Random bits of my so-called life.

At the end of today, I closed down my laptop, hauled my garbage carts out to the curb, and moved to the back yard to check XFKAT (Zifkat?) and other stuff. Chillin’ out. After a few minutes, I heard other people hauling their carts out. I don’t really think they were waiting for MEEEE to put my garbage out but once LofPNet across the street told us they take their cue on whether the garbage goes out from whatever I do. Most weeks it goes out on the regular day, Friday, but it gets tricky with holidays. Delayed a day on some but not others. I follow @RecycleAnnArbor on Zifkat but I also know how to look things up.

I’m afraid I totally failed as Garbage Woman when we closed up the moomincabin this year. The GG kicked me down the road before he shut off the water and put the dreaded window coverings up. I appreciated that and I HATE when the window coverings are on, as necessary as they are. I KNOW I had a conversation with him saying that I was going to LEAVE the garbage under the kitchen sink for HIM TO SCHLEP in case he found other things to put in it. This made sense to me although I don’t mind schlepping a bag of garbage. I had dumped a Green Bag off at the res two days before so there wasn’t much.

All these days later, I opened up the Landfill garbage cart to put my one bag of Landfill garbage in there. There was a bag in there already that STUNK TO HIGH HEAVEN, which leads me to believe it did not come from the moomincabin. I know there were a FEW chicken bones in the moomingarbage but this smell was NOT rotten chicken. Chemical of some sort. Yuck.

In the ensuing conversation, we came to the mutual realization that he LEFT a bag of garbage up there under the sink. With chicken bones in it. Apparently he doesn’t remember me TALKING about the garbage. I guess next time we have this situation, I will put the kitchen garbage “can” out in the middle of the floor where he might trip over it? I am not complaining. He works very hard on the moomincabin and he will be back in the yooperland later this fall and he can snag the garbage AND the butter I left in the refrigerator.

If you embiggen this pic a couple times, you might be able to see a green plastic can under the sink. That’s the main moomingarbage. I keep an eagle eye on that and whenever it fills up and I need to remove it (and put it in a Green Bag), I wash out the green can before putting a new kitchen bag in.

I actually took this pic to show where the moomin “back” and “front” doors are. The back door is to the left at the end of the kitchen and “back” is toward the garage, road, and swamp. The front door is next to the refrigerator. It is not in the actual “front” of the cabin. That is behind me. It would be really hard to have a door there because the “front” is the beach side and if there is a northwest wind, it could be hard to go in and out. So the “front” door is essentially the “side” door.

Our “front” and “back” doors are not very far apart are they? It’s a small, rustic cabin but we love it.

I FINALLY finished my work today. And it’s okay, it was a SUCCESSFUL day albeit too complicated to describe. I decamped to the back yard and opened up XFKAT (X Formerly Known As Twitter) and this is what I saw. I’m sorry but I could NOT stop laughing.

Just for starters, I canNOT believe anyone would vote for someone so idiotic they would use a sharpie to try to change the course of a hurricane. But Xeorge Xonway usually cracks me up anyway, which is why I follow him on XFKAT. I won’t go into why I started following him or what I think of his wife (I think they are separated at this point). I don’t know who the Elizabeth person is and don’t follow her. The short story on what I think of XFKAT’s owner is 💩💩💩. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about how rich or “smart” he is or any of his companies’ achievements. He is also a NUTCASE and there are plenty of rich, “smart”, nutcases who have wreaked havoc in this world throughout history.

I sent this screenshot to some beach urchins and one of them sent back “Xnne Xinlayson” (my name with Xs), which cracked me up even more. Not that I’m gonna change my XFKAT handle. I haven’t tweeted or interacted with anyone on that platform for years. Instead, it reminded me of how totally incensed The Commander was once when I was a kid and she received a package addressed to Mrs. “Tinlayson”. Mrs. Tinlayson! Well! Our name starts with “F”. It is Scottish as far as we know although we are aware there are Scandinavians with that name.

