half to death although not like the time last year she arrived AS SCHEDULED and I had just started nodding off a bit. That time I jumped up and screamed (sorta) in a very weird way.

In an attempt to ease back into fiber arts stuff, I have picked a very low stakes prodject, knitted dish cloths. Easy and quick. I made one two years ago then started but quickly abandoned a second. Last weekend I picked up the abandoned one, finished it and am closing in on finishing a third. I LOVE these things. They are knit of cotton yarn, and are a bit “scrubby” in a soft sort of way.

One of my beach urchins is an expert knitter (designs her own lace patterns, etc.) and people used to always ask me if I was also a knitter. My answer? I know how 🤡🤡🤡

In other news, I finished the Silo TV series last night. It basically covered the first book (there are three). I sure hope they create more. I liked this series, both TV and books. The TV series didn’t EXACTLY follow the book but I was okay with what was changed. I particularly liked that a crusty but lovable ancient male (I think) character in the book was female in the series.

So… It was too early to go to bed and I don’t necessarily do well with reading at that time of night. So what’s next? I mean, nowadays we can watch all kinds of stuff on “TV” or in my case, my iPhone. Casting about for something different, I stumbled upon Chemistry Lessons. Now… I know a LOT of people absolutely loved the book. Although I didn’t dislike it, I was less enthusiastic about it. I mean, I GET IT. I am a woman. The stuff that happened to that female *chemist* was horrible. [Delete a bunch of VERY complicated and BORING navel gazing about my own life.]

Anyway, I took a chance on the Chemistry Lessons series. I LOVE it. I’m not sure exactly why but it made the characters come alive for me. Not to mention the early 1950s in general. The automotive vee-hickles, the music, the food, whatever. I entered that era at the absolute tail end. The first vee-hickle in my memory was our Black Ford and it may have been manufactured in the early 50s. Speaking of TV (as I did in the previous paragraph), there was no TV in my childhood yooperland city until well after the early 50s. And when we did get TV (I was two years old), it was many years before we got more than one station and our original one station was Canadian.

I will continue to watch Chemistry Lessons and hope it continues to be good.

Photo credit to the GG who is camping at Tahq this weekend. People, it rained cats and dogs ALL DAY here on The Planet Ann Arbor. I took one photo today. It was of two sandhill cranes in a field and a bunch of mud. There was enough mud on the back roads that some of them were actually a little slippery. My sandhill crane pic is TERRIBLE enough to not be worth posting anywhere. Fortunately the GG is in a sunnier place and this is what he got. All day long, our radio stations were admonishing people to not look at the sun. Yeah right. There is NO WAY anyone around here could see the sun today.

It took me a while to process what I was seeing in the pics. My eye gravitated immediately to the big white lights, thinking that was the sun. But then I figured out (I think) that the crescent shape shows the moon partially covering the sun. He wasn’t in the path of totality or whatever you call it. I *think* he took these pics with his iPhone 15. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t prepared with his telescope (he has a solar filter) and digital SLR. After all, this was a hiking / business trip. The other way I can reasonably guess it’s his iPhone is because of the lens flares it made. I *think* that’s what you call them. I am a lens flare fan, not everyone is as enthusiastic.

The business end of the trip? Snagging the GARBAGE we inadvertently LEFT at the moomincabin when we closed it up. He kicked me out an hour or so before he left that day so he could finish up shutting down the water without my interference. I told him I was leaving the garbage for him in case he ended up with more to add to it. That strategy failed but it’s okay, there wasn’t much in the garbage anyway. We also left butter up there, hidden in the refrigerator door.

So the lead singer and originator of the band Procol Harum is dead. I won’t detail my adolescence too much but I used to dance in my bedroom to music I would play on my little record player. I used to think no one (my parents and brother) knew I was doing this but I’m sure they did. I was the original emo teenager except that I wasn’t really much of an original because most teenagers are a bit emo and I was also very focused on a lot of things.

I loved Procol Harum’s song Whiter Shade of Pale but I don’t think I had that record. The Procol Harum guys were quite a bit older than me but I’m thinking if they were in 16 or Tiger Beat magazine or whatever 1960s mag I was reading, I mighta thought they were very cute, like I did when I googled and found a video of them prancing around as young men.

