Random bits of my so-called life.

The moomincabin is pretty much a disaster these days. It might not look like that to visitors. It probably looks like a CABIN. To me it looks like a super cluttered up cabin. I cannot CLEAN when I have to move umpteen bazillion things.

The GG aka Suzy Homemaker did a lot of cleaning today. He scrubbed the gas grill within an inch of its life and refilled the propane tank. Hey we are having Fin Fam Steak Dinner on Sunday so we need to be ready. And then he washed windows! Yay! He was angling to use dish cloths until I pointed him toward the micro fiber cloths in the bedroom. Yes yes yes.

At the end of the afternoon a potentially scary storm bore down on us. Bow echo or comma or whatever. We sat on Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bench to watch it for a while. It was beautiful but when it started to rain we decamped to the moomindeck. We never got any severe weather here. There was heavy rain for about ten minutes and then it all moved east. Not exactly a plassover.

We have missed a lot of severe weather down on the Planet Ann Arbor. Tornadoes and other crazy winds Apparently our house is okay and since our neighbors don’t seem to have lost power, I’m guessing we haven’t either. We’re kinda sorry we missed all of that but we also kinda happy we did.

It felt a bit late to head out to the island (a half mile away) but I decided I would join the GG for a wee bote trip. The seagulls seem to be gone. There are some cormorants around. Not sure if/when they migrate.

Late July/early August can be difficult to walk the beach because many young (and sometimes old) seagulls for whatever reason are not able to fly their migration and die on the beach or maybe die elsewhere and wash up on the beach. The worst is when a seagull is sick or injured and we have to watch it slowly die on our shore. One year there was a particularly awful situation where a young seagull was initially able to fly a bit but couldn’t get very far. It deteriorated until it could barely move and eventually there was just a wee bit of ragged breathing whenever I walked by.

My brother was coming up and when he arrived, I asked him to take a walk with me down the beach. With his gun. I am not anti-gun but I do not shoot them but I wanted to put this seagull out of its misery. Wouldn’t you know by the time we got down there, it was already dead. Such is life…

So our evening bote trip was loverly but I am hitting a wall so I think I will shut this thing down for the night. Maybe I’ll watch an ep of my latest series (The Last Empire) or maybe I’ll just hit the hay.

G’night, KW.

They’re back. Sorta. I potted these flowers Memorial Day weekend. We were here about 10 days, then the GG went west and I took a dive down below the bridge to Trollandia. The GG did a moomincabin drive by sometime before 4th of July weekend on his own way to Trollandia. The flowers were thriving then. By the time we arrived here FOR 4th of July weekend, they were decimated. Heinrich (snowshoe hare) or deer? I do not know. I don’t *think* they are on the pine marten’s menu.

Oh, there were a few flowers in one pot but I wrote them off and didn’t bother to try watering them or anything. It is now something like six weeks later and all of a sudden they seem to be reviving a bit. I’m still not going to try any heroics here. I’m kinda done with flowers for the year. My Planet Ann Arbor impatiens didn’t do quiiiite as well as they usually do but they were okay the last I looked. But we’re heading toward the end of August and I kinda give up bothering with them at this time of year. A gardener I am not.

It was a chilly day but I am glad I hightailed it back up here when I did because the SE Great Lake State is heating up big-time. I don’t think we’ll quite beat Arizona but I saw heat indexes of 105 predicted. No thanks. I woke up somewhere around 1:00 AM to thunder and lightning but nothing severe and it only served to send me back into blissful slumber. Stormed again when it was time to get up for the day and then again when I met with MMCB₂ for virtual coffee. I was on the moomindeck and it was so wet I had to decamp to my childhood moomincabin bedroom.

Although I think MMCB will continue to meet virtually for the foreseeable future, I am hopeful for a warm enough day in September that we can meet in person AT Barry’s. There is outdoor seating. I know that Barry’s has undergone a MUCH needed renovation and I’d love to see it. Of course, I could always go over there and get takeout coffee. And a tuna bagel. I miss those.

The title? Meaningless🤣

A couple of my young male cousins (1st cousins twice removed) wandered into the “parking lot” between the Old Cabin and the moomincabin early this afternoon. I think they were looking to borrow kayaks and we are happy to oblige. Before we could finish our conversation they spied the GG walking up the path through the woods from the beach. They yelled, “Don’t shoot!”

