Random bits of my so-called life.

That’s the last I heard about how many covid positive people reported their status following last weekend’s Soo High 1972 class reunion. The one I did not attend. I dunno. Covid was probably the biggest concern for why I didn’t register for the reunion early on. But then I did and in the end, the main reason I didn’t attend was yooperland travel fatigue.

I am so glad I did NOT attend. Seeing the photos, the organizers did a beautiful job. But. All of those photos showed people congregating close together and NO MASKS. People on facebook reported hugs and kisses, etc. My fam and beach community are still doing air hugs. To be honest, we aren’t really big huggers from the getgo but pre-covid if someone wanted to hug me I would go for it.

I hope all of the positive reunion folks are vaxxed/boosted and/or do not have more than mild symptoms.

I always have to laugh when people assume that I went to a SMALL high school. No no no no. I mean it wasn’t huge either but my graduating class was something like 360 (124 attended the reunion). It was a small town (15,000?) but big enough to have eight elementary schools, at least when I was a kid, there are fewer now. We all fed into the same junior high and high school and the high school picked up a lot of eastern yooperland kids too. Some of them were there because they needed better academic options and others because they needed a “skill” center education, aka I’m not going to college for whatever reason. Of course some of those folks DID end up in college and beyond. Don’t take those stoopid facebook memes seriously when deciding what you think about the policies surrounding forgiving student loans. It’s not that simple.

The pic is the GG posing next to a mule crossing sign by the Maumee River. There is a canal there on which people and mules towed barges once upon a time.

To our apple tree. I could not for the life of me get a good pic of this operation due to the shade in our yard and the angle of Mr. Golden Sun. It’s the GG up on a ladder and he has a borrowed saw of some sort from Bob, the next door neighbor not the UU.

We will miss the apple tree but it’s not like we ever got many edible apples from it. A few would fall most years but never enough to do much of a harvest. Except 2013… We had TONS of apples. I would walk out there and grab a few off the ground every day. They were GOOD too. Small and sweet. Problem? EVERYBODY was inundated with apples that year. So I would go to work and there would be boxes full of them in the lunch room.

Weather was the cause of this. I am not really knowledgeable about this stuff but okay. 2012 was when The Commander died. That March was soooooo hot (90s and one day the Ninja proclaimed 106 when I got into her at the end of my work day) that all of the flowering trees bloomed. They don’t usually do that until May or even June. Then there was a freezing spell in April. That killed a lot of fruit crops in the state but for some reason it made the crops over-produce in 2013. Including our poor neglected tree.

Since that year we’ve gotten the usual few measly, wormy apples every year. Until this year. The tree didn’t bloom or leaf out at all. Dead dead dead. So the GG took it down. Yes there are power lines up there. He is WELL AWARE of those and is very careful. He is a certified chain sawyer and knows all of the safety rules regarding saws. And ladders. And power lines.

I wish I could find the pic of mouse and and her horse encamped in the apple tree many years ago. I can’t and I don’t feel like trying tonight. I suspect it is in an album, not online.

We’ll miss the apple tree as unproductive as it was but maybe a bit more sunshine will find our back yard without it.

My high school reunion in the yooperland. A significant anniversary, try 50 🐽🐽🐽

Three reasons… 1) I am still a covid pessimist and some of this stuff was inside. 2) I am a HUUUGE introvert and the pandemic has given me permission to EMBRACE that. 3 but not least) The way the schedule turned out, I’d’ve had to make a rocket trip up there for the weekend and I was… weary… So I DM’d The Beautiful Mimi, gave my regrets, and told her the class could keep my money. She was gracious as always.

I actually had cooked up kind of a fun plan for this reunion, involving wearing my cousin’s Ann Arbor Pioneer High 1972 t-shirt. Her reunion was earlier in the summer. I have lived on the Planet Ann Arbor for long enough that even though I didn’t spend my childhood here and the beach urchins didn’t go to Pioneer High, I figgered I could get away with it. And it would be a potential conversation starter since I am abysmal at small talk. (Don’t worry Pooh, I’ll mail the t-shirt soon.)

Pictures of the event were posted to FB and a fellow alum DM’d me wondering if I had attended since she didn’t see me in any of them. I replied and she understood. She’d have had to fly from Texas AND find a place to stay. I can just stay at the moomincabin.