My mother was a STICKLER for proper English, spelling and grammar and whatever. As I have said on here before, if you wanted to use the word “ain’t” you had better be over in the schoolyard or somewhere. Wherever she couldn’t hear you. People mangled our family name all the time and it drove her nuts. When I had learned the bare basics of phonics, I remember sitting in my bedroom figuring out that our name consisted of three simple syllables, each a valid word on its own. Fin. Lay. Son. We put the main accent on the first syllable with a lighter accent on the last. How can you screw that up? Every which way, the most common being “Finnelson” followed by “Finallyson” and some people accent the middle syllable. Finlaaaayson. Nope.

And no, I did not change my name when I got married. There was no big political discussion about this. I just didn’t change it. I had no problem with my kids taking the cFam name. I have no problem with people calling ME the cFam name, in fact when the kids were in school, I used that name informally all the time. Once a wonderful grade school PTO prez rather nervously asked me which I wanted to be called. I told him either was fine or just “Mouse’s Mom.” That immediately put him at ease.

The biggest problem is that The Commander always struggled with my refusal to officially take the GG’s name. Her feminist side was apparently at war with her “proper” side. This was fine until she died and my lawyer found that she had referred to me by the cFam name in a few official documents. He was a good lawyer and this was an easy if annoying complication to sort out. And I remember just sighing, “Oh moom.”

So I was driving my five-hour drive yesterday. My phone was plugged in to Cygnus and however the heck that works, it means I can make and receive phone calls without picking up my phone and dialing it. Most of y’all prob’ly have the same kind of technology. I appreciate that I can do this but I prefer to drive without the interruption of phone calls.

I get VERY FEW spam calls but yesterday was my day. Dundee Michigan, area code 734, my area code. Various numbers. I would decline one and maybe a half hour later, I’d have to decline another one. Whack-a-mole ALL DAY. I actually answered one of the calls. I know that is not the way to deal with nuisance phone spammers and I know why but I was at the end of my rope. There were weird “knocking” noises on the other end. I didn’t say “yes”. I know better than that. I did yell, “DON’T CALL ME AGAIN!” Fully knowing that it was likely a bot and hoping it couldn’t “hear” me and translate those words into something like, “you have access to my bank account”. Fortunately the calls stopped overnight. I got one more of them today, then they (knock on wood) stopped. I can (and do) block these phone calls but I have to wonder what happens if you get like say 100 of them in an hour. Who the heck can keep up with that? Is there a way to stop it? Maybe there is but I don’t know what it is.

Speaking of banks, there was some bank annoyance. Actually it wasn’t the bank, it was related to persistent “I’m your bank [or best friend]” telephone solicitors. I won’t say anything more about that. We were not targeted but a vulnerable person we care about was. Again. Myself? I don’t [normally] answer calls from numbers I don’t know. Why can’t these *ssholes use their talents to pursue a more positive line of work?

So we’re ready for new iPhones (we have X and XS, which are basically the same thing and long story). The GG watched today’s Apple “presentation” or whatever it was. I was fighting with a (work) content management system that has changed since the last time I used it, which was a few months ago but I’d’ve been really bored with the Apple presentation anyway. I am not impressed that Apple isn’t offering a phone as small as the one I have now. I have small hands and I like small phones. I guess I will get the 6.1 inch iPhone 15 (I may not know the correct names for these phones) and live with it. It WILL still fit in my pocket.

Actually given Michigan freeways, it’s more like clunkity clunkity clunkity clunk ka-whomp! I am back on the Planet Ann Arbor. I feel like I’ve been on the moon.

The GG kicked me outta the moomincabin this morning so he could close down the water without me in the way. He did fill a bucket of water so I could do one last moominP and flush it down. (I do know how to flush a terlet with a bucket of water, thanks to the moldy old Hoton Lake cabin.) A part of me wanted to follow Mooon Yooonit and the Lyme Lounge down today but it was better for both of us for me to just skedaddle ahead of him.

It was a decent drive (but then again it was a WEEKDAY) except for fairly heavy rain for maybe 45 minutes in the Gaylord area. I touched in when I gassed up in Waters. The rain had momentarily let up and I texted “Waters” to my family but I did not tell them about the rain because I didn’t want the beach urchins to worry about me. And truth be told, I was fine. I slowed down from 75 (the speed limit) to 70.

