Random bits of my so-called life.

The GG has been working on a landfill prodject this week. Unfortunately it is not a “take things to the landfill (or wherever)” prodject. Fortunately it has restored some crappy old rotten peckerwood from the box that surrounds our faaaarplace chimney.

For a few years when the beach urchins were young, a particularly assertive woodpecker discovered our metal chimney and woke up everyone in the house when the sun came up by pecking on the chimney and continued on and off throughout the day. Apparently this is not unusual behavior. It scared the beejeebus outta the beach urchins until the GG captured a picture of the offender and showed them that it was just a silly old bird.

The grandparents were another matter. When they would visit, they slept on our fold-out couch in the “back room” where the faaaarplace is located. They visited during a period of woodpecker metal chimney drilling and I warned them that they would be awakened when the woodpecker started, uh, pecking. The Comm said, “Oh no, it won’t wake us up.” I had to say, “Moom, the woodpecker WILL wake you up.” And it did. Note that I KNOW I’ve told these stories multiple times in this space of blather. I am NOT senile.

The metal chimney peckerwood died (I guess) a long time ago but we still get peckerwoods and they have made a mess of our siding back there over the years. Add that to the general neglect of our house’s siding, and it was PAST time to do a replacement. So that’s what the GG did this week and the pic is what our faaaarplace and chimney looked like from the back this morning, unprotected by its “box”.

A horrible note to end on but the GG is on a zoom call with his North Country Trail chapter and they were talking about MULTIPLE instances of people getting on the I75 SUV Speedway GOING THE WRONG WAY! One incident resulted in a tragedy. But then, I guess I haven’t ended because later on the GG was noisily eating dorito-type chips and crackling the bag like crazy and was called out for it. Why did he not mute himself? I do not know🤣🤣🤣

P.S. “You Peckerwood” was one of the names my dad called The Comm late in his life. I’m not sure exactly what it meant or whether there was a NSFW component to it. I suspect so but I’m kinda glad I don’t know. I’m not even sure The Comm knew.

A long time ago when the beach urchins were very young, The Commander and Grandroobly were visiting here and The Comm was deep into a book. I think it was a historical novel. She called it a potboiler and of course we all cracked up. At least the adults did.

What the heck is a potboiler? I never got an exact definition of what The Comm thought was a potboiler but I think it basically meant she was reading a historical novel in which there was a bunch of romance and non-explicit sex, etc. The Comm at one time subscribed somehow to a lifetime reading list. This was before those intertubes so she must have gotten the list from the library. I don’t know if she ever finished all of the books on that list. I’m guessing not. I’m sure she read some of them maybe long before she encountered the list. I also bet there were a few on that list that (in her heart of hearts) she wasn’t interested in reading. I’m not sure I’d’ve read them either. One of the good things that happened was that The Comm bought the complete works of Shakespeare and one of her granddaughters (a frequent Shakespearean actress) read that book and likely owns it now.

I finished what I’m calling a “potboiler around the edges” novel today. Tidelands. It’s the first in a series of three books. I have already signed on to read the second in the series. I won’t go into what started me on this series. Why I’m continuing it is because it’s an easy read, with some history that I don’t totally understand (I keep confusing the king with the Outlander series king, don’t ask).

I started writing this, then we ate dinner. Chicken shwarma, American style. I have TOTALLY lost my train of thought. Do you like potboilers? Or not? If you do, name one you like!

A lot of folks who have gotten to my stage of life more or less and have lost their mothers are talking on the internet about how many women they view as “mothers”.

First. A lot of people who have known me for a long time remember times when I may have seemed to be at odds with my mother. Guess what? I was. That’s what teenagers do. In the bird world, it might be called fledging. When humans fledge it can be a lot more messy. Or maybe not… All that to say that I DID very much get along with my mom even through those difficult years. They were very difficult for me so I can’t imagine how difficult they were for her. I do know that my mother’s home and moomincabin were ALWAYS safe for me. And fortunately I grew up.

Aunts? I have been BLESSED with aunts. I loved them all, biological aunts and in-laws. The two I remember the best are Radical Betty, who was one of my best friends as well as an aunt and my mom’s sister Charlotte who I didn’t see all that often but she was always fun.

Then there was my mother-in-law, Grandma Sally, who treated me like a daughter even though she had four biological daughters plus a few more daughters-in-law.