Funny enough, at an earlier reunion this friend “recognized” the GG from high school. We were on the Soo Locks tour bote and I came up from the bathroom to find them talking and she was just figuring out that she did not in fact know him. He went to high school in Royal Joke after all. But she had seen him on the internet! It was hilarious 🤣

So how about that Ugly? The pic, I mean. Jeebus. My hair has always been totally unruly and I remember that day as being hot and very humid. I was just enough of a hippy wanna-be that I eschewed “beauty parlors” so no fancy do for me. I actually look a lot like the GG’s high school pic here. Except his hair was longer than mine, reaching his butt. Mine straggled about halfway down my back ending in a frazzle of split ends, etc.

Okay, so I did some things with the GG this weekend. I mean besides the usual Saturday date which is to go ta da dump ta da dump ta da dump dump dump. I went to an actual restaurant yesterday and today? Drum roll… We went to O-haaaa-o! It was beautiful!

We drove down to Toledo and eventually connected up with the Maumee River. It’s the biggest river to feed into the Great Lakes, has to be Lake Erie. We drove along the Maumee River for many miles, nipping in and out of Toledo area metroparks so the GG could re-live some of his hiking trips along the old canal tow-paths adjacent to the Maumee. The tow-paths have been converted to hiking trails.

Western Ohio is flat flat flat. It is also beautiful but not in a photogenic way. I am only a lowly iPhoneographer but I tried to figure this out today. For one thing, the human eye (at least my human eye) sees things that my camera cannot. Not to mention that I didn’t spend any time at all trying to line up decent shots. For instance. A beautiful old stone railroad bridge across the Maumee didn’t work because Mr. Golden Sun was in the wrong place and I couldn’t get it to stand out against the background. I also didn’t try very hard 🐽

We went south along the Maumee until we got to highway 109 and we turned north on that. It eventually became M52 as we crossed the state line back into The Great Lake State. After we had traveled M52 for a while, we got away from flat flat flat into glacial hills.

The pic I chose was a Maumee River dam. I am not sure how this dam works but I was distracted (and amazed) by all of the dead trees hanging out there. I wanted to know if people ever removed those from the river/dam. The GG did not know and I didn’t pursue it much further.

Looking forward to a day trip to visit Napolean and Defiance Ohio.

Guess where this photo was taken (by meeeee). It was at a RESTAURANT! Yes it is outside. But this marks the first time I have INITIATED the idea to eat at a restaurant since pre-COVID.

I had initially thought about lunch at the Griz but in the cold clear light of the morning, I knew that I wasn’t ready to eat downtown yet, inside or out. The Umich students are arriving and while the west end of downtown (“our” end) isn’t as nutso as the campus area, I was just not ready. So we drove out Jackson to The Session Room, another lunch fave of ours pre-COVID. YES! They had outdoor seating available! I wore my mask THROUGH the restaurant but certainly took it off outside. The GG harassed me for wearing a mask. Sorry, I guess we will continue to cancel each other out and hope for the best. Most customers were not masking but a fair number of employees were. I masked in solidarity with them!

Anyway, it was wonderful and I could not find ANYTHING to complain about and I tipped well but I have ALWAYS tipped well, even before COVID. I am not ready for inside dining yet and I am also not ready for LOTS OF PEOPLE EVERYWHERE although we had a BIG picnic table to ourselves. Not really afraid of getting infected from others at this point, just not ready for the whole scene. But baby steps.

The GG worked on his Minnesota maps to prepare for various upcoming hiking trips. He kept asking me what I was reading. Well. I finished my book this morning and wasn’t quiiiiite ready to start my next even though it was queued up. So I was reading WaPo articles. One profiling five long COVID folks. I am sooooo glad my own COVID case was quick and mild. I also know that my lifestyle allows me to AVOID COVID. Like I don’t have to work in an assisted living facility to pay my bills. Or any kind of business that involves dealing up close and personal with the public. Note that I HAVE worked retail before and I actually LOVED it. But $1.75 per hour (at that time) was only okay because I was a college student largely funded by my parents.

Then I read a series of abortion stories. I could write a BOOK about this. NO ONE LIKES THE IDEA OF ABORTION!!!! But life is not neatly packaged and tied up with a pretty little bow. I will NEVER understand how a bunch of mean (yes, mean) old fossils (yes, fossils), can dictate that a 10-year-old MUST give birth (one EXAMPLE, there are many others). Oh but there are plenty of [pretty rich white] people who want babies and can’t have them. I am all for adoption but it should also be the birth mother’s CHOICE. Most 10 year olds do not have the “tools” to make that choice for themselves.