Fortunately, living in a frozen northern outpost, I didn’t get much chance to meet rock stars. That was a good thing, at least in retrospect.

Vestal virgins? Jeebus. Somebody in Procol Harum must’ve taken Latin in high school. I had Mrs. Velde. She was a Latvian survivor of the holocaust. She had a leg injury and used a cane to get to the third floor of the old Soo High, where I went to school in 9th and 10th grade. Junior and senior year, we all moved to a new high school. The academic wing only had two stories and Mrs. Velde was on the 2nd. I THINK there was an elevator in that school but I’ll bet that Mrs. Velde still walked up the stairs with her cane.

Whiter Shade of Pale is still a great song. Listen to that organ!

I got this interesting photo (at least I think it is) last night with my iPhone 15. I figured out that it is “night mode”, which is new but not new. I don’t *think* it is new for the iPhone cam but it is new for *me* for the iPhone cam. But it is not really *new* to me because my last Canon digital SLR had it. I used it to snap The Indefatigable (Jeep Wrangler that we had for 17 years) the night some of the GG’s EPA buddies came over to tow it away to its new home.

I’m not sure what I can do with “night mode”. This was just a lucky point-and-shoot. But maaaaaybeeee this weekend I will look around on the google to see if there are free tutorials. In between picking away at cleaning/flinging and knitting dish cloths. Yes, really.

So yesterday, I was talking about sunscreen (among other things). At the end of this summer, I was picking away at moomincabin closing chores when I spied a cardboard shoebox lid in the bathroom linen “closet” with two *ancient* bottles of sunscreen in it. (The Comm used shoebox lids to organize things in drawers, etc.) I stood there for a minute wondering how long they had been there. Could The Comm have actually bought them? And then I started plotting about how to sneak them into the garbage without having to have a long conversation with someone who thought they might still be good or something.

A beach urchin was there and had plans to uber-clean the bathroom. I clean bathrooms regularly but this kiddo makes them SPARKLE and I am always excited when she lends a hand. I was surprised and greatly relieved when the beach urchin said something like, “Moom, whaddya think about these sunscreens? Should we get rid of them?” YES YES YES YES YES!

When I was a kid, we had Sea and Ski. That was it. It was not really all that pleasant, kinda sticky or whatever. Throughout the years other products have come on and off the market and I have not found one I like. It used to be a good idea to keep sunscreen at the moomin but nowadays I think everyone who visits likes to bring their own. So we threw them out and good riddance. I mean, everything freezes solid during the winter so I wonder how many times the contents of those bottles have done that.

I cannot remember what the story behind this pic is. The GG sent it to me yesterday. Where was it? When was it? Who took it? I do not know. Actually it’s probably somewhere in upstate NY or Vermont, taken in recent weeks. Twin brothers, clowning around…

Of course I ALSO forgot that he was going off this evening to a north country trail boondoggle in a town 50 or so miles away. Did I want to accompany him? Nope. I am still not up for an evening with a bunch of strangers. Even before covid I was not a social butterfly. I am saving up my social stamina for the “formal” wedding looming on our calendar. Exactly one month from today. (KW wedding GUEST mantra: this is about the bride and groom, not about meeeee.)

I just finished North Woods, a recently published book. It might not be everybody’s cuppa but I enjoyed it a lot. Gorgeous descriptions of the natural world and related processes woven in and around human stories. Very quirky humans for the most part. And a whole bunch of sorta spooky stuff that didn’t become clear until the end. There’s a great big bear on the cover. Throughout the book there was a lot of talk about catamounts but any significant mention of bears was absent until the end.

I’m starting a re-read: The Good Mother. I’m revisiting this because I have a vague memory of being somewhat annoyed by this book back when I first read it, which is when I had very young children as my children are similar ages to the book. There was also a movie (which I didn’t watch and probably won’t).

