Random bits of my so-called life.

I am so glad “we” (our country) are not bickering about football players taking a knee any more. At least I don’t think we are but maybe I’ve missed something. I never had an issue with it. It seemed like a form of peaceful protest against some things our country doesn’t seem to “get”. Like people are people are people no matter what color they are and should therefore be treated as, well people.

It was/is a football Saturday and although I couldn’t care less about team sports, I do like the ambience of football Saturdays in our Big 10 town. I also don’t mind it on TV especially when the weather is bitterly cold like it is today.

So the GG walked down to the Big House and then (eventually) over to get porterized. I enjoyed my space-ification and used it to clean the refrigimatator and READ. The Marriage Portrait and having trouble putting it down.

Late in the afternoon, I received this pic. It is a requested xmas gift. The problem is (or was) what IS it? The instruction with the pic was something like, “pick it up soon to get the sale price.” Okay… WHERE do I “pick it up”? Turns out it was REI and there ain’t no way I was gonna drive over there to buy it. I mean, I can just order it online, roight? Like I’ve been doing with REI stuff for years, even before the pandemic. So, ordered. And yes he knows this. Why? Because he thought I would have to GO TO REI to get the sale price. No no no no no! I did talk him down off that ledge.

Whaddo I want for xmas? Well nothing really but I do have to provide some ideas because I always get asked. My answer THIS YEAR? Couch. Couch. Couch. Couch. Mid-century modern. Couch. And. This is a two-part request. 1) Couch. 2) GET RID OF THE OLD COUCH.

That would be the Green Couch. I didn’t want to adopt the Green Couch in the first place. But I made my peace with it. But now? After going on three years of telecommuting from it, I am done done done.

And by getting rid of it I don’t mean putting it down in the dungeon to further molder. I mean taking it outside, putting it in the trashmobile, and dumping it in an appropriate place.

Mother’s March means the chief cook and bottle washer (aka meeeee) is trying to get rid of leftovers or whatever. I got that term from My Dear Uncle Harry who did a lot of the cooking for his family. (He is alive and kicking but not doing the cooking any more.)

I worked on Mother’s March tonight. I concocted a pasta/veggie/sausage dish that incorporated the remains of a bag of mixed frozen veggies that the GG bought on one of his northern boondoggles. I do not buy veggies in that form factor although I do occasionally buy frozen peas and lima beans, etc.

To be fair, I also used up some fancy blueberry bratwurst that *I* had purchased at Sparrow last June. It was really good but not the right size to put into a bun (waaaaay too long). I wish I could get to freezer zero before turkey day but I will definitely not.

The pic is one of Bill’s Birch Point Beach Bank Benches. Except this one is on the North Country Trail near Tahquamenon Falls. A hiker who encountered this bench a couple months ago posted to the facebook group that they thought someone was burning wood from it (the remains of a campfire was nearby). The GG saw the pic and replied with something like, “Naw, it’s rotted wood and I’ll fix it.” And so he did that this weekend.

We are into snow around here now and so I didn’t really want to ask how his drive back to The Planet was. It turns out that it was intermittently AWFUL. From the Big Mac bridge to Gaylord yesterday it was White Knuckle. Today was better except when it wasn’t. Intermittent snow and sleet and whatever. Himself got home safely this afternoon 🧡🧡🧡

So I am omnivorous. I have ALWAYS been part carnivore and definitely plan a lot of menus around meat, although we do also have meatless days. I can’t really say why this is. My dad was a pretty darn good carnivore. He didn’t touch fish and even complained about chicken (khkhh was his opinion or sometimes SHIT). As a kid, I loved both chicken and fish. Of course we ate vegetables too. The Commander made sure of that having grown up on a farm and possessing a home economics degree. (She would kill me if she knew I called her degree that but I can’t remember what the heck it was actually called.)

I don’t know what is really going on but I sometimes wonder if whatever DNA created me makes me NEED to eat meat. Like how much protein my body needs and how it processes it and what kind of protein… Well, who knows… It’s got to be different for everyone. I do like a wide variety of foods but a nice little beef filet on the grill remains one of my faves. With friends. FinFam Steak Dinner. By “friends” I mean sides that go with steak but also family and friends to share it with. I certainly don’t eat steak every day, more like every few weeks.