This was hilarious! I think these young men have encountered the GG at The Garage, sometimes shooting, sometimes not. When people drive by and the garage door is open, they often stop to talk. The Busybody of Birch Point Beach.

So I am cracking up. And reminiscing. First, remembering when I was a kid and these young folks’ parents were babies younger than me or not born yet. And then I was having my own babies and their parents were just beginning to have their own children. I am trying to figger out how the GG and I went from being the “cool” aunt and uncle (if we ever actually did get to that, probably not) to wherever we are now. I think we are verging upon being the kinda cray-zee old fogie aunt and uncle kind of folks. The ones who might like to have toooo much fun. Make no mistake, we are careful to keep from providing the too much fun kinda stuff to our young adult cousins. We are also well aware that they know how to provide their own fun. Been there done that.

We hosted our friends of porterization for dinner tonight. I was reluctant at first. I had a loooong work day and it is a school night. It started out as a happy hour but turned into dinner on the moomindeck. Cheers!

Okay, I guess that’s a bit of a stretch. Botes and automotive vee-hickles are inanimate objects and do not make friends with each other except maybe in cartoons.

I was heading out to the moomin after a laundry run and a few grocks. I went to Pat’s for grocks because I can put my laundry in the warshing musheen, drive the eight blocks or whatever to Pat’s, and get back before the warshing musheen is done. I am direct about grocks, not to mention laundry. That is not really pandemic driven but probably more so since the pandemic. In. And. Out. I have a daily standup meeting at work and I didn’t want to miss that.

But then. I was done with laundry and the few grocks I needed in a short enough time that I could slow-drive along the locks. The American Spirit was s-l-o-w-l-y leaving the Poe Lock upbound but what was that in front of it? Was it a cruise ship? Yes it was! It was the Viking Octantis waiting for the American Spirit to finish its exit so the Octantis could go through the lock downbound. I couldn’t really get a good pic but I joined all the other rubberneckers *anyway*.

Oh yeah, one afternoon last week when it was too cold (windy) to sit on Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Bench, I had my after-work cocktail in the little hollow in front of the Old Cabin. Suddenly a small mammal with a very cute face and ears came along. It looked a bit weasel-y? It was NOT a squirrel. I know what a squirrel looks like. We figured out today that it was probably a pine marten. I have never seen one in real life before. The weekend of my dad’s memorial celebration, one of my brother’s dogs encountered a pine marten and all I can say is there was a big, if brief, hullabaloo.

Apparently pine martens eat all kinds of rodents. All the way up to rabbit. Hmmm. I haven’t seen Heinrich around the yard lately. I hope he’s okay.

Well, that weekend went FAST!!!

I have scoped out (sorta) what to do with the bazillion books here. Oh NO, I am not getting rid of them. This is really not blahggable but here goes anyway ’cause it sticks in my dern craw, so possible lurker(s) be damned. After The Commander died, a relative kept throwing hissy fits about getting rid of the books in the moomincabin. This was odd to me because I had NEVER SAID I intended to get rid of any books and had made no move to do so. In fact my memory is of *encouraging* that person to identify books they thought were important.

After a while it clicked in that it MAY have been the old “Red Books” — little Great Lakes shipping annuals. Well… It was THE COMMANDER who got rid of those, not me. She donated them to the local historical society. She did not consult me. If she had, I might’ve discouraged her (not because of that person). But she did not NEED to consult me. She OWNED them. And was of sound mind! And our local historical society is WONDERFUL. I once commented on pics they posted of the old bank my dad and granddad worked at. I was a very young child when the pics were taken but I remember that old bank building and also remember when they moved the bank up the street. I got a VERY KIND response about my dad’s help when the director was applying for a mortgage. Dad (and his dad) were well respected local bankers and I miss them.