Then there was my cousin The Beautiful Jan who had children when I was still a child. She is/was a wonderful mom and I tried to emulate her when I became a mother. As I did with my sister-in-law The Lady of Linden, who birthed five children before I had my first.

And the family friends. Ginny Boult, mom of one of my best childhood friends and wonderful friend of The Commander. Her house was always a safe place, not that I needed one. Barbara Mullin, the woman who taught me to swim (and everybody else on the beach 🤣) and put up with me playing with her children even though I wasn’t always nice to her daughter (ugh). Esther Sherman who came with her husband Pete and their five children and camped in the moomincabin yard and shared our outhouse. She got mad at me one time about tearing a hole in Danny’s handmade (by her) sweater and didn’t hesitate to ream me out. I don’t think Danny cared. He was my boyfriend (we were six). But she was right.

Anyway, it takes a village (as they say) and some of these women were part of my village. And they are totally why I became a successful adult. And I’m sure I’m missing some.

Thank you moms!

I did a plum dash when the store opened this morning. I had a list! A mother’s day dinner list. When I got there I couldn’t believe how many cars were in the parking lot. Normally at the time the store opens, there are almost no vee-hickles in the parking lot. But, oh yeah, it’s mother’s day. Seeing young dads extricate their children from car seats and men exiting the store with cut flowers in hand affirmed my suspicions.

My mother’s day? It was WONDERFUL. A walk early in the morning, a FUN trip to plum. The store manager seems to recognize me but I’m not sure he knows of my current connection to the store. And I doubt he knows that it’s been my main grock shopping place since it opened 16 years ago, replacing an old movie theatre. I was ECSTATIC when the Plum opened.

I maybe have different needs than a lot of mothers do for mother’s day. Mine were met perfectly. I got my usual flats of impatiens (from one beach urchin) and for whatever reason, the GG actually POTTED them. He had already finished one pot before I realized what he was doing. My other main gift was a haircut (from the other beach urchin). Man oh man did I need that. This wasn’t my first pandemic haircut but it’s been two years. And no, I am not afraid to go to a salon to get my hair cut. It’s much more complicated than that not to mention too long and boring to talk about here.

So both our beach urchins collaborated on dinner, which was zucchini stuffed with tabouleh and spiced ground beef and various accompaniments.

I haven’t ever asked for much in the kid department but they are the best!

My trip to the farmers market this morning was a fast one. I am cooking for one again for a long weekend and then the calendar hit me in the face. Wouldn’t you know Memorial Day is just around the corner even though it is a late one this year.

So we’ll be at the moominbeach that weekend and before and/or after but I still don’t have my brain totally wrapped around that. All I know is that I do NOT want to drive up there on the Friday of the holiday weekend with all the yay-hoos. If you are a yooperlander with a permanent residence on the Planet Ann Arbor, you have to be cagey, as The Commander used to say.

She LIVED in the yooperland and the last time I heard her say the word “cagey”, it involved driving an automotive vee-hickle into her garage. Except not long after that she had duct taped her driver’s side mirror on after some maybe not so cagey garage driving. She was nervous about getting it fixed, I think she thought someone might report her somewhere and take her driver’s license away. But. Not. Auto repair shops don’t normally care why your mirror is duct-taped on, they just want to fix it and take your money. And so they did. I mean she couldda lied and said, “My daughter did it. She’s not cagey about the garage.” Or something like that [snort].

That is all to say that all I bought today was asparagus. I knew that I could incorporate asparagus into the next week’s meals but I didn’t want to buy a whole bunch of other stuff that might end up in the compost heap. This IS asparagus season and I do NOT want to miss it. I sure hope I don’t miss shelling pea season (June) but we’ll see.

I didn’t get any pics AT the farmers market but I got this one of an adjacent building from where I parked Cygnus. It is free parking there until 8:00 AM, which I was able to inform a woman in the next car who asked as she arrived. I don’t really mind paying for parking, just it’s easier not to have to deal with the app. Although the app is easier than making sure you have umpteen bazillion quarters in your car.

Answer? Nooooo! 🤣🤣🤣

That’s not even the short answer. That’s THE answer. I LIKE aminals. I like dogs and cats. I am not in any way shape or form allergic to them (or pretty much anything else). I just don’t want to deal with one as a full-time lifetime commitment. I applaud those who do.