I was intrigued when NPR’s All Things Considered ran a piece on cultivated meat this afternoon. I didn’t listen to all of it so I didn’t totally understand it but it sounds like “they” are figuring out how to grow actual meat from well, I dunno, meat “cells” or whatever. Which means you don’t have to raise aminals just to kill them to eat them. Which we have been doing forever but… (Here’s where I run out of words).

There are so many issues to think about. The most personal one for me at the MOMENT is would I like this cultivated meat? Can they actually create a beef tenderloin or ribeye steak or whatever from cells or whatever. I am all for reducing the need to raise aminals and kill them on a large scale but I would like to know more. And will this fancy new meat cost more at the grocery store than the regular old meat?

I know I would never be happy eating the proverbial “beans and rice” every day (although I do love beans and rice!).

The book I’m currently reading (Lungfish) finds a young mother and her child isolated and destitute on an island with a drug-addicted husband/father. They eat native flora/fauna when they can’t get to the mainland. When they can get to the mainland, they can only afford to buy cheap grocks. So the native foods aren’t enough to satisfy them in terms of quantity and taste. The food they can afford on the mainland fills them up but isn’t always very nutritious. In both cases, they are probably not getting enough protein.

Emphasis on the “GAG” part of the word. A disclaimer here? I did NOT come up with this tag for Make America Glorious And Great Again. I am not that clever. I dunno who did come up with it but it is now all over them thar intertubes, the ones ol’ Al invented (not).

I was going to title this entry “Here we go again”, which referred to the first snowfall we’ve had that stuck, although it is gone now. I guess that title would also have been fine for the Orange Baboon’s third run for prez. I hope “we” (aka his “base”) aren’t stoopid enough to fall for him again but who knows. I do NOT want to look at his mug and listen to his Word Salad for the next two (or six?) years. I wish somebody would put him out of his misery. Oh, I don’t mean kill him. Just get one of those big old hooks, pull him off the stage, and feed him a hamberder.

I also don’t want to give him any oxygen at all, even the teensy tinesy little bit my blahg might generate. So let’s talk the S word for a bit. No it is NOT an early snowfall. November 2014 the first half of the month emulated the previous winter’s Polar Vortex, when Canananada got drunk and fell asleep on the upper midwest (I cannot take credit for making that up either). I have seen snow in September. I have seen snow in June. I think. Maybe that was in the yooperland.

This bitsy little snowfall was earlier than last year’s first but not by a whole lot. Even people who have lived here forever are constantly commenting on how weird the weather is. Not. This is the Great Lake State. It does EVERYTHING here. In just about every month. We can have days and days of 70s temps in the winter and I keep glubs at the moomin for those nice cold July days we sometimes get. Radical Betty one particularly cold July: We just get a little BOX of summer.

G’night! I’m not gonna support the Orange Baboon (I didn’t before) and neither should you. Bad Orange Man 💩💩💩

P.S. Another good one: “Florida Man makes announcement”

Grock worker beach urchin texted this afternoon to report that she had been Courtoised. That could mean a lot of things. In this case it meant that two members of the cFam visited her at work today and then proceeded to get another cFam guy on facetime or whatever.

Yes, they were all guys. Having guy fun I might add. Our oldest nephew called the GG today about meeting for lunch since he had a prodject going on here on The Planet Ann Arbor. So he and the GG met at the Village Kitchen (VK). I did not accompany them but if I had not just stocked up on wrap sandwiches at Plum this morning, I’d’ve maybe asked for a take-out gyro. I have to keep reminding people I’m still not doing indoor dining but also, friendly introvert that I am, I wasn’t up for cFambly style chitchat today🐸

The VK is across the parking lot from the Plum so OF COURSE being cFam guyz, they visited my mouse (who was at work, I hugged her there this morning) after lunch. And THEN. They got the UU on the phone just to make it all more fun and cFambly-like. UU being the GG’s identical twin and therefore also nephew’s uncle. All this while my mouse was trying to get to a work teleconference.

And yes, “service workers” do have meetings. One that is burned into my brain is when I worked at Tempo umpteen bazillion years ago and Mr. Drysdale called a meeting to educate employees about shoplifting techniques. He used a package of “men’s briefs” as a prop, which cracked me up🤪 but… Dun dun dun… The reason the meeting was called was because I alerted him to the fact that certain customers were wandering around the store filling their carts with items that they then brought to the office to “return”. For a refund. I hadn’t really glommed on to what they were doing. I worked in the office and I was taaaared of trying to process their “returns”. Mr. D. TOTALLY GOT IT! And called me out (in a good way) for catching it, even though I didn’t really know I was catching anything at the time.