Okay, rant over. I don’t think people care that much about bedsheets but I have been reluctant to get rid of ANYTHING for the last however many years it’s been. I worked on sorting those out today and I think I have a tentative strategy for getting rid of some of them. I focused on the double bed sheets. It’s the biggest bed we have here. We have 4-5 matching sets (top and fitted sheet) and many miscellaneous sheets without matches. (We won’t talk about the mile-high stack of mostly random pillow cases.) I’m inclined to get rid of the singletons and keep the others for now. Eventually they will all go BECAUSE… The double bed has the worst mattress on earth and we are on the verge of replacing it. When we do, we will need new sheets because the ancient fitted sheets will not fit on the new mattress. Don’t ask me how I know this 🤣

I envision buying three sheet sets. That should allow people to take used sheets home to the Planet while leaving clean sheets here at the moomin. Me? I will continue to sleep in my uber comfy sleeping bag.

I should clarify that I actually don’t have trouble sleeping on the awful mattress. But that’s me. I can sleep just about anywhere as long as there isn’t bright light, loud music, or dog poop in the vicinity (or radio noise but that’d be a whole ‘nother story). But the beach urchins think it’s awful and I know they are right so I am MORE THAN HAPPY to let them drive this. Not to mention that they have friends who are MUCH taller than me and the GG so it must be a horrible place for them to sleep.

Anyway, I am back to moominCubelandia tomorrow. Plus laundry and a few grocks.

A weekend day. I made my own coffee (again, yes I knooooow) and took my time heading in to town. Grocks and dumping the recycle were my chores. After that I took a slow drive through parts of town, along the locks/waterfront, up Ashmun, angling off to the right on the way up Ashmun hill to do a Dillon house drive-by. Looks a little shabby but maybe(?) someone is living there. There was a shovel along the portico and twinkle lights strung up but the curtains were all closed… But people do shut curtains… I guess I could look on Zillow.

I do not miss the Dillon house all that much. It was not my childhood house. That was on the South Side down on Superior Street. My grandparents lived in the Dillon house when they needed a one-story house. They bought it from my piano teacher and her husband, our high school band director. My parents sorta inherited it from my grandparents. Still, I spent a lot of time at the Dillon house in my adult years and it’s the only house the beach urchins knew my parents to live in… Except for the moomincabin of course. Our Quick Green Lizard figured out PDQ (like three years old) that the Dillon house was Grandma’s Other House, the Real House, Where She Lives Some of the Days. Kids are so smart!

We are not hoarders and the moomincabin is relatively clean and comfortable but it needs some attention. I won’t go into that in detail but I did take a gander around today to figure out what bookshelves we HAVE here and think about what we need (we need to rejigger books). In the garatchkey, we do have some bookshelves, some emptier than others and I have my eye on one of them.

We also have license plates from my parents’ automotive vee-hickles since apparently the 1960s. I remember when we changed from Water Wonderland to Water-Winter Wonderland. I was a kid then and I loved it but I lost track after that. This display is the GG’s work.

I was on the deck and all of a sudden there were like three or four Blue Jays flying all around the yard. I dunno if that qualifies as an irruption (probably not but I love the word). I couldn’t get a pic of any of them. Too fast. I have chipmunks and baby (?) squirrels all over the place. They scurry up onto the deck. I am certainly not afraid of them but I am barefoot and do not want to be bitten. Thumping one of my big homo sapiens feet on the deck scares them off. The MOE-skee-TOE is a wee bit harder to deter. There’s only ONE but it is persistent. But I’ll get it eventually.

P.S. I just got it!

My parents were rattling around out west somewhere (as they did after they retired from gainful employment) and my dad used to collect mugs. Oh boy did he collect mugs. I think The Commander was into it at first but eventually (after dad died) she had some difficulty about weeding out the mugs. My dad called this mug Big Butt.

We got rid of some mugs but we did keep a few. Big Butt of course made the cut. Since The Commander died, Big Butt is the mug the GG serves me coffee in every morning we are at the moomincabin. I am a medium sized person and I don’t have a big butt but I LOVE this mug.

This morning I MADE MY OWN COFFEE! I ground some beans that were sitting in the fancy Oxo grinder that Amazon sent me TWO of during the early days of the pandemic. I ordered ONE for the GG’s 2020 birthday and we received two. At that time Amazon didn’t really want the hassle of returns so we were able to keep the two and one of them has been at the moomincabin since then.

Back on March 13, 2020, which was my first day of what turned out to be permanent telecommuting, my loverly husband the GG served me coffee. When I used to go into the office, including just the day before, I did not make coffee at home. If I needed coffee, I got it from the office kitchen. Otherwise I didn’t drink it except for Wednesday at Barry’s.