I remember being at the moominbeach with my young children and having various relatives ask over and over if us young moms were “Good Mothers”. This question was related to the issue of whether or not we were slathering our babies with sunscreen. Now. I am all for protecting children from ultraviolet rays (although I can’t say I was always perfect). But at some point I remember getting totally fed up with the Sunscreen Police and declaring a Sunscreen Moratorium. I meant a moratorium from DISCUSSING sunscreen, not from USING it.

Of course the book is not about whether the mother is using sunscreen or not, but the Sunscreen Police were definitely borrowing the phrase from the book/movie. All these years later, I can’t remember exactly what the issue was. I know there was a divorce and an accusation from the ex-husband about inappropriate behavior on the ex-wife’s part. So for whatever reason the book flew by me on the internet and I snagged it to read again.

If you do the NYT Connections puzzle and haven’t done it yet today, do NOT read this!

I LOVE the Connections puzzle. I am also TERRIFIED of the Connections puzzle. I tap my four choices and almost have to look away for the l-o-n-g split second it takes for the app to lemme know if I have passed or failed. The Spelling Bee, Wordle, and xword are much more forgiving. But still. Connections is interesting and I keep at it.

Today was one day my early Sunday School classes came in handy. What the heck grade was I in? I think I was in the kindergarten room but I also feel like I could read. I couldn’t read in kindergarten. I knew letters and my name and some words. I REMEMBER when I GRASPED reading. It was the beginning of first grade and I was quick to learn Dick, Jane, and Spot, etc. And then. There was a s-u-r-p-r-i-s-e word. For a split second I puzzled over those letters and then SURPRISE! I sounded it out. I don’t remember ever having trouble with reading again. (That is a true story 🧡)

Anyway, in Sunday School, we got a stamp each time we memorized a new bible book and could recite all the previous ones from the beginning. I was good at that kind of stuff although I don’t think any of us got anywhere near through all of the bible books. And how many of them are there anyway? I did the google and seems like there might be some differences of opinion about that? I dunno. It was a fun activity for us nerds and I’m not gonna pursue it further tonight.

So today there were words that could be bible books but two of them could be something else too. Genesis could be a bible book or it could be starting something (or a rock band but it wasn’t) and I was thinking Kings was a bible book but MIGHT also be a sports team. But then there was “kraken”. What the heck? I had a vague memory that “kraken” was a sports team, not just a sea monster or a Game of Thrones family sigil. So I tiptoed along from there. It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park but I managed it.

I was standing here at my computer counter (which is in the chitchen) looking at some little artifacts one of the beach urchins made in grade school art class. This brought back memories, specifically that some of my fellow parents weren’t crazy about the art teacher. I dunno why. I thought she was pretty good.

One friend of mine (a normally reasonable parent) explained that her daughter “viewed” herself as “talented” and didn’t necessarily want to follow the teacher’s rules. Sigh. Yes, your kid probably *is* talented but she’s a *fourth grader*. Art is a very creative subject (heck, accounting can be a creative subject) but good teachers can help talented kids hone their skills and grow their talents.

I have always been an autodidact. My Detroit grandparents gave me a wooden recorder for xmas as a kindergartner and I taught myself how to play the carols in the book that accompanied the recorder. When my parents finally managed to swing the cost of a piano, I banged my way through the Leila Fletcher method books on my own. I needed help with dotted quarter note rhythm for a while but my cousin Uber Kayak Woman helped me through that. She was taking lessons from a real piano teacher. And then The Commander signed me up for lessons too. I was reluctant at first but I quickly figured out that a piano teacher was a *good* thing.

And then there was the flute. Fifth grade. I had been HOT to play the flute forever, emulating a couple of my older cousins who played it and also I was fascinated by flute pictures in my Golden Book Encyclopedia. What do all of those keys and other contraptions do? It was complicated but also fascinating.

There were three flutes at my grade school and three of us wanted to play flute. Of course I got the worst flute. Nevertheless, I persisted. And managed to get through the whole Rubank beginner book the first week. After that, what to do? I didn’t exactly languish but I had no clue about how buy music, not to mention what to buy. There were no *real* flute teachers in my small ice-bound city. The band director (not a flute player) and the first chair flute in the high school band. Make no mistake, she was pretty darn good and I loved her but she was *not* a professional teacher. At this point she had me using the Rubank books (that’s all she knew) and I knew I *needed* a REAL teacher.