All that said, [again] the cFam was the BEST family to marry into. There’s occasionally sibling stuff but every family has that (mine did). But it’s not serious stuff and no one hires lawyers to bully and harass people (like happened in my fam). We recognize that we are all different and have our own unique strengths and weaknesses. We do what we can to help others if we have the means to. And we, the cFam boyz at least, are not above visiting relatives at their work places and doing our best to try to embarrass them.

BTW, that’s Gorilla in the pic. Our pandemic-gifted outdoor propane heater. (Don’t ask. About the name, I mean.)

Oh not this woodpecker. I can hear this one rat-a-tatting around here and there sometimes but it does NOT peck on the metal fireplace chimney. DR-R-R-R-R-R-R!!!!

Today it was apparently in some kind of competition with another woodpecker. They’re downys, little ones. Chickadees often nest in this birdhouse in the spring. I dunno what these characters were doing. The GG sent me the pic. He was typing away at a North Country Trail newsletter, a little too frenetically for my taste since I was picking away at a glacially paced archaeological dig. Frenetically? Pacing and sighing and other activities.

And then. Dun dun dun. “Is it okay if I go back to the great white north?” Well, yes. And no, I do not want to go. You are gonna be out playing with DR mowers and fixing benches and I am gonna be working and it’s all fine but I can’t stay at the moomin because it’s closed (and wouldn’t be easy to keep warm at this time of year even if it weren’t). And I don’t wanna stay in a motel. I’ll stay here and get ready for turkey day.

Another day at the Landfill.

I have been on the WARPATH! The Clutter Warpath. I hereby declare that I pick up after MYSELF, not anyone else. Take a note.

What was it today? Not much really. An [empty] igloo cooler that has been squatting in a corner of the living room for what seems like months. Move it move it move it! A plastic pail with some kind of a squeegee tool that was IN the living room but I moved it to the “foyer” a while back so it wouldn’t be in Roooooomba’s way. Move it move it move it! A “shim” hanging out in my kitchen. I had to ASK what it even was. I was trying to clean counters and not only was it in my way, it fell OFF the counter. Move it move it move it! We won’t even talk about the remainder of the NCT/camping/whatever BS that was piled in the back room. Move it move it move it!

Tools and other non-decorative crapola do NOT belong in the living areas of the Landfill unless they are actively being used. Thanksgiving is coming up and I think it’s happening here this year. I am not messing around. And guess what? The Landfill Refrigimatator is not actually jam packed with crapola! The freezer is not so great but I have made progress. There is still a Pandemic Stash in the living room but it is down to one box and that box comes in handy to block Rooooomba from trying to go over the step down to the “foyer” so I am living with its supreme fugliness. Note to beach urchins: don’t buy brown sugar or oregano or nutmeg. I HAVE TONS! Probably some other stuff I’m forgetting too.

A couple days late but how’s about Blue keeping Senate control? Yay for everyone who helped keep it from flipping. Special thanks to all the college students who kept the polls open until after midnight so they could vote (and register and it is legal in the Great Lake State to register on election day *at* the polling place). Now if we could just get rid of Lauren Boebert who I feel especially antagonistic towards. Sorry, I know there are others equally ridiculous and likely some Dems too. Apologies to the republicans I know and love (even the MAGAts🐽).

Weird mix of folk/blues music (kitchen) and football (back room) tonight. I’m actually getting along with it 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

We didn’t get our first snow today. That happened I can’t remember when but the last time it was little spitty bits of snow in the air. Too warm out for real snow. Today it was in the upper 30s and snow did actually fall for a couple hours. Not enough to stick anywhere. I’ve been doing rain dances for a while now. Does this mean my “prayers” have been answered?

It was cold enough at 0-skunk-30 this morning that Cygnus warned me the roads could be icy. They weren’t. They were bone dry. The ice warning triggers at 37 degrees.