I suffered a weird lack of driving confidence during the COVID pandemic heyday but I seem to be over it. I hate to admit this but I was even a bit nervous about crossing large suspension bridges for a while, like the Big Mac. I’ve been crossing that bridge almost my whole life and I WASN’T even nervous about it after 2001 when people were suggesting big bridges as targets. But I am over that. YAY! (And I do respectfully note that this is the 22nd anniversary of the 911 terrorist attacks.)

So after schlepping umpteen bazillion grocery bags of food and laundry and laptops and other stuff into the Landfill, I *tried* to chill out for a bit but I couldn’t sit still so after a while I started in on laundry. I did a big load of moomincabin towels, then my sleeping bag, and finally a filthy throw rug that hasn’t been washed in eons. There are more of those and I’m doing them one at a time. Some of them have rubber or whatever and cannot go in the dryer. It will take me a while to put away the non-perishable grocks because there are duplicates, which means I need to RESET the Landfill Chitchen. I did not unload the GG’s big iMac or the rifles. Those are his and I left them for him to deal with.

So here I am sitting in my back yard listening to the crickets and I just slapped a MOE-skee-TOE, which I have seen very few of in recent weeks at the moomincabin. Welcome home, KW. Work tomorrow, Hi Ho!

You’ve heard of Manhattans right? The drink, I mean. 2 shots of bourbon (or whatever) and a shot of vermouth. It gets complicated with bitters and cherries and yada yada yada. And simple syrup. Simple syrup? Whut?

If you know the FinFam, we make Fran-hattans (in which The Commander would sometimes reverse the proportions). And Anne-hattans, which are basically Fran-hattans that I put in the freezer (aka freezer-hattans). As a side-note, my BELOVED sister-in-law Gay spent many years managing her family’s tavern and has pointed out that my recipe is not exactly correct. I’m sure that’s true, especially I learned how to make them from The Commander. It’s okay, I just muddle along.

Tonight… I made the GG a gnat-hattan. Last night I somehow ended up with two partial bottles of vermouth. I had intended to combine them but forgot. And. I apparently threw out the cap to the lesser bottle and DIDN’T combine it with the other bottle and ALSO did not stick saran wrap in the top. So I made the GG a freezer ‘hattan this evening and when he pulled it outta the freezer there were all these teensy tinsey little buglets in it. I looked at mine and noticed a bunch of them too.

The GG saved the day with a sieve and I started remembering that we have been minor-ly plagued by these gnatty-type bugs. I don’t know if they are actually gnats. Whatever they are, they are VERY small and they do not bite. They are just annoying. Especially when they collect into your cocktail of choice.

A rainy evening for our last night here until next spring. This is okay. This pic is off the back deck. If you look carefully, you can see the shed roof and a little sliver of the garage roof.

Poised to travel tomorrow with a whole crapload of junkola and I’m not sure why all of the rifles always end up in MY vee-hickle…

So this patriot or whatever he is took our adult daughter out on a North Country Trail hike today. I did not accompany them. I worked on organizing and packing stuff we will have to schlep down to The Planet Ann Arbor in a couple days.

I do not leave ANY kind of food, perishable or not, over the winter here. It was easier when my parents were still around. They could close the moomincabin whenever they wanted to. They just had to haul stuff to their house in town. If they didn’t get eveything into town all at once, they could drive back out to the moomin, pick up their stuff, visit Radical Betty, and whatever.

We can’t do that. We have to haul whatever down to the Planet Ann Arbor and not come back. I spent today doing penultimate stuff. I have two bags of non-perishable food in Cygnus already. I took some last-minute recycling into town and made a mini-trip to Meijer and dropped off a Green Bag. I got rid of a bunch of condiments, etc. I mean, what is the point of schlepping a tablespoon of pickle relish down home. So I emptied that jar (and some other things) and washed out the jars… So there is more recycling (there is ALWAYS more recycling) but it’ll get dumped into my Planet Ann Arbor recycle cart.

Love talking to my kiddo about her younger days. Like driving to a Radiohead concert in Ohio. As a teenager. She ran into one of her cFam cousins there and he didn’t recognize her at first. And she drove my car (new top dollah Honda Accord) with my permission because she felt like that car might not be likely to break down and maybe if she were driving, she might have more control over what was happening. Like mother, like daughter.