I dunno why but probably the GG was concerned about my abrupt change in workplace status (and covid of course), he schlepped coffee to me on the Green Couch EVERY day. I ran with it and began to call him Coffee Boy. It has continued until today! Today! This morning, I made a pot of coffee on my own. I served a cuppa or two in my own personal Big Butt mug. It’s not like I have never before made coffee. It’s a weird pandemic thing that maybe I’m finally over?

I went to bed with 20 mph winds last night and I could hear them all night. I wasn’t freaked out at all. It was just life at the moominbeach as usual and I slept well. The wind is finally calming down now.

G’night, KW

This beach day began with heavy rain. I’m not sure what time it started. I think it was a while before sunrise. So HEAVY rain for most of the morning. Looking out the front door of the moomin, here is Cygnus. She needed a bath anyway.

Looking toward the back (this is NOT a large cabin), here is where the water spills out of the gutters.

Both the beach umbrellas tipped over during the course of the day. The red one was over by the time I got up (7-ish because I was enjoying the rain) and I’m not sure how it flipped because there was no wind at that time of day. I left the white one up, thinking it could dry out but at around noon the wind kicked up and eventually it flipped the white one AND TURNED IT INSIDE OUT. All is well with the umbrellas now. I should’ve taken them down last evening. My bad.

So yes, the wind kicked up around noon. It is a NORTHWEST wind. NORTHWEST NORTHWEST NORTHWEST! Not north.

20 mph winds but it’s not dangerous to swim in these waves on the moominbeach because it is shallow and there are sandbars and no undertow. We who have grown up here actually love to swim on days like this, diving into waves and body-surfing a bit. Nevertheless I do not swim solo on days like this. When I was a teenager and young adult, we still did not have indoor plumbing and I bathed in the lake EVERY DAY, even on chilly, windy days like this. Even then, I always asked The Commander to “lifeguard” on those kinds of days and she accommodated my requests without hesitation. Solo swimming wasn’t the only reason I didn’t swim today. It was not all that warm and I wore my Smartwool leggings when I went to the beach after work.

And now it’s raining again 😵‍💫

Okay, it’s unfair to call him Outhouse Guy. I’m trying to think if we were still using the outhouse when he first started coming up here with me. Or had The Commander already done indoor plumbing? I mean besides cold water in the kitchen sink via a garden hose from my uncle’s pump. To wash dishes, you had to heat big pots of water on the stove, which was at least electric.

I knew the writing was on the wall to replace the outhouse when I acquired a sister-in-law but the exact timeline is lost to me at least for the moment. I know the GG wouldda been happy to use an outhouse. I was still pretty happy when The Comm decided a Flushy Indoor Terlet was a good idea at the moomincabin. If anything, I no longer had to deal with the werewolves and vampires who frequented the outhouse when I was a young teenager. Or the spitfire (whatever that was) I had to dodge when I was younger. Our outhouse was a pretty long way out there and my parents were too cheap to install a LIGHT on it (or a DOOR but that’d be a whole ‘nother story) so I had to run with a FLASHLIGHT!

So although he is a champion outhouse user, not to mention woodsP or urbanP or backyardP or whereverP, in this pic, he is shooting a BB gun at old paint cans which he has hung in the vicinity of our old outhouse.

So yesterday, the GG went “out in the county”. I didn’t ask where he was going. For some reason I thought he might be going south? Not. He was gone for HOURS (that was okay, I was working) and it turned out he went to Paradise (that’s a town in the yooperland) and then went inland to look for the Dogman’s old cabin. The Dogman was uncle to one of our cFam nieces.

The GG found the Dogman’s cabin and I’m glad I didn’t go with him because it involved “seasonal” roads and that means they are one-lane dirt roads and often have big water holes on them. I do not like that kind of driving. I was also working BTW.

TODAY!!! My facebook friend Mushie posted a link to a forest faaaar in the area the GG was driving yesterday. Apparently it is not a Maui-type event. It has been contained and no homes were in danger. That’s probably because homes are few and far between in that area anyway.

Praying in my own godless way for Maui residents. Natural disasters happen. They have happened throughout history and they will happen for whatever future human kind has. We could have a forest faaar here and lose everything. I can do what I can to help the Maui folks (money is probably the best bet) and I can pray in my own godless way. But really, shit happens and homo sapiens just needs to keep crawling on.