This is the first Saturday I’ve been to the farmers market in a while. Reasons? Complicated ones involving road construction and changes to long-term traffic patterns (think one-way streets now two-way plus dedicated bike lanes separated from auto traffic by curbs). Navigating the constantly changing streets in the pitch black mornings we get at the end of the EDT season was just not worth it. Plus I have been alone a lot this fall and so have not been buying a lot of food.

Today? Construction is done, EDT is over (meaning it’s light at 7AM), and the GG is back from his boondoggles. Sparrow Meats flew by on facebook with some prepared turkey broth so I followed that siren song inside. Maybe I’ll use that as the basis for tday gravy this year (I make it ahead). While I was in there, I noticed that no one was crowding Monahan’s seafood counter so I bought a big salmon filet AND HEY, you have swordfish scallopini! I cleaned them out of what was currently on display. Outside to the market proper for yams, apples, onions, broccoli, and lettuce. Hydroponic lettuce although we can usually get fresh lettuce throughout the winter because hoop houses. And no, I don’t HAVE to go down there at 7AM but it gets crowded FAST and I do not do well with crowds. And that’s not because of COVID although COVID has exacerbated it.

I do wear a mask at the market even though I am mostly outside. We keep hearing about hospitals filling up with RSV and regular old flu viruses and I can’t help thinking those cases might not have materialized if people would just continue to mask up.

The GG put a fake log on this afternoon and hunkered down to watch Umich beat the crap outta whoever. Nebraska I guess. I prob’ly shouldn’t have said that. It might jinx them against O-haaaaa-o State in a couple weeks. But still. Hail Hail Michigan and not just because our home football team is actually winning this year.

Somebody on facecrap the other day asked who was going to step away from Twitter now that it has been thrown into disarray. Nope. Not me. Not yet. I do use it (carefully) as a news aggregator. I can’t remember the last time I actually posted something so I am unlikely to get suspended. But I also kinda wanna stay around to see what happens. On a first hand basis, I mean.

I joined Twitter back in something like 2007, probably after I got my first iPhone. My first friends were a few males that I didn’t know in real life. Eventually my daughters and a few other relatives found me there. If I remember right, one of Lizard Breath’s SanFran roommates in that era WORKED for Twitter. Hopefully that person is long gone from that job. Nobody that I know personally tweets any more. Lost in the shuffle maybe?

You can’t really compare Twitter to the fintech industry. Or can you? But I do know at least a little bit about software/web development after working forever as part of a fintech development team. One thing I know is WHEN WE MAKE CHANGES, WE DO IT CAREFULLY. We can do at least certain things quickly if we have to but we don’t just start wildly swinging around blowing things up. Ever. We think about how our users will experience the change. We think about what the change might do to existing stuff. And then we TEST THE HELL OUT OF IT BEFORE WE IMPLEMENT IT. If we didn’t do those things, we would be BLEEDING clients!

My head is SPINNING since Mr. Melon took over Twitter. I can’t even put most of it into words. I have never had a “verified” account. I am not a celebrity and I rarely tweet, right? It is kind of HILARIOUS that a technology mogul thought it would work out to charge any yay-hoo who came along (like me?) eight dollars a month to basically do whatever they wanted to. Impersonating other people or whatever. Because they sure did, often with hilarious results and sometimes with permission from who they were impersonating.

I think Mr. Melon should stick with Tesla, SpaceX and his (snort) hyperloop 🤣

I soooo hated that song back in the day. Muskrat Love, I mean. The link comes with an ad. Then again, I wasn’t really into groups like The Captain and Tenille. I was more into psychedelic rock, etc., in those days. I still am but I don’t listen frequently and I am just as likely to listen to country nowadays, which is not the Muskrat Love genre either. When I started to tolerate and eventually like country, I do not know. I think it had its origins in when I started hanging out with the GG, long-haired freaky people type guy that he was. He had a mix tape, Agaloogaboogdigby (something like that) with some country songs on it among other things.

Actually he did not have waist-length hair by the time I met him. He was working for Corporate America by then. I won’t detail (again) that meeting tonight except to say that he was cooking a CAN on a tiny stove. One he probably still has. The stove, not the can. I hope 😵‍💫

Anyway, it was 70-something again today so he schlepped a kayak down to the river and found this muskrat lodge. When he first sent the pic, I was thinking beaver. I quickly realized that anything Bucky Beaver built would be MUCH more extensive than this little dome. Also, I don’t think Bucky lives in this area of the Great Lake State.