With some amazing luck, a professional flutist moved to town when I was in 8th grade. The Comm signed me up for lessons immediately and to make things easy, this woman lived across the schoolyard from us. She really got me going with scales and formal finger and tone exercises (which I loved) and anthologies full of all varieties of classical pieces. My parents were not rich but they sprung for whatever music my teacher suggested. I now suspect that when making lesson arrangements they may have told her to load me up with music at their expense. Alas, my loverly teacher was in town because her husband was in the Air Force at the nearby Kincheloe base and they only stayed there a year so I lost her.

In eighth grade, I challenged my way up to third chair in the high school band (long story). In high school, I beat my way through the gauntlet of old ladies who ran the scholarship process to get into the Interlochen all-state summer camp. (My parents could afford the tuition but first-year campers couldn’t enroll without a scholarship.) I got first chair there even though I no longer had a teacher.

Long story short, I got a music degree and then not knowing how the heck to make a living, I ended up in the tech industry. That began as luck and a connection but I was also a tech autodidact. As with music, I eventually formalized my home-grown skills with education via a wonderful, challenging program at our local community college.

The moral of the story is that self-teaching is GREAT and there are people who succeed at their art or whatever without a formal education. But a good teacher can give a leg up if one is needed. Hats off to all of the wonderful teachers I’ve had throughout my life. (Boo to the very few bad ones. They do exist.)

I’m not sure who took this ancient pic but it could well be my cousin’s husband’s professional photographer brother who probably took pics at that wedding. If so, credit to him and I hope he doesn’t mind me posting it.

I was schlepping a load of laundry down to the Landfill Dungeon early this morning. The Dungeon is ALWAYS as black as the ace of spades. I got down to the bottom of the stairs and I turned left and left into the storage/laundry room. Yiiiiy! There was something all lit up orange over on the shelves. For a split second I thought faaaarr (because orange) but then I realized it was ‘lectric Jack and the GG must’ve turned him on last night just to yank my chain.

We took a beautiful slow ride on slow roads southwest of town today and when we got back, the GG watched the Lions win (for a change). At some point a beach urchin texted to ask if she could come over for a ‘hattan. OF COURSE! So we did that. It was not all that warm out but we managed to hang out in the back yard in the lee of the landfill where we were at least not in the wind.

I think I am about done with this for the night. I think I have managed to discourage the GG from thinking I-E-I-E-I need to IRON all of the moomincabin curtains that I schlepped down here and washed a few weeks ago. Ironing them would require me to hang out in the Landfill Dungeon for too long a time. I hate it down there. Did I mention it’s dark? I don’t think the curtains are all that wrinkled and if they are, we can iron them at the moomincabin next summer. Or just hang them up. Since they are almost always shoved over to the sides, no one can see if they are wrinkled or not. C’mon. Nobody cares. Not even The Commander…

Sometimes great big bunches of stuff get flung on a given day. Yesterday it was ONE THING.

The GG bought this telescope back when the beach urchins were very small. He got it at a garage sale somewhere in the neighborhood. I was NOT a happy camper. He paid a King’s Ransom for this thing, which in those days was a couple hundred bucks. Not money I would have spent on a telescope or anything frivolous. Even clothing and that was back in the day when I was still sort of a Clothes Horse. And he already HAD a telescope.

When he decided (yesterday) to put it on Craig’s List, I was pretty happy. What I didn’t realize was that it was actually a really good telescope. Somehow I had gotten it into my head that it was some sort of home-made jobby-do. Not. He offered this for a “song” and had two serious inquiries. The first was a knowledgeable young man (and his young son) from a neighboring town. The second was from a guy who lives only a few blocks away and posts frequently and knowledgeably on next door neighbor. In other words, he is NOT one of those CRANKS who rant and rave about bicycle/car wars or dog poop or whatever. I think the scope went to a good home but in a way I was hoping the new owner wouldn’t show up because I kinda wanted to encounter the next door neighbor guy IN PERSON. Because I am a bit of a fan.