Whitefish Point. Whitefish is usually an annual trip but I think the last time I ventured there was 2019 aka pre-pandemic. It was raining so hard that day (ALL day) that we barely got out of the car, which was The Mean Green Frog Hoppin’ Musheen (Subie Outback). We did go into the gift shops. We don’t really do the museums.

Today I don’t think there was a cloud in the sky ALL DAY, which meant the sun was BRUTAL but it was also not very warm so… We walked the beach to the tippety-tip of the point, where this pic was taken. We continued around the point and walked the nature trail back to the lighthouse area.

We drove the short distance to the Safe Harbor to eat lunch, which was turkey sandwiches, apples, chips, and beer. Except we didn’t drink the beer because there were a TON of law enforcement vee-hickles in the parking lot with us. We later figured out that there were also divers around and maybe the law vee-hickles were involved in some kind of training exercise and probably had no interest in us at all butcha nevah know.

We “nosed” west onto Vermillion Point Road but didn’t make it all the way out to the “point”. The road seemed good if sandy and Cygnus could probably have done it but we were getting a bit taaaared by that time. After a minor spy mission, we stopped again at the outhouse just above the Tahquamenon River mouth and that is where we drank our beers. BTW: that is the cleanest outhouse I think I have ever been in. It smelled wonderful, not even like they were using some kind of floral scent to MASK what is down the hole. And there was hand sanitizer in a dispenser. That said, do NOT look down the hole. I sorta glanced at it and you don’t wanna know.

Back on the road to home again, Liz was driving and as we were passing the Naomikong overlook, the GG yelled STOP. After a few confusing moments involving a deer looking to cross the road, we got turned around and headed back to the overlook. The deer was not why he wanted to stop. It was a North Country Trail friend’s vee-hickle. OMG. I soooo wanted to go home. I did NOT want to get hung up with whatever NCT maintenance was being staged for this weekend. Fortunately, although he found our friends, he was willing to continue on. Once home, two people (Liz and the GG) took naps. I felt nappish but that is never a good thing for me.

For once, Cygnus’s warning to “LOOK IN THE BACK SEAT” was arguably useful this evening (upon shutting her off when returning from a trip to get porterized with pizza). Our “baby” was in the back seat. Of course she has LONG been able to remove herself from an automotive vee-hickle under her own power, not to mention that she has owned her own vee-hickles for many years.

I was sitting outside the other night, under the kitchen window. There was a dragonfly flapping against the screen doing its best to get into the kitchen. This was driving my beach urchin (indoors) absolutely nutso. I’m not sure why it wasn’t really bothering me. It was obviously in distress of some sort.

Finally the beach urchin asked if she could turn out the kitchen light. YES! The dragonfly left for a bit after that but it returned. Why? Because the bright fluorescent light above the stove was still on. Once that got turned off, the dragonfly left for good. Later on I figgered maybe a solution would be to turn off the kitchen lights and turn ON the bathroom light. The bathroom is more or less an interior room. Although it does have a small window so maybe the dragonfly would be flapping against THAT window.

We don’t have that kind of problem with insects tonight because I don’t think the temperature got above 60 degrees all day. Am I complaining? I dunno. 90 degrees the other day was AWFUL except for swimming in Gitchee Gumee. Today’s 60 eventually prompted me to actually turn on the propane stove. Hot or not?

Other than that, laundromat, quick grock stop, recycle, and gasoline. Plus a drive by what we called “the oldest house in town” when I was a kid. No house there any more but the entire lot is ringed with heavy vegetation. I wonder what that house’s actual story is. My parents may have known but they never told us.

The GG took a bunch of stuff to Habitat and did a whole bunch of reorganizing out in the garage. I haven’t been out there to see it yet and there was no way I was gonna go out there at 9:00 tonight. It was time to call it a day. And yes this is all pretty much filler.

The woman in question was walking the beach and I had just decamped to Bill’s Birch Beach Bank Bench. The questioner was a life-long friend. I answered (with a bit of a giggle), “Yes, it’s my daughter!” I think my friend remembers my beach urchins as very small very cute tow-headed blonde baby girls. They are still blonde and they are still good-looking but they are 30-something adults and blonde hair is not usually as brilliant on adults unless they get it out of a bottle. Which my daughters (and me) are not interested in. For that and many other reasons I can understand why my adult children don’t look familiar to my friend on sight.