That is about all and so g’night. Oh, except satty-lite radio just reported that a Burmese python swallowed a full-size alligator. Where? In Crazy Old Florida of course. (I do not know if that is true or fake news 🤪)

I woke up at That Batscope Hour. It was the usual reason, a quick visit to the Water Closet.

When I got back I COULDN’T HELP checking my phone. You know why. With bated breath, I did a search for our governor, “Big Gretch”. Whew! She WON! I wasn’t really surprised. Her challenger is a DeVos puppet. But still, given the political climate we’ve been living through these last few years, I had been nervous. I mean, six years ago I went to sleep on election night thinking the Orange Baboon wouldn’t win. You know what happened there and I found out at That Batscope Hour when the GG finally came to bed.

Last night I couldn’t contain myself! I texted (at 3:30 AM) the beach urchins to let them know. They are also Gretch fans. Then I told the GG. I cannot [exactly] figger his polly-ticks lately but I’m pretty sure he isn’t as enthusiastic about Gretch as I am. It was all right. If he reacted at all it was of the mumble-mumble-snort-mmmph sort of reply.

It wasn’t until this morning that I learned of a few more positive results. Like… Our Secretary of State survived a challenge from a rabid election denier. BOTH Great Lake State legislative bodies now have DEMOCRATIC MAJORITIES! I don’t remember when that was last true and we have some pretty darned old FOSSILS among the state republicans, “old” not necessarily meaning in age.

But… Drumroll… Maybe the best result of all was that ballot proposal 3 PASSED!!! This is the “reproductive freedom for all” proposal and if you click the link, it’s a PDF and I set it to open in a new window but who knows what the heck your browser might do with it. So now protections for women seeking abortions are in our state constitution. Note that this DOES NOT mean that anyone can obtain an abortion at any time in their pregnancy. Abortions after fetal viability are still prohibited except in the EXTREMELY rare devastating maternal and/or fetal conditions that are part of life whether we like it or not.

As anyone paying attention knows by now, all of the reproductive rights efforts throughout the country have favored a woman’s right to choose. As is said OVER and OVER and OVER again, an overwhelming majority of our citizens support abortion rights at least to some degree. The Supreme Court’s horrible decision last summer was NOT about states’ rights. It was about suppressing women’s control over their reproductive rights. When that decision was made, I told a coupla MAGAts that I know and love who claim they are pro-choice, “You voted for him. He packed the Supreme Court and look what happened. We are COMING FOR YOU.” And we damn well did 💪

The bad news? We didn’t jettison Marjorie Taylor Greene 🐽

P.S. The pic is from Wisconsin (I think), not The Great Lake State.

So the polls are closed now. I walked by the school/polling place in my backyard just when they were opening and that’s all I’ll say about that, since I absentee voted weeks ago.

I am hoping for the best but expecting the worst being someone who actually cares about people who have fewer resources than I do and weren’t born with the proverbial bootstraps. Instead, I will show some pics of leaf-raking in previous years when we could just dump them in the street. First, we would rake them onto big sheets of plastic. We still do this at Hoton Lake. We don’t rake at the moomincabin at all but we’re in a pine forest there, which is a bit different.

We would drag our leaves down to the street and dump them out of the plastic. Twice during the season the city would send crews out to pick up the leaves. That worked out pretty well for the most part except for the year we got a foot of snow the day before the second pickup (December). They never did do that pickup and it was a mess in the spring.

It took me a while to find this pic. It was meeeee who backed the POC into the street and up on the curb in this way. The older beach urchin was a sophomore at kzoo college and I sent this pic to her. She gnoffed and gnoffed about it. Haha. If you embiggen, there’s a gratuitous shot of The Indefatigable’s ass end to the right in the driveway🐽

G’night and we shall overcome. Someday. Maybe.

As nervous as I am about this election day, I am not gonna even try to write about that. At least not any of the actual pollytickle contests. I will say that I vote exclusively “blue” these days but that’s because at this turbulent time in our country’s history, it is the “blue” folks who come across (to me) as more pragmatic and willing to seek out facts. In general that is, there are nutcases on both sides. Facts and common sense PLEASE.