When I ordered my most recent roooomba, I did a little questionnaire about my housekeeping needs. Who lived in the house? Adults only. Are there pets? NO. I fergit what else but it steered me to a nice little rooomba that I love but may not be the best for cleaning up pet hair.

I remember when my brother and his fam used to take their 2-3 dogz up to the moomincabin. My parents loved the dogz (and so did I) but they did not like to clean up the fur and beach sand that blanketed the cabin. Once when I was there on an afternoon when my brother and fam had left, I witnessed my parents SWING INTO ACTION with brooms and vacuum cleaners.

Not that an occasional pet dog or cat would not be welcome at the moomincabin. Mia was a wonderful guest dog. Even Bugs and Horsey commented on her behavior, albeit they were not behind her when she went into a sand-digging frenzy. But it is so nice to only have to clean up the sand and pine needles, etc., that adults track in. That is except for the occasional shower of drywall dust but we welcome that person 🤣🤣🤣.

My back yard was FULL of birdsong this afternoon when this catsa came to visit. I dunno if this cat is a bird killer or not. It is a familiar cat to me, a fairly frequent visitor. I know because of the blue collar, which is not visible in this pic.

Not the best pic but these are a FEW of the 100 daffodil bulbs the GG planted last fall. A little fuzzy but I like how our “bushes” or whatever they are frame the daffs.

There’s a whole line of daffs along edge of the “vinca” ground cover in front of the Landfill. The “bushes”? They look okay as a frame in this pic but they are fugly fugly fugly. Part of me wants to get rid of them and the GG did get rid of one of the worst ones earlier this week. The problem is that they provide bird / animal habitat and I don’t want to destroy our friends’ homes and resources. Not to mention that (daffs aside) we do not have a good track record at keeping plants alive so what would we put in place of them and how long would it stay alive. In fact, I will even miss the one “bush” the GG did cut down. It turned into a tyrannosaur every time there was a snow or ice storm (because it would get weighted down).

In an “experimental design” photoshop class back at community college, one of our prodjects was to design pages for an online daffodil store. Each of our prodjects involved following a “style” dictated by the prof. I can’t find the specs for this one but it was a totally over-the-top style with fancy striped and polka-dotted backgrounds and scalloped borders and the idea was to kind of go a bit CRAZY.

And I did. I created a pastel fantasy world with daffs everywhere (actual pics) and incorporated fantastical aminals and insects and things I created in Illustrator. I was participating in a critique at one point and I checked myself a bit and asked, “Is this TOO over the top?” A classmate opined that it maybe was but the teacher was an emphatic NO. The goal of the project was to completely embrace the design style so over-the-top was okay. Get those students out of their comfort zones!

In real life? I know that my design was a clumsy student effort and I doubt I would ever have presented it to a client (if I’d ever had a client). But I’m not a graphic designer. I’m a user experience designer and online banking products are not known for experimental graphic design. Our product doesn’t even allow for images except that clients can put a logo in the upper left corner. I am fluent with the conventions of our product and easily able to design changes or new functionality without changing the overall user experience.

The idea was to drive down to the Huron/Seventh Street intersection and try to figger out why the changed traffic pattern was so confusing (mainly to people complaining on next door neighbor🤣). Our city council has spent the last few years changing traffic patterns all over downtown. One-way streets now two-way. Badly designed bike lanes (arguably, some people like them). Most of the work happened during COVID…

We’ll talk about all that some other day (or not). This particular intersection I was really curious about because our first apartment on the Planet Ann Arbor was about a block away from it on North Seventh. In other words, I traversed that intersection ALL THE TIME! It has always been a funky intersection in that North Seventh St. and its counterpart South Seventh St. do not line up at all so you have to make a big jog when you cross Huron. I have long been accustomed to navigating this intersection but it is a busy one and people are apparently confused by the “new” signage (or not). Mainly that there is a new “no left turn” sign but a big left arrow remains painted on the pavement. Which is correct? And if there’s no left turn, why didn’t the city paint over the pavement arrow?

Anyway, this is a fairly recent picture of the old place where we occupied the second floor. It had some good points. I loved hanging out on the porch, it was a quick walk through West Park to downtown, and the landlord was friendly. But it was small and ragged and after a couple years walking on the roller-coaster floors I started feeling a little seasick, figuratively speaking at least.