For many many many years we didn’t encounter too many unfamiliar people walking our beach. In recent years, now that the OTHER end of the beach is accessible, we see more although we are certainly not inundated. If I understand riparian rights law at all (and I think I am shaky on that) it is legal for people to walk along waterways even if the waterfront property is privately owned. Our beach is private but it is certainly walkable and I don’t usually question walkers about who they are.

Yesterday was interesting though. When Lizard Breath and I went down to the beach to cool off at the end of her work day (and my slug day), there were two women standing just off our shore with kayaks next to them. In earlier years I might’ve been a bit perturbed but times are changing and I just gave them a hello and followed my daughter out past the second sandbar to get dunked and COOLED OFF! They were just hanging out there gossiping (yeah, I’ve been coming up here with “Bill” since 2007). I kinda wish I had introduced myself and talked to them more but for many many many many many years, I would go down to the beach here and be the ONLY person on the beach. Being social to strangers on the beach is new to me.

My childhood friend and I are definitely in in agreement with keeping our families’ beach as private as we can for as long as we can. And I felt her relief knowing who “that woman” was. She knows any daughter of mine is an ally 🧡🧡🧡

These candle holders are from Crate and Barrel — I think but I could be wrong. I also think (but could be wrong) that I bought them for the moomincabin. Whatever the truth is, they are PERFECT for the moomincabin. For dark stormy evenings or even just parties that go on into the late evening although most of ours end pretty early.

The problem has been that they have never “lived” anywhere. And that’s not really true either. They lived in the drawer at the bottom of the barrister’s bookcase. That odd location meant that every time somebody wanted to get the candle holders out, they had to REMEMBER where they were. And the flip side of THAT is once somebody gets them out, they end up kinda scattered randomly all over the room. Like this summer.

THIS summer! The GG had a brilliant idea! He would build shelves between the studs in our un-insulated dwelling. We have shelves like this already in other places, The GG has put some up and I think my parents did too. But this was a REALLY GOOD IDEA. Not only would the candle holders be easy to grab when needed, they are a DECORATIVE element. Why hide them down in the drawer at the bottom of the barrister’s bookcase. So here they are. First pic is a close up, second shows (more or less) where they are situated.

Other than that, it was another EXTREMELY hot day here. 90, which is very hot for here. Once again, Gitchee Gumee saved the day by cooling us off.

Swimming on a hot summer day. Labor Day to be exact. It was hotter than Hadies today. I have to compare it to a Labor Day in my childhood when bitsy little snowflakes were spitting at us. Us kids HAD to swim. When we were kids, we swam EVERY day. Hot or cold, calm or windy as hell, rainy, whatever. Spitting snow. Yes we were gonna swim. Later that day we had to move to town and the next day was the first day of school. I remember The Commander down there life-guarding us in a winter jacket and Otto, my dad’s buddy and father of some of my beach friends.

It was so hot today I had to sit on the back deck next to the grill to read this afternoon. It was the only place not in the sun. I eventually swam after my older beach urchin arrived and we ate dinner with the neighbor-cousins. Dinner was kebabs and corn and potato salad and garlic bread and green salad. And blueberry crisp for dessert courtesy of my cousin. Preceded by a ‘hattan or two. We swam between dinner and dessert and I still feel wonderful and uber clean after our beautiful dip into the fresh water of Gitchee Gumee.

I was remembering a night long ago when I was up here alone with The Commander. It was hotter than hell (like today) and my aunt Radical Betty and I made a plan for an evening swim. I encountered my other aunt Bubs (she and Betty were my dad’s sisters) and I asked her if she wanted to join us. She said… Maybe… As it turned out, the three of us did swim. By that I mean we all walked out past the second sandbar until the water was up to our necks, hung out a bit and headed back in. I miss those two women and their brothers.

Love y’all, KW.

I missed the northern lights twice last night. Our Northern Correspondent texted me that there were faint lights so I went down to the beach to check them out. They were very faint at that time but I did see a “column”. But I bagged it after that. Back up at the moomin, another neighbor posted a pic of DECENT northern lights. A green strip along the horizon with a purple column above. By the time I saw the pic and got back down to the beach, they were gone again.

Oh well. We had made our own northern lights, I guess.

