Random bits of my so-called life.

I had three main missions for today (I took the day off). One was to obtain some ham in a not-too-overwhelming quantity. Two, get a pic of the old Ron’s restaurant before it collapses or burns. The third? Lunch at the Spikehorn.

I cook a ham once a year, on Easter (which we observe in a secular way). I try to buy the smallest piece of ham as possible. The best, most reliable way to do this is to get pre-sliced in whatever quantity you need at Honey Baked. But we aren’t anywhere near a Honey Baked ham store and won’t be until tomorrow afternoon and there is no way in hell I’m gonna drive cross-town the day of the spring football game. So I decided to try to get one at Houghton Lake although I figured that would mean a trip to Walmart or Family Fare. As luck would have it, Best Choice was also on our agenda and lo and behold, they had ham there. I bought a half, which is waaay too big for us, but I’ll cut *that* in half and freeze one of the halves.

That stroke of luck left us with a lot of time before lunch so we headed west and took a little self-curated oil well tour through the Dead Stream Swamp. As I have said before, the perimeter of Houghton Lake is chock-a-block with “cottages” but if you drive a mile or so away from the lake, dwellings are much sparser. And POORER! One of the things we agree on is we both like to take slow cruises on the back roads and today’s cruise did not disappoint. Also, the Great Lake State probably doesn’t come to mind as a big oil producer but there is a TON of oil here.

On to get a pic of Ron’s, lunch, then a little bit more touring in the area, then a quiet afternoon. I didn’t like the pics I took of Ron’s so I’ll have to go back another day. Lunch (for me) was whitefish “fingers”. Very good (fried though, this is bar food) and just the right amount of food for me.

Back to the Planet tomorrow. I’ll have to switch out my red hat and for my trusty old blue one🤪

I’ll try to organize a comparison of the Hoton Lake moldy old cabin that this beautiful new one replaced another day. For the moment, this is what I think I can talk about. I was sitting in my chosen work space for the week. My work day was done and we were done eating dinner and I was just kinda mindlessly staring out over the lake.

The pic to the left of the doorwall is the 10 cFam sibs when they were children. The decor was organized by my many sisters-in-law. The GG’s sisters and the GG’s brother’s wives. They did a fantastic job.

I was just dozing. There is a movie on and I think it is probably pretty good but the characters are speaking French and there are subtitles and I normally like those but I am kinda just taaared tonight.

Two looooong meetings today. Good ones but they have left me doing a lot of processing. In the middle of the day, I trekked over to Best Choice, a meat market and small grocery that we’ve been shopping at for many years to get something to eat tonight. They still have plastic up at the cashier counter from the f*cking covid days. I noted that my drive to Best Choice was eight miles. Down on The Planet Ann Arbor, eight miles would probably entail 10-20 traffic lights. Here? One stop sign. Period.

I’ve been going to this little store since I’ve been coming up to Hoton Lake. It’s a half mile down the road and for most of those years, mainly stocked a small assortment of grocks and sundries, beer and whine, donuts on the weekend, you get it. OH! And candy! Including penny candy. One of the first times I went there, we asked if they had olive oil and they had never heard of it! In all fairness, I was a heavy olive oil user by that time of my life but not too many years before I hadn’t heard of it either.

The store has had multiple owners over the years but has managed to hang on all this time. The latest change in ownership has come with a noticeable upgrade. Still a small inventory but carefully curated. No meat or produce, a small dairy case, LOTS of beer, whine, and pop. All kinds of non-perishables (I have bought garlic POWDER and Worchestershire there this week). A small selection of sundries (deoderant anyone?). And a LARGE selection of booze. They still have donuts, ice cream cones, and pizza.

I don’t know anything about keeping a store but I think they have a formula that works. Long Point, where the cFam cabin is, is a good-sized drive from any of the other grock stores in the area so if you went shopping and forgot a random item (like deoderant, duh, except I actually forgot to pack *that* from *home*), They are selling a lot of things (like Worchestershire) that you wouldn’t want to make a half-hour trip to get. And beer/booze? Another thing that could be a last minute thing. Not a lot of non-perishables so not a lot to throw out if they don’t sell quickly. I didn’t think to look for candy but probably there is a good selection. I don’t think anything costs a penny any more.

On one hand, Long Point, where the cFam cabin is, is kind of out in the boonies. Except that it isn’t really the boonies because the entire perimeter of Hoton Lake, including Long Point, is chock-a-block with “cottages”, many of them full-size, year-round houses these days, so there is often a lot of traffic everywhere. I’m thinking that back when the GG was a kid, a lot of moms may have been up here “alone” with their kids and sometimes without automotive vee-hickles so the corner store may have been a go-to grock store for some of them when they didn’t have a car at their disposal? That wouldn’t have been my mother-in-law. But I was a kid in Sault Ste. Siberia then so I have no clue. I do know that there were plenty of moms in the Sault without their own cars back then and there were lots of small full-service neighborhood stores.