When we got married (1982), we moved to a sturdier upper flat maybe six blocks west and then two years later when the first beach urchin made her presence known, we bought the Landfill. No more landlords and a sizeable back yard with a woods behind it. The first time I walked in I thought, “Yes, this is my house.” It still is.

Even though I have driven N. Seventh a couple times in the last few months, it wasn’t until last evening that I noticed our old apartment was NO LONGER THERE!

I texted this pic to my cousin who ALSO lived there for a while. I took the flat and her partner’s landline number over when they moved out of state (662-2983, a good old Planet Ann Arbor phone number). My cousin’s guess is that because of the green grass nothing will be built there. She may well be right but I have a hard time believing that in this affluent little city something new will not be built. Detroit might be another story although there is much more renovation work there now than like 20 years ago or whatever.

The GG said that he had noticed some earlier renovation work on the old building during various peregrinations around town. Maybe whoever owns it now decided it was too far gone for renovations or couldn’t afford them? Sad if that’s true. I dunno what’s next for that lot but I will be keeping tabs on it. I hope the city doesn’t let some developer shoehorn a big ugly multifamily thingy in there.

This is trillium. If you don’t know about trillium, it is a spring wildflower in the Great Lake State and probably many other places and this one is in the woods behind my house. It is a protected plant, meaning you aren’t supposed to pick it. The back of my brain is tickling me a bit that the actual rules are complicated but I don’t really know what they are. Bottom line is we don’t pick trillium.

Except for the time The Commander did. Actually she didn’t “pick” it, I mean she didn’t pick the pretty flowers and put them in a vase. She dug up a trillium plant and attempted to transplant it somewhere else, her house or wherever.

We were on a family ride in the south-eastern yooperland. Me and the GG, our two young beach urchins, and my parents. This was a two vee-hickle operation as we had driven The Indefatigable up there that weekend and between us and the grandparents, there wasn’t a car that could legally or comfortably accommodate six people.

We drove down to and around the Cedarville / Hessel / DeTour / Raber area and as we were driving back north toward Sault Ste. Siberia, we hung a left off M129 south of Pickford onto Rockview Road. The Comm had been told there were trillium plants galore along that road.

And we found some. The Comm was prepared for this trillium heist with a bucket and trowel and glubs. She was also very nervous. The Comm was a Rule Following Woman and she looked forward and back along the road in case the “police” (DNR agents) might arrest her. She was as nervous as if she were about to rob a bank. She accomplished the heist without being apprehended by anyone. Another vee-hickle came up behind us at one point but they were not the DNR and didn’t look like they knew or cared anything about wildflowers.

I’m not sure if the trillium transplant was successful. I don’t remember ever seeing trillium around the yards at the moomincabin or Dillon House after that. I’m sorry that I abetted a trillium heist but it was so much fun to experience my mother actually do something illegal🤣. I mean when I was a kid, I couldn’t even say the word “ain’t” unless I was over in the schoolyard or someplace she couldn’t hear me. And that doesn’t even break a law. After all, “ain’t” is in the dictionary.

First, I spent a while this morning monitoring a chipmunk’s progress scampering back and forth around the edges of the back room, behind the furniture for the most part. I was right to be skeptical about the GG’s capabilities about capturing it because he didn’t. After maybe 10 minutes of this (felt like hours), I excused myself to use the Water Closet. When I came out of there, the GG was on the phone with the UU discussing the latest fraudulent scammer attempts to usurp a relative’s plastic card.

That is all I will say about that except that as annoying as two-factor authentication is, you are HAPPY that your bank is hiring my employer to provide it. You’re welcome and yes, two-factor authentication IS ANNOYING to me too! But being on the phone a part of xmas eve and day dealing with my bank because someone has hacked one of my [very few] plastic cards is more annoying. It was eventually resolved.

The chipmunk apparently went down into the dungeon and we (i.e., the GG) never found it. The GG thinks it actually gets in and out of the Landfill via the basement and not our rather holey doorwall screens. I dunno.

Next thing… The Landfill Refrigimatator has been intermittently making a RATTLY noise for MONTHS. I was kinda rolling with it for a long time but in the last few days, it seems to have gotten WORSE plus a faint WHINY noise started up. All this time the GG has been saying he thinks defrosting the freezer will fix it. Um. Nope. This is a FROST-FREE fridge and if you tell me I have to start defrosting it, WE ARE GETTING A NEW ONE! Turns out it does NOT need to be defrosted at all. It is various other minor (I hope) things related to a “motor”. He cleaned up the motor and it hasn’t rattled since.