Sorry, I am off the track here. We’re about to get porterized with sweet and dry moose and a faaaar in the back yard.

Do y’all have any facebook friends who share your last name but are [most likely] not blood relatives? I have a few. One woman mostly shares pics of vintage sports cars and exotic birds. Innocuous fare. Another guy I can’t quite figger. “Retail [person’s first name]’s daily deals” videos. ??? Like I do NOT SHOP? He also seems innocuous though. I let these folks’ posts just fly on by.

At some point I started getting FLOODED with friend *suggestions* for people with my last name. There are a bunch out there in Australia / New Zealand. Were their ancestors former prisoners? And there seems to be a Utah / Idaho type group. Are they Mormons? I have yet to see anyone from Cananada, which is where my family emigrated (from Scotland) and rumor has it some of the (many) boys in that generation joined the Mounties and mixed it up with the Native Americans there. My own great grandfather was friendly with Native Americans in northern Saskatchewan but he was already married when he went there and that’d be a whole ‘nother story 😀

I do not EVER send friend requests to anyone I don’t know personally. I am friends with these couple of people because they sent *me* requests and they looked harmless. And they share my name. I mean, if I really wanted to connect with people who share my name, Ancestry would probably be the place to go but I have a weirdly tentative relationship with Ancestry although I do have a membership.

An odd thing is that a while back, I was scrolling through “people you might know” and it was FILLED (that day) with Fins. Somehow the next day someone accepted *my* friend request. Say what? I did NOT request a connection with this person and I’m pretty sure I didn’t accidentally drag a finger. This has happened a couple times with other people and I am always kind of embarrassed about it. Like should I tell the person “I don’t really wanna be friends with you unless you really wanna be friends with me?” I dunno. Awkward, awkward, awkward.

Now I am seeing a suggested friend with my (late) little brother’s name. Jim “Fin”. My brother died before facebook. He was on Instant Messenger and I remember one beautiful afternoon sitting out in the back yard I/M-ing with @BigBandGuy. An apt handle for him because he was a jazz trombonist with a major focus on the big band style. He even played with Woody Herman a few times when he was in college.

This Jim “Fin” has not sent me a friend request and I will not send him one. He doesn’t really look like my brother except that he is tall (maybe taller than my brother) and maybe blond but it’s hard to tell. He is definitely a LOT younger than my brother, like even a lot younger than my brother in this pic.

“Moom, I think that is the most out of tune I’ve ever heard you sing.” And yes, it was out of tune on purpose.

This beach urchin, after spending the night at The Landfill (her childhood home), made a quick brek to take with her to work this morning and took off apologizing for leaving a FEW dishes. And I mean a FEW! I remember all the times years ago when she would spend the night here and we would get a bagel and coffee at the Plum and then she would drive over to DayTwa to home and work and I would head to Cubelandia. Nowadays, when she goes to work from here, she just drives across the Planet Ann Arbor. She does have to drive back to DayTwa after work. For now…

She left a few dishes here. I was happy to wash them. I am a dishwasher from the getgo and this was not a whole lot of dishes and she certainly wasn’t having a beer while I did them.

The lyrics in the title are from Paula Cole’s “Where have all the cowboys gone” not to be confused with “Where have all the cow pies gone”, which we used to sometimes say even though we LOVE the song and Paula Cole.

I have heard this song many times but I think my main memory of it is when the beach urchins and I were traveling from Hoton Lake to the yooperland via the POC one morning. I remember a lot of trips up north with me and my daughters. Sometimes the three of us in a minivan and later on tandem driving two vee-hickles, usually the POC (Island Teal minivan) and The Indefatigable. For many years now, everyone has had their own cars.

Miss those days. And then there were all the years we weren’t together a whole lot as they were “spreading their wings”. That should be a good thing for families and for us it was. I could maybe say more but I’m kinda done done done.

Love y’all, KW!

P.S. Alone is a good reality series to watch.

Yaaaargh. It is relatively cool for late summer here on the Planet. Sometime about midday, Mooon Yooonit (parked outside the dining area window) catches some sun and just about blinds me. It fades as the sun moves toward the west. The last couple hours of the afternoon the sun is killer here in teleCubelandia. Hot and bright. The photooo is me leaving the Plum Market a few mornings ago. We had Lizard Breath for dinner tonight. I mean she and I collaborated on a meal here, not that we are cannibals who eat our young.