I was blissfully space-i-fied this afternoon while others did a group hike. I did dinner prep stuff for tomorrow, began my slow decluttering journey, hung around on the beach and did some reading. Everyone reconvened on the moomindeck for ‘hattans this afternoon and after a minor kerfuffle about which door needed its screen replaced with a window FIRST, I think we are about done for the night. Always always always. The BACK door is the FIRST to have its window replaced with a screen and the LAST to have the window put back in. Many days we don’t even PUT the screen in the “FRONT” door. If you have ever spent more than five minutes in the moominkitchen on a warm day, you will know why this is the procedure.

G’night. KW.

Where are the neighbor-cousins? When are the porters coming back up? Yiiiiy! I do not know. Well maybe I do know (sorta) but I am not the Beach Google and I REFUSE to keep track of everybody else’s whereabouts or schedule. One of the problems is that I am kinda GOOD at keeping track of things like that…

Today? It was the first day of my last summer-type vacay and I wanted a MEEEE day. I mean. The biggest excitement I had today was taking a Green Bag up to the res to drop it off with the friendly garbage attendant. Unless you count that I dusted the ANCIENT barrister bookcase (or whatever it is). Odd that we have such an artifact given that my branch of the FinFam doesn’t seem to sprout lawyers. Honestly, I think we are too honest 😵‍💫 But the barrister bookcase pre-dates my birth…

Disclaimer: I have actually known a few DECENT lawyers not to mention competent. My overall experience, admittedly not terribly extensive, is Clown Car but we’ll go there some other time, or not. Uh, I’m talking PERSONAL experience, not the Orange Baboon’s “team”, which is total idiocracy and why are “we” letting these people talk on TV (etc.).

So, a commenter asked if the botes (freighters) “honk” as they go by. He should know better than to ask that kind of question [snort] but… No, they don’t honk. The GG honks when he drives the Motor Bote over to the commenter’s shore and takes his air horn with him. The freighters… Well it turns out to be kind of complicated. One of the funniest things I have ever heard from a 3-year-old was “the botes are horning”. It was a foggy morning and a young cousin was fascinated by the foghorns. As I was writing this my brain was wandering around (as it does) and I remembered my parents and probably grandparents saying the boats were blowing their horns. So. No they don’t really honk. They blow their horns and the then 3-year-old was not far off.

We are having beautiful weather and I’ve got dinner in the hopper (American “soccer mom” style chicken shawarma) and rice but I need to hop to it a bit because in remembering Jimmy Buffet and margaritaville, another blogger seems to think it’ll be manhattanville here at the moomin tonight. Yes, yes, it will🐸

The GG sat on Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench under a couple of umbrellas. I sat with my cousin in the hollow in front of the Old Cabin. He eventually joined us. It was too hot on the bench this afternoon.

Eventually I headed up to the moomin to make one of our fave versions of shrimp scampi. I got released from work a couple hours early today. It was always typical for us to get released early the day before a holiday. Since the pandemic I think that tradition has gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle. I knew that I would not be very productive today and I wasn’t afraid to say that to the folks I work with. Not only is Monday a holiday, I am off for the rest of that week and the following Monday. Vacation mode.

The cousin-neighbors to the west joined us on the moomindeck after dinner until darkness fell. And that is about all I have today except that after looking at some fly-ish insects that seem to be embedded in one of the living room curtains ALL SUMMER, I had an epiphany! Hey, I can WASH these curtains. So I have added the living room curtains to the end-of-summer laundry agenda for next week. I’m trying to think when the last time they’ve been washed. Certainly not since The Commander died. And I’m not sure when she might have laundered them before that… … … It’s time.

G’night, KW

Since the seas were calm tonight, we took an evening bote ride to look at the moon. The “intruders” at the end of the beach had a faaaar going and after our uber slow cruise out around the island, we headed straight for the faaaar and this is the fuzzy version my ancient iPhone got.

When we got close in, some other lights came on. Kinda looked like spotlights. The GG wondered what they were. I opined that they were trained on US to see what we were doing. Did they know that my grandfather and a couple of his friends bought this beach 100 years ago or so? No I’m sure they did not. And actually granddaddy did NOT own that end of the beach although he was able to keep people out of it for many many years and so were we. It’s a long story but the upshot is something like tough shit.