I’d like to say that more things LEFT the landfill today than entered it but alas. I have ordered kind of a lot of things in the last couple weeks and that stuff is starting to arrive. Mostly formal wedding guest-related clothing but also some MORE Mexican blue-rimmed tumblers and a few other clothing articles that I encountered as I was wedding guest clothing shopping. You don’t wanna know. Am I turning BACK into a Clothes Horse? Gah… I have spent quite a bit more than the couple hundred bucks we paid for that telescope long ago but I also haven’t bought anything that breaks our bank at this stage of the game.

’tis the season. The squoil season, that is. I mean we literally have squirrels here year round but in the fall they are EVERYWHERE. Don’t ask me why. I am not an expert.

My brother had four dogs in his adult life. Sam was the second and he was a CHARACTER. Well, Alfred (his fourth dog) was even more of a character but this is (mostly) not about Alfred.

So my brother and his family (and Sam) were visiting us one beautiful fall day and leaves were falling and squirrels were everywhere. Sam was going absolutely NUTSO every time he saw a squirrel on our front porch. I couldn’t figger this out (yes, I am sorta stoopid) and asked why he was going so crazy. Didn’t they have squirrels at their house (45 minutes north of ours)? The answer was no. Why? Because HE (Sam the dog) is there. He wasn’t eating them or anything, I think he was just scaring them. I THINK! I do remember when he was introduced to Izzy (mouse’s pet rat) and opened his mouth wide as if to say, “Thank you for the treat!” So who knows.

I won’t go into all of Alfred’s eccentricities, at least not tonight. I don’t know what he thought about squirrels. I do remember when he encountered a pine marten on the cabin road. A huge commotion ensued.

Bonus: my parents’ four granddaughters’ (aka my daughters and nieces) early pronunciations of squirrel in birth order: 1) shirl, 2) cirker, 3) squirrel, 4) [shriek]

These beasties are pretty much gone from the yooperland by now although I HAVE encountered them at this time of year. They are still here on The Planet Ann Arbor, at least when it is hot out. I smashed this one last night. Note that I do not kill “bugs” indiscriminately, like I shared my shower with a couple spiders this morning and I left them alone. I won’t say that either of them died by my hand (a mosquito did) but ifya wanna take a shower with meeeee, ya pay yer money and ya take yer chances.

It is not anywhere near hot tonight but it isn’t terribly cold either. Yet. It rained ALL afternoon, heavily for quite a while (which I loved) and it is still warm enough that I can keep the windows open although that’ll probably change in a couple days. Or even by morning.

STOP HERE IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ ABOUT PRO-CHOICE STUFF!

I’ve been on an “abortion” book jag. I mean most of the books I’ve been reading are novelizing (is that a word?) the issues that women face when they have an unplanned pregnancy or are trying to avoid one. I will not go much farther into that today but a book that I really liked is “The Cider House Rules”. I have read books by this author before (a long time ago) but haven’t ever read this one and I didn’t even know what it was about. For the first time I actually have a high-level understanding of what a dilation and curettage is. Although it is a procedure for an early abortion, it is also involved in miscarriages that have not expelled all of the fetus and need to be cleaned up. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regard myself as an expert in any of this.

So the other books I’ve been reading about this subject are not bad but they couldn’t be called high literature. Still, they illustrate life for women in the US before abortion was legal and what it is like now that it is NOT, at least not for every state. States rights? Yeah roight. That was really not what rolling back Roe vs. Wade was about.

End abortion book jag.

Another book I read was People Collide. I was anticipating this book. The author had an interesting idea, basically that a married couple suddenly become each other, i.e., the man is in the woman’s body and vice versa. I wanted to like this book. I thought the writing was fine but I’m not a good judge of that. I HATED the characters! Self absorbed people all of them and gazing at their damn navels forever. And there was no resolution. Sometimes I don’t need that but with this book I did. There was a weird event that happened at the very beginning of the book that was never explained. I’m sorry but what the hell?