Whoever you vote for, PLEASE remember that our election workers are trained citizens who care as much as you do about making sure our elections are fair. They are your friends and neighbors. They put their own political opinions aside as they manage the polls and try to process votes accurately. After all, they get to cast a vote too. Be polite and treat them kindly. Remember that those who are managing in-person polling sites are dealing with the “unwashed” public ALL DAY. Think about all the “Karens” they encounter. Also COVID is NOT over so they are still braving a risk of infection.

There is no evidence of voting fraud at the scale that would sway an election one way or another. I have my own little story about that. One I have told before. MANY years ago, I worked with a woman whose dad owned an apartment building in our city but lived in a satellite village. He was angry at something our city council did that affected his apartment building so he voted TWICE using his residential address and that of his rental building. Guess what? He got caught! How? Because election officials in one or both districts were diligently doing their jobs. One extra illegal vote is not NORMALLY enough to throw an election. It wouldn’t have in this case. But isn’t it great to have people trained to find those discrepancies?

Whoever you vote for, please vote, if you haven’t already. I did a few weeks ago. Oh yeah, and be patient. Given the election denial climate, it may take a while to count those votes. That’s not because people are waiting on truckloads of fake ballots to be delivered, it’s because our poll workers are being careful to make sure vote counts are accurate.

Actually there wasn’t as much rummaging as usually happens upon the GG’s departure or return from one of his boondoggles. For one thing, he was caught in a huge rainstorm yesterday on the way down the I75 SUV Speedway. Unfortunately, the vent on top of the Lyme Lounge popped up and there was a “gallon” of water in there by the end of his trip. So he had to deal with that.

Also, about the time he returned, it was at the hottest part of the day and I decided I needed to catch some rays. So I took my booook out back, put my sun hat on and read. Mr. Golden Sun was brilliantly bright this afternoon with no clouds in the sky and he kept me warm for a while but eventually I had to head back inside. It is November and our light breeze turned chilly as Mr. Golden started to head down toward the Landfill Roof. And now Mr. Golden has been below the horizon for almost an hour. Pitch black except for the moooon, which is beautiful to the eye but would look like a round white thing in an iPhone photo. Part of being an amateur iPhoneographer is knowing when your device is not up to the task 🐽

Even though I WROTE today’s title, I keep reading “resume” as that thing that you write when you’re job-hunting. Not that any meager little resume that I ever wrote was what got me a job. I fell into all of them via connections and I’m not sure anyone ever read any of my resumes. I don’t really need one any more. If I could find any old resumes, I would BURN them. But I didn’t want anyone to think I was rummaging through a whole bunch of old resumes. I meant resume in terms of continuing something after a break, aka “rezoom”. (Although the GG has probably been rummaging throughout his entire boondoggle. It’s just that I haven’t been subject to enduring it.)

BTW: I realize that a proper spelling of resume probably has one (or two?) accents. Even where I have used it in that sense in this entry, I left the accents out. It’s not because I don’t know how to put accents over letters via my keyboard because I do. It’s because when I looked up how to spell resume with accents, the first site The Google turned up started out with a discussion about whether there are supposed to be ONE or TWO accents. Nope. I was outta there like a bat outta hell. I am not (usually) out here to argue about spelling and grammar, especially when accented letters are involved. So that’s a rabbit hole I kept myself out of today.

Apparently they didn’t need to close the BigMac and the GG is at Hoton Lake tonight. The beach urchins ascertained that by checking out the webcam. They’ve been doing that all week to see how the leaf situation is going since they raked leaves up there last weekend. Fun for 30-somethings 🐽

I did not rake any leaves today. It was nice and warm out but it was blowing a gale so there didn’t seem to be much point. Although I have raked leaves in high winds before, not to mention standing water. It also rained today but nothing significant. No standing water although I dashed outside with one bare foot and one sock to get the sunset. I was halfway through putting on my socks at the time. My feet got wet but this was a smart wool sock and those things dry out super fast plus they have other magical powers.

I finished Demon Copperhead (Kingsolver) a couple days ago and really liked it although it is hard to read because it’s about prescription drug abuse and what that can do to devastate people and, in this case, populations of people, mostly poor. The book was set in an area where folks used to make their living mining coal and that ain’t really happening any more that I know of. Oh yeah, the foster care system also played a big role in the book. Good and bad and not necessarily to blame for the drug problem.