I was thinking about outhouses today and kinda wanted to write outhouse stories but two-factor authentication aka scrambled eggs overrode that to the point that I do not have the chops to write about outhouses today. You don’t really want to know why two-factor authentication overrode my thoughts. Also we had happy hour guests. That was fun but not conducive to blahg post writing.

So I checked my phone twice in the early morning hours. To get the time. Or maybe more than twice. But two times I received notifications from various sources. The first time was from some news source to tell me the Orange Baboon had been indicted for the fourth time. Quadruply indicted as various tweet/X-ers were wont to say. Oh, ho-hum. The uber weasel is gonna weasel outta all of these things. And that’s giving a bad name to the weasel members of the mustelid family. The baboon members of the Cercopithecidae family are who they are and from what I’ve heard about them (from someone who lived amongst them in Africa), they are much like their orange member. Tromping around stealing food and other plunder from wherever they can find it and generally making a mess and creating havoc.

The second notification I got was MySubaru declaring my credit card had expired. I am uber-confused about this. I THINK I got this notification a few months ago? And fixed the problem. But when I went out to check on it, yes, the credit card expired this month. So I fixed the problem. Again… At least they didn’t say it was declined, which it was but for a reason. Words matter.

At least I didn’t wake up to 28 text messages about guns and pickles.

Of course that’s a quote from a Gordon Lightfoot song. The great lakes are not like the oceans but they are treacherous in their own way as any body of water is. I mean toddlers drown in bathtubs or buckets in their own back yards. Things happen fast.

I don’t know everything about living on a great lake but I have “summered” in this location since I was born and I am quite familiar with its various weather patterns. Including that they can change PDQ.

Today our bay was dead calm until afternoon. The GG took off in the Motor Bote in dead calm waters. Fine, I thought. He is busy and not in my hair. I was working on my current “scrambled eggs” prodject and although my brain needed distraction in order to function, xwords and such were a better distraction than randomness from the GG. Plus he was wearing earphones most of the day and couldn’t hear me when I DID want to get his attention. I dunno what he was listening to. Hopefully not MAGA crapola.

He had been gone for a while when I sensed that the wind was starting to pick up. Okay… It isn’t terribly strong yet and maybe he’ll come home on his own. When it picked up a little more, I called him. What did we do before cell phones? We worried.

Where are you? I figgered he might be out near the shipping channel but it turns out he was in the process of being porterized (a half mile or so to the west on the other side of the Birch Point range light). And thank the gods, he had noticed the wind and was just leaving. He knows a lot more about botes than I do and understands wind conditions. But I am a wife and a moom and I am always counting heads.

Okay. I listened for the sound of the motor bote to arrive back in our bay. I didn’t hear the motor over the wind but I did hear the hull of the bote thudding against the waves as it approached our beach.

He arrived safely. The waves were not all that big and he had a good time with whatever bouncing around he had to do. I’m not sure I wouldda been a happy camper but I am always glad when a boater arrives back on the beach safely.

We haven’t lost anyone on this beach to a water accident in the 100 years the fam has owned it although there was a close call a few years ago. I want to keep it that way.

Maybe that’s overstating the case since I was down on the Planet Ann Arbor for two whole weeks. But here I am back at the moominbeach. Not exactly planned. I mean I had planned to return in another week but part of me just kind of went what-the-hell? The GG is here and I’m sick and taaaarrred of cooking for one person. Although he won’t be with me the entire time I’m here. So I’ll still be cooking for one person.

So I spent a LOVERLY S-L-O-W day yesterday getting ready to travel back north. So often I just blast back and forth willy-nilly. Leaving things MOSTLY cleaned up and usually forgetting something. Last time I actually forgot WHINE! Can you believe it? Good thing we are only a 20 minute drive from civilization, although it looks like we are totally in the boonies. I did forget a couple things this time. Lemons and some onions. They are in my fridge and if the beach urchins need/want them, they are more than welcome to abscond with them. But yesterday I made slow but relentless progress on cleaning and packing and was able to spend the afternoon reading and the evening with the beach urchins.