That got us into a Landfill-style discussion about how old the current fridge is. He was thinking we bought it in 2008 but that was not the argument. We DID buy this one in 2008. The argument was that we bought an earlier version of THIS fridge in 1997. So we have had two. After rummaging through a bunch of paperwork, he agreed with me.

The fridge we bought in 1997 (that he didn’t seem to remember) replaced the then 31-year-old fridge that came with the Landfill. That one had been in a failure mode for YEARS but being young “poor” parents, we didn’t replace it and we didn’t replace it and we didn’t replace it. Until. The ice storm of 1997. When the power finally came back on, that ancient fridge was making a loud seagull kind of noise. Skrawk! Skrawk! It was a Monday and the GG was fixing to go off to work and I said something like, “NO YOU ARE NOT GOING TO WORK! WE ARE BUYING A NEW FRIDGE!” And we did. It lasted 11 years and then it died and we bought a nearly identical copy of it in 2008. The GG is conflating storms and refrigimatators a bit but the 1997 fridge just died on its own (in 2008). It was not storm related.

Whoosh! Did that all make sense?

Oh Geez. First, I didn’t get to bed “on time” last night. That was okay. I tossed and turned a bit but not a whole ton. I had some REM-type processing dreams that I can’t really remember at this point, just that certain people had bits and pieces of information I needed to sort out a problem and I couldn’t get them all in the same room at once, let alone answer my questions. Some of them are dead, so there ya go.

I got up 5:00-ish to use the water closet. I didn’t really go back to sleep after that. I kept looking at the clock as it inched closer and closer to 6:00 AM. At six, I decided I could slodge around a bit longer even though I wasn’t able to sleep. But then it was 6:30. Yikes, I need to get up. Except, why the heck is it so dern dark? Was it raining? I wasn’t sure. I grabbed my phone to check the weather. Guess what? My phone proclaimed that it was ONLY 5:30 AM.

It took me a while to process that. I mean for a weird moment I was thinking my phone was wrong… I thought about calling the old “at the tone the time will be” lady but it’s been a looooonnng time since we’ve had a landline and I don’t even know how to do that anymore. Like doesn’t my iPhone connect with a reliable time source? Naval Observatory Master Clock or whatever? I schlepped out to the chitchen to check Gertrude’s clock and it matched my iPhone.

Okay then. I guess it’s not quiiiiite time to get up yet. It wasn’t until MUCH later in the day that I got to wondering why it had been so dark at “6:30” since Mr. Golden Sun rises BEFORE 6:30 these days. Like yesterday when he was brilliant and well above ground when I got to the farmers market at seven. Somehow our alarm clock, which doesn’t keep good time anyway, had apparently gotten switched to Daylight Savings time AGAIN.

It was a good day and I got some vaccuming and mopping chores done and cleaned the bathroom. A beach urchin was scheduled to visit late this afternoon to grab some art work I don’t want and some yard cleanup tools she needs. When she found out we were grilling a chicken, she decided to stay for dinner. I would have asked her but I am sensitive to my adult daughters’ lives enough that I don’t want them to feel pressured to come over to the Landfill for dinner every Sunday or whatever. I mean it would be so easy to fall into that kind of thing now that no one is in SanFran or Detroit or Ypsilanti or Manchester but I know they need their own space. But we had fun tonight!

Haha! The cattycorner neighbors are moving. When their house was still up for sale, the beach urchins were at least superficially interested. We all decided it was a little too close for comfort🤣

We have robins again. ’tis the season. They have nested around the corner from our backyard “nook” this time so we didn’t realize that they had laid four eggs and one hatched today. The GG took this pic using a selfie stick at a time when the parents were momentarily away from the next. We are very careful not to disturb them. This baby is not totally out of its egg.

This was the first Saturday in May and that marks the day the farmers market opens at seven AM for the first time of the season. I didn’t have a whole lot on my list, onions and apples mainly. The last time the market made a facebook post they said there wasn’t asparagus yet but there would be some soon. So I was on my way back to my car and lo and behold, a woman was putting out ASPARAGUS! You know I bought some.