Anyway for whatever reason, the GG turned the motor bote and we moseyed back down along the beach to the moomincabin.

In happier memories… Back when there were no SODding idjits at the end of the beach, a whole bunch of us FinFam folks loaded up into a big old canoe and headed out into the lake to watch a full moon rise. Kinda like tonight. We were way out past the second sandbar when we noticed a SWIMMER coming along, trying to catch up with us. It was my dog Tigger. The water was WAAAAAY over her head. At 12-13 feet, it was way over everyone’s head. She was a good swimmer (part retriever) but this was a little scary. There was no way we could get her into the canoe so we turned around back into shore and of course she followed.

I mean the guy on the right of course.

This is another pic from our stay at Steinhatchee. We walked over to a nearby restaurant and sat at the bar to eat shrimp. Alas (but we knew), it wasn’t the in-season shrimp people along the gulf coast can sometimes get but the food was fine and sitting at the bar allows one to strike up temporary friendships with locals or at least the bartender. Of course that is also potentially dangereuse, especially if you are, well, if you are anybody, really. But it was all okay.

After dinner we were out in the lobby and there was this, uh, portrait. I went to the water closet and when I came back, the GG reported that a woman traversing the lobby had said, “We’ve got to get rid of that Trump.” Something like that. I had been guessing that in that neck of the woods there might be a lot of MAGAts (probably even MORE after all these years) so I was heartened to hear of a Florida woman saying something like that. I just wish I had been out of the water closet in time to high five her or wink or whatever. Did she have a southern accent? I dunno. Not everyone in Fla does.

I looked up pics of Steinhatchee today and they did get hit pretty hard. I do not know about deaths or injuries and pray in my own godless way for the folks who live in the Big Bend. Steinhatchee was a home for us if only for one night. That area of Florida is not as populous as many others so in terms of that, it may not have been as destructive a hurricane as some others. But I don’t wish hurricane destruction on anyone no matter who they are or where they live.

Here on the moominbeach it was frickin’ cold all day. The wind has been outta the NORTH all day. I had the propane stove on all day and I was dressed in a turtleneck sweater, polar fleece jacket, Smartwool socks, and Smartwool leggings. ALL DAY. It was okay. I was warm enough and I had a LOT of work to do.

Where is Idalia gonna land? I do not know. But a word leaped out at us from the radio today. Steinhatchee. It’s in the Big Bend area of Florida. We spent a night in Steinhatchee. In 2017. Way before the pandemic. I had no clue we were in the Big Bend area at the time. I had never heard of the Big Bend until today although when you look at a map of Florida, it’s pretty obvious that there is a Big Bend.

On that trip we kinda wanted to do a bit of mosey-ing down to and through Fla to get to our cool retro motel on the gulf coast. We asked friends of ours who are better moseyers than us for Fla gulf coast recommendations. In the end, we didn’t really do very well with the moseying. Before we even started the trip the GG was like dooya wanna go visit your cousin in Arkansas? Um. I love my cousin but isn’t that a few states over to the west from where we are going? And then the first day we drove something like 600 miles before we landed in northern Alabama.

That was fine and pretty much planned but… Not without stuff like “Hey, there’s a sign for a distillery. Wanna stop?” Um no. This was in Tennessee and we had no clue how far off the freeway the distillery was or if it was even OPEN. If you are in southern Tennessee and you have been on the road since Michigan, it is probably time to skip the distillery and make a HARD stop. So we did. In northern Alabama on a strip mall type highway. The hotel was pretty okay but it was NOT a pleasant walk the mile to the wings place. I was actually the one with a craving for wings. Go figger.

Anyway, after spending the next night in Panama City Beach where our first attempt to get to the BEACH was blocked by police who were investigating a shooting, we landed in Steinhatchee, which WAS a recommendation from our friends and we enjoyed it. But so much for the moseying. Some people just can’t settle down. After that we pretty much bee-lined down the road, over the Sunshine Skyway Bridge into Bradenton and out to Long Boat Key. Can I siddown now?

This is one way botes are stored in Steinhatchee and probably other places in Fla. I dunno if Idalia will actually hit Steinhatchee but hopefully those botes are currently stowed somewhere a little bit safer. BTW: stein is pronounced steen and hatchee means river.