“So, he is always doing something. So, I don’t know what he is doing.” Say it with an Indian accent. Umpteen bazillion years ago, I picked up the GG and some of his co-workers at the airport after some kind of EPA boondoggle out to DC and we were dropping them off and when we got to our Indian colleague’s house, there was evidence that *something* had been going on in a ditch out by the street. We wondered what and that was her response. I could identify.

What did the GG do today? Researched taaaars for Mooon Yooonit and tried to figger how to get them delivered to a yooperland taaaar place because it would be $600 cheaper? Me? Whyyyy do we have to make everything overly complicated? Visited FlaMan, leaving me in PEACE for 4-5 hours. Went to REI to look for new shoes/sandals/whatever only to find that they only had some size 13s in the style he wanted. Made charcloth…

I won’t even begin to describe the charcloth-making procedure but charcloth is a very light-weight faaaar starter for backpack camping. It involves flint and some kind of processed pieces of cloth. I was interested but I did NOT want the flint, knife, or charcloth anywhere near my face because the sparking kind of freaks me out.

I don’t like to light matches either. I think this dates back to when I was a small child. I was my parents’ first child and was born when they were 33 and 35 after 11 years of unsuccessful attempts. I can remember them (or at least The Commander) being terrified that I would light matches on my own or stick silverware into lucky-shuckial outlets. By nature, I was a pretty cautious child when it came to that kind of stuff. I only had to hear it ONCE! They waaaaaay overdid it and I am still trying to recover from that early indoctrination. On the other hand, it’s probably one of the reasons I have never been a cigarette smoker.

Other than all that, I think charcloth is pretty cool. Just don’t put it near my face. BTW: All of those red dots are actually faaaar.

I really didn’t/don’t have anything much to write about today but you never know what might happen. I finished my work day and was sitting out here in the back yard and a seed pod or whatever it was slowly descended and landed on the impatiens in the pot just in front of me. Sometimes that’s all it takes. G’night. KW.

The first thing was that I heard the washing musheen going. Um, I have done umpteen bazillion loads of laundry since we drove down to the Landfill, It turned out that the GG did NOT know which of his clothes were clean or dirty so he just washed them all. I get this but I don’t get this.

Laundry goes in a basket and so do keys. Like at the end of last week when we were trying to leave the moomin and drive to the LANDFILL, the keys to the Lyme Lounge were missing. For some reason, those keys did NOT need to be in the basket? Why not? If they had been IN the basket, they would not have been lost. (They were actually found when we got down here.)

This cat visited me this in the Landfill backyard this afternoon. It was a friendly cat who jumped up on my lap without a serious invitation. Belled (so as to warn birds and things) and left shortly after the pic. The GG was kinda grumpy when he saw neeeee hanging around with a cat but it was all okay.

Sorry but I got up at 0-skunk-30 after a difficult night. I mean, I was fine, I just didn’t sleep all that consistently. I know I DID sleep because there were some bizarre REM dreams, like one that featured a man who came to the door of a weird version of my childhood house in the middle of the night with ONE big blue eye in the middle of his face, like directly above his nose? No, you don’t wanna know. But there was also a fair amount of calm wakefulness until… My plan was to get up at 6:00. Wouldn’t you know, at 10 of six, I started seriously dozing.

I did get myself up at six and when I checked my email, apparently a whole bunch of people who went to the annual national flute convention came home with COVID. A convention where people are flying in from all over. (I am not an active musician these days but have long lurked on a flute email list.) Um, duh. Really? You are surprised that you got COVID? You are vaxxed and double-boosted and masked MOST of the time? Except when you are eating? Or playing the flute? Um… When you play the flute, you are blowing air ACROSS the mouthpiece and OUT INTO THE ROOM. And if you are playing in a group (duo, trio, octet, flute choir)?

To be fair, these people were all polite. Some of them DID mask comprehensively and one woman reported eating all of her meals in her hotel room. That’s what I’d’ve done and she did NOT get COVID. One person opined that it was “not any worse than the common cold” and we all need to “get over it”. Well. It was NOT worse than the common cold for meeee and probably many others but there ARE people who struggle. Including a co-worker (vaxxed and boosted) who didn’t need hospitalization but felt like they were run over by a truck for about a week.