As glad as I was to obtain asparagus today, it made me miss the old days when Farmer John ran his market in the lunchroom at Cubelandia. Those days are gone forever and I am reaaalllly taaaared and totally outta steam so g’night.

The GG, not me. Lemme see…

Monday: The GG collected a bunch of crapola and took a drive around town to find a place that wanted it. Kiwanis is not open on Mondays but bingo for Sharehouse. There’s a lot more to go…

Tuesday: He walked to Dexter and BACK (10 miles each way). And complained about various aches and pains the whole evening and the next day. I was like, you couldda called me for a ride!

Wednesday: Got rid of more old Apple stuff and backed up my iPhone and laptop and I dunno what else. Aaaaand…
Checked out the size of the smaller iPhone 14 Pro! It’s beyond time. For me anyway.

Thursday: Walked downtown and back and I fergit what else.

Friday: Lucky-shuckial work in the Lyme Lounge. Only one trip to the hardware store and no electrocutions. Window washing and I dunno what else. I didn’t take this pic today. He was window washing EXACTLY one year ago TODAY so I used last year’s pic.

FOUR years ago today? Well, the fire at the Notre Dame cathedral happened but earlier that day, the big news was that a cassowary in Florida turned on its owner and killed him. I texted this to my kids and a niece. That niece, a forensic anthropologist in Florida at the time, texted back that she expected a call from the police and then again texted to confirm she was on her way in. Although some of us laughed, it was really not funny.

That stuff happened pre-COVID of course and I was in a conference room with Amazon Woman when the Notre Dame news flashed on the company website we were projecting. I’ll never forget her gasp.

Waaaay back in the day, I used to prepare my pre-school Mouse for her weekly activities with a little song.

Monday nursery school
Tuesday story hour
Wednesday nursery school
Thursday swimming class
Friday nursery school
Saturday nothing
Sunday nothing too

My weekly cooking schedule is a weeeee bit like this. I cook interesting stuff on the weekend. It is enough food that I can alternate leftover nights throughout the week. If everything works out right, Thursday is a conglomeration of everything still left over. It doesn’t always work out that well but it did tonight. Scallop/greens dish from last weekend, lamb stew and garlic bread from Sunday, ham et al frozen from Easter. It was just little bits ad pieces of everything and so worked out well.

I took this pic last night and promptly forgot about it. The GG was in the Lyme Lounge in the driveway and I was standing at my kitchen sink.

I thought his silhouette out there might be interesting but I didn’t look at the photo until this afternoon. Yes, you can see the GG in there, silhouetted against his laptop. But look at all those other reflections. A hand soap dispenser. My then empty compost container. Some kitchen utensils sticking up out of my teal crock. If you look hard enough you can even sorta see meeeee. And there are LED light things that I can’t even quiiiite figger out.

I LOVE accidentally interesting photos like this. (At least I think it’s interesting.)

The rest of the day was meeee working on various work stuff and the GG backing up my iPhone and laptop and then figuring out what every single dad-blasted device was connected to our main wifi router or switch or whatever it is. We weren’t worried about other people using our wifi*, just trying to level-set on what was WHAT. One puzzling thing was that there was an Android device connected to our wifi. Say what? Turns out it is the picture frame thingy here in my chitchen. Okay then.

*We lock down our wifi here on The Planet Ann Arbor. Up on the moominbeach we don’t. I forbade that when I first installed a DSL back in 2011. I was telecommuting from there while dealing my mother’s last year of life. I was happy to provide free wifi to my neighbor-cousins. At the time, most of them were only up there for short periods of time. At this point, the neighbor-cousins on one side of us are year-round residents and have long paid for their own wifi. On the other side, the folks are not there all year (or even all summer) and I remain happy to provide service. If worse comes to worst, we have good cell service there so phones can always get on the internet.

I woke up to two deaths in the rock and roll world. Of COURSE, Gordon Lightfoot. Maybe I should put the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald on the homepod. Okay I just did. I was in Sault Ste. Siberia that night but we won’t go there tonight…

Gordon Lightfoot is a legend but I have to note that another old rock musician died yesterday, Tim Bachman of Bachman Turner Overdrive. I loved BTO’s music too. Taking Care of Business, Let it Ride, and others. Those were good driving songs in whatever crappy RUSTY old vee-hickle I was driving back then. I think his death was a bit overshadowed by Gordon Lightfoot’s but he made some wonderful contributions to the music of my youth.