I remember when the Orange Baboon was running for prez in 2016 and talking mumbo-jumbo (as he does) about bringing back coal mining. I thought something like, “didn’t that train leave the station 40 years ago or so?” Anyway, I don’t know how to solve these extremely complicated societal problems and I don’t think most of the people running for elective offices do either. I do know that we ALL need to seek out FACTS and they are not going to be found on alt-right media.

So g’night. Debating with myself on whether to watch the first episode of Westworld season 3…

The Master of the Universe is coming home. I actually have an estimated ETA although Edmund Fitz gale-type winds may close the Big Mac bridge so I dunno if that will hinder his trip or not. He can’t stay at the moomin at this time of year but he can always stay at the Driftwood although I hope he takes food out and masks to pick it up. I’ve had my fingers stuck in my ears and singing la-la-la for his trip. Fortunately he’s been mostly outside or alone in the Lyme Lounge.

Actually I was just on the phone with him and he thinks he is staying in the moomin parking lot tomorrow night. I was a bit skeptical given the gale force winds thing but apparently these winds are coming from the southwest? I’m not sure but it’s the northwest winds that hit us the hardest and sunk the Fitz so maybe it’ll be okay for him.

He will come home to shit-tons of leaves. I did my best this week and got what leaves I could get out by the curb before yesterday’s pickup. Gah! After they dumped my carts, I almost filled up one of them AGAIN today just with the leaves in the driveway. I HAD to get them picked up because some tree is dumping some little round thingies and as I was taking a cart out yesterday, one of my feet found one (under the leaves) and for a split second, it felt like I was skating but I recovered. I was too busy with *paid* work today to do much else.

So when himself gets back he will have some work to do. Our leaf pickup system these days is not conducive to manual tools and one-woman labor and if I didn’t have the GG around with his power stuff, I would have to hire someone. But then again, the city picks up compost carts and leaf bags EVERY WEEK through the end of November so if I worked on it every day, I could probably get it all done. But it gets god damn boring after a while and sometimes the weather is dismal for raking leaves.

P.S. I do not have boy toys here. That’s just a joke. The GG has always been enough for me but I am fine when he is off on his various boondoggles. I revel in being space-i-fied in my comfy little house. It was 72 or something outside today and after my workday, I sat outside in the back and watched my latest Westworld episode. I am at the end of season 2 at this point and I still can’t say I totally understand it but I also can’t look away 🤣🤣🤣

This’ll be a quickie. Lemme see. I made a mad plum dash this morning and THEN… Dun dun dun… I went to the hardware store. Guess what I got?

I was calling them leaf grabbers but they are actually called leaf SCOOPS! Oh man were they a Game Changer for my old-skool manual labor leaF raking operation. They pick up SO many more leaves than the human hand, especially my kinda mini hands. My hands may be small but they are extremely agile as various flute professors of yore might tell you. Even with titanium pinky.

Anyway, I put our two big compost carts out tonight plus two leaf bags that I also bought at Ace Hardware this morning. All of this was before the fog lifted.

I had to work today so I followed a version of Fly Lady (google her) to get it done. I took a five minute break every half hour (except when there were meetings) to go out and rake/scoop as many leaves as I could. I got quite a lot done but we still have a lot of leaves. They are picking up leaves in the morning and then I will follow that protocol again tomorrow (but maybe every hour) and then pick away at them through the weekend.

Quickie because it was beautiful out today. Hot while I was raking but cooled down when I sat in the back yard after work and raking. But I was trying to finish my boooook and I want to watch a Westworld episode but haven’t gotten to it until now. So I am off to do that. Sayonara, KW.

Okay, so we have umpteen gazillion leaves down in our yard and TWO (count ’em) compost carts to put them out for pickup. That means not a whole lot can go out for the weekly pickup.

We used to rake everything out into the street (I have written about this before). We would rake them onto big sheets of plastic and drag them down to dump them. The city would come and pick them up a couple times in the fall. It was fun and I was a rock star raker in those days. But then the city ended that program and we were left to do various things with our leaves. Like hire somebody to come and get rid of them maybe. The GG being a HUGE DIYer (good and bad) ramped up to use his (gasoline powered) lawnmower to mulch the leaves and also gather them in an attached bag that he can DETACH to dump them into our compost carts. He puts them in various other places too and he uses a (gasoline powered) leaf blower for detail work. “Those boys and their toys” was something like what The Beautiful Sally (my late mother-in-law) used to say. But she was mainly talking about shovels and rakes in those days.