And about this vaxxing and boosting? I think by now it’s pretty common knowledge that vaxxing prevents SERIOUS disease in MOST people. But it doesn’t stop the virus from spreading. Testing is fine but we have discovered first-hand that home antigen tests are not always accurate.

It seems to me (and I am NOT AN EPIDEMIOLOGIST so this is just MY humble(?) opinion) that vaxxing is very important but MASKING is one of the major tools we have to prevent spread. I certainly did not get the disease all those months I was masking during my quick early-morning grock runs (I still do those). I got it after sleeping with my dear darling [snort] mask-averse covid-positive negative-testing husband for three nights. (To be clear, this was last January. I don’t have it now.)

Anyway, that all annoyed me to no end but then I saddled up Cygnus and hit up the farmers market (masked) (whole chicken, lamb stew, corn, eggplant, carrots, red onions, and I fergit what else). Then the Plum (masked) when it opened. I LOOOOOVE when I get over to the Plum and Oriole is in the parking lot because that means I will likely see my (always *double*-masked) grock worker. No, it doesn’t take much.

I don’t have much tonight. It is 8:00 and the sun sets around 8:30 and I can hardly wait so I can go to bed! We drove down today and it was pretty much a smooth trip. Since it wasn’t a Sunday there was not a lot of traffic. Despite that a couple loads of laundry upon our arrival just about did me in. So Chinese takeout tonight. I will miss seeing the Grinchie’s headlights turn on at 0-skunk-30 when he heads out to work. Other than that, sayonara from KW! Farmers market in the morning.

The GG: Dooya wanna drive down to East Lake? Meeee: Yes but nooooo. The GG: Dooya wanna go over for more porterization? Meee: Yes but noooo.

We took a Green Bag over and it turned out they also have a recycle thingy. I do not know why I didn’t know that but now that I do… I had been convinced that we’d have to drive all the way out to the township hall (or Sault Ste. Siberia) to dump the recycle. We did it at the res along with the Green Bag dropoff. Who knew?

Because today was my last day here at the moominbeach, I didn’t really want to go anywhere. And I didn’t except for garbage/recycle at the res. While the GG was driving to and from East Lake, I was hanging out on the deck here as a really nice thunderstorm rolled through. There was a LOT of thunder but very little lightning. That was mostly over eastern Lake Superior. But we got a BEAUTIFUL soaking rain. Weee needed that. Meeeee and the woods.

I have been extremely minimalist about food this summer so my dinner plan tonight was “homemade” pizza. That means prepared crust, in this case Bisquick because that’s all I could get, pizza sauce in a jar, pepperoni, canned mushrooms, and green pepper. I cut up the green pepper so yay for me. Oh, and pre-shredded cheese, mozz and parm. The Old Cabin cousins were hanging out with us on our deck and my brain finally surfaced enough to make me ask them to help us eat our pizza? Yes!

Down south tomorrow but back sometime in September to close up. It feels like we just opened the place…

Love y’all, KW

The moomingarage was my brother’s idea. I wasn’t crazy about the idea. My teenage beach urchins HATED it. My brother was an automotive kind of guy (and so was my dad) and he won my parents over on building it and paying for it. Me and my beach urchins would’ve preferred a bunk house with a SHOWER and maybe even laundry facilities.

After my brother and then my dad died (my dad died nine months after my brother), The Commander looked at me one day and said, “We have a garage”, in a way that indicated that she wasn’t really happy about the garage either. This was during a celebration of my dad’s life and it was a frickin’ COLD day so we hosted the beach community at a potluck from the shelter the garage provided. We also had about a bazillion family members staying at the moomincabin for that. I said to The Commander that the garage was okay. We NEEDED it.

Over the years (including that weekend) the garage has provided extra parking space when all of the beach urchins in the moomincabin and the Old Cabin are here with all of their vee-hickles.

It proved to be INVALUABLE after The Commander died (six years later) because it served as a staging area for anything from her house that didn’t go directly to beach urchins or donations or trash or whatever. We are still dealing with a few leftovers from that stuff (Cygnus has a load to take down) but we are getting there.

I suppose the person who has benefited the greatest from the garage is the GG. He loves garages and we do not have one at The Landfill. He spends a LOT of time out at the moomingarage. This was what he was doing this afternoon. I mean I don’t really know what he was doing in the pic but this is the GG in his element. When C*Q*L was younger and lived next door, she would hoof it over here from next door and when I would say, “He’s in the garage”, she would beat tracks to get out there. The GG and the garage were MUCH more fun than me and whatever boring thing I was doing.