Driving NORTH on a Sunday is a nice calm drive. Driving SOUTH not so much. I was northbound and was a bit annoyed when I got to the Big Mac tollbooths because they had a couple northbound lanes closed and I had to wait a bit to get through that. I have a commuter pass that allows me to sail right through without stopping but I had to jockey around in traffic and go through a regular lane. After I got through the toll, I remembered why they had northbound lanes closed. Because it is Sunday and southbound travelers were backed up for about a mile. So they needed more southbound lanes open. I think. The yooperland is getting too popular is all I have to say.

Anyway, I am here and it is not all that warm here because a pretty decent northwest wind is coming onto the beach. And an interesting but unfamiliar dog came to visit the moomincabin while I was unpacking Cygnus. I’m not sure its owners know that these days it is polite to leash your dog at all times on the beach. Not so much when I was a kid but times have changed, at least for dogs and their owners at the moominbeach. The dog was docile around me and I was not afraid of it but dog-related trauma is real for those who have it.

I dunno exactly what this vee-hickle is but it apparently goes on water. It is parked next to Gitchee Gumee.

I spent the day tinking around with various household tasks. Laundry, a few grocks, sorting toiletries out, running Rooooomba, dusting various things, cleaning the bathroom, I dunno what else. I did not go to the farmers market this morning but I did make it to the corn cart over by Ahmo’s and the liqwire store. I got corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and a cuke. Not as comprehensive as the farmers market but a pretty cool selection of veggies.

I finished my chores in the early afternoon and spent some time reading and enjoying my back yard. Tom Lake is my current book. Set mainly in the Great Lake State and I am enjoying it.

In the late afternoon the beach urchins brought takeout food from Harissa and we sat in the back yard to eat that.

G’night, KW.

When I woke up this morning, my iPhone proclaimed 28 text messages. I did not count them but there were a lot of them and they were all from the same thread, which was between the GG and our friends of porterization. I was like what? There was a lot of talk about implements of too much fun and then there was some pickle tour talk. I was like WHAT? Imma gonna guess this “pickle” is the Pickle Finger aka Light 26. It wasn’t clear in the message and it wasn’t until after I made a 7:00 AM trip to Meijer and then Speedway Gas (because Cygnus was at a quarter tank) that I figgered it out. Maybe.

The Pickle Finger was built when Lizard Breath was a toddler. It’s actual name is Light 26. Radical Betty was grumpy about it when it was first built and called it the Fickle Finger of Fate. I have never exactly been sure what that meant but Lizard Breath misheard it (as a 3-year-old or so) as the Pickle Finger and so that has been it’s name forever. Out of the mouths of babes.

We did have a flyover today. Four fighter jets one at a time directly over the Landfill. They were not at treetop level but low enough that I could see that they were fighter jets. Passenger planes also fly over my house.

I am strategizing my whereabouts for the next couple days/weeks. We’ll see where I end up.

Well, this pic is from 2017 so it was back during the early years of the Orange Bombasty and Dark Brandon wasn’t “born” yet.

It is interesting being married to someone who doesn’t share your political views but is an A-number-1 person in most other categories. I struggle with the Let’s Go Brandon t-shirt but I have to admit that a couple weeks ago I found myself alone with “Let’s Go Brandon” at the Up North laundromat and I made the hard decision to NOT leave it there. I mean surely some of the guys (or gals) working on the New Lock (and do their laundry there) are probably MAGAts and would have gladly absconded with it. But I dutifully put it in the laundry basket and took it home. I’d like to report that I also folded it but I didn’t fold ANYTHING that day. I knew that if I took time to fold the laundry, I would be late to the 10:00 standup. Dry laundry can wait to be folded.

I dunno what Dark Brandon was doing with the Ninja in the pic but there it is, as well as the Mean Green Frog-hoppin’ Musheen. Both of those vee-hickles were replaced in the next few years by Cygnus and Mooon Yooonit. As much as I love Cygnus, I still miss the Ninja. Among her general loveliness in all ways, her pop the trunk feature was great for doing pandemic curbside pickup. Cygnus does EVERYTHING ON EARTH including some things I don’t WANT her to do but she does not do pop the trunk. I don’t think… I owned the POC for umpteen bazillion years before I figgered out it could do pop the trunk. Or maybe that was the Exxon Tanker Valdez…

It took me a while and a concerted effort to find the Dark Brandon pic, even though various “memory” app features have “suggested” it to me recently. Alas, I didn’t save it when that happened. I have now TAGGED it with the GG’s name and “laser” and “Dark Brandon”. I’d rather Dark Brandon be at the helm for the next four year term than any of the alternatives.