The GG is off gallivanting on the north country trail (with my blessing) and most of the leaves are down now. Problem. I cannot rake and drag them down into the street any more. (I am not complaining about the change in policy. I’m sure there were good reasons). But I am not friends with the lawnmower or leaf blower. But. I needed to at least make a minor dent. So. I dredged a cardboard Duraflame box up from the Landfill Dungeon (I had to remove a few weird items from it first). I raked leaves into a pile, used my HANDS to put them into the box, then dumped the box into a compost cart. It was very easy to fill a cart but given the ton of leaves in my yard (more to come, oaks anyone?) it would take 20 compost carts a week to dispose of them that way.

My daughters are “threatening” to come over and help with the leaves. They are both good at raking and one of them owns her own lawnmower and knows how to use it. But we’ll see. The GG will be home soon and I could always hire someone. Like the Skyline High choir kids and donate to their fundraiser? In the end, the problem is not the raking, it’s where the heck to put the goddamn leaves! We can’t just dump them into the swamp because this is the one out of three properties we own that doesn’t have a swamp behind it.

We are at the time of the year when it is almost time to switch to standard time but the sun rises LATER than it does around the solstice, two months from now. Absolutely pitch black in the morning. The flip side of that will be after the time switch is made this weekend the sun will set at 5:30 or so. This pic is from my trip to the plum market yesterday morning at 8:00 AM in the rain. Don’t worry. I was in no danger taking the pic. This is one of the longest lights on the planet and it had just turned red.

The beach urchins came over for dinner (and one of them an overnight). None of us could think of anything to cook so we ordered pizza and a lovely Greek salad with big slabs of feta in it. Another guest was invited but bagged it because the cornfield next door to the mouse house was being harvested or whatever and it was too exciting to miss. Apparently hawks were circling and deer were bouncing around all over the place. A sudden major disruption to their habitat.

We watched an episode of Shetland tonight and I think I will put that into my growing queue of TV shows and movies. I guess Green Acres reruns have finally run their course.

And that, my friends is about as exciting as it gets around here these days. So a lot of mostly nothing. Except that now people are getting in my space and otherwise acting like the GG 🐽🐽🐽

Jeebus. At something like 5:15 or so this afternoon a minivan disbursed some children to trick-or-treat on my street. The went to the neighbors next door and two neighbors across the street. They did not come to my house. It was a little early for trick-or-treating but when I used to schlep over to Cubelandia I couldn’t get home in time for 5:15 trick-or-treaters. I can now (of course) because I am a full-time telecommuter.

I know that it is best practice to turn on your porch light to let trick-or-treaters know you have treats. Mine was on but it is on a motion sensor so it does turn off. After a few groups of trick-or-treaters walked by the Landfill without stopping, I put ‘lectric Jack out on the porch and also remembered to turn the orange LED lights.

After that I got ONE trick-or-treater. I mean ONE. It was a 2-year-old (or so) and he arrived in a wagon his dad was pulling. He was NOT a happy camper. I dumped a bunch of candy into his pumpkin pail. There were people out on the sidewalk and I asked his dad if there were any more kids. Nope. I asked if he wanted any more candy ANYWAY and then I dumped a bunch more candy into his kid’s pail. The kiddo actually perked up at that point.

Oh man, Halloween… It was Lizard Breath’s first holiday after her birth and she was eight days old and we had a ton of trick-or-treaters here and The GG showed her off to everyone who came to the door (no f*cking covid then) and The Commander was also here.

And then there was my mouse at 18 months and not happy with her tiger costume. The GG took the kids out and every time they went inside someones house where there was a shoe pile in the entry, my mouse would yell “Shoe on”. I told that story to my one trick-or-treater’s dad tonight and he totally cracked up. Yes, that’s him, meaning his kid.

Trick-or-treat is officially done now. I hope no one else shows up. I enjoy the kids who get bused in from wherever but I don’t really want to deal with them tonight. I’d rather watch an episode of Westworld undisturbed 🐽

I have a lot of leftover candy but I’ll figure out what to do with that.

P.S. We did have quite a bit of rain today but not during trick-or-treat and it was pretty warm out today.