As much as I hated the idea at the time, thanks to my brother for pushing the idea of building a garage and thanks to my parents for paying for it. Another thing is that I am sitting on the deck tonight and I can’t even SEE the garage from here. Lots of trees have grown up between us. That is a good thing.

I only have a few more days here, at least on this trip. Taking Friday off to drive and (what the hell) Thursday off as a MEEEEE day! Since I have vacay to burn… I will be hanging around here at the moomin on Thursday except for driving a Green Bag up to the res and some recycle up to the township. But those are scenic trips along the lakeshore.

I went to town today. The big town and my last trip in there for grocks, at least this time around. Normally a grock run is quick and easy but this year there is a six mile DETOUR because one of the bridges on Six Mile is being replaced. It isn’t all that bad a detour. There is a one mile stretch of gravel but they are religiously grading that so it’s pretty good although Cygnus is FILTHY! This morning I got stuck behind somebody SLOW. Make no mistake, I am not a speed demon but this person was going 40 in a 55 mph area on a clear sunny day with dry roads and pavement at that point. I could NOT get around them. So I don’t really wanna go into TOWN again.

There are two bridges on Six Mile. The Whiskey Waiska River and its branches wind all over that area. When I was a little kid, Six Mile was gravel (I can still remember hearing gravel pinging up on the underside of the Old Black Ford we had then). The bridges were one lane then. I don’t suppose they were all that dangerous then because people couldn’t go 90 bazillion mph on a gravel road. After they paved Six Mile that changed.

They upgraded those bridges to two lane one at a time, so for a while there was a one lane bridge and a two lane bridge. One absolutely TERRIFYING night, I was 17 and riding with my then boyfriend in his friend Chewy’s car. Chewy was drunk as a skunk and I did NOT feel safe in any way, shape, or form. We were heading IN to town where my boyfriend (not drunk but couldn’t get Chewy to let him drive) was gonna pick up his OWN car in town (a Gremlin, remember those?) and drive me back out (and yes that seems like a lot of driving around). When Chewy couldn’t remember if the first or second bridge was the one lane bridge, I MADE them turn around and take me back to the moomin and man oh man it was a relief to get there in one piece. Fortunately my boyfriend made it home too.

I forget why we called that guy Chewy. Well, except after an incident when he fell asleep nude in the snow outside his house, we called him Mr. Bare Nature for a while. He eventually became a cop and I know nothing about his whereabouts now. My boyfriend became an accountant who ended up at Boeing in the PacNW. I haven’t communicated with him in many years. He was a really good person and I think I broke his heart but for whatever reason (The Commander asked me once) I had to move on. Fallin’ in and out o’ looooove…

What a day (not). I mean it was okay. It was NOISY this morning. First there were birds squawking like nobody’s business. I was somehow thinking the seagulls were leaving for the winter but a little later a cousin wondered if it was geese and I think it probably was. Then there was a lot of big banging and thudding around. I mean from Cananada or some place. The water was as still as glass this morning so sound carried and I dunno what was going on but this kind of thing is not unusual. And FOUR botes were downbound. I watched the first two (salties) pass by, then had to get down to business.

I’m late getting at this tonight and I am dead taaaared. I spent ALL morning doing a mid-year performance evaluation, not an easy task for a job that doesn’t lend itself to metrics. Plus figuring out if I actually HAVE FIVE weeks of vacay this year or not. YES YES YES! I DO! I cannot believe how long it took me to figger that out but I did it. This perk kicks in at 15 years. I’m not the new kid on the block any more although sometimes I still feel like I am. Imposter syndrome anyone?

I’ll leave y’all with a couple of pics related to one of the GG’s main activities this summer. The first is of Himself (Michigan’s Designated Helper) doing some chainsaw work. The second is of a photographer, probably not taking chainsaw pics. I think these are mouse pics I got via text so they’re probably okay to steal.

G’night, KW.