At any rate, I was impressed by the upgrade!

This was the view sometime in the mid to late morning. It was a very blustery day and I was glad to be in a modern house instead of the moldy old cFam cabin as much as I loved that old place.

I remember hanging around with the Gumper (my father-in-law) listening to him talk about various things. Lake levels and the Dam Man. Stories about serving as the master mechanic on the Hornet aircraft carrier in the south Pacific. He would tear up a wee bit talking about the pilots that got billeted with him that never came back. On a lighter note, there was this mathematical conversation in which I set him straight about something, mainly, that I wasn’t all that bad at math.

Gumper: KW, do you know what a parabola is?
KW: Why yes! I know all the conic sections.

That pretty much stopped him from asking me mathematical questions although he did sometimes ask me some nosy questions but that was what he was all about. He also once divulged some (sorta) NSFW information to me, which eventually earned me the title “The Family Liberal” from another out-law. That is all I will say about that except that I loved him and think he liked and trusted me. And make no mistake, it was not anything sordid at all.

So, a few years after the Gumper died, a quintet of his children bulldozed the moldy old place and rebuilt it. So I took this picture out the window from where I was working today. Large Catholic families are one of my lots in life and I am blessed to be a part of this one, non-Catholic that I am.

P.S. The GG found Coal Miner’s Daughter was on TV tonight, miraculously with no commercials. A great film and when I was young, random strangers would sometimes tell me I looked like “Carrie”, aka Sissy Spacek, who plays Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter. Just a fun fact.

Masquerading as John Bolton. Embiggen a couple times to see the mustache. He kissed me this afternoon when he returned (sweaty as all getout) from a day of chainsawing and his mustache was wet. Fortunately I has just seen him take a swig of bourbon. which is sanitary. I think. TMI? In more ways than one I’m guessing😵‍💫

Meanwhile, back at the ranch aka group home, yer fav-o-rite blahgger could not get her work VPN to work. It’s too long a story but it involved The Mother Ship turning OFF wi-fi on my laptop. She may have detected I was trying to connect from an unfamiliar location. I fixed that but my VPN still didn’t work. Eventually tech support got that resolved. I’ve been spending too much time with those folks lately, lovely as they are.

And I am streaming! Last evening it was just the two of us here and we needed a little quiet background noise. Just enough to distract us from the Ticking Of The Clock. We turned on the TV. Oh. My. God. That was a disaster. Shows we didn’t like. LOUD! Commercials every two minutes (it seemed but probably they weren’t that frequent). But they were even LOUDER than the shows. We very likely don’t know what channels/shows are available to us via this TV service but we weren’t really wanting to figure it out.

I was soooo missing the Sunday night folk and jazz on the Ypsilanti WEMU NPR radio station. The GG doesn’t like NPR as well as I do (but he does listen to it, make no mistake) but he was on the same page as me about the TV. Eventually I dragged my laptop (I mean my personal MacBook Pro) over and started streaming WEMU. We both enjoyed some interesting jazz QUIETLY. Today I flipped between WCMU (for weather updates here at Hoton Lake) and WUOM for the talk shows I listen to intermittently on the Planet Ann Arbor and now WEMU for some evening jazz.

The GG rummaged through the cabin looking for things we couldn’t find, like a radio and a bar of soap. He found a radio and one bar of soap. I’m glad he found a radio but streaming works even better for me. We both prefer using bar soap to shower. I know others are skeptical about how sanitary that is if you are sharing soap. I understand that and usually travel with my own personal bar of soap but forgot it this weekend. As well as deodorant… More TMI…

Anyway, it is great to be here for the week. Lamb stew is in the hopper for tonight.

Oh, come on, it’ll be fun. You can work up there while I’m out chainsawing. To be clear, he will be chainsawing downed trees, not people’s jobs. And I will be here in the rather luxurious Hoton Lake (HL) Groop Home communicating with The Planet Ann Arbor and India and Florida and I fergit where else.

The truth is, I haven’t spent much time at HL since before the pandemic. From the time I met the GG until then, I often came here. It is beautiful here. The picture doesn’t do it justice with the gray skies and water and brownish grass.

At the beginning of covid, I didn’t come here because (duh) I didn’t want to get covid. Who did? I had a hard time that first summer (2020) keeping the Twinz of Terror from rooming together in the Lyme Lounge or wherever. Youz guyz, the covid virus doesn’t care if you were womb-mates.