Before all of that… Last night a Sault Ste. Siberian childhood / facebook friend posted that a classmate had died. The late classmate never overshared on facebook but we were “friends” and I knew that she was dealing with serious health issues by reading between the lines. I can’t really describe my childhood relationship with her.

We mostly knew each other from ballet lessons (which I was HORRIBLE AT) as young chidren. We went to different grade schools and didn’t really meet up again until junior high and high school. By that time she was (to my eyes) a diva. She was in the in crowd. I was not. My first high school boyfriend was friends with whatever boyfriend she was hanging out with and I used to feel like she might have wanted to steal MY boyfriend from me.

She didn’t want my boyfriend but it took me a while to figger that out because I was a frickin’ idiot. One of the last times I remember seeing her was in the Alpha Bar lady’s room if you could call it that. She was about to marry a hot looking Canadian hockey player which involved moving to Toronto. I was hanging out with my beloved Grinchie cousin and a bunch of our yooper friends and wondering what the f*ck I was gonna do with my life. Ozone Jim and Ozone Bob and Dusty and Marvin Chard Schmucker.

I became a successful failure and I’m not really sure what my childhood friend did with her life. I have figgered out that she had a child with the hockey player and that she married another guy later on.

We became facebook friends a long time ago and all of the old childhood crapola had fallen away.

Godspeed Donna. You are in good company with Gordon Lightfoot and Tim Bachman.

I rather unexpectedly finished my Game of Thrones prodject (intentionally misspelled) Saturday night. I thought I had a few more episodes to go. I’m not exactly sure when this phenomenon started but toward the end of the season, the episodes got fewer and longer and all of a sudden, I was done!

I am a bit bereft about the ending of the GOT series. I started watching it last fall. Alas, I could not keep up with it. So I read the books. There are five (long) books and if I have it right, the author has long been planning a sixth but has suffered from writer’s block. I suffer from writer’s block a LOT but my prodjects are nowhere near as epic as GOT. A daily blahg of blather and the functional specifications that I write at my financial tech job which pays the “rent” here at the Landfill. I finished reading the GOT books to the detriment of my Goodreads challenge for the year and then I began re-watching the TV series.

Apparently the TV series writers went on ahead and their story eventually diverged quite a bit from the author’s. At least I think it did. I believe they did consult the author and the general arc of the story seemed to ring true to what I think his vision is.

I did like how the TV series ended things whether or not the author may have agreed with everything. It wrapped things up on a positive note. I needed that after watching so many episodes of violence and dystopia (which may not be the right word) and family members dead or separated for years. I have a feeling the author might have needed to write 10 more books to wrap things up at the pace he was going. This is NOT a criticism. He is an amazing writer. I think he has an immense vision and hasn’t yet quite figured out how to tie it all back together. I think one reason this is okay was maybe that it gave the TV writers a bit of poetic license in their adaptation. For all I know, people will write dissertations about this someday but I will certainly not be one of them.

What I mainly had trouble processing throughout the series was the battle scenes. I could not follow them whatsoever and had to just kind of ride along, waiting until the end of the battle to find out who won and which characters made it through. But that’s how I personally process movie/TV battle scenes anyway and not a criticism.

All that said, I am now in mourning, wondering when I will be ready to start another series. The last episode didn’t end with insights from the TV writers and I missed that. I didn’t binge this series in the sense that I watched umpteen bazillion episodes a day. I saved an episode (or two (and once or twice three)) for each evening. I looked forward to that every day and savored watching it. I have heard that the Golden Compass is now a TV series. I couldn’t convince the GG to watch GOT with me but he has read Golden Compass and seems more open to that. I’m not sure if I’m ready to start a new series yet but I’ll get there.

The GG is gently pushing the beach urchins to get some of their lingering belongings out of the Landfill. Getting rid of things is hard for EVERYONE in our family! I “get” the Marie Kondo philosophy but I have trouble deploying it.