Screw meaning the hardware kind of screw. The GG took the Motor Bote out for a long run this morning and when he got back, I don’t totally understand what happened but some screws got somewhere they weren’t supposed to be and one of them was actually in the sand somewhere. If you lose something in the sand it is likely you will never see it again.

npJane found the sand screw with a magnet and the GG eventually managed to retrieve the other screws from wherever they were. He had to go to the hardware store (of course) but couldn’t find the correct tool so had to improvise. I *blissfully* ignored 99% of this. Thanks to the GG for not involving me. I might’ve sicced Dark Brandon on him if he had 🤡

I didn’t do a whole lot today besides read. I finished The Big Rock Candy Mountain yesterday and after some deliberation started Children of Blood and Bone today. I’ve enjoyed the two Stegner books I’ve read and Blood/Bone is pulling me in. I think it’s by a Nigerian author and while I think India is gonna be next to run the world (based on my AWESOME Indian colleagues), maybe Nigeria will be after that. I’m gearing up to re-read Dune and some of Larry Niven’s stuff. I actually re-read Lucifer’s Hammer (Niven and Pournelle) a while back but am thinking about revisiting Ringworld and Integral Trees. It’s been a WHILE! And I struggled with Dune way back when so hoping it works out. Will a weeeeeee bit of maturity help or is Dune just not my thing? We’ll see.

I did work on the refrigimatator a bit, fishing out the few science experiments that were in there. I have to say that my daughters are MUCH better at leaving me without a whole lotta extra food than I was with The Commander. In my defense, The Comm lived 15 miles away in Sault Ste. Siberia and moved out here for the whole summer whereas I bounce back and forth between the moomincabin and The Planet Ann Arbor with wild abandon and so have to keep the fridge under more control than The Comm had to.

I don’t agree at all with the politics of the Twinz of Terror, one of which is my husband. I love them *anyway*. Last night, the UU spent the night here at the moomincabin and I had coffee with both of them this morning before they took off for a group hike. I don’t do well with group hikes especially since covid. It’s not that I’m afraid I’ll catch covid (which I’ve already had anyway). I am just ultra introverted since you know when. I miss having both of the Twinz of Terror here even though I don’t agree with their polly-ticks.

Anyway, I had a great time doing errands and cooking today. I went to Meijer for food supplies and a little later I took a green bag up to the dump. After that, I did a bit of exploring. I wanted to find the old dump. The one my parents occasionally used when I was a kid. This wasn’t a regular thing for us. My dad worked at the 1st National Bank in town and he drove there every weekday and I will guess that he dealt with the garbage in town a lot of the time. But we did occasionally go to the dump, usually with The Commander driving.

It’s been driving me nuts trying to remember where the old dump was. I was thinking that we 1) turned left onto Plantation Road 2) hung another left somewhere and 3) then a right up a hill to the dump. Not! The old dump is off Plantation Road all right but Plantation Road continues west from the new dump and there are no turns or anything. All that is different is that the road is paved, at least to the new dump. It’s gravel from there to the old dump.

I do remember going to the dump with a friend’s family to watch the bears. My parents would NEVER have taken us there for that but allowed us to go with their friends.

Then there was the time I was 22 and I rode with The Commander to the dump and I noticed that she didn’t turn on to Plantation Road but didn’t say anything. We ended up on the Spectacle Lake overlook. Uh, moom? She was only like 55 so it wasn’t dementia. We gnoffed and gnoffed and made our way back to the actual dump.

I lived in Sault Ste. Siberia my entire childhood and have had vacation property in the area my whole life. Our family has owned that property for 100 years now.

I think I have been to Sugar Island maybe four times? For whatever reason my parents never wanted to drive over there. The GG and I went exploring over there today. We drove most of the island and its wildly varied terrain, even taking dead end gravel roads to see where they ended up, which was usually on somebody’s private road. We also walked in two nature preserves.

The nature preserve I show here is UMich’s Chase S. Osborn Preserve. Chase was the only Michigan governor from the yooperland and my family knew some of the Osborns. This land was donated to UMich and it is supposedly used as a learning center of some sort but we could see little evidence that it gets much use.

We had a mini-adventure involving the ferry. It is a small ferry and crosses a narrow stretch of the St. Marys River so it only takes a few minutes to get across. Basically it goes back and forth with no published schedule. On the way back to the mainland, we pulled up to wait to board the ferry and were second in line. We soon heard the horn announcing the ferry’s departure from the mainland and it showed up quickly. It dispersed only about three vee-hickles, which I thought was a little weird. Instead of motioning the driver ahead of us to board, the crew motioned to the lane NEXT to us and an AMBULANCE pulled past us and on to the ferry, which took off IMMEDIATELY without boarding anyone else. So we patiently waited for it to cross over and back to pick us up.