Time marched on and most people got vaxxed in 2021 and covid numbers went down a bit that summer (and then back up again with the Delta and Omicron variants). I braved an overnight stop here on our way to the yooperland. There were about a bazillion people here. The Uncly Uncle’s family (three kids, spouses, and grandkids) and maybe others I’m not remembering. They are all wonderful fun people and it was lovely and I kinda almost forgot about covid. And guess what? I didn’t get it. But although I had a good time that weekend, a year plus of full-time telecommuting had kicked my introverted ass into high gear and I was dead tired at the end of it. I needed a “freak-out chamber”, usually the Lyme Lounge, but it was at the moomincabin that weekend.

Another overnight a couple years later with one of our Colorado nieces and her kids (we had the Lyme Lounge that time) but other than that I’ve just made quick stops here and there.

So okay. The GG shamed convinced me to come up for the week. Because I cannot be without my own transportation for more than a day or so, we each drove a car. I mean, he’ll be out chainsawing, right? I dragged him away from PBJ for burgers at the North Shore Bar for lunch, then we did a slow drive on the old dirt roads near the “scenic trails”, which seem to be taken over by ORVs these days. Cygnus can do a bit of rough driving but not that rough.

Cheers to Hoton Lake and g’night! KW

Moom! Look who’s up ahead! And there he was, the Easter Bunny, or maybe the Energizer Bunny by the way he was bopping around in and out of Dexter’s Pub and up and down the street.

The original idea was that me and Lizard would meet up for lunch on Sunday. When moom is Home Alone, the beach urchins like to make sure she is properly socialized and since moom has shaken off her covid cowardice, lunch at a restaurant is an option once again and I am loving it. Various gyrations in schedules flipped our original plan on its head and we met today instead. At Dexter’s Pub and joined by the GG. He is not unwelcome at these lunches although today he was a little stinky after walking 10 miles from The Planet Ann Arbor to the satellite village of Dexter. And his John Bolton mustache is starting to look scary enough that even *he* admits to being a bit scared of it.

So my beach urchin Lizard drove over to my house and I was like, “Baby you can drive my car!” When this beach urchin was an emerging talker, she once grabbed my keys and said, “I d[r]ive.” How do you explain to a toddler that no they can’t drive? And then all of a sudden they are 14 and in high school and taking driver’s ed. 14? Some might ask. Some parents get freaked out about putting their kids in driver’s ed as early as is legal, which is 14 in Michigan. Why oh why oh why? The longer your kid drives with adult supervision, the better. Er, unless YOU are a bad driver… Or afraid of driving, as some people are, which I am sympathetic to.

So my daughters are wonderful drivers and I enjoy riding with them any time they are willing to drive me. And it’s usually my car. There’s nothing wrong with their cars but I think there might be more “stuff” in them than Cygnus X-1 has. Which is somehow typical of younger folks? I’m guessing because there used to always be a bunch of crapola in my cars. You know. Old dried out McDonald’s hamburgers that the kids didn’t eat and whatever. Also, Mooon Yooonit usually has a lot of crapola in it and the GG “stores” a certain amount of that overflow in Cygnus. I am not happy about this but I tolerate it.

First task of the day. Not too long after 7:00 AM. This was to drop off two of the five checks I will write this year. Most years, I write three, all for various property taxes. This year I was tasked with writing two income tax related checks.

The GG was in a minor panic because the tax stuff got delivered a day later than expected, a day when he wanted to be out of town. Well. I *can* write checks. I *can* follow instructions (from the accountant). I drove over to the post office to mail them because people have been known to grab checks out of the drive-up drop boxes, “wipe” them clean (how?), and put their own name and amount on them. I would have thought this was an urban legend except that I first heard about it from a good friend, one I talk to weekly, because it had happened to her. And then somebody blew up the drive-by mailboxes at one of the Planet Ann Arbor post offices. I mean exploded them. With some sort of bomb. I went early today because there’s almost no traffic then. After dropping off the checks, I texted this photo to the GG and I could FEEL his relief through my phone when he texted an emphatic THANKS. Don’t wanna be late filing the taxes. (We have documents that don’t arrive until sorta late.)

I didn’t go early to the grock store as I had tentatively planned. Bad thing but I had morning meetings I needed to do some prep for so there you are. When I did go, it was NOON and traffic everywhere was a frickin’ mess. I did manage to get “my” u-Scan though. The Plum Market checkout process is always fast even the day before Thanksgiving or xmas.

Man oh man, coaching a new colleague is challenging my poor old brain but in a good way. They are helping me remember all the stuff I forgot years ago🤣 Keeping me young?😵‍💫

Actually I did not have any big plans today. Except to work and this view is from my work space. The last few days have been *filled* with meetings. Today was pretty open. Tomorrow has filled up.