Progress was made today but people (all of us) were a bit exhausted by the process and there really wasn’t all that much to go through! This is one of the few items that is a keeper. This is the back of the shirt. There is a MANATEE on the front! We aren’t exactly sure why “I like cheese” and a mouse are on the back. Well, except that a MOUSE drew the pictures and wrote the text. And why does the letter H make up the mouse’s legs and a lot of the letter parts (embiggen if you care). Possibly(?) the H stands for our elementary school (Haisley) but we do not really know.

When the first beach urchin arrived this afternoon, she proclaimed that the Landfill smelled like FISH! She is not crazy about fish. She emulates her maternal grandfather in that preference or lack thereof. Well. Fish? I did saute some scallops last night but scallops aren’t really fishy smelling. Then I spied the bowl of red onions that I had cut up this morning and left raw with a cover over them. Hmmmm. Well, maybe it was actually an onion smell, said the urchin. Yes.

I chased the onion smell out via tonight’s lamb stew. The onions were destined for the stew and once that stuff started a-bubblin’, the odious smell went away.

The title? A rhythmical rendition of how I buy a lot of things.

And it didn’t climb up on my lap. That always freaks out the GG, who seems to think I am befriending a catsa and will start feeding it or whatever. Anyway, I didn’t have a lap at this moment. I was standing up!

My encounters with neighborhood cats are brief. I enjoy an occasional visitor but other people around here do not want cats around. Why? Because they eat birds. Waaaaay back in the day, I was rudely awakened in the middle of the night by a crazed man who asked me if it would be okay with me if he “shot” a cat. (Oh, don’t get yer undies in a bunch. He was talking about an air gun. It’s illegal to shoot an actual faaararm within our city limits.)

Well, NOOOOOO! It would NOT be okay with me (I didn’t know what kind of gun he was talking about when I answered that question). The problem was that baby birds were fledging (in the middle of the night) and some cat was trying to eat them. The GG put on clothing (and took it off again) something like THREE TIMES so he could go outside and try to scare the cat away. In the end, alas, Daddy Bird lost the war. Sad? Yes. But whaddya gonna do?

It was a pretty darn boring day in general. I declined a “date” that involved a trip to Harbor Freight. I probably wouldn’t have turned down a date that involved a trip to the dump or Kiwanis.

I mobilized late in the afternoon and made sea scallops with greens (spinach and collard) and rice. Scallions, garlic, soy, sesame oil, and lime added a bit of zip. Recipe from the NYT cooking app and I ordered the scallops from Luke’s Lobster, which is a pandemic find although local stores also carry scallops. These were extra good and I will definitely make this again. Soooo good.

I started my blahg in 2003 and although I was a mother, I did not consider myself a mommy blogger. My kids were in high school and college then and I knew waaaaay better than to over-share any bits of their lives on the internet. I mean, I’m sure there were many bits of their lives that I didn’t even KNOW ABOUT (or wanted to)🤣🤣🤣

For a while I followed a bunch of mommy blogs. I mean moms of young children, babies and toddlers, etc. I liked some of them better than others. A lot of them seemed like the same old same old prom queens and sorority sisters I rather disdained in my youth.*

I felt a bit like a voyeur. Some of the mommy bloggers seemed a little too cute or cool or whatever for their own good and I would chortle at some of the stuff they posted, oversharing and sometimes posting questionable pictures of babies without clothing on. Pictures like that should remain in private family albums. Other more dangereuse voyeurs than a baggy old moom were also out there. When one mommy blogger was approached by such a voyeur, she blogged, “What on earth has happened to the internet?” I could only think, “Nothing has happened to the internet. It is and always has been the wild wild west and anyone can get to your blog including people searching for pictures of naked children.”

I figured that a lot of these gals would age out of mommy blogs and it seems like they have. Or maybe it’s their children who have. Most kids learn how to read and I bet school-age kids are not interested in reading about their baby antics, at least not out there for everyone on earth to also read.

Maybe some of these women have moved to FaceBook or Instagram? If they have, I have not searched them out in those places and don’t plan to.

My blahg has always been my own dumping ground for whatever is in my head. I do write about my kids and other family members but they *are* part of my life and I try to be discreet.

*DISCLAIMER! There are some WONDERFUL prom queens and sorority sisters. Some prom queens get elected because they are truly nice folks. I was just jealous. At least of prom queens. I couldn’t have cared less about living in a sorority house with umpteen bazillion women. Living with a few roommates in a crappy box apartment or crumbling old house was bad enough although I had some good roommates too, including my cousin for a while.