Onward into our country’s uncertain political future.

I dunno. I *thought* he was going to the yooperland today. I also knew (but wasn’t thinking about it) that his ID twin and family were at Hoton Lake for the week.

I am not concerned about his whereabouts. I do know that when he left this morning he had his PHONE and BOTH of Mooon Yooonit’s key fobs. If he is at Hoton Lake, I know he is having a good time. If he is in the yooperland, I know he is having a good time. *I* am having a good time because I got a LOT of pesky work stuff done today, enough that “switching to glide” should be easy this week.

The Flote Bote is a lot of fun, especially when you drive it over to the tiki bar, which they probably didn’t do today because there were many children. Not that children aren’t welcome at the tiki bar, just that it’s a lot of kids to keep track of and maybe easier to have a beer or a bit of whine on the bote or at the cabin. Load the bote, sink or flote!

We can’t really have pontoon botes at the moominbeach. I mean, we could, but we have no way to dock them on the beach and you can’t really pull them up on the beach without an army. When I was a kid I *think* there were various attempts by neighbors to create docks along our beach but the big waves created by the northwest winds that hit our beach destroy them sooner or later, usually sooner. We use a system of rollers to beach our little motor botes, three- and four-seaters. The three-seater can be schlepped to the beach via human grunt labor. The four-seater has to go to the state park bote launch but once it is launched it can stay for the entire summer.

So if you wanted to have a pontoon bote at the moominbeach, you would have to dock it at a marina and drive over to launch it. And that would be on a good day. Gitchee Gumee kicks up PDQ so you don’t want to be out on the water when it does that. Small craft warning anyone? Houghton Lake can kick up a bit but in general you can have a dock there and it’ll be fine. Unless a tornado rolls through although to be fair I don’t think that did anything to our dock, just flipped the Flote Bote off its hoist. Good times.

Anyway, the GG has texted that he HAS arrived in the yooperland and Lizard Breath has landed safely at Daytwa Metro so all is good.

Man and boy. Yesterday I was working on a functional specification for a work prodject. I was NOT happy with my progress on this document. Some prodjects are easier to spec than others. This one is like Scrambled Eggs, as my once colleague Lewie-Lewiiii once told me about a similar prodject I was working on that he had to QA test.

But we have to keep moving so I was doing the best I could, knowing I could always tweak it later. But. Then. At 1:46 PM yesterday afternoon, the gods conspired to make me fat-finger a few control key shortcuts and instead of whatever I was trying to do, I accidentally destroyed the document. It was unrecoverable. Don’t ask. I thought to myself it was probably a good thing that at that moment in time I was operating a laptop and not an automotive vee-hickle. Because if I had been driving a car, I’d probably be dead.

But. Okay. All of my diagrams and screenshots were saved (i.e., elsewhere than in the Word document I lost) and I just had to re-write. So I started in again… I did not finish it yesterday but by the end of the afternoon I had an epiphany about how to PROPERLY write this thing up and this morning I did just that in the couple hours before my team did an internal review. We don’t have all the issues sorted out yet but we know what they are and there will be a “soft” review with a larger audience tomorrow morning. I am ready.

I have run out of recent pics (and I can’t easily find the “Dark Brandon in my driveway pic”) so I’m stealing one from my mouse who was recently hiking in the yooperland near the Niagara Escarpment. This is NOT the escarpment but I think it’s in the area. The Great Lake State has interesting geology if you like and understand that kind of thing.

WTF is black tie-dye? A beach urchin wanted to know. Well. It is basically a black skirt with strips of tie-dye. It is a pretty cool skirt, quilting-type cotton, not t-shirt fabric. Maxi length with elastic waist. Black Chico’s “travelers” tank top. I wore those ALL summer under loose summer-weight knit jackets back when I worked at Cubelandia. I saved a few just in case. Turquoise/aqua colored cotton “wrap” to drape over my shoulders. I needed that by the end of the night. It was chilly enough that the venue put out a tub of blankets on one of the tables on the porch.