During our touchpoint meeting this morning, my two Indian-American co-workers were talking about their daughters who I *think* are both sophomores at Moo-U. One of them has moved into an apartment and I’m not sure where the other is living but the apartment kid has been giving her LOVERLY dad some crapola. Like last week, Dad you need to help me move NOW. If you cannot help me move NOW, I will be gone. In other words, be there or be square. So he left for the afternoon. He was laughing today that his daughter couldn’t wait for him to GO HOME after he dropped her off (despite the fact that she wanted his help)!

I remember when he took a half day off to accompany his daughter to kindergarten. I was a new employee at that time and my older kid was living and working in San Francisco while my younger kid was doing study abroad in Dakar.

Been there done that, in other words. I remember the days when I drove to Kalamazoo to do whatever with my kids. Drop them off at college. Pick them up. Take them out to eat. The Crow’s Nest was a fave. Watch them in plays. Drop off gifts and other stuff. I dunno. I told these Indian dads how much I missed driving over to Kalamazoo College to visit my kids there. Our co-worker Dana chimed in about visiting her children in college. She said to enjoy these times and I so agree.

See that empty bottom shelf? Man oh man. After The Commander died, I moved her cookbooks to that bottom shelf. I can’t remember exactly why. They had been in the living room for many years. I can only think it had something to do with combining the cookbooks at the Dillon house (which we were selling) with the moomincabin cookbooks. And we certainly weren’t selling the moomincabin.

This “solution” didn’t really work out all that well because it left very little space to store non-perishable grocks. I won’t go too much into all of this. When it’s the beginning of the summer and just the GG and I are around, we don’t need a lot of storage space but when daughters and nieces and cousins and partners and friends arrive, it gets a little crowded in the kitchen.

Yesterday and today, I moved all of the cookbooks BACK into the living room where they belong. They are easily accessible there and now there is more space on the kitchen shelves although it is still a mess there.

Some of the Old Cabin cousin-neighbors returned today so we made FinFam Steak Dinner for them. They drove from the American east coast through Canananada and stayed in North Bay last night. When I was three years old, I stayed in North Bay when my fam took what we called The Long Trip. I was ENTRANCED by the fact that the bathroom in our little roadside motel had PINK fixtures. Many years later, I learned that The Commander was LESS THAN ENTRANCED by the SPIDER in the bathtub. She was not a spider fan.

That was a fun trip. We had tea with the Halliday sisters (FinFam relatives) in Toronto, visited Niagara Falls, and then our Sherman friends in that vicinity. I have been told that when I spied the Sherman kids, I got all excited and yelled “kids”! Doesn’t exactly sound like shy me but photooos show me having a good time and we later became good friends when their family visited us at the moominbeach, parking their VW bus and camper in our yard during various summers.

Nowadays we don’t depend upon local TV or radio stations at the moomincabin. For radio we normally listen to an NPR station that originates from Central Michigan University but has satellite stations all over the place including Sault Ste Siberia. Television? We have not had a television here for many years.

We had no TV at the moomincabin until I was a teenager when we had a teensy tinesy little Zenith black and white model. Like other TVs around that era around here it picked up two channels, TV 9 and 10 and channel 2, which was Canuckian.

Many in my family watched the moon landing back in 1969 on our little TV. I was a teenager then and watched it at the Piedy cabin with other beach teenagers. I was sick with a fever and sore throat that night and that is mostly what I remember about that. It wasn’t COVID…

CKLW was a Windsor Ontario radio station that all the cool kids like the GG listened to when they were teenagers in the Detroit area. Once in a blue moon, when the weather was just right, us teenagers here on the moominbeach could pick it up.

When we finally got cable TV, I came home from junior high one day and my brother said LOOK AT THE TV. Yes. We had more than two channels! I spent my high school years doing homework to Lost in Space reruns.

And then there was Bill Kennedy at the Movies. That was on the Detroit channel WKBD and I used to watch it with my dad sometimes.

Nowadays we have gone back to no TV here at the moomincabin. But we certainly use screens. We use iPhones constantly and when I am working here I am on my work laptop and right now I am blahgging on my personal laptop. I watch TV series on my phone (apparently series is plural for series…). And there is the GG using his big old Mac.