Anyway. The Twinz of Terror were up and out at 0-skunk-30. They did allow me to get the first shower (they know how I roll) and hung around long enough to have a wee bit of coffee. Then they took off to the Albion/Marshall area to hike on the North Country Trail. They were gonna get more coffee at the Zeeb Road McDonald’s. They took two cars for various indescribable reasons. Imagine if you are working the McDonald’s window and the same guy (in a different car) buys coffee from you as the last customer.

This is kinda my annual “April snow” pic. it’ll probably snow again this month. It might even snow in May. Probably not June although it can get pretty damn cold. Growing up in the yooperland, the only months I haven’t ever seen snow are July and August. This is the Great Lake State and that’s what happens here. This morning’s crapola wasn’t slippery and shoveling wasn’t required. Despite predictions of low 40s temps, I think 37 was the highest it got today so there is still a bit of it hanging around.

There was the usual chorus at today’s work stand-up meeting. “I was so surprised when I woke up to snow”, etc. I kept myself on mute but NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! We *almost always* get snow at this time of year. Usually it’s a nothing-burger, like today. But not always. I had a glacier in my back yard the April after the Polar Vortex Winter (2014). Actually we mostly stop shoveling/snow-blowing in March. Unless there’s a large accumulation of snow/ice, it usually melts quickly. Like this morning’s minor accumulation did. It did not ice the streets or sidewalks.

What a day! It began early when I returned to bed from the water closet for a few more minutes of shut-eye. Beeeep. What was that? (You know what it was.) After 30 seconds or so. Beeeep. Lather rinse repeat. At least it wasn’t SCREEEEECHING! I checked my Nest app. All was well. Alas, we also have non-Nest smoke alarms. It turned out to be intermittent so we endured it until we returned from dropping off Mooon Yooonit at 7:15 AM, then the GG scurried around changing batteries like mad. I have said this before but I’ll say it again. I will never understand why we need to have FOUR smoke alarms within a six-foot radius. Yeah they are in different rooms but you can’t tell which one is beeping. Rules be stoopid sometimes.

Then I had to deal with my broken token. Man oh man, what a big mess. I won’t try to detail this ordeal. The high-level overview is my VPN app expired and due to VERY confusing emailed instructions for how to replace it, I deleted it before I installed the replacement app. Bad thing. So. I couldn’t get to the support folks on my laptop. Instead I would get to a page saying, “You are not logged in.” Yeah, I knooooow.

I resorted to filing a ticket by phone. It took something like six tries to process all of the instructions for just getting into the phone queue for a callback but I FINALLY did it. What I didn’t do was disable the setting (on my personal phone) that silences all incoming calls from unknown numbers. So I missed the callback and then went through all kinds of search gyrations to try to figger out if my employer had an office in Podunkville, Lower Slobbovia. I never totally figgered that out but I finally sucked it up and turned off the phone setting. A while later I received another incoming call from that same number and a lovely tech support woman took over my screen and totally sorted me out, then thanked me for “all I do for the company”.

This was all going on while I was in meetings and/or I/Ming with various people via Teams (and picking up Mooon Yooonit). I was taaaared by the end of the day and I am now celebrating that end by having a ‘hattan with the Twinz of Terror (the UU is visiting). I am in the Landfill Chitchen writing my blahg and they are in the GG’s lair talking MAGA and economics and surfing the internet. Hundreds of Beavers anyone? And now guns.

And now mouse is here and the shouting is over.

We totally spaced it out this year. I didn’t even realize it was this Sunday until after it was over.

We used to go to Festifools most years, at least when we were in town. I guess we got out of the habit when covid shut it down for a few years. Back in the day, we would watch the parade for a while, then grab a ‘hattan at the Old Town before heading home.

What is Festifools? It is a “parade” of sorts with huge puppets constructed from various materials. The Detroit Party Marching Band (google it) participates whenever it feels like it. And all kinds of other people, large and small. The dictators in the top pic are Papier-mâché (I think). The pic is from 2017 when those of us (meeeeee) who hate Trump (and Putin) were still trying to adjust to our new horrible reality. This float was actually a rotating trio. Kim Jong Un is on the other side. Little did we know another new reality awaited us so many years later. I am so taaaared of people who care nothing about anything but themselves but I am kinda done for tonight.

So here is the GG in the ghillie suit he got at the army surplus store south of Gaylord a buncha years ago. Can you believe that *women* were walking up to him and hugging him in this suit? Maybe it was because his accomplice (meeee) was wearing biz-caz (red pencil skirt, black tights, black t-neck, and polarfleece vest) so they might’ve felt he was safe? And he is “woman safe”. Four sisters and two daughters. But not sure these women saw me at all. I think they thought he was adorable. I mighta been jealous about all this hugging when I was a much younger woman. Now I just gnoff and gnoff and gnoff. You want ‘im? You’ve got ‘im. I am kidding of course. I need somebody who can fix terlets and things🤪

We never quite made it past the Ark (in the photo). But later in the spring we were opening our cabins at the moominbeach with npJane and she mentioned that she and some friends were a little further on in front of Conor O’Neills or wherever that day. Some sort of drama was going on in their friend group (npJane has a bazillion friends) and I said something like maybe it was a good thing we didn’t get that far down the street. But then she said a wee bit more about the drama and I thought maybe a guy in a ghillie suit with big googly eyes might have lightened up the moment. But we turned around before we got there.

I wore the ghillie suit to work one Halloween. At least the top part. I do not dress up much for Halloween except for my aurora borealis costume sometimes. When I heard the Benevolent Despot’s voice booming over to my cube (he LOVES Halloween), I put on the ghillie suit top. He expressed amazement at my costume (or more likely it was amazement that I was actually wearing a costume). I took it off as soon as he left my cube🤪

It’s spring and all the lovely little critters are coming alive!

First, Amazon Woman’s cats brought a LIVING vole into her house this morning. Actually, further research revealed it was a deer mouse, not a vole.

I don’t really know much about rodents but I have a working vocabulary of some of the various kinds, mouse, vole, mole, etc. Why? Because my daughter (as you know if you’ve followed this bunch of blather for any length of time) decided at the age of 18 months that she did not like the “government name” we had assigned her at birth and changed it to “Mouse”. She named herself after a stuffed aminal. This is the name she still uses. It took a little getting used to and there were awkward-ish conversations over the years about what she would be called at school. But she has always been enchanted with any kind of friendly rodent (and a whole lot of other living creatures too).

Actually I am sympathetic as I am not crazy about *my* “government name” either. It never “fit” me and when The Commander was angry at me for whatever, it sounded like a buzzer. “Anne!” When I discovered that Anne of Green Gables (also an Anne-with-an-e) didn’t like her name either, I felt better about it.

Maybe a better system would be to wait a bit before naming a newborn baby? People *do* do that. I remember we were all hot to get the birth certificate squared away (we did have her name pretty much picked out before she was born though, after family members). For reasons I can’t totally remember, we had to return to the hospital to finalize that piece of paperwork. This totally *freaked* out her 2.5-year-old big sister. “Don’t take my sister back to the hospital!”

The kinda fuzzy pic? That’s *moe*-skee-*toe* larvae swimming around in there. The Mad Scientist got them from a vernal pond near mouse’s house and has a setup that somehow ports a video onto a computer.

Speaking of rodents, we watched a *bizarre* movie last night: Hundreds of Beavers. I’m not necessarily recommending it. It was pretty funny (and creative) but also very very violent although most of the characters are BIG stuffed aminals (actually humans in suits). The protagonist is named Jean Kayak (he’s one of the few human characters) so how’s about that?

Cheers, Kayak Woman

This morning’s 7:10 airport run was made much easier because we didn’t actually have to drive over to Metro. The beach urchins, returning from visiting their cousin (my niece) in Hawaii, grabbed the Michigan Flyer, i.e. the *bus*. All we had to do was drive downtown and I mean downtown *Ann Arbor*, which is less (fewer?) than two miles from our house and absolutely deserted early on a Sunday morning. And it wasn’t even snowing or anything.

I am glad, as I always am, that their travels were safe. I don’t really ever worry much but that tragic crash in DC in January did rattle me. I wish that Pengie (niece) lived closer to us but she has an important job that bases her in Hawaii and she is needed there. I’m very very proud of her and so would my brother (her dad) be if he had lived long enough to see her grow into the talented, respected woman she is. I’m glad my daughters got to go and see her and hopefully we’ll see her in the summer🧡🧡🧡

I made CPP (chicken pot pie) today. I don’t make it with a “traditional” pie crust. I top it with a biscuit crust. I am not a born and bred biscuit maker but drop biscuits from The Joy of Cooking work and people seem to like it. So. I made CPP mostly because I had a crazy craving for it but also because it would feed a small crowd if the beach urchins were up to dinner at The Landfill. As I sort of expected, they weren’t. And that is A-OK with me. Overnight flight anyone? No pressure, no guilt is one of my mantras. We’ll have leftover CPP and it also freezes well.

After the bus station, we dropped the city mouse off at her house and then we dropped the country mouse at her house and I made the GG turn around to retrace our route because I had spied Mr. Golden Sun rising as we were heading *to* the rodent’n’raccoon ranch and I wanted to get a pic on the way back. So this is from the eastern terminus of the country road mouse lives on.

In other words, we welcomed our travelers home early but it was an otherwise boring day. I only made one trip to the grock store😵‍💫 Kathy was there working the guest counter but I didn’t interact with her, trying instead to slide under the radar.

Because I’d rather not try to write about arrogance today, except that I CANNOT abide it. You know who I’m talking about.

Triple grock store day. Why?

First grock store, Jackson Rd. Meijer at 0-skunk-30. Among other things, I bought some little mini-filets (steak) that are individually packaged (I know that’s environmentally bad). These grill up nicely when you don’t run out of propane 😵‍💫 like we did last week. I finished those in the broiler and they were wonderful. Today I bought four. I scanned the first one and then I got ahead of myself and managed to drop the second one on the floor. That triggered the uscan to call for a cashier to come and HELP (HELP HELP)! Of course the u-scan cam caught the whole thing 🤪 Good thing it was just a little piece of meat encased in plastic and not a whine bottle or something. More staff would’ve been required for that.

Second grock store, neighborhood Plum Market. But. Where the heck did all this traffic come from? I know it is not a Football Saturday but it feels like one and I am a little later than usual because I stopped at home after Meijer to have some coffee. I could not make a left turn onto Maple to save my life so I had to go right and left and around the “block”, where the roads were blocked by people exiting Alanon. I did fine at Plum and didn’t do anything stoopid enough to need help with the u-Scan from Kathy at the guest counter but…

Third grock store (Plum again). When I got home, I opened my phone and there was a voice mail from Kathy at the guest counter saying that I had left a bag of coffee beans at the u-scan. I was like done done done but Chainsaw Man rose to the occasion and drove me over so I could just hop in and retrieve it. And THANK Kathy. She knows me as mouse’s mom, not sure she knows my government name and I know she doesn’t know my phone but, when I swipe my phone app, everything gets stored and my phone number is on file. So she even knew I had PAID for the coffee although it took me a hot minute to remember if I had scanned it or not.

Then I ran roooomba. There were some initial mis-communications but after a bit I heard her beep and she was going great guns… Until she encountered an error. This roooomba cleans herself but occasionally she needs some help. This time there was blonde/white hair wound around her “brushes” in such a big mess that when I was trying to remove one of the brushes, I broke a part and couldn’t put the brush back in properly. A new set of brushes is on order.

Is that enough? It pretty much was. The pic is from our table at Dexter’s Pub last night and I have no clue what Lewis 1863 means.

Sick and tired. What do I think about tariffs? I don’t KNOW much about tariffs. I remember reading stuff back in 4th grade history class about tariffs. Back when we were sailing the great blue seas to trade our goods. I was not the best student of history.

Here’s the thing. I don’t think *Trump* knows anything much about tariffs either. The lively conservative woman on a podcast I listen to (Left Right and Center) says that *she* can’t follow what’s going on with the tariffs, and she seems uber smart. Why the heck would I understand them? And what the f*ck does Trump think he’s doing? I dunno.

When a lot (but not all, I will admit) economists think tariffs are a bad idea, don’tchy’all think it might be good for the head cheetoh to actually, y’know, *consult* some experts about this? He certainly isn’t one. He’s not a stable genius either.

Whether tariffs are good or bad, what really bothers me is the reckless willy-nilly way the orange baboon is implementing them. There is no conscious thought going into any of these policies. Gosh, I wish I could remember what somebody said on the radio (yes NPR) yesterday about Trump’s “formulas” for calculating tariffs. It was something about dividing apples by bagels and I can’t remember the next step and The Google is no help. In other words, just plain gobblety-gook.

And then there is the whole insecure email non-scandal. I mean… Hillary Clinton arguably lost an election (but not the popular vote) because “but her emails”. And these f*cking idjits are BRAZENLY using Gmail, etc. to communicate highly sensitive information. They kowtow to Trump and are (mostly) not women so I guess that’s okay? (More in a minute.)

As y’all are taaaared of hearing about, I work for the online banking industry. My work laptop is totally locked down and it’s really hard to communicate with people outside company email or chat. The government can implement similar procedures but after all the caterwauling about Hillary’s emails (nine years ago?) it apparently hasn’t happened. Or maybe Trumpy doesn’t really care as long as it’s his own minions doing it.

What I am really miffed about is that once again, I feel as though the men I know do not really care to listen what I have to say. Yes, I do get “emotional” sometimes. I did tonight. I am not sorry about that. I think the reason we have an orange president AGAIN is because there are too many people (of both genders) who refuse to elect a female president, let alone a female BLACK president. I think Kamala would have been wonderful. She isn’t perfect but she would not be imposing tariffs on Antarctic islands inhabited totally by penguins.

We’ll talk about chainsaws some other day.

And no, I did not look at my 401K today. But I’m not going any further with The Orange (F*cking) Baboon today (or his asshole MAGA sycophants). I just can’t go there. Except I think it is hilarious that he’s exacting tariffs on an island inhabited by penguins and maybe a few other Antarctic aminals.

You, who are on the road… I mean young folks navigating their way through adulthood. Which ain’t easy even in good times. The f*cking stock market, etc., crashes sometimes. It often recovers. I’m not sure what will happen this time. What scares me is the idiot who thinks he can run our country like he’s a f*cking king. But. After like 15 years of “unemployment” (by choice), I totally fell into my current career in 2007. I had been working a year or less when everything crashed. Stock market. Housing. Whatever. Am I gonna lose this newly acquired online banking tech job? I didn’t. I have somehow survived many “Black Fridays” (layoffs) over the years. I’m not sure why. But I don’t think anyone working on our application lost their job during that period. And the stock market went waaaaay back up after that. Hold tight if you can. But I know you are nervous and so am I. Sigh.

Switching topics, I keep getting messages from a woman who has seen my LinkedIn profile (which I think is largely useless) and she keeps wanting to connect me to a job at a dog grooming company. As a business analyst, not a dog groomer. The GG was confused. No I would never want to be a goddamn dog groomer. What were you thinking?

After about the fifth message from this person, I began to think it wasn’t spam. So. I replied to yesterday’s message. I told her I was not looking for a job. I told her I was a full-time forever telecommnuter, implying that I did not want to commute to an office. I told her I was closer to the end of my career than the beginning. I didn’t tell her that there was no way I would want to drive to Northville to work for a dog groomer company. Nope.

The GG asked if I told her how old I was. NO NO NO NO NO! It’s none of her damn business, fer kee-reist. I got a polite response from this person and am hopeful that she will take me off whatever list I am on. I mean from online banking to dog grooming? LOLOLOL! Not that dog grooming companies are not honorable businesses who need business analysts. But I’m guessing they can’t afford me. Did I really just write that? All I can say is it’s been a long strange trip.

Pic from last night when lightning lit up our street.

Re-reading yesterday’s blahg entry, I was musing about languages. Growing up in my little northern yooperland city, everyone I talked to spoke English like I did. There were undoubtedly some grandparents and parents of the kids I knew who had varying degrees of competence ranging from a bit of an accent to not at all. I’m mainly talking about people who spoke European languages for this post. I’m leaving thoughts about the Native Americans in the area and their languages out of this particular post. It’s important but beyond the scope of this post.

It wasn’t until I began my checkered series of “careers” here on the Planet Ann Arbor that I banged up against people who were not always easy for me to understand. Especially my current career in which I work with a number of people in or from India. “She’s talking to Indi-uh”, I heard The Grinch tell another cousin (in a British-type accent) outside the Lyme Lounge one day when I was working at the moominbeach. Yup. I was on the “phone” with iDeep. Fluent English with a light accent and *extremely* fluent written English. Oxford comma discussions, anyone?

Make no mistake! I fully realize that some of my co-workers probably have trouble understanding my high-energy fast-talking English. A combo of yooperland and Northern Cities Vowel Shift (google it). So it goes both ways. I am capable of slowing down and I do. I mean, if I have questions, I’m not gonna get answers if nobody can understand my gabblety gabblety.

When I was 10 and my brother was seven, our parents took us on a trip around Lake Superior. A trivia note: this was before there was a bridge to Canananada so we rode the ferry to get across the St. Marys river to start our trip.

We stopped at a rest area somewhere up King’s Highway 17 North and my brother made friends with a little girl around his age in the parking lot. He was speaking English. She was speaking French. The Commander asked him how they were talking to each other using different languages. His answer was something like, “You just have to put your mouth a different way.” Which is undoubtedly not un-true. But.

The only spoken language I know is English. When people ask me what languages I know (which they rarely do), I always answer “FORTRAN”. Some people still know what FORTRAN is. My kids both know Spanish. One of my kids is actually pretty talented at languages. She took both French and Spanish in high school and learned some Wolof when she did study abroad in Dakar.

Finally, that fiddle-head is in Hawaii. The title: I used to sometimes tell my kids to “stop fiddly-doodling around and getcher [damn] boots on.” Or whatever it was I wanted them to do. I’m sure they HATED when I said that.

I was in meetings with my TWO (count ’em) colleagues today. The ones who speak my “language” and I am not talking about native speaking languages. I’m talking about WORK languages. Like developer vs. designer.

This is dicey to write about but at one point my newly acquired colleagues and I were talking about password change functionality throughout the years. MANY years ago, our system sent a gibberish type password to a person trying to change theirs. You’ve probably experienced that kind of thing on many web sites. I certainly have. That got changed MANY years ago for various reasons and I won’t tell you what the process is now. Actually I’m not even sure I know what it is. I won’t tell you all the reasons either (I can’t even remember them) but one is that users were receiving temporary passwords with “bad words” in them. As in foul language. I’m remembering a beloved former colleague complaining about this to no end.

Lewie Lewii was religious (Jehovah’s Witness, which he NEVER brought to work). A very sweet man and a car aficionado. When I bought the Ninja (Honda Civic SI with a 6-speed manual tranny), he sidled up to me one day and said, “Can I ask you a personal question?” Well, uh, okay? “Is that Civic your car?” Yes. Yes it was. He seemed a little surprised that a baggy old 50-something kayak woman might be driving something like that. With performance taaaars no less.

The pic is of some temporary co-workers at Cubelandia a long time ago. This seems to be a Valentine partay. Broooosie provided Sparty and Wolverine. I brought Green Guy and Frooooggy to work. I was struggling to remember what all the party stuff in my cube was about. The party certainly didn’t happen in my cube. Looking at the date of the pic, I realize the streamers were leftover from what my boss and colleagues greeted with me when I returned to work after The Commander died. They did remove the ladder.

Brooosie is an interesting character in his own right but he is not the person who complained about the foul language in the temporary passwords. I’m pretty sure he didn’t even know about that.

Marital Discord at the Landfill a few weeks ago, a Twitter play.

KW: I want to relocate my sewing area upstairs to mouse’s old bedroom.
GG: But what about all my stuff in mouse’s bedroom?
KW: You’ve taken over lizard breath’s old room and now you want to take over mouse’s too?

This weekend, the GG dredged my sewing musheen “table” up outta the Landfill Dungeon and here it is. I figured out years ago that the dungeon was NOT a good place to do fiber art (or any kind of art). There is NO DAYLIGHT at all and the incandescent lights are not terribly high in wattage. And it’s a mess down there. So here is my “table” in the Purple Room (a story for another day perhaps). It’s actually my childhood desk and I want to get rid of it and replace it with something more appropriate for sewing. I “fit” the desk in a physical sense but I would like to have a little more legroom and, oh, I dunno what else. Need to scout around online…

To the right in the next pic is where this desk used to be. Would you be comfortable working in this messy room with minimal light? The light is lying. It is not that bright.

The dresser is a point of Marital Discord that hasn’t been fully resolved. I want to get rid of it (and its twin and the two identical HUGE desks that go with them). I believe I made some progress when I declared that I would not be comfortable in mouse’s old room with so much stuff in it and probably would not want to use it. He conceded (a bit) by putting the dresser in the closet with a couple of Anny Hubbard art pieces on top of it. A peace offering maybe? Okay. For now…. (We do have to keep a bed in this room for the very occasional guest and I am okay with that.)

To me, this is a long and complicated prodject. What I really want to do is hire Schlepper’s Haulaway (a real company and a cool one) or someone to come and take about half of the stuff out of our shithole house and take it wherever. But I am eating an elephant and this little bite is a start.

First, I did not take these photos. The Uncly Uncle (the other half of the Twinz of Terror) texted them and a bunch of others to the cFam spam group beginning yesterday. (Used with permission.)

The first is at his house in Gaylord where they were hit with a heavy ice storm. Lots of trees and branches came down but I don’t think there was any major damage to his house. But after a night without power and no end in sight, he and TBG (his wife), decamped to the group home at hoton lake, where it was too warm for ice (an hour or so south of Gaylord) but heavy rain flooded the yard (second pic).

Back before we rebuilt the group home, a rain like this would flood the kitchen. Once when Lizard Breath was a toddler, we met the UU up there for the weekend. We were upstairs in bed when he arrived and we heard SPLASH! SHIT! It was dark and he had dropped his pillow in the water🤪 The new group home is built four/five steps off the ground with a half-height basement underneath.

Here on the Planet Ann Arbor, we just got a severe storm alert on our phones. Way too warm for snow or ice here but we do worry a bit about wind, especially living in what is essentially an urban forest. The GG is wondering if he should put the cars in the street. I sure don’t want a tree to smash my car (been there done that) but I’m not sure it would be any safer in the street. It’s getting very dark and we’re getting radio warnings left and right but we’ll see what we end up getting.

The UU was scheduled to head down here today for a couple days of hiking with his twin. Right about now, he would be enjoying a nice pre-steak-dinner ‘hattan at the Landfill. It was not to be.

Meanwhile… the beach urchins are soaking up Mr. Golden Sun with Pengo Janetto (who is also a beach urchin) on a beach in Hawaii. Beach urchin is what I call all children who have grown up on the FinFam beach, even if they didn’t spend the whole summer there. I am definitely a beach urchin. My dad was a beach urchin. The Commander was not (Detroit gal) but she loved the beach and enthusiastically participated in beach community culture.

Follow-up to yesterday. If we had anything in our yard resembling an actual garden, a groundhog could and probably would be very destructive. But we don’t🐽

P.S. The Planet Ann Arbor storm was basically a “plassover” and we are gonna grill those afore-mentioned steaks.