Come to think of it, I should seek out an extra (or two or three) of that skirt. I bought it on Etsy at the beginning of the pandemic. I was looking for my standard tie-dyed t-shirts and I found those but then this other site popped up. I didn’t receive the skirt for a long time. The seller was much more concerned than I was. I was tracking it and I knew it was stuck at a facility somewhere near Detroit. Brownsville maybe? But probably not because that’s Amazon. I think this was just a post office. Anyway, I assured the seller it was NO PROBLEM and NOT HER FAULT! I wasn’t going anywhere that I needed to wear that skirt.

Beaded purse. 100+ years? I’m not really sure. I am pretty sure I took this from my step-grandma Bolette’s house after she died and people were picking out jewelry and things. The narrative in my head is that it originally belonged to my great Uncle Henry’s wife Lillian. Uncle Henry was The Commander’s paternal uncle and he gave Bolette a lot of things before he died. Including a Cadillac, I think. I think she may have driven it for a while. She was quite a bit younger than my grandfather and his brother Henry.

That is really all somewhat conjecture possibly with some kernels of truth sprinkled here and there. I was a young mother during those years. With a part time job no less and my aunt Charlotte was largely taking care of Bolette’s affairs then. Not without some complaints from Bolette who at that point was struggling with whatever sort of dementia she had. Before that started to set in she and Charlotte were wonderful friends.

At any rate, Great-Uncle Henry lived long enough to know that my daughter, his great great grandniece was born and long enough into her toddlerhood that he sent her Hush Puppy. When she opened the package, she took one look at the expression on Hush Puppy’s face and said, “Needs a Mama!”

I have a few more recent similar (much cheaper) purses that I bought. I’m gonna fling those. I’m keeping this one and maybe some day I’ll try to get it restored. I guess in those days they didn’t design evening bags to be sturdy enough to contain things like iPhones and automotive key fobs…

With rows and rows of these grapevines, I’m sure VineyardP was possible but I don’t think anyone took advantage of the opportunity (butcha nevah know what the GG might be doing at any given moment). TMI?

So this is a bit of yesterday’s wedding venue and our weather was BEAUTIFUL! Sunny, not anywhere near 90 degrees, gentle breezes throughout. Today? Rained cats and dogs off and on ALL DAY. I am not complaining. It felt soooo good and we needed it. But it was nice to spend a lot of time outdoors yesterday.

Other bits and pieces. The invitation, which we (of course) LOST but thankfully there was a website. Like two days before the wedding I read “Attire: cocktail”. I have a vague idea of what cocktail attire is and it does not reside in my closet. I have NO CLUE about how to go about buying a cocktail dress. I don’t even know what stores are still around the Planet Ann Arbor. In the end I decided this was a NO PANIC ZONE and wore a long black tie-dyed skirt and tank top. And carried a 100-something-year-old beaded “evening bag” that started to disintegrate during the evening. I’m not sure my attire was what the bride may have had in mind but she was gracious enough not to notice it and no one else seemed to care.

What helped was that during a morning Plum run one of mouse’s sweet co-workers told me how good my hair looked!?! Say what? I’m not sure I agreed with her but it somehow gave me the boost I needed to get through the “attire” part of the day. I suppose what she was reacting to was that my hair was actually DRY. I was a bit later than usual and when I am over there early, my hair is still WET from my shower and sometimes pulled back into a fugly ponytail depending upon its level of scraggliness.

The GG kept saying we were sitting at the Old Folks Table. I preferred to call it the Aunts and Uncles Table. And indeed, sitting with his sibs and their spouses was what kept me sane during the social bits. There were plenty of people there but it wasn’t some big 300 person blowout. I was impressed with the bride and groom for keeping it down to what seemed like a manageable crowd. And honestly, I support their choice of attire. It was THEIR day, it was NOT about me. And they and all of their young friends were obviously enjoying getting a little dressed up. I remember those days 🐸

Today? I WAS A SLUG! Partly it was because I was basking in our heavy rain showers (nothing severe, no lightning all day). Partly it was because I am totally failing at making progress on flinging. That is what I WANTED to do this weekend but could NOT get the gumption. Where do I start? The GG? Cleaned automotive vee-hickles and the Lyme Lounge (in between rainstorms) and I dunno what else. He was